Pieter Pietersz Heijn, popularly known as Piet Heijn, was one of the most celebrated Dutch naval commanders of the 17th century. The son of a ship’s captain, he probably went to sea at the age of 16. Around 1598-1600 he was captured by the Spanish and made a galley slave in the fleet commanded by Ambrogio Spinola until his release in 1602. Between 1607 and 1612, Heijn was in the service of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC). Later, between 1624 and 1629, he made three voyages for the Dutch West India Company (Westindische Compagnie, or WIC), the last of which would prove to be his claim to fame. In May 1628, the 31 ships under his command managed, with very few Dutch casualties, to ambush the Spanish silver fleet off the coast of Cuba. The captured cargo of the Spanish ships was worth around twelve million Dutch guilders, and among those who shared in the profits were the Stadholder Frederik Hendrik and the shareholders of the WIC. After his return to the United Provinces, Heijn left the WIC and became Lieutenant-Admiral in the navy, a position he was not to hold for long, for on 18 June 1629 he was killed in a skirmish with Dunkirk privateers. The traditional attribution of the present bust-length portrait to Jan Daemen Cool was based on a portrait print of Piet Heijn by Willem Hondius, also of 1629.4 The print is inscribed ‘Joh. Dame pinxt’, which leaves little doubt that it was made after a painting by Cool. However, as Ekkart has argued on the evidence of the quality of the Rijksmuseum portrait, the model for Hondius’s engraving was not the present painting.5 Rather, the Rijksmuseum portrait and an identical one in the Historisch Museum, Rotterdam6 are old copies, probably executed by Cool’s workshop, after a lost Portrait of Piet Heijn that served as the model for Hondius’s engraving. As that engraving gives Heijn’s age as 47, Ekkart suggests that the original portrait by Cool would have been executed in 1624 or 1625.7 The present portrait corresponds to Hondius’s engraving in all but the clothing. In both this engraving and the Rijksmuseum portrait Heijn wears over his left shoulder the gold chain awarded to him by the States-General on 23 January 1629.8 Appended to the chain in the engraving is a medallion issued in 1609 that Heijn never actually received.9 Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 51.