Portrait of Jacob Bas Claesz

Adriaen Thomasz. Key was the leading portraitist of Antwerp in the second half of the sixteenth century, the painter who took over the workshop of Willem Key and afterwards adopted his name. Trained first as a glass painter’s apprentice and enrolled in the Guild of Saint Luke by 1558, he built up a practice among the governing class of the city and worked for William of Orange, and his portraits were admired for a technical mastery that a later generation, Rubens among them, took as a model. Key had turned Calvinist, yet after the fall of Antwerp in 1585 he chose not to leave, and it was in that year’s aftermath that he painted this panel. The sitter, Jacob Bas Claesz, was a burgomaster of Amsterdam; the picture is the pendant to the portrait of his wife, Grietje Pietersdr Codde, which also belongs to the Rijksmuseum. Both are dated 1586. The painting is held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.