Jocular Character or Actor

Entry

Jocular and other genre tableaux occur comparatively infrequently in sculpture and those that do exist are borrowed in the main from similar depictions in Netherlandish paintings. These two small caricature busts (for the other bust see BK-1959-50-B) fit perfectly into this genre. They are part of a small group of works in bronze and terracotta that probably had their origins in Antwerp in the second half of the seventeenth century. The images often relate to smoking or drinking. For example, there is a small bronze group of two seated ‘peasants’ filling their pipes and drinking,¹ of which there exists a monumental version in terracotta by the Antwerp sculptor Jan Pieter van Baurscheit I (BK-2006-19). With their caricatured faces and the allusion to smoking, the small Rijksmuseum busts are somewhat similar to this group. The present figure has a pipe in his hat and a roll of tobacco in his coat, the other’s mouth looks as though it is puffing out smoke or spitting out tobacco. Associations with smoking like these are taken from Dutch and Flemish paintings and prints in the seventeenth century and in general did not have a positive connotation. Smoking was associated with the lower social classes and, like the excessive consumption of alcohol, was seen as an unwholesome form of self-indulgence. Moreover, the fleeting smoke could be read as a vanitas symbol of the transience of life.²

In terms of theme, type and manufacture the two busts are linked to some other ‘jocular busts’ in bronze and terracotta.³ It is as yet not clear whether they all come from the same sculptor or founder. Leeuwenberg attributed the two Amsterdam bronzes to Pieter Xaveri (c. 1647-1673), an Antwerp sculptor who worked in Leiden for a short time around 1672.⁴ Xaveri made realistic genre tableaux and mythological scenes in terracotta, for the most part inspired by the Flemish painting of Rubens, Teniers, Brouwer and other artists from his native region.⁵ A local echo of his genre groups is found in the work of the lesser known and less talented Jan Smeltzing I (1656-1693) from Leiden (cf. BK-NM-5346 and -5347). These two bronze tronies do indeed have much in common with Xaveri or Smelzing’s tellingly modelled jocular figures, although an Antwerp provenance cannot be ruled out. Executed in a comparatively expensive medium and in the formal, classical shape of a sculpted bust they evidently poke fun at serious sculpture, of which they are in fact humorous inversions.

Xaveri’s sculpture was very appreciated in Leiden and his terracotta’s were highly sought after by collectors until well into the eighteenth century. It is quite possible that these bronze character heads also derive from terracotta’s like these and that they were reproduced in bronze for a local collector in Leiden. The faces can best be compared to those of the busts of Democritus and Heraclitus modelled in bronzed terracotta that Xaveri made in 1670 for the inner facade of the house of David van Royen at 90 Oude Singel in Leiden, today preserved at the Museum De Lakenhal (fig. a).

The figures might be identified as actors in a rhetorical play. They are highly reminiscent of the costumed actors from the Amsterdam Rederijkerskamer (rhetorical chamber), who the painter Jan Steen (c. 1626-1679) – a contemporary of Xaveri and likewise living in Leiden – portrayed around 1655-60. They also recall a much older portrait from around 1600 of the Leiden rhetorical jester Pieter Cornelisz van der Morsch (1543-1629), alias Piero de Zot.⁶

The bronze founder Philip van der Mij (1654-1721) was active in Leiden at the end of the seventeenth century and in 1700 was praised for his qualities by one of his patrons. The wealthy Leiden cloth merchant and art collector Pieter de la Court, for whom Van der Mij made, among other things, four bronze garden vases after a design by the painter Frans van Mieris, wrote from Paris: ‘These days the best founders here in Paris come from Switzerland [the brothers Johann Jacob and Balthasar Keller from Zurich, who worked for Louis XIV] but couldn’t the city of Leyden also provide an excellent founder? Therefore, Mr Van der Mij should devote himself to casting in bronze.’⁷ Around 1707 De la Court commissioned Van der Mij to make him a series of bronze casts of ivories by Francis van Bossuit, which at that time were in the possession of his aunt, Petronella de la Court, in Amsterdam.⁸ If the attribution of the two busts to Xaveri or Smeltzing is correct, Van der Mij was probably responsible for the casting.

Frits Scholten and Bieke van der Mark, 2025
An earlier version of this entry was published in F. Scholten, M. Verber et al., From Vulcan’s Forge: Bronzes from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1450-1800, exh. cat. London (Daniel Katz Ltd.)/Vienna (Liechtenstein Museum) 2005-06, no. 44