Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (37.1996)

The signature on our painting is in a shape which I do not recall from any of
Honthorst’s other works. Additionally, the V is linked with the h so ambiguously
that they seem to form K together. However, obvious stylistic features, the
quality of the brushwork, and the early date accompanying the signature,
corresponding exactly with the perioci when Honthorst produced his first
known bacchic scenes, convince me to preclude any other possible attribution.44 45

On the contrary, The Adoration of the Shepherds in the Diocesan Museum in
Pelplin (Fig. 14), considered possibly a work of Honthorst or his studio,4j is
certainly not the product of anyone from his workshop. The attribution to the
circle of Trophime Bigot and Crijn Hendricksz Volmarijn should also be excluded.
Instead it may be presumed that it was painted by Wolfgang Heimbach (c.
1615-1678), a German painter, influenced by such artists as Honthorst, Fetti and
Saraceni, born near Oldenburg, trained in Holland (possibly in Haarlem), who
traveled to Italy and Prague, and was active for years at the royal court in
Copenhagen, just over the Baltic sea from Pelplin. Such a painting could easily
be imported through Gdansk (Danzig), the principal port city and the capital of
the region. The Adoration, whose general outlines recall paintings by Honthorst
such as Nativity in the Uffizi Gallery and The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1622,
in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, reveals characteristics very typical
of Heimbach, such as exaggerated light effects, including the favourite overstressed
motif of a candle masqued by the hand and faces illuminated from below. These
faces are of several particular physiognomic types, with a predilection for bowed
eyebrows, half-shut, chink-shaped eyes with swollen lids and protuberant noses,
and distinctive profile views. We can find these features, as well as fleshy, softly
falling folds, in The Card Players (in 1955 with Pardo in Paris), his numerous Boys
or Men Masking Candles, Nocturnal Scene in Schloßmuseum in Gotha, or The
Flight into Egypt, in Szépmüvészeti Muzeum, Budapest.46

During the symposium in Warsaw, the organizers of the exhibition had to face
the criticism of not including another putative Honthorst from the collection
of the National Museum in Poznan. As the issue seems not to be fully clarified,
I would like to discuss briefly the question of the attribution. In 1958 Anna

44 Gerard van Kuijl (1604-1673) is the only pupil of Honthorst with initials GvK known to me.
In 1623 he did not even study in Honthorst’s workshop. The first archival reference to Van Kuijl
dates from 1625, and only in c. 1628 he made for Italy, the traditional trip at the end of painter’s
studies. Moreover, his first dated work is from 1638, and is further distant from Honthorst’s manner
than even his later paintings, of which none, incidentally, is so as similar to Honthorst as our Satyrs.
Nor he had ever taken up Bacchic themes. Cf. E. J. Sluijter, “Niet Gysbert van der Kuyl uit
Gouda, maar Gerard van Kuijl uit Gorinchem (1604-1673), Oud Holland, 91 (1977), pp.166-194,
passim-, idem, “Een aanvulling op het oeuvre van Gerard van Kuijl”, Oud Holland, 91 (1978),
pp.264-265, passim.

45 Not shown in the Warsaw exhibition; cf. j. S. Pasierb, Pelplin i jego zabytki, Warszawa-Pelplin
1993, pp.104-105, il. 185.

46 Cf. G. Göttsche, Wolfgang Heimbach, Berlin, 1935; A. Pigler, “Une scène de légende de W
Pleimbach”, Kunsthistorische Mededelingen, 3 (1948), no. 1, pp.8-11, Afb. 1; R. Fritz, Wolfgang

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