Johan de Witt, Dordrechts Museum, 2025

In the 400th anniversary year of his birth, the Dordrechts Museum is paying tribute to the life of Johan de Witt, one of the most important and well-known politicians in Dutch history. Through a historical art exhibition featuring works by the most renowned artists of the seventeenth century, the museum poses the question: who was Johan de Witt?

A special aspect of this exhibition is that a painting Duifhuizen created in 2018 of Johan de Witt was included in the show.

In 2012 Arjan Nobel got promoted on a study titled: 'Controlling the Country Side'. Cromstrijen 1550-1780 (Zutphen 2012). On the occasion of this promotion research Martijn Duifhuizen received the assignment to realize a work of art as a result of the artist Johan de Witt.
In preparation he visited, together with the clients, the Museum of Dordrecht where you can find paintings of Johan and Cornelis de Witt and their father Jacob de Witt. The purpose of this assignment was to reinvigorate the artist Johan de Witt after his violent death in the disastrous year of 1672.

He characterized Johan de Witt as

• peaceful, sober, Protestant, calm, service-minded, incorruptible, self-controlled, mathematical;


• politically: punctual, resolute, harmonizing, pacifying, networking, seeking the golden mean, systematic, an actuary, a master of consensus, the Dutch Garden;


• appearance: dignified black.

To translate this into the visual language of the artwork:
black, austere, linear, punctual, systematic, mathematical, harmonious, rivers and networks, meadows and water, the Dutch Garden, reclaimed land.

In 2022, an interview about my work was published in the historical magazine ‘Holland’; you can download it here.

Watch the process and results in the videos below.

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