SECTION VII AELBERT CUYP THE date of Aelbert Cuyp's birth was for long supposed to be 1605, on the evidence of a baptismal certificate wrongly assumed to be his. G. H. Veth has at last determined the true date as the end of October 1620, and published the discovery, with many other interesting details about the Cuyp family, in Oud Holland^ vol. ii. This disposes of the difficulties presented by the earlier date, which seemed to show that his admission to the Painters' Guild and his marriage were unusually belated. It was natural that his father Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, himself a very capable painter, should have introduced his only son at an early age to the art which he practised. Whether Aelbert afterwards enjoyed the teaching of other masters, perhaps of his uncle Benjamin Cuyp or of Jan Van Goyen, or whether he spent his youth entirely in Dordrecht, there are no documents to show. But the second assumption is incorrect ; so at least one may conjecture with tolerable certainty from the views of places which occur in several of his pictures. He must, for example, have seen Arnheim, Nymwegen, and the country round Cleves. One might also infer from the landscapes of rivers with steep rocky banks, such as, for instance, are preserved at Berlin and Rotterdam, that Cuyp in his later years travelled up the Maas and the Rhine. Besides the influence of the father, which is noticeable in the early works of Aelbert Cuyp and especially in the arrangement and handling of the portraits, the landscapes of his first period show in so marked a degree the characteristic peculiarities of his older fellow-countryman Jan Van Goyen, that for a long time they were confused with Van Goyen's pictures. Yet most of them bear Cuyp's full signature. The theory that Cuyp in his early years only signed his pictures with the monogram A. C. is false, but has long led stylistic criticism astray. Cuyp was one of the few great artists whose works were prized by their own contemporaries, and who therefore had not to endure extreme poverty. He worked his way up to a highly respectable position in the society of his native town. He married in 1658 Cornelia Bosman,.widow of Mynheer Johan van de Corput. He became deacon of the Dutch Reformed community in 1660, "Holy Ghost master" of the pesthouse of VOL. II I B
