Gerard ter Borch (Zwolle 1617 - Deventer 1681)

It can be deduced from the epitaph written for Gerard ter Borch by his half-sister Gesina and the year of birth given by Houbraken that he must have been born in Zwolle at the end of December 1617. He was the son of Gerard ter Borch Sr and his first wife Anna Bufkens. His father was active as an artist, but in 1628, as licence master for the States-General, he collected taxes on commercial transactions in Zwolle. Gerard junior’s earliest documented work is a drawing of 1625 that his father annotated with the statement that it was an ‘inventur’ (invention) of his 7-year-old son.⁴⁴RP-T-1887-A-782. It was around this time that he received his first lessons in painting from Ter Borch Sr. An inscription on a drawing places him in Amsterdam in 1632. Stylistic influences suggest that he may have studied there with Pieter Codde or Willem Duyster. From around 1634 he was taught by the Haarlem landscape and genre artist Pieter de Molijn. He had already made several drawings by then, but it was in Haarlem in 1635 that he produced his first signed and dated painting, The Consultation.⁵⁵Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie; illustrated in A.K. Wheelock Jr et al., Gerard ter Borch, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Detroit (Detroit Institute of Arts) 2004-05, p. 48. He joined the city’s Guild of St Luke that same year, which gave him the right to practise his profession as an independent master.

Ter Borch lived briefly in London soon after finishing his training. He was back in his native Zwolle in April 1636, possibly after a stopover in Antwerp in the autumn of 1635. There has been much speculation in the literature about a putative journey to Italy between 1637 and 1640, but there is no firm evidence for this, leaving aside a mention by Houbraken. There are references to a stay in Spain, among others in a poem written by the Zwolle schoolmaster Joost Hermans Roldanus on the occasion of Ter Borch’s marriage to Geertruydt Matthys on 14 February 1654. Roldanus speaks of the great esteem in which the artist’s work was held at the court in Madrid, and of a portrait that he had painted of King Philip IV.⁶⁶Known from a copy in a private collection; illustrated in S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, I, The Hague 1959, p. 184.

Ter Borch again settled in the Dutch Republic for a while in the 1640s. It has been suggested that he lived in either Amsterdam or Haarlem, but although he collaborated on several paintings with his former teacher Pieter de Molijn,⁷⁷See, for example, Vienna, Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste; illustrated in A.K. Wheelock Jr et al., Gerard ter Borch, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Detroit (Detroit Institute of Arts) 2004-05, p. 61. and his small-figured portraits exhibit a debt to Hendrick Gerritsz Pot, his name is not found in the Haarlem guild ledgers of the period. Stylistic influences and remarks by Roldanus and Houbraken indicate that he travelled to France and Flanders in the early 1640s. Dated portraits show that he was back in the Republic by 1644 at the latest.⁸⁸SK-A-1784, for example. At the end of 1645 Ter Borch went to Münster in the wake of the Republic’s representatives to the peace talks with Spain, where several of the participants sat for him. He may then have gone to Brussels in the entourage of the first Spanish ambassador, the Count of Peñaranda. According to Roldanus and Gesina, he was knighted by Philip IV and was presented with a gold chain and a medal in gratitude for his services to the Spanish delegation.

After all his wanderings Ter Borch settled in the Republic for good at the end of 1648. From then until 1654 he worked in Amsterdam and Zwolle, and possibly in Kampen as well in 1650. He and Johannes Vermeer signed a notarized document as witnesses in Delft on 22 April 1653. In 1655, a year after his wedding to Geertruydt Matthys in Deventer, Ter Borch was registered as a burgess there. From 1666 until his death he occupied the municipal post of gemeensman, or representative of one of the city’s eight wards. In 1667 he was enlisted to paint a group portrait of the Deventer civic dignitaries for the Town Hall.⁹⁹In situ; illustrated in A.K. Wheelock Jr et al., Gerard ter Borch, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Detroit (Detroit Institute of Arts) 2004-05, p. 163. Ter Borch was regularly in Amsterdam during the perilous years of 1672-74, where he immortalized the Pancras and De Graeff families. Cosimo III de’ Medici commissioned a self-portrait from him in 1675/76, but negotiations over it broke down. Ter Borch’s last dated picture, The Duet,¹⁰¹⁰Buckinghamshire, Waddesdon Manor, Ferdinand de Rothschild Collection (National Trust); illustrated in A.K. Wheelock Jr et al., Gerard ter Borch, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Detroit (Detroit Institute of Arts) 2004-05, p. 172, fig. 2. is from 1675, but as late as 1680 he was in Haarlem for discussions about a likeness of Elias Trip. Ter Borch died in Deventer on 8 December 1681 and was buried beside his father in the Sint-Michaëlskerk in Zwolle.

Ter Borch was a portraitist and genre painter all his life. Documented pupils in Deventer were Caspar Netscher (c. 1635/36-1684), Antoni Jordens (1664-1715) and the otherwise unknown Bartholt Berentsen. It is believed that Pieter van Anraedt (1635-1678) and Roelof Koets II (1655-1725) worked in his studio.

Gerbrand Korevaar [publication date 2026]

References
J.H. Roldanus, ‘Bruylofts-Lauwer-Krans, Gevlochten ter Eeren Van den E. Eerentsesten, Wijsen, Voorsienigen ende Seer Const-rijcken Heere, Mr. Gerhardt ter Borch, Bruydegom: Ende de Eerbare, Veel-eer ende Deuchden-rijcke Juffrou, Geertruida Matthyssen, Bruydt’, Zwolle 1654; R. de Piles, Abregé de la vie des peintres: Avec des reflexions sur leurs ouvrages, et un traité du peintre parfait, de la connoissance des desseins, & de l’utilité des estampes, Paris 1699, pp. 402-03; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, III, Amsterdam 1721, pp. 32, 34-40; J. Campo Weyerman, De Levens-Beschryvingen der Nederlandsche Konst-schilders en Konst-schilderessen, met een uytbreyding over de Schilder-Konst der Ouden, II, The Hague/Dordrecht 1729, pp. 367-72; J. Nanninga Uitterdijk, ‘Gerard Ter Burg. 1651’, in Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van Overijssel, IV, Zwolle 1878, p. 88; J.I. van Doorninck, ‘Het schildergeslacht Ter Borch’, Vereeniging tot beoefening van Overijsselsch Regt en Geschiedenis – Verslagen en mededeelingen 13 (1883), pp. 1-22; A. Bredius, ‘Etwas über die Ter Borchs und den Maler Bernard van Vollenhoven’, Der Kunstfreund 1 (1885), pp. 229-32; E.W. Moes, ‘Gerard Ter Borch en zijne familie’, Oud Holland 4 (1886), pp. 145-65; A. Bredius, ‘Gerard ter Borch 1648 te Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 17 (1899), pp. 189-90; M.E. Houck, Mededeelingen betreffende Gerhard ter Borch, Robert van Voerst, Pieter van Anraedt, Aleijda Wolfsen, Derck Hardensteijn en Henrick ter Bruggen, benevens aanteekeningen omtrent hunne familieleden, Zwolle 1899, pp. 1-173; Bredius in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, IV, Leipzig 1910, pp. 336-38; H. Geisenheimer, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des niederländischen Kunsthandels in der zweiten Hälfte des XVII. Jahrhunderts dem Florentiner Staatsarchiv entnommen’, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 32 (1911), Supplement, pp. 34-61, esp. p. 56; A. Bredius, ‘Varia (documents)’, Oud Holland 34 (1916), pp. 158-65, esp. p. 160; S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, I, The Hague 1959, passim; ibid., II, 1960, pp. 9-50 (documents); J.M. Montias, ‘New Documents on Vermeer and his Family’, Oud Holland 91 (1977), pp. 267-87, esp. pp. 280-81; Kettering in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XII, Munich/Leipzig 1996, pp. 665-66