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Willem Bartel van der Kooi (1768-1836)
The drawing lesson of Anna Charlotte Didier de Boncour (1748-1802). Signed and dated W.B. v.d. Kooi/inv. et fec. 1793. Canvas, 42.5 × 52 cm.

Leeuwarden, Fries Museum, inv.nr. 1969-46. Purchased at sale Luzern, 28 November 1967, lot 2281.

The woman at the table was identified by C. Boschma, director of the Fries Museum, as the fifty-one-year-old amateur artist Anna Charlotte Didier de Boncour. Anna Charlotte studied drawing in The Hague, where she was born, under Dirk Kuipers. She left there for Leeuwarden in 1775 when she married the three-year younger Henricus van der Haer, registrar of the Court of Friesland. In that provincial capital she madethe acquaintance of van der Kooi, who wrote in later years that he 'had the honour of being acquainted with her household several years before her death.' He said this in a letter to the art historian Adriaan van der Willigen, advising him to include the artist in his forthcoming history of Dutch painting. (Anna Charlotte's name is not to be found in the four-volume work.)

There can be little doubtthat the standing man behind the draughtswoman is van der Kooi at the age of forty-five; Boschma's identifications of the other figures as members of Anna Charlotte's family are very plausible.

Van der Kooi came from a family of Friesland civil servants. He was a committed patriot, and under the Batavian Republic served as a representative in the provincial assembly. In1798 he was appointed Lecturer of Drawing at the Frisian university of Franeker (where young Bonifacius van der Haer, whom we see from the back in this painting, began his law studies the year before).

Boschma 1978.