(Utrecht 1596–1660)
Christ among the Doctors,
oil on canvas, 101 x 134.5 cm, framed

We are grateful to Luuk Pijl for confirming the attribution. His written analysis is available.

Pieter Wtewael was the first child of the famous Utrecht-based Mannerist Joachim Wtewael and his wife, Christiana van Halen. The portrait Joachim made of his son (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, inv. no. 18020) shows Pieter as a painter with brushes in his hands, although it is known today that he only pursued the profession of a painter for a brief while. Pieter worked for the Utrecht city council and successfully saw to his family’s business matters. When he died in 1660, he left substantial possessions, including several works by his own hand and some by his father.

Pieter’s manageable oeuvre dates from the period between 1624 and 1630 and comprises no more than twenty-five works. Only during the last fifty years has it been possible to securely attribute paintings to Pieter that were formerly assigned to his famous father (see A. W. Lowenthal, Some Paintings by Peter Wtewael 1596–1660, in: The Burlington Magazine, 116, 1974, pp. 458–66). Having been trained by the latter, Pieter successfully followed his father’s footsteps artistically. The strong-featured doctors in the present painting recur in several compositions by Joachim, such as the figure of the almost caricature-like bespectacled old man that resembles Matthew the Evangelist in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore or the man in a turban recalling one of the shepherds in the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Musée Magnin in Dijon. Today it is also assumed that Pieter and Joachim collaborated on a number of paintings, which makes a separation of their hands difficult. A smaller and modified version of Christ among the Doctors that was earlier regarded as the sole work of Joachim and is now largely given to Pieter once figured in the collection of Richard L. Feigen and was sold at Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 4 November 2003, lot 119. From their known oeuvres and old sales catalogues from previous centuries it becomes clear that father and son frequently produced several versions of popular subjects. For example, a version of Christ among the Doctors featuring the same dimensions was sold at Cronenburgh’s in Amsterdam on 22 March 1762: ‘Een stuk, verbeeldende Christus onder de Leeraars, door Jochim Uittenwaal, zo goed als Goltzius, h. 40 b. 56 d.’ [‘A piece representing Christ among the Doctors by Jochim Uittenwaal, as good as that by Goltzius, h. 40 w. 56 inches’] (see A. W. Lowenthal, Joachim Wtewael and Dutch Mannerism, Groningen 1986, p. 204).