Page of Jeronimus Tonneman and his Son by TROOST, Cornelis in the Web Gallery of Art, a searchable image collection and database of European paintings and sculptures (1100-1850)

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Jeronimus Tonneman and his Son

1736
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

This small-scale double portrait of Jeronimus Tonneman and his son Jeronimus Jr. ranks with the best conversation pieces. It is a type of portrait which continues the tradition of portraying full-length figures, seen in little, in a familiar setting while posing informally or engaged in activities that allude to their status and interests. The tradition was initiated by Thomas de Keyser in the 1620s and was carnied on by other artists in their small family portraits (Frans Hals, Molenaer, Adriaen van Ostade, Terborch, de Hooch, Metsu, Emmanuel de Witte). The tradition was broken in about 1675 by the new vogue for courtly portraits and those with a classical flavour. Troost can be credited with resuscitating it in the 1720s, and by the following decade he was its unrivalled master in Holland.

As in seventeenth-century Dutch portraits of this type, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the interior which serves as a setting for a conversation piece is imaginary or not. For example, the room in which Tonneman is seated near his son playing a fashionable slender flute looks like a plausible portrait of an interior in his Amsterdam home. It is not. He did not have a room in his home decorated with a statue of St Susanna modelled after a work by the Flemish classical sculptor François Duquesnoy (he and members of his workshop were responsible for the splendid sculptures that decorate Amsterdam's new town hall) or large plaster reliefs of mythological and allegorical subjects.

On the other hand, the parchment-bound volume of van Mander's Schilderboek that lies on the table doing double duty as a makeshift stand for the son's music and as a sign that we are in the company of people who know something about the arts, is most likely not an imaginary prop. It almost certainly belonged to Tonneman; no less than three copies of van Mander's volume were listed in a 1754 posthumous sale of his effects.