A fine small painting after (and in reverse orientation to) the original painting by Van Dyck, of the musician Hendrick Liberti holding a sheet of music. Oil on wood panel, unsigned, 10.75 in. x 8.5 in., period frame.


"Hendrick (or Henricus) Liberti (c. 1600- 1669), was as van der Doort fairly stated: ‘one of the Chiefe Musitians in Antwerp’ (Millar, op. cit., 1960). The son of Libertus von Groeningham, who thus must have come from Groningen in northern Holland, he was a chorister from s’-Hertogenbosch, who in 1617 became a singer in the cathedral choir at Antwerp. He was a composer and a highly successful organist, appointed organist to the cathedral on 17 March 1628 and retaining that post until 1669. He also worked for the court at Brussels. His first publication, Cantiones sacrae..., was apparently issued at Antwerp in 1621. This was to be followed by other works, many of which are now lost, as is the case with his Paduanes et Galiardes, which appeared at Antwerp in 1632, and the Fasciculus Missarum of 1646. Of his extant compositions, the best known are the fourteen Cantiones natalite issued between 1648 and 1657, which are ‘homophic carols on Dutch texts in a strophic binary form’ (R.A. Rasch, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London, 2001, 14, p. 636). As Vey noted (op. cit., 2004), on the basis of de Jode’s print (fig 2), rather than the Munich version of this portrait, see infra, the sheet of music Liberti holds— surely a manuscript—is of a four-part canon: ‘Ars longa ars ars longa vita brevis’ (Art endures, life is short). Vey suggests that the gold chains worn in the portrait were awarded to Liberti at Brussels, where no doubt his galiards were performed. He also suggests that the portrait was commissioned by Liberti himself ‘to mark his appointment at the cathedral’. Had he done so, however, it would seem rather odd that within a decade this portrait would have been owned by King Charles I and placed next to the portrait, of almost identical size, of another prominent musician, Nicholas Lanier, now in Vienna (fig. 1; Vey, op. cit., 2004, no. III.92), ‘Master of His Majesty’s Music’, who was one of the agents employed in the formation of the king’s celebrated collection. It is thus perhaps possible that Lanier was in some way concerned with the commission, but it should be remembered that van Dyck himself had musical interests, which are expressed in a number of pictures of the Italian period and in an exceptional portrait of the London period, that of François Langlois (1589-1647), known as ‘Chiartres’ after his native city of Chartres (prime version, London, National Gallery, and Birmingham, Barber Institute) (see, for example, Glück, op. cit., 1936). The very large number of early copies of the portrait no doubt attests as much to the contemporary celebrity of the sitter as to the originality of van Dyck’s characterisation of him."


The above biographical sketch is quoted in full from the Christie's Old Master Sale catalogue of 2 December, 2014 at which the original Van Dyck portrait of Liberti was sold for approximately $4.5 Million.