Jacob de Wit

Dr. J.W. Niemeijer (the former owner of lots 124-127 and 132-142 in the present sale, and of lots 57-59 in the sale of Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries, on 5^th July), was the curator for 18th-century Dutch drawings and watercolours at the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, from 1962 and its director from 1974 until his retirement in 1990. A pioneering scholar in his field, Niemeijer's publications played a vital part in bringing the artists and works of this period, which had generally been considered little more than an inferior appendix to the story of Dutch art of the Golden Age, to the attention of an international audience. 

The subject of Vestal Virgins, priestesses of the Roman temple of Vesta, was one that De Wit seems to have depicted only rarely. A painting, dated 1749, is in the Montauban museum¹, and two studies for chimney-pieces of Vestal Virgins are now in Frankfurt, and in the Lugt Collection, Paris - the former made for Teodor van Snakenburgh in Leiden in 1739, the latter commissioned by Dionys Muilman in 1745.²

Another version of the same composition by De Wit, formerly in the collection of Cornelis Ploos van Amstel, is also known.³

1. A.P. de Mirimonde, 'Les vestales par Jacob de Wit', Oud Holland, LXXIII, no. II, 1958, pp. 114-116

2. A. Staring, Jacob de Wit 1695-1754, Amsterdam 1958, pp. 151 and 153 

3.  R-J.A. te Rijdt, 'Uniforme opzetvellen van Cornelis Ploos van Amstel voor zijn kleinere tekeningen', Delineavit et Sculpsit 41 (May 2017), p. 114-122, ill. 4 (recto) and ill. 5 (verso)