Helena van Heuvel
Details
The story
In 1664 Helena van Heuvel, from a family of Amsterdam merchants, married Leonard Winninx, who had made his fortune as an official of the Dutch East India Company. That same year the couple bought a large house on the Singel, one of the city's grand canals, for 42,000 guilders. The Museum of Fine Arts puts the sum in proportion. It was 140 times what a skilled craftsman earned in a year. Their estate inventory lists 60 paintings, along with diamonds from India, pearls, other gems and textiles worth some 34,000 guilders.
Maes painted her in about 1680 to 1683, when she was in her forties. The museum reads her silks, pearls and jewels as an advertisement of the family's wealth and its ties to trade in Asia, and it adds that the frame leaves out the forced labour in mines and on plantations that produced such goods. Her name comes from an old inscription on the back of the canvas, and an unattributed portrait of her appears in her husband's estate inventory in 1693.
About two centuries later the picture belonged to Jules Porgès, a Paris financier whose fortune came from the diamond mines of South Africa.
