The Rediscovery of a Portrait Listed in Hendrik van Limborch’s Rijksmuseum Notebook

In 1997, Guido Jansen published an essay in the Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum that explored a notebook kept by Hendrik van Limborch (1681-1759), an early eighteenth-century Dutch history painter and portraitist active in The Hague. In March 2021, twenty-four years after Jansen’s essay was published, a Parisian auction featured one of Van Limborch’s portraits of a female sitter, dated 1711. By consulting the painter’s notebook entries for the year 1711 in combination with archival references, the author is able to identify the sitter of this particular portrait. It represents The Hague resident, Maria Adriana van der Heim, daughter of the financial comptroller for the province of Holland. Her husband, Willem Sluijsken, whose name appears directly above hers in van Limborch’s entry, likewise enjoyed a distinguished legal and financial career. Both sitters exemplify the elite status of sitters whom Jansen describes as the painter’s customary clientele.