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Werner van den Valckert (?; ca. 1560/65- after 1627)
The anatomy lecture of Dr. Sebastiaan Egbertsz. de Vrij (1563-1621). Painted in 1619. Canvas, 135 × 186 cm.

Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum, cat. nr.2io, inv.nr.A 7352. Presented to the city in 1864 by an ad hoc Committee of Art Lovers, Artists and Physicians, after the city, in 1862, had permitted it to be sold, with fourteen other paintings belonging to the surgeons' guild, to a private individual.

This is the second painting of an anatomical demonstration by the prelector of the Amsterdam surgeons' guild. The first one dates from 1603, and portrays the same Sebastiaan Egbertsz., who held the post from 1595 until his death. The repetition established a tradition from which Rembrandt benefitted in 1632, when he painted the fourth painting of this kind for the guild, the famous Anatomy lecture of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp.

Both paintings of anatomy lectures by Sebastiaan Egbertsz. followed upon important events in his political career. (Even before he became guild prelector, he had served a term as alderman, and in 1606 and 1608 he was burgomaster.) In 1602, he entered the town council, and in 1618 he was ejected from it. The ejection was the result of Sebastiaan's siding with the Remonstrants, an attitude one would not expect from the son of one of the most militant Calvinists in preReformation Amsterdam, who escaped being executed by the Spaniards only by dying in prison the night before.

An event in the history of the guild of which he was such an important member no doubt also gave an impulse to the painting of a second anatomy lecture by Sebastiaan Egbertsz. In April 1619 he opened a new anatomical theatre, above the weighing hall in the former St. Anthony's Gate, premises which the surgeons shared with the painters of the guild of St. Luke.

From 1746 until 1983, the painting was thought to be the earliest work by Thomas de Keyser, son of the town architect and sculptor Hendrick de Keyser. In a recent article, however, Pieter van Thiel has removed it, with convincing arguments, from de Keyser's work and assigned it tentatively to Werner van den Valckert. The attribution certainly makes good sense from the point of view of patronage politics. Van den Valckert, who lived on the square outside St. Anthony's Gate and was probably a guild officer, was a painter to the Catholics and Remonstrants of Amsterdam, like Sebastiaan Egbertsz.

The painting is a brilliant performance, introducing into Dutch group portraiture a new kind of dynamism and unity, enriched with a sense of humour.

Elias, vol. 1, pp.258-260. Van Thiel 1983.