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Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburgh (1537-1614)
Self-portrait. Inscribed AN°. DNI. 1568. Panel, 94 × 71.5 cm.

Leiden, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, inv.nr. 1738. Purchased from the Schaeffer Galleries, New York, in 1974. Discovered in 1965 in London by Lodewijk Houthakker of the Bernard Houthakker gallery, Amsterdam.

The self-portrait of the artist at his work was a relatively new phenome-non in 1568. Two years earlier, van Swanenburgh's kinsman and pupil Otto van Veen painted himself at the easel, in a room filled with members of his family.

Van Veen later moved from Leiden to Antwerp to become the teacher of Peter Paul Rubens and a famous man in his own right. His painting has been in the Louvre since 1835. In 1558, an image closer in type to van Swanenburgh's was created by Anthonis Mor, a portraitist from Utrecht who in 1557 had painted King Philip n of Spain and was famous throughout Europe. Mor's painting hung in his house in Utrecht in the 1560s, but later entered the Medici collection of self-portraits, and is still in the Uffizi.

Swanenburgh's fame remained limited to Leiden, but in that little pond he was undeniably a big fish. In 1576 he had been elected to the Leiden town council, and in the following four decades he controlled all township matters pertaining to art. For all his talent and influence, however, his reputation did not carry very far, and this painting, one of his best, remained unknown to art history until its rediscovery twenty years ago by the distinguished Amsterdam art dealer Lodewijk Houthakker.

The painter's riveting gaze draws our attention irresistibly to his personal appearance, but in the corners of our eyes we see the attributes that make him what he is: the coat of arms refer to his distin-guished family back-ground, the Renaissance statuette and drawing sheet to his solid artistic training, and his hands, grasping palette and brush, to his innate talent.

Ekkart 1974, Ekkart 1978 and Ekkart 1979