Four hundredth anniversary of the death of Lucas van Leyden (Vereniging voor Penningkunst 1933, first medal)

Gerrit Jan van der Veen became a sculptor only late in life. He had begun as a mechanical engineer, held a position with the NAM on Curaçao where he acted exemplarily during a fire, received a sum of money in gratitude, and enrolled in 1928 in the sculpture class of Bronner.

In 1932 he won the Silver Prix de Rome. During the war he was deeply involved in the artists' resistance. He paid for it with his life: he was executed by firing squad in 1944. As an artist, he became known above all as a sensitive portraitist. For his Lucas van Leyden medal—the painter died in 1533—he chose an engraving by Andreas Stock of Van Leyden's self-portrait from the museum in Brunswick, one of the earliest Dutch self-portraits.

The furrowed head with its searching gaze and wide mouth fills the entire field, and the folds appear emphatically in the neck and find an echo in the hair lying like a cap over the cranium. The animation of all these lines lends the head a tense expression. The pupils are hollowed out, which gives them the effect of dark eyes: this is how the painter looked in the mirror. The reverse shows a painter behind his easel on a spacious field.

As a model for this, Van der Veen used the painter figure from Johannes Vermeer's Allegory of Painting from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Palette and brush protrude emphatically to the side of the canvas on which the painter is working. The depiction is kept very small and contained in a circular form; its proportion to the virtually empty field has an amusing effect. The text and dates are pressed right up to the rim in sans-serif letters.

The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, holds this object as NG-C-2017-18-1; its record gives material recorded as bronze (metal); technique striking (metalworking); measurements diameter 6 cm x weight 95 g. Description translated from the museum's Dutch catalogue text; details are those of this museum object, and how far it represents a wider type has not been independently verified.