Thomas de Keyser’s Equestrian Portrait of Pieter Schout, 1660

Abstract

1After a hiatus of nearly twenty-five years, Thomas de Keyser painted several additional portraits, apparently a by-product of family and professional connections. Among these was his masterful small-scale equestrian portrait of twenty-year-old Pieter Schout (1660), a young lawyer with high cultural and political ambitions. With new archival documentation, this essay recreates the biographical, familial, and social networks that must have brought artist and patron together, with a consideration of the social import of the painting for its sitter and subsequent owners.