This portrait of the Amsterdam fur trader Nicolaes Ruts marks a turning point in Rembrandt’s career: painted in Amsterdam, where the artist moved from his native Leiden in 1631, it appears to be Rembrandt’s first portrait commissioned by someone outside of his family. The year is inscribed—upside down to viewers of the painting—on the slip of paper held in the sitter’s hand. Every care has been taken to portray in precise and vivid detail Ruts’s fur-lined clothing and spectacular hat (endorsements of the sitter’s livelihood), and his moustache and beard, the wisps of facial hair incised into wet paint perhaps with the handle of a paintbrush. Celebrated for his ability to capture the psychological presence of his sitters, Rembrandt conveys the confident gravity of the wealthy merchant.
The portrait is painted on mahogany, a wood imported to Europe from colonies in the Caribbean. This exotic support testifies to the network of global trade, inextricable from colonization and enslaved labor, that benefited merchants like Ruts and, along the way, artists like Rembrandt. The increasingly wealthy merchant class in seventeenth-century Amsterdam turned to artists to visualize their success with painted portraits, status symbols that had in the past mainly been reserved for aristocratic and noble classes. Ruts acquired his furs from Russia, reportedly a less reliable source than the colonies in North America. Not many years after Rembrandt produced this painting, Ruts declared bankruptcy. The rise and fall of the sitter’s fortune mirrored that of the artist himself. Rembrandt enjoyed enormous commercial and critical success before falling into financial ruin in the 1650s.
Nicolaes Ruts
Born in Cologne, Nicolaes Ruts (1573–1638) was a merchant who traded with Russia, the source, no doubt, of the rich furs in which he posed for this portrait. Rembrandt’s likeness of him, perhaps the first portrait commission the artist received from someone outside of his own family, was painted presumably for Ruts’ daughter Susanna. A 1636 inventory of her property listed the picture of her father as “the portrait of Nicolaes Ruts made by Rembrant.” The dramatic contrasts in lighting and the detailed rendering of the varied textures are characteristic of Rembrandt’s early work, differing markedly from the warm, diffused light and broad brushwork that distinguish the Frick Self-Portrait executed over a quarter of a century later.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Susanna Ruts. Ruts family. Owned in 1799 by Joost Romswinckel, Leyden, and still in his collection, in The Hague, in 1817. Anthony Meynts sale, July 15, 1823, Amsterdam, Lot 107, as Portrait of a Man, sold for 4,010 florins to Brondgeest (one of the agents—“makelaars”—for the sale), possibly for the Queen of the Netherlands. Willem II, King of the Netherlands, sale, August 12, 1850, The Hague, Lot 86, as Portrait d’un Rabbin, sold for 3,400 florins to Weimer, The Hague. Adrian Hope sale, June 30, 1894, Christie’s, Lot 57 (now identified as Nicolaes Ruts), sold for 4,700 guineas to Agnew. Joseph Ruston, Monk’s Manor, Lincoln. His sale, May 21 and 23, 1898, Christie’s, Lot 95, sold for 5,000 guineas to Colnaghi. Bought (through E. Fischof, Paris) by Comte Boni de Castellane, Paris. Bought (before 1903) by J. Pierpont Morgan, and brought by him to New York in 1912. Knoedler, 1943. Frick 1943
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: American, British, Dutch, Flemish and German. Volume I. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
