A Portrait of a Boy in grey Silk Tunic and blue Cape, standing in a Landscape holding a Bow with his Spaniel by his side

BARTHOLOMEUS MEYBURGH
1624-1708
Dutch School

Oil on canvas, signed and dated 1684

95 x 76 cms

373/8 x 30 inches

 Overall framed size 103.5 x 85.5 cms

                                 40¾ x 335/8 ins

 

Bartholomeus Meyburgh was a Dutch Golden Age painter who specialised in portraits, religious and allegorical works and animals.

He was born in Maashuis in the western Netherlands in 1624, a town which was strongly protestant in the predominantly Catholic province of Maesland. He was friends with the painter Christoffel Pierson who was taught to paint by Meyburgh despite being only three years younger than him and they traveled to Germany together in 1653 to paint.

Meyburgh continued to live and work in Maashuis until 1661 when he moved to The Hague which was one of the principle centres of Netherlandish painting in the seventeenth century. He joined the Confrerie Pictura which had been founded in 1656 by forty-eight artists who had become frustrated and disenchanted with the Guild of St. Luke which represented the artists in The Hague and advanced their interest and maintained standards. The first deacon of this august breakaway body was the portrait painter Adriaen Hannerman and other members included Daniel Mijtens the Younger, Adriaen van der Venne, Dirck van der Lisse ad Jacon van der Does.

In the records of Confrerie Pictura, Meyburgh's place of birth is given as The Hague but this is almost certainly just an assumption by the scribe based on the fact that Meyburgh was then resident there. He continued to live and paint there until his death in 1708 except for between the years 1684 and1689 when he was working in Germany.

Meyburgh's compositions and style show the influence of the important Dordrecht portrait painter Nicolas Maes and other artists who painted in a similar vein at that time include Jacobus Levecq, Adriaen Hanneman and Jan de Baen.

His commissioning patrons included the Queen of England and the Queen of Bohemia and the Dusseldorf Museum holds examples of his work