Een dame en anderen - four portraits by Hendrik Pothoven

 

Interieur met een dame zittend aan een tafel, ND.

This portrait - lively and charmingly naïve - is what first called my attention to the work of Pothoven. Apparently undated, it's stylistically quite different from the following three pieces. I'd venture to assume it was painted earlier in his career than those, but the unspecificity of his subject's toilette and her strange non-coiffure make it difficult to hazard any sort of a guess.

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 Jan de Groot en zijn familie, 1777.

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Familiegroep in het interieur, 1774.

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Petrus Bliek, remonstrants predikant te Amsterdam, met zijn vrouw Cornelia Drost, 1771.

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Hendrik Pothoven (25 December 1725, Amsterdam – 29 January 1807, The Hague), artist during the period of the Dutch Republic. According to the The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD (RKD/Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis), he was a pupil of Frans de Bakker and Philip van Dijk, and was a follower of Frans van Mieris and Adriaen van de Velde. Best known for his portraits, landscapes, and engravings, he worked in his native Amsterdam until 1764. He then moved to The Hague, where he would later die at the age of eighty-one.