Portrait of Leonardus van der Voort

On 1 March 1796 the first National Assembly of the Batavian Republic met in The Hague. It was the elected parliament that took the place of the old Republic's States General after the revolution of 1795, and Leonardus van der Voort, a physician from Boxtel in Brabant, sat in it for Heusden. Scheffer painted him in 1799 wearing a deputy's sash with the word REPRESENTANT and holding a paper marked as the draft constitution. That draft was put to the voters in 1797 and rejected, and the country adopted a constitution only in 1798. As far as the Rijksmuseum knows, this is the only painted portrait of a member of that first assembly. An inscription records his dates, born in Boxtel in 1762 and died there in 1809. The painting is privately owned and has been on loan to the museum since 2007.