Willem Bartsius and the art of Dutch history painting

Abstract

Willem Bartsius (c.1612 – in or after 1639) is a seventeenth-century Dutch painter whose artistic output has puzzled art historians. Only six signed works have survived and on the basis of stylistic analogy, another ten paintings have been attributed to him. The scarcity of his paintings has been explained in the light of his being active for less than a decade during the 1630s, his career being cut short prematurely by his presumed death in or after 1639. The existence of a drawing, signed and dated ‘BARTIVS f. / 1657’, in Cologne1 at first made me anticipate the possibility that he lived much longer, but the authorship of the drawing proves to be questionable. In this article I will present the known facts of the artist’s life and try to reconstruct his movements. This is followed by a discussion of works by or attributed to Willem Bartsius in an attempt to establish his extant oeuvre and define his strengths and preferences in terms of style and iconography. His output will be considered in the context of Dutch history painting at that time in order to arrive at a plausible reconstruction of his artistic achievement.