Jacob de Wit, aptly named ‘Titian of the Amstel’, was baptized on 19 December 1695 in the hidden Catholic church Het Vrededuifje in Amsterdam’s Kerkstraat.[1] Although his father, a wine merchant and innkeeper, was not an artist, Jacob started his artistic training at a young age. Only nine years old, he apprenticed to Albert van Spiers (1665-1718), a painter who specialized in canal house decorations. After four years, the aspiring artist left for Antwerp to study at the Art Academy. There he lived with his uncle Jacomo, a prosperous wine and art dealer whose large collection of paintings by Rubens and Van Dyck provided perfect study material for the young De Wit. De Wit executed many studies after Rubens and his copies of the ceiling in Antwerp’s Jesuit Church became the only pictorial reference after lightning destroyed the church. By 1713, De Wit joined the Antwerp Guild of St Luke.

By 1715, De Wit returned to Amsterdam, after a traditional artist’s pilgrimage to Rome was vetoed by his uncle, who considered him too young. In 1716 he received the first of many commissions from Aegidius de Glabbais, a Roman Catholic priest of the clandestine Moses and Aaron church. The majority of De Wit’s patrons were fellow Catholics, but before long Protestants too employed him to decorate their homes. In 1735 stadholder William IV invited him to paint the decoration for Huis ten Bosch Palace in The Hague. Soon De Wit became Holland’s most in demand artist and he and his wife Cornelia Eleonora van Neck bought two adjacent canal houses on the Keizersgracht. De Wit exhibited part of his considerable art collection of about 200 paintings and 800 mostly Flemish and Italian drawings in one of the rooms of his house. Behind the house was De Wit’s studio. In 1742, his income was 4,000 guilders, establishing him as the best paid painter in Amsterdam. When Jacob de Wit died on 12 November 1754 the Old Church’s great bell tolled for four hours.

This rare, double-sided drawing is directly connected to the most prestigious commission of De Wit’s career, the decoration of the Council Chamber at the Amsterdam Town Hall, now the Royal Palace. On 24 January 1735, the committee entrusted with the renovation selected the Old Testament subject of Moses obeying God’s command to choose seventy elders to advise him and Jacob de Wit, the only history painter capable of producing a painting on this scale.[2] The theme of Moses identifying his advisors would have been understood as an appropriate allusion to the role of the city councilors. De Wit produced eight small-scale representations of his plan before finding the final composition of Moses in the wilderness raising his arms in awe as the divine inspiration descends as a dove. These preparatory studies for the monumental mural range from quick delineations in ink on paper, to exercises in gouache to colorful oil sketches on panel (Rijksmuseum, Bijbels Museum, Amsterdam Museum, Teylers Museum, Musée Picardie, Amiens, and Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Canada). The final painting, measuring 5 by 13 meters and for which De Wit received 5,000 guilders, was completed two years later in October 1737.[3]

[1] Biographical information from: Jacob de Wit. The Titian of the Amstel, exh.cat. Amsterdam, Royal Palace, 1986

[2] Eymert-Jan Goosens, Master of Deception. The painter Jacob de Wit 1695-1754, exh.cat. Royal Palace Amsterdam 2003, pp. 14-19

[3] A. Staring, Jacob de Wit 1695-1754, Amsterdam 1958, p. 119