RKD STUDIES

Painters in northern Europe consistently preferred oak as a support for panel painting because of its durability and reliability, despite the availability of other woods. Among the available types, the most highly valued was Baltic oak (Quercus robur). Grown in the Baltic region, it was dense, straight-grained, and more resistant to warping than oak from Flanders or England, or local wood alternatives such as walnut, beech, or lime. These qualities made it particularly suitable for painting supports. Baltic oak was extensively used from the thirteenth until the mid-seventeenth century, when disruptions to Baltic supply led to increasing import of oak from other regions, especially the Rhine region, Bremen/Weser, and Lippe.¹

Oak trees were felled in winter by organized teams of lumberjacks, after which the trunks were split radially into halves, quarters, and smaller sections to produce planks known as wainscot. As these boards entered long-distance trade networks, systems of marking have been used to regulate their movement and guarantee their origin, quality, or ownership. From the late medieval period, lumberjacks and woodworkers in the Baltic region incised simple symbols into the timber with hook knives,² marks that are sometimes still visible on the backs of some panels and altarpieces.³ By the sixteenth century, these practices appear to have become more formalized within Baltic trade, reflecting growing concerns about quality control in export regions. The Hanseatic merchant Jakob Stöve (1545-1617), for example, distributed drawings of Lithuanian forestry marks to his trading partners to identify sources of timber [2].⁴ Several of these marks have been recognized on altarpieces in Aarschot and Scherpenheuvel-Zichem in Belgium [3].⁵

Transported as standardized boards, typically around three meters long, thirty centimetres wide and eight centimetres thick, wainscot moved along established trade routes to North Sea ports. There the timber was stacked on quaysides [4], handled by intermediaries, and sold on local markets. At this stage, the planks were often further processed by sawyers who cut the radially split wainscot into thinner boards suitable for use. This was done either by hand, as mandatory in Flanders, or, in mechanized sawmills, as became increasingly custom in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.⁶ Both methods leave distinctively different saw marks: curved marks reflect the sweeping motion of the hand saw whereas straight, parallel marks perpendicular to the grain those of the machine-driven saw.

2 The account book of the Hanseatic merchant Jakob Stöve, 1560. Münster, Landesarchiev Nordrhein Westfalen, A XII Nr. 23a

3
Mark of a landowner or merchant, resembling the one drawn at the bottom of the left column in Stöve’s Office Book, probably Sigismund II Augustus (1520-1572)

4 Timber stacks on the Berderenwerf in Antwerp, detail of Antverpia Mercatorum Emporium (1515-1521)