Portrait of the artist, half-length, holding a fob watch

Ary de Vois, like Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris the Elder, belonged to a group of artists known as the Leiden fijnschilders (‘fine painters’) on account of their meticulously handled, often small-scale works. Due to the laborious nature of their production, paintings by these artists frequently commanded exceedingly high prices in the period and were especially sought by collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, de Vois depicts himself holding a fob watch, a frequent vanitas symbol in the period owing to its telling time. De Vois’ inclusion of this detail recalls the aphorism ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’ (‘Art is long, life is short’) and cleverly suggests that de Vois’ paintings, and therefore his artistic reputation, will outlive him. De Vois may have been inspired by prints like the Young man with a skull of around 1519 by his illustrious Leiden predecessor, Lucas van Leyden (fig. 1). In de Vois’ time, Lucas’ print was thought to be a self-portrait.

Though unknown at the time of its sale in 1995, the painting has an interesting early history. It was one of five 'very good pictures' acquired in 1825 by the merchant, shipowner, East India importer and collector Robert Gilmor Jr. of Baltimore from the then director of the Rijksmuseum, Cornelis Apostool. Two years later, Apostool would describe Gilmor, perhaps a bit flatteringly, as one of 'two of the most accomplished connoisseurs, in the arts,' the other being Sir Charles Bagot in England, who himself had been ambassador to the United States a few years earlier (quoted in L. Humphries, ‘Robert Gilmor, Jr.‘s “real” Dutch Paintings’, in Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals, E. Quodbach, ed., New York and University Park, PA, 2014, p. 37).

Gilmor was, without question, one of the most important collectors and patrons in the United States before 1850, and his collection included some 400 paintings by the Old Masters and contemporary European artists as well as numerous miniatures, drawings, prints, sculptures, antiquities, coins and medals, autographs, minerals and medieval manuscripts. Nearly a century before the founding of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Gilmor had hoped in vain that his remarkable collection would be acquired en bloc by the Smithsonian Institution and serve as the nucleus of a national museum.