Portrait of Pieter Schout (1640-69)

On 15 June 1660 Amsterdam sent out more than 100 riders to escort two royal visitors into the city, Mary Stuart, widow of the Prince of Orange, and her nine-year-old son, the future William III. Pieter Schout, a 20-year-old from a well-off Amsterdam family, rode in the first and grandest group. That same year Thomas de Keyser painted him on horseback, a format usually kept for princes. The black Andalusian horse performs a piaffe, a trot on the spot, and the blue ribbon at Schout's wrist may be the colour of his troop in the procession. De Keyser painted it on a copper plate 86 centimetres high, the only one of his four equestrian portraits on copper, and the metal gives the surface a jewel-like finish. His monogram and the date are on the saddle. Schout later became high bailiff of Hagestein, a village on the river Lek, and died unmarried in 1669, aged 28.