Elegant Gathering

Elegant Gathering, a finely executed piece painted on precious copper, is the work of the deaf and mute artist Wolfgang Heimbach, who hailed from Ovelgönne, near Oldenburg. In keeping with Heimbach’s training in the Netherlands, the work is redolent of the genre of group portraiture so typical of 17th-century Dutch painting, such as Frans Hals’s members of the civic guard or capitulars. Considerably smaller in format, our painting shows a wedding gathering: The marital contract has been drawn up, the matrimonial bed stands ready. A Bremen and an Oldenburg coat of arms indicate the origins of the wedding couple, though a more accurate identification has not been possible to date. What is certain is that they were members of the upper class, whose lifestyle was only scarcely inferior to that of the court. Two additional, much larger group portraits in the collection of the Kunsthalle hang in Bremen’s City Hall: the Gröning Family Portrait by Simon Peter Tilmann (1601–1668) and the Löning Family Portrait, executed somewhat later by an unknown artist.