Considering the prominence of Thérèse Schwartze, the wealthiest artist in turn-of-the-century Amsterdam, and the fame of her sitter, who has both a street and a museum named for him, it's quite odd that there is so little published literature about the Portrait of Pierre J.H. Cuypers .

The owners of the work, the sprawling, Gothic Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, situate their collection in buildings designed by Cuypers. They received the work as a donation from the Cuypers archives in 1919. Art historians consider the precise dating of works to be the bread and butter of the profession, like speech-giving to a mayor or carrying plastic bags to a dog walker. And yet the Rijksmuseum offers a window which covers most of Schwartze's professional career, up until her final year of life, for the dating of this painting: 1885-1918. In fact, the research of Cora Hollema, the reigning dean of Schwartze studies, gives only seven works as "autograph," or painted in the artist's own hand without assistance, prior to 1885. The artist commissioned the sitter's nephew and protegé, Eduard Cuypers, to build her new studio when she moved out of her late dad's workshop in the attic of the Schwartze home. 

Born in Roermond in 1827 to Joannes Hubertus Cuypers and Maria Joanna Bex, Pierre J.H. Cuypers was one of the most famous architects in Dutch history, building dozens of churches and other important landmarks. If you want to sound sufficiently Dutch, you'd pronounce his name somewhat like "kye-purzsh," with that distinctive buzzing "zzh" sound unique to the Dutch "s." The Netherlands was still recovering from its colonization by the Spanish Habsburg empire, which had ended just over a century before the architect's birth. The state religion of the Spanish Netherlands was Roman Catholicism, and the vibe in the Netherlands was tense between Catholics and Protestants. Maybe almost as tense as the vibe between Republicans and Democrats in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. For instance, just before the Habsburgs took over, the family of the artist John de Critz had fled the Netherlands for Protestant England, where de Critz became a spy for the Protestant cause. Cuypers made no apologies for his Catholic background, which made him many adversaries who shared the "Protestant and liberal view." For them, Cuypers' Gothic, Romanesque architecture threatened to bring the Netherlands  "back to the dark Middle Ages and the infinite hedonism of Rome." Bas Kromhout uses the Dutch term vleespotten to describe the Protestant view of the sexual attitudes of the Romans in this sentence, which literally means "fleshpots." For the Dutch Roman Catholics, however, Kromhout writes, "Cuypers was almost a saint, whose buildings radiated the self-confidence of cultural revival."