Pieter Pietersz the Elder
1603 · Habsburg Netherlands, Dutch Republic · Northern Mannerism, Northern Renaissance
The story
When the Mauritshuis bought this portrait at a Haarlem auction in 1874, it was sold under the name of Pieter Aertsen, the Amsterdam painter of market and kitchen scenes. The actual painter was his son. Pieter Pietersz, born around 1540, was one of three sons of Aertsen who took up their father's trade.
The sitter is Cornelis Cornelisz Schellinger, born in 1551, and the portrait is dated 1584. Pietersz had been working in Haarlem since 1569, and there the young Cornelis van Haarlem, later a leading Mannerist painter, trained with him. The painter-biographer Karel van Mander wrote that Pietersz turned to portraits because large commissions were no longer to be had. In the mid-1580s he moved to Amsterdam, where he died in 1603 a wealthy man.
