Cornelis Ketel

Adam Wachendorff, a merchant of the Steelyard, London, 1574

Ketel quickly established himself as a successful painter of portraits in London. Karel van Mander records that Ketel was patronized by the prosperous German Hansa merchants of the Steelyard and that a Force overcome by Wisdom and Prudence commissioned from him and presented to Sir Christopher Hatton introduced him to court circles.[14] Hatton commissioned a portrait and Queen Elizabeth I sat to him in 1578.[15] Ketel's large output in these years, much of which is now lost, can be estimated by the quantity of his known commissions. In 1577 Ketel was commissioned to paint a series of 19 portraits for the Cathay Company, one of which is the famous (but very damaged) full-length of Martin Frobisher now in the Bodleian Library.[16] and several "great" paintings of Kalicho, the Inuit man Frobisher had brought back to England.[17] Ketel's self-portrait, which was engraved by Hendrick Bary, is in the Royal Collection.[18] Recently, a series of head-and-shoulders paintings of members of the family of Thomas "Customer" Smythe dated 1579, now widely dispersed, has been identified as the work of Cornelis Ketel.[19]

Apparently, all of Ketel's allegorical paintings have been lost, however, a formerly lost masterpiece was discovered and exhibited at the Tate Museum, London, in 1995, in a major exhibition entitled Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630. Attribution as to title of this work, this may be the lost "Triumph of Wisdom and Prudence over Force" 1580, painted in England. (Miedema-Schulting 1988) Referred to as "Allegory", this fragment, which was recently discovered, today forms, together with the reverse of no. 55, the sole remnant of Ketel's rich production of painted allegories, described in detail in van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck of 1604 [Miedema 1994].

Records indicate that Ketel charged £1 for a head-and-shoulders portrait and £5 for a full-length.[20] Nicholas Hilliard, then in his prime as a painter of portrait miniatures, typically charged £3 for a miniature.

The Company of Captain Rosecrans by Cornelis Ketel, 1588. The painting has been trimmed on all sides, especially at the top

Some of Ketel's history paintings are documented in various ways, including a Democritus and a Heraclitus copied very brilliantly by Rembrandt aged around thirteen, when he was training with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam.[21] These were perhaps tronies, the Dutch genre of imaginary portraits of mythological or historical persons. A van Mander story describes a peasant trying to explain a Ketel Danae to his wife, and getting it confused with an Annunciation.[22]

Ketel's 1588 The Company of Captain Rosecrans, the earliest Dutch group portrait where the figures are shown standing and full length, "greatly influenced later artists of militia pieces, such as Rembrandt in his Night Watch of 1642."[23]—to whom one should add Frans Hals and Bartholomeus van der Helst[24]—and set an Amsterdam tradition; Hals's Harlem groups are from knee-height only, but his great Amsterdam group is full-length. However, Ketel, like Hals, spread his sitters laterally at irregular intervals, but kept them all in a row at the front of the picture space; it was left to Rembrandt to spread his subjects deep into the picture-space as well.[25] The picture has been trimmed on all sides, especially above; originally the city gate in front of which the group are standing was much more prominent, and in this respect closer to the Night Watch.[26] The group also carry their weapons indoors, another innovation.[2]

Together with Pieter Pietersz, Ketel was the leading portraitist in Amsterdam for many years, and one of the generation of Dutch portrait-painters whose increasingly sophisticated work laid the foundations for their much more famous successors. Whereas in England portraits in oils remained mostly confined to the court and gentry, in the Netherlands they were already common among the prosperous mercantile classes. Ketel lived across Oude Kerk, where he bought in 1593 a house on the so-called "Velvet Canal". Both Ketel and Pietersz developed an Amsterdam style often marked by depicting sitters "very close to the picture plane, from an unusual angle, and cropped closely by the frame" (see Double Portrait of a Brother and Sister, below).[27] Ketel seems to have kept a stock of drawings of poses, from which a patron might choose, and which could be worked up by studio assistants without the sitter's presence being required.[28] Van Mander records that around 1600 he at times discarded his brush and painted directly with his fingers, and even developed the trick of painting with his feet and toes—presumably just for short periods. This may have been to amuse himself and his sitters, to relieve boredom.[29] An alternative, perhaps more likely, explanation, is that he was forced to do so by a progressive paralysis, perhaps arthritic, which finally completely overcame him by 1610–1613.[30]

• 
  Sir Martin Frobisher, 1577
• 
  Thomas Pead, 1578. The skull is inscribed "Respice finem".
• 
  Richard Goodricke of Ribston, 1578
• 
  John Smythe, 1579
• 
  Thomas Cecil, First Earl of Exeter. 1575