Young Woman Wearing a Turban and a Veil

The painting in the Fundação Gaudium Magnum collection only recently appeared in the public eye, when it was auctioned in New York in 2018¹. The composition had, however, been known previously, through a painting in the Devonshire Collection in Chatsworth². This painting had been attributed to Flinck, but the attribution was rejected by Joachim Wolfgang von Moltke in his catalogue on Govert Flinck in 1965. He suggested that it might rather be by Jan van Noordt (1623/24- after 1676)³, but in 1984 Werner Sumowski reaffirmed the attribution to Flinck⁴. He dated the Chatsworth panel to 1636, comparing it with a Young Man Wearing a Gorget painted in that year (FIG. 1). Comparison between the painting in England and the painting in Lisbon under discussion here, however, makes it clear that the latter is the original of the two and also that this painting can be attributed to Flinck. Sumowski’s comparison with the young man in the gorget still makes some sense, especially in the incarnate. In the handling of items of dress and textures, however, for example the turban and the gold chain or the gold braid of the cloak, there are clearer parallels with later paintings, such as the 1643 Self Portrait⁵, the Dismissal of Hagar and Ishmael painted c. 1642⁶ and Isaac Blessing Jacob in the Rijksmuseum painted c. 1642⁷. The picture should therefore be dated c. 1642.

This painting depicts a young woman gazing at the observer, but should be not considered a portrait. It is what Dutch 17th-century inventories call a “tronie”, which translates as “head” or “face”. This is an ambivalent category, midway between portrait, genre painting and history painting. The – for the 17th century – old-fashioned dress and, above all, the multicoloured turban clearly indicate that we are not looking at a standard portrait⁸. The “tronie” served numerous purposes and often holds many different meanings. First of all, it offered the painter artistic freedom of expression and a chance to experiment with picturesque details such as facial expressions, dramatic lighting and – most obviously in our case – textures and colours. The ambiguous narratives that the “tronie” expresses are, in fact, an essential component of the genre, carrying broad and diffuse connotations such as, in our case, youth, femininity or an exotic touch. The “tronie” therefore has a meaning that is sufficiently ambiguous for it to serve as a conversation piece. This does not mean, however, that the “tronie” is purely a product of the painter’s imagination. It is likely that, in most cases, someone did pose for the painting. Although Sumowski unconvincingly suggests that we are looking at Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612-42), Rembrandt’s wife in the Chatsworth painting, the truth is that we will probably never know for sure who posed for Flinck, nor whether the painting was ever intended to immortalise the sitter⁹.

The most eye-catching feature of this painting is obviously the colourful turban the young woman is wearing, adding both to its aesthetic appeal and to its meaning. People wearing this oriental headgear often feature in 17th-century Dutch art, ranging from “tronies” such as this one to paintings depicting biblical subjects, where they frequently serve to indicate that the painting shows a scene set far away, in biblical lands; the Middle East. They also feature with surprising frequency in cityscapes depicting the Dam in Amsterdam. In fact, there are not many 17th-century views of Dam square where they are omitted (FIG. 2).

In cityscapes, turban wearers reflect a very real presence of Turkish and Armenian merchants in Amsterdam in the 17th century, trading in goods from the Levant and beyond, such as Turkish and Persian carpets or Tulip bulbs. Thus, Flinck and other 17th-century artists could easily encounter a person wearing a turban on the streets of Amsterdam. At the same time, the stock figures of oriental traders on Dam square served a rhetorical function omnipresent in 17th-century Amsterdam art and literature, namely that Amsterdam, and Dam square in particular, were the centre of 17-century world trade. The turbans are thus pointers to Amsterdam’s cosmopolitan status as the centre of the trade network, their presence on Dam square “proof” of the fact that Amsterdam was the important global trading power that it was¹⁰.
Our young woman wearing a turban might therefore have had a similar connotation. On the wall in a 17th-century home it might have alluded to the pride in Amsterdam’s trade links with the rest of the world; or perhaps it conjured up an associations with a biblical figure; or maybe it did both simultaneously. The expensive gown and the abundance of jewellery also play a role in this. The amount of gold, pearls and gems that adorn the woman’s gown might allude both to the wealth built up through trade, but also to the woman’s potentially lofty social standing. The golden sceptre in her hand also suggests a form of nobility, yet a more precise determination of her identity remains elusive. The ambiguity of the “tronie” still functions today. 21st-century observers will also be able to “project” meaning into the painting, or simply enjoy its painterly qualities.
A complicating factor is the fact that the turban wearers on depictions of Dam square are invariably men. The turban as a headdress was and is worn by women, but it is more often considered to be headgear suitable for men. This is also reflected in tronies, where wearers of turbans are almost exclusively men, and usually older men at that (FIG. 3).

Another very famous example of a young woman wearing a turban is Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1632-1675, FIG. 4). Like our own picture, the exact meaning of this famous painting remains unclear, perhaps because it was intended to be that way. Ben Broos and Arthur Wheelock wrote of the painting: «The girl with the pearl earring, in her exotic dress against a dark, undefined background, escapes every definition. She could be an allegorical figure, a muse or a Sybil for example, but she misses the attributes»¹¹. The same could be said about our ‘girl with a pearl earring’ by Flinck. Vermeer’s inventory drafted in 1676, a year after his death, mentions «Twee tronyen geschildert op sijn Turx» [Two tronies in Turkish fashion] in the kitchen¹². One of those might well have been the Girl with the Pearl Earring. The Young Woman Wearing a Turban would probably have been described in a similar fashion in the 17th century. Turkish was a very broad term used to define the Islamic Middle East at that time.
Flinck painted dozens of “tronies” in the course of his relatively short career, ranging in style from those clearly inspired by Rembrandt (FIG. 1) to more Flemish-inspired exemplars. The painting under discussion here still owes a stylistic debt to Rembrandt, although the clear delineation of form, and use of brighter colours already points to a shift in Flinck’s development that is also seen in his history paintings and portraits. The subject matter of the tronies is generally diverse in terms of the age and gender of the depicted faces, although Flinck seems to have had a preference for the picturesque effects of old age on men.

Around the time that Flinck painted the young woman in a turban, he also painted two other “tronies” that reflect the wider trading world of Amsterdam in the 17th century. They depict two young archers, of whom one is a black boy while the other is a boy with a feather headdress (FIGS. 5 and 6). Since they are of similar size and both on wood, they may well originally have been companion pieces. The skin colour of the first boy and the headdress of the second suggest that these “tronies” may have been intended to conjure up associations with the continents of Africa and America respectively. Like the Young Woman with a Turban this may have served the rhetorical purpose of alluding to Amsterdam’s trading power, but with two other continents than Asia, with which the Turban was associated.
Govert Flinck undoubtedly painted “tronies” to sell them, yet they also served as a training ground for what was considered the more prestigious genre of painting, namely biblical and mythological histories. “Tronies” only rarely reappear in history paintings in recognisable form, but the experience gained could certainly be used when painting figures in larger compositions at a later date. In the Berlin Dismissal of Hagar and Ishmael painted in 1642¹³, for example, we see different ancient dress and oriental headgear in the oriental style from what we see in our “tronie”, but the rendering of texture, light and colour is perfectly comparable.