Gerrit Zegelaar (Loenen aan de Vecht 1719 – 1794 Wageningen)

A Man Offering Game

A Woman Offering Vegetables

Both oil on panel, 22.5 x 19 cm (8.9 x 7.5 inch); presented in the original Neoclassical giltwood frames

The first signed 'Gt: Zegelaar Pinx' (lower centre), the second signed 'Gt: Zegelaar Pinx.' (lower left), ,

Provenance
With Kunsthandel C.P.A. & G.R. Castendijk, Rotterdam, exhibited at ‘Oude Kunst-en Antiekbeurs’ in the Prinsenhof in Delft, 1981, where acquired by the family of the former owner

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Zegelaar was born as the son of the carpenter and alderman Hendrik Zegelaar and Johanna ter Bruggen.¹ Although he was deaf-mute, he moved to Amsterdam and was taught the art of painting by Nicolaas Verkolje (1673–1746). In 1757 he married Maria van der Steen. Zegelaar was declared bankrupt in 1785, upon which the couple first moved to Utrecht and then to Wageningen. The aristocratic author Belle van Zuylen wrote in a letter of 1789 that Zegelaar had lost his mind.²

Although the artist is now little known, in his lifetime his work was included in two of the most prestigious art collections in Amsterdam, those of Jan Gildemeester and Gerrit Braamcamp. By 1743 he had acquired a considerable reputation, judging from a poem accompanying a self-portrait in which he was praised as the ‘Apelles from Loenen’.³ Gerrit Zegelaar was preoccupied with his own likeness, as is demonstrated by the several self-portraits that have come down to us, including an example showing the artist in a realistically rendered window sill (fig.).⁴ The portrait illustrates Zegelaar’s love for meticulously depicted surfaces in the manner of the Leiden finepainters and for trompe l’oeil effects.

Our well preserved pair of genre pieces show a male seller of game and a female seller of vegetables, surrounded by stone niches, a motif also favoured by Leiden finepainters, adding an illusionistic effect and extra sense of pictorial depth. They can for instance by compared to Zegelaar’s Fish Seller in the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede (fig.).⁵

1. For the artist, see E. Munnig Schmidt, 'Gerrit Zegelaar. Een 18e-eeuwse kunstschilder uit Loenen a/d Vecht', in Jaarboekje Oudheidkundig Genootschap Niftarlake, 2002, pp. 62-84 and E. Munnig Schmidt, ‘Een merkwaardig zelfportret van Gerrit Zegelaar’, Jaarboekje van het Oudheidkundig Genootschap Niftarlake, 2008, pp. 115-117.
2. Munnig Schmidt 2002, op. cit. p. 70 and p. 84.
3. Munnig Schmidt 2002, op. cit., p. 72.
4. Oil on panel, 27 x 21.5 cm; Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 11 November 2008, lot 58, repr.
5. Oil on panel, 48 x 35.5 cm, inv. no. 2581.