page_title: Cornelis Ketel
section_title: Later works
hierarchical_section_title: Cornelis Ketel / Works / Later works
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Gravure van Cornelis Ketel door Hendrik Bary
context_page_description: Cornelis or Cornelius Ketel was a Dutch Mannerist painter, active in Elizabethan London from 1573 to 1581, and in Amsterdam from 1581 to the early 17th century, now known essentially as a portrait-painter, though he was also a poet and orator, and from 1595 began to sculpt as well.
  According to Ketel's biography, written by his contemporary Karel van Mander, he seems to have wanted to concentrate on the most prestigious of the hierarchy of genres, history painting, which included mythological subjects, but after he left France he is known almost entirely as a portrait-painter. Neither England nor Holland had much demand for large history paintings during his lifetime, and none of Ketel's histories or allegorical paintings are known to have survived intact, although drawings and prints survive. He did however significantly influence the development of the largest type of painting commonly produced in the United Provinces at this period, the civic group portrait.
context_section_description: Some of Ketel's history paintings are documented in various ways, including a Democritus and a Heraclitus copied very brilliantly by Rembrandt aged around thirteen, when he was training with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. These were perhaps tronies, the Dutch genre of imaginary portraits of mythological or historical persons.  A van Mander story describes a peasant trying to explain a Ketel Danae to his wife, and getting it confused with an Annunciation.
  Ketel's 1588 The Company of Captain Rosecrans, the earliest Dutch group portrait where the figures are shown standing and full length, "greatly influenced later artists of militia pieces, such as Rembrandt in his Night Watch of 1642."—to whom one should add Frans Hals and Bartholomeus van der Helst—and set an Amsterdam tradition; Hals's Harlem groups are from knee-height only, but his great Amsterdam group is full-length.  However, Ketel, like Hals, spread his sitters laterally at irregular intervals, but kept them all in a row at the front of the picture space; it was left to Rembrandt to spread his subjects deep into the picture-space as well. The picture has been trimmed on all sides, especially above; originally the city gate in front of which the group are standing was much more prominent, and in this respect closer to the Night Watch. The group also carry their weapons indoors, another innovation.
  Together with Pieter Pietersz, Ketel was the leading portraitist in Amsterdam for many years, and one of the generation of Dutch portrait-painters whose increasingly sophisticated work laid the foundations for their much more famous successors.  Whereas in England portraits in oils remained mostly confined to the court and gentry, in the Netherlands they were already common among the prosperous mercantile classes.  Ketel lived near Oude Kerk, where he bought in 1593 a house on the so-called "Velvet Canal". Both Ketel and Pietersz developed an Amsterdam style often marked by depicting sitters "very close to the picture plane, from an unusual angle, and cropped closely by the frame" (see Double Portrait of a Brother and Sister, below). Ketel seems to have kept a stock of drawings of poses, from which a patron might choose, and which could be worked up by studio assistants without the sitter's presence being required. Van Mander records that around 1600 he at times discarded his brush and painted directly with his fingers, and even developed the trick of painting with his feet and toes—presumably just for short periods. This may have been to amuse himself and his sitters, to relieve boredom. An alternative, perhaps more likely, explanation, is that he was forced to do so by a progressive paralysis, perhaps arthritic, which finally completely overcame him by 1610–1613.
caption: Cornelis Ketel by Hendrik Bary
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