Jean Humbert

Who was Jean Humbert?

Jean Humbert de Superville was a Dutch painter of Swiss and French extraction. Humbert was primarily known as a portrait painter.

Humbert was the son of Pierre Humbert, a merchant from Geneva who had settled in Amsterdam in 1706 as a bookseller and publisher, and his second wife Emilie de Superville, daughter of Daniel de Superville, a Calvinist theologist from Saumur who had fled to the Dutch republic in 1685.

Humbert studied painting in Paris, where he served as apprentice to Jean Fournier and subsequently probably also to Joseph-Marie Vien. In 1761 or 1762 he moved from Amsterdam to The Hague. In 1767 he became an apprentice of the academy of drawing of the local painter's guild Confrerie Pictura. In 1787 he was chosen as one of the guild officers and in 1792 he was even elected as head of the guild.

He painted portraits as well as historic and mythological subjects. His portrait subjects included Dutch East India Company official Abraham du Bois, politician Hendrik Fagel and writer Isabelle de Charrière. The portrait of du Bois originally hung in the Dutch East India Company offices in Rotterdam, but is now part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.