Portrait of a mother as Charity and three children

Though this painting was previously attributed to Jürgen Ovens, it has more recently been recognized as a characteristic work by Jan van Noordt, one of Amsterdam’s most fashionable painters of historical scenes and portraits in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The painting belongs to a specific category of portraiture which was particularly popular in the period known as the portrait historié.

The figures are all dressed à l’antique and the mother is rather daringly shown with one bare breast, a detail that marks her as the personification of Caritas (Charity). The throne on which she sits, carved in the auricular style popularized earlier in the century by the Utrecht silversmith Adam van Vianen, furthers the allegorical conceit: it is carved with an additional child and a sunflower, a symbol of devotion, at the center of the backrest. A sculpted figure of Hope, shown holding an anchor, appears in the painting’s left background. As David de Witt has pointed out, the combination of these virtues follows the recommendation in the Dutch version of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (op. cit., p. 208).

On account of the painting’s smooth and broad handling of the flesh, its ‘sweeping movement’ and the diagonal organization of the children’s poses, De Witt places it around 1670. Particularly close parallels can be drawn with another family portrait in Dunkerque datable to the same period (op. cit., no. 62).