Peasant Girl

Entry

This bronze statuette of a peasant girl is accompanied by a pendant in the form of a peasant boy (BK-1961-49-A). Both conceal their hands beneath their clothing, possibly to protect them from the cold. The boy has one hand in the pocket of his ruffled knee breeches and the other in his shirt at the level of the chest. He wears a wide-brimmed hat and wooden shoes on his feet. The girl has her right hand tucked away in a fur muff, with the other in the opening of a wide dress with a close-fitting jacket. She wears a small cap on her head with a hanging cloth. Hanging from the belt around her waist is a small dish, possibly a beggar’s bowl.

The style and clothing of both statuettes appears to be of Northern Netherlandish origin. Despite the rather plump rendering of the figures, they possess an element of grace and naive charm, possibly under the influence of popular rural genre sculptures devised by Barthélemy Prieur and Giambologna around 1600, respectively in Paris and Florence (cf. BK-1954-42).

As Leeuwenberg previously observed, the Amsterdam figures recall works by the Antwerp/Leiden sculptor Pieter Xaveri (c. 1647-1673). The crude detailing and weak execution of both bronzes nevertheless fails to warrant a convincing attribution to this sculptor.¹ Two similar terracotta figures of a fish seller dressed in rags and a peasant woman with a basket more closely approach Xaveri’s style and that of his follower, the Leiden sculptor Jan Smeltzing I (1656-1693).² In all likelihood, the Amsterdam bronzes are derived from similar terracotta models. The scantly defined rendering brings to mind Southern Netherlandish brasswork (dinanderie). On the basis of their alloy, containing a high percentage of English copper, a dating of these casts any earlier than the mid-eighteenth century seems improbable.³ Given the overall style, however, the models on which the casts were based may very well have been made in the late seventeenth or first half of the eighteenth century.

The low life genre remained popular throughout the entire eighteenth century. Casts of sculptures were either remade from older models – as is likely the case with the present statuette and its pendant – or sculptors drew their inspiration from existing works that dated back to the seventeenth century. Three terracotta figures from an ensemble comprising a peasant with rooster, a peasant girl with basket and a manual labourer share a number of visual motifs comparable to those encountered on the Amsterdam bronzes. The latter were (probably indirectly) derived from the terracottas.⁴ The manual labourer, for example, conceals his right hand in his shirt in a manner similar to the Amsterdam peasant boy, while the bronze peasant girl has a blanket draped over hands with a basket hanging from her right forearm in much the same way as the terracotta peasant woman with her (beggar’s?) bowl. This ensemble has been dated to the second half of the eighteenth century, presumably on the basis of the caricatural facial expressions.

A second, but smaller (h. 15.9 cm) version of the Amsterdam peasant boy at the Victoria and Albert Museum probably functioned as ornamentation on a furniture piece.⁵ A second cast of this smaller version was recently sold on the Paris art market.⁶ A variant of the peasant pair is held in a private Swedish collection. In this case, the peasant woman is depicted at an older age and in mirror image, with the muff concealing her left versus her right hand.⁷ This pair can be traced via inheritance to Count Johan Gabriel Stenbock (1640-1705), private counsellor to Queen Dowager Hedvig Elenora of Sweden.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025