Portrait of Hendrick Bicker (1722-1783) (copy)

Hendrick Bicker (1722–1783) was a member of the Bicker family, one of Amsterdam's most powerful patrician dynasties, whose name had been synonymous with the city's commercial and civic life since the seventeenth century. This 1789 portrait in the Amsterdam Museum is catalogued as a copy—made six years after the sitter's death and therefore necessarily based on earlier images rather than direct observation. The Amsterdam Museum's collection of portraits of Amsterdam patricians forms a visual archive of the city's governing elite, and this copy of a Bicker portrait participates in that documentary tradition. The Bicker family had been central to Amsterdam's history since the era of Cornelis de Graeff and the republican resistance to the House of Orange in the seventeenth century, and portraying them faithfully was a civic as well as artistic duty.

A posthumous copy made in 1789 after a Liotard original: the quality of execution will reflect the copyist's skill and fidelity to the original. If Liotard himself made this copy late in life, it represents one of his final works; if made by another hand, it is a secondary record of a lost or inaccessible original.