Terborch, Gerard the Younger

Terborch, Gerard the Younger (or Gerard Ter Borch) (b Zwolle, Dec. 1617; d Deventer, 8 Dec. 1681).
Dutch painter and draughtsman of interiors and small portraits. A highly precocious artist—his earliest dated drawing (in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) is from 1625—Terborch studied with his father Gerard the Elder (1584–1662) in his native Zwolle, and with Pieter de Molyn in Haarlem. Unlike most of the Dutch artists of his time, he travelled extensively. In 1635 he visited London, and according to Houbraken he travelled in France, Italy, and Spain. From about 1645 to 1648 he was in Germany, where he painted the Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster (1648, NG, London), a group portrait of the signatories to the treaty that gave the Dutch independence from Spain. In 1654 he finally settled in Deventer, where he won both professional and social success. He began his career with guardroom scenes, but turned to pictures of elegant society, to which his gifts for delicate characterization and exquisite depiction of fine materials were ideally suited. His best-known work, the subject of a charming passage by Goethe, is the so-called Parental Admonition (c.1655, versions in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). It is symptomatic of Terborch's unvaryingly tasteful decorum that the true theme of this picture is a man making a proposition to a courtesan (the coin that he proffers to his ‘daughter’ has been partially erased in the Berlin version and it is omitted in the engraving Goethe knew). Terborch's most important pupil was Caspar Netscher.