Ode to Anna Maria van Schurman | An elderly lady at the Rijksmuseum

This text was translated using AI and may contain errors. If you have suggestions or comments, please contact us at info.ode@amsterdammuseum.nl.

Anna Maria van Schurman lived from 1607 to 1678 and, with all her talents, was a widely known woman in intellectual circles of the seventeenth century. She was unmarried and around the age of 50 she began to feel alone.

Was it menopause that played tricks on her? People did not talk or write about it, and there was more: friends and relatives fell away and she also became disappointed in church life. But then the preacher Jean de Labadie came into her solitude. He brought a new clarity and she freed herself from her learned past. 

With a group of followers, she followed her leader to Amsterdam, in 1669. There they lived together on Lauriersgracht, in a sisterly and fraternal cordiality (women lived downstairs, men upstairs). They embraced each other and exchanged the Christian kiss of peace, a very new experience in her old age; it made her happy.

She had chosen the Best Part, as she would later call her book Eukleria. Mayor Koenraad van Beuningen was sympathetic to the group, but the ministers thought otherwise. When the rabble also rioted on angry rumour, the group had to leave town. 

A printed print of an elderly lady, probably Anna Maria van Schurman, dates from that time. After her death, at least someone wrote her name and year underneath by hand (the place of death is not correct and is taken from De groote Schouburgh by Arnold Houbraken, 1718). For Schurman's biographer, Pieta van Beek (2004), there was no reason for doubt and she mentions that the black cap was common among female Labadists. This attire was fashionable around 1650 to 1670, especially among older, well-to-do ladies and not typical of the Labadists (it was typical of Baptists, see for example the Amsterdam Emmerentia van Loon-van Veen, by the painter Vaillant, 1667). Finery was later rejected among the Labadists, so are her earrings, perhaps a reference to the time around her stay in Amsterdam.

However, the description of the print in the Rijksmuseum states that not Schurman, but Maria Matham was represented by her brother, the engraver Theodor Matham.His typical signature is not printed with it, as is is many of his other engravings. Was Schurman rightly replaced? In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is a second print of this print; at the bottom is, again handwritten: ‘Th. Matham sc.’ [sculpsit, has this inscribed] and ‘Maria Matham’.

Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote about that print in 1855 (in French), ‘that he had seen in the King's portrait collection a fine portrait by Th. Matham, without signature, on which is only handwritten Maria Matham, apparently [’apparemment‘, sic] his sister’. Mariette relied on what was written underneath the portrait, but being a print connoisseur, his opinion was reproduced in the New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings. 

I, however, conclude that the handwriting does not resemble Theodor's at all and so we get nowhere with those handwritten captions. He might have made the print, as he died in 1676.But judging from dozens of portraits in oval, which are of him on the internet, I see a difference in background shading with the present print. I leave the judgement to experts. So against the authoritative reference book and the Rijksmuseum, I have to make other arguments in defence of the elderly lady in the print as Anna Maria.

Theodor Matham (+1676) had no sister Maria at all (though there were three brothers). However, there was a Maria Matham, who married Nicolaas Versluys in Amsterdam in 1669, aged 24, with her father Theodor as witness; so she was born around 1645. With that, she cannot be the old lady of the engraving.

All this, and the fact that Matham was Catholic, makes it unlikely that he made the print for the strictly Calvinist Schurman. 

There is a clue before Schurman, though: the Utrecht engraver Steven van Lamsweerde knew her personally and engraved a portrait in 1657. According to the prevailing fashion, she too wears a starched, white shoulder cap with lace-trimmed strips over a dark gown.

The bodice of the gown features three raised lanes running to the waist, two curved from the armpits (one visible) and one straight from the centre. The sleeves fall wide and she wears white, lace cuffs. That attire and the courses of her gown are almost identical to the above engraving. 

Anna Maria thus posed for two portraitists, in different years, dressed in the same gown. All in all, I am convinced that the portrait in Amsterdam does indeed depict Anna Maria van Schurman, and with that statement the Rijksmuseum must make do.