Jacques des Rousseaux

The painter Jacques des Rousseaux was born around 1600 to a Huguenot family in Tourcoing, France. By 1622 they had moved north to Leiden¹, probably to escape religious persecution. The family generally worked in the rough cloth trade, but Jacques followed a different path². His initial artistic training is undocumented, but he likely completed it in his new hometown, before embarking on a trip to Italy that lasted several years. On the way back first returned to his native town, in 1627, before rejoining his family in Leiden³. There, he appears to have undergone finishing training, almost certainly involving Jan Lievens, the friend of Rembrandt. This is evident from his earliest known painting, a character head (or tronie) of a young man wearing a gorget, in Tourcoing, bearing a signature and date of 1630⁴. The pose, turned away from the viewer and gazing intently to the left, appears regularly in Lievens’s tronies, including his Bust of a Young Man with a Fur Collar of around 1629 in a London private collection⁵. The same applies to the smooth handling of surfaces, which was less a feature of the other artist Rousseaux encountered in Leiden: Rembrandt. It appears that Rousseaux stayed on in the Leiden atelier, which was taken over by Rembrandt after Lievens’s departure for England and Flanders in 1632⁶. He produced paintings under his own name, but may also have assisted Rembrandt on paintings in Leiden and Amsterdam during these busy years, as did Gerard Dou and Isaac de Joudreville, although his hand has not yet been detected in any of them. Rembrandt closed the studio in 1635, and Rousseaux married Catharina Biervliet in Leiden the next year, and apparently to died shortly thereafter, as she was referred to as a widow in 1638.

Rousseaux does not appear to have been widely known in his time, and was not taken up by Arnold Houbraken in his compendium of artist’s biographies of 1717-1721. His identity only resurfaced in 1922, when Abraham Bredius linked a number of paintings that bore his monogram, I.D.R. or J.R., to an artist encountered in the Leiden archives⁷. To him they showed the manner of the early Rembrandt, marking him as a pupil of this master. He did not recognize the role of Rembrandt’s friend Jan Lievens, who was at the time often sidelined as a follower. It was enough for inclusion in the comprehensive dictionary of artists launched in the 1920s by Ulrich Thieme and Félix Becker⁸. But it was only in the 1980s that another German scholar, Werner Sumowski, revisited his biography and oeuvre, with many new attributions of unsigned works, in a section of his series on the paintings of Rembrandt’s pupils⁹. Additional paintings, signed or attributed, appeared in an addendum volume appearing in 1994¹⁰. While these also include history paintings and genre scenes, the bulk of the paintings assigned to him are tronies, or imaginary character heads, based on head studies for history paintings.

One of these single figured paintings stands out, however, a panel in the Sveaas collection in Oslo, monogrammed and dated 1635 (Jacques des Rousseaux, Self-Portrait, 1635. Oil on panel, 57 x 44.5 cm, Oslo, Christiaan Sveeas Foundation). Instead of looking off to the side, such as in many tronies by Lievens, and suggesting a mental focus on something else and possible narrative, the young man with curly hair stares directly at the viewer, with eyelids drawn, giving his gaze extra intensity. His right eye is accentuated by the light falling from the upper right, which casts the left side of his face in deep shadow, including the left eye. The artist demonstrates dramatic lighting such as would underscore the dramatic events in history paintings, following the Caravaggesque mode of Lievens and Rembrandt, and their penchant for high emotions. It is far removed from the soft and even lighting that dominated portraiture, flattering the sitter and smoothing out blemishes and wrinkles. These choices align closely with the Self-Portrait Rembrandt painting on copper around 1630, now in the museum in Stockholm (Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1630. Oil on gilded copper, 15.5 x 12 cm, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum). He likewise wears a beret, headwear long out of fashion in the seventeenth century but still favored by artists, as it still is occasionally today, Jacques des Rousseaux has clearly depicted himself, around the age of 35. His upcoming marriage the following year may have provided occasion to paint such a dashing and assertive statement, taking his place in the world. He evidently wished to signal his training with Rembrandt, as practitioner of the fashionable manner in high demand at the moment. It shows the launch of a promising career, but unfortunately at the same time marks its end, along with a number of other paintings dated to the same year. The vanitas message of the early painting by him in the collection of the Magnum Gaudium Foundation, takes on special significance.