Last month I published an article in the Burlington Magazine, A legacy to Mr Peter Lilly’ new light on the collaboration between Peter Lely and Remigius van Leemput which suggests that Remigius van Leemput’s wife Maria – daughter of George Geldorp, portrait painter, frame-maker, art world fixer, networker extraordinaire and irrepressible scoundrel – was a chip off the old block. We’d last met her in Leemput v Leemput 1656 when she’d taken time off her work in London (presumably in Leemput’s studio) to sort out the sale of Geldorp’s property in Antwerp, helping her husband untangle her father’s characteristic shenanigans. Geldorp was defrauding them while accusing them both in Geldorp v Leemput 1656 of owing him money. Twenty years later in Leemput v Leemput 1676, another previously unpublished court case in the National Archives at Kew, she seems to be very much her father’s daughter. Her stepson Lewis van Leemput alleges that she forged her late husband’s will in order to disinherit him and the children of Leemput’s first marriage in favour of her own children by him, including the painter Maria van Leemput.(1) As evidence that the will now on record was a forgery, Lewis states that his father had intended to leave a legacy to Lely the portrait painter. This legacy is not mentioned in Leemput’s surviving nuncupative will, which Maria and her supporters claimed was dictated from his deathbed. We knew that Leemput was a copyist of Lely’s work. Numerous surviving pictures show it, and George Vertue records this remark: ‘Remy [Remigius van Leemput] us’d to say to Sr P. Lelly. that he coud Coppy his pictures better than he cou’d himself.’ The fact that Leemput may have wanted to leave Lely a legacy in his will paints a picture of an even closer relationship, and I suggested that they may have enjoyed a professional relationship comparable with the role as prime copyist in little that Leemput played in Sir Anthony van Dyck’s studio some years previously.

The art historian Neil Jeffares, author of The Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, drew my attention to the source for George Vertue’s remark.  Vertue was on a visit to Wilton House at the time and he noted the reference to Leemput in a copy of Count Carlo Gambarini’s Description of the Earl of Pembroke’s Pictures published in 1731 which he was reading there.

Gambarini identifies a copy of Van Dyck’s great painting The Pembroke Family 1633–5 (Earl of Pembroke, Wilton House, Wiltshire) by ‘Remy’ [Remigius van Leemput] which he used in having a print made of the Wilton painting: ‘‘I had the Help of a little Picture painted by Remy in the same Time of Van Dyke, who was us’d to say to Sir Peter Lelly, that he could copy his Pictures better than he himself could copy. This Picture was done on Purpose to be grav’d at Paris, and was carried by Mr Towers [William Towers (d.1678), art dealer and collector], who waited upon King Charles II. when he went thither; and at present is in the Collection of Mr Croissat [the financier and collection Pierre Crozat (1665–1740)], from which I have now ingrav’d it.’ (2)

Here attributed to Remigius van Leemput (1607–1675), The Pembroke Family after Sir Anthony van Dyck, oil on canvas, 98 x 129 cm, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

The subsequent provenance of Crozat’s painting and its purchase as a Van Dyck in 1772 by Catherine the Great is well documented, leaving no doubt, as Jeffares suggested to me, that it is the painting now in the collection of the State Museum Hermitage, Saint Petersburg.(3) Its authorship has become forgotten, however, and it is currently catalogued as a copy by an unknown Seventeenth Century Flemish painter. To my knowledge, Jeffares is the first person to reattribute it to Leemput and to restore an important early painting to the canon of Leemput’s work.

1. J. Innes-Mulraine: ‘A ‘legacy to Mr Peter Lilly’ new light on the collaboration between Peter Lely and Remigius van Leemput’, the burlington magazine 166  (2024), pp.163–5.

2. C. Gambarini, Description of the Earl of Pembroke’s Pictures, London 1731, pp.xv–xvi, quoted in N. Jeffares, William Towers (d.1678), art dealer and collector, blog post April 28^th 2023, available at https://neiljeffares.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/william-towers-1678-art-dealer-and-collector/ accessed February 13^th 2024.

3. R. Ziskin, Collecting and Social Identity in Eighteenth-century Paris, University Park 2012, p.214.