Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, Australia, for at least 100 years


Two signed and dated versions of the present composition by Marinus van Reymerswaele are known: that which is dated 1542 in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, (inv. no. 718) and the 1545 version in the New Orleans Museum of Art (acc. no. 70.7). The present composition differs from both of these, as well as those other period copies that are known, most significantly in that the left-hand figure uses a different facial model (who curiously seems to have a halo in the present version). In the Munich and New Orleans pictures the number of letters hanging immediately behind the lawyer and his clerk differs from each other as well as the present version, as does the script on them; the script on the letters that the lawyer is holding, as well as that on the letters in the foreground in both these versions, however, appear to mirror that in the present work more closely, if not exactly. The grain on the woodwork is also different in the various versions. There is one other version (with Sotheby's, 14 April, 2011, lot 14), in which the script on the letter behind the figure on the left, for example, is closer to that in the present version. It should also be noted that the present painting includes a pentiment, by which the artist appears to have corrected the angle of the central clerk's left little-finger when compared to the New Orleans and Munich versions.

All these scenes show a lawyer with his arm and hand raised, seated at the left with a clerk, writing, in the centre, and three other men to the right with the one in front emptying a bag of money. The criticism of greed was a popular theme in 16th-century Netherlandish painting, when it was used to satirize the legal profession, mocking its avarice. Marinus's reputation in particular is based upon this type of satirical genre painting. Indeed, the documents in the background of the Munich and New Orleans paintings have been identified as referring to an actual lawsuit about a salt refinery which began in 1526 in the town of Reymerswaele on the North Sea, but was not resolved until 1538, by which time the property in dispute had been destroyed by storms. The satirical subject is thus a particularly timeless one that will strike a chord with lawyers today. Just like Charles Dickens's fictional case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in his novel Bleak House, which became a byword for interminable legal disputes, Reymerswaele's subject was inspired by a real-life case.

The discovery of this new version of Marinus's Lawyers is particularly interesting given the light this particular subject has shed on Marinus's life. Until relatively recently what was known about the artist's life was largely based on the account by Henri Hymans in 1884, but an article by Adri Mackor for Oud Holland in 1995, entitled 'Marinus van Reymerswale: Painter, Lawyer and Iconoclast?' argues that the artist most likely had another profession from which he derived an income, which enabled him to develop the smooth handwriting displayed in his work and might have given him access to documents which were surely considered classified material, or at least inaccessible to the public in his day (see Oud Holland, vol. 109, no.4, 1995, pp. 191-200). Mackor suggests that Marinus may well have trained in academia and possibly pursued a profession in law, money or administration, explaining the absence of signed (or dated) paintings over long periods, especially after 1545, and the apparent disappearance of the painter without a trace for long periods might be explained by the appearance that he could have continued a second career in a town other than the impoverished Reymerswale. He suggests a likely timing of this move to have been after 1542, the year in which he painted the Munich Lawyer's Office with disguised names of Reymerswale citizens featuring in the original documents, and before 1545, when he made the New Orleans version of the same painting with the authentic names on the document. Mackor further questions the common speculation by Hyman and others that Marinus could be identified as a Protestant iconoclast in the 1560s. Perhaps the intriguing presence of a haloed figure on the left-hand side of the present composition might enable us to speculate further on the true identity of this somewhat mysterious artist?