Object data
oil on panel
support: height 74.5 cm × width 59.4 cm
outersize: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. SK-L-4315)
Willem van Odekercken
Woman Scouring a Vessel
c. 1644
Inscriptions
- signature, upper right, on the lower edge of the cupboard: W. Odekercke
Technical notes
Support The panel consists of three vertically grained, tongue-and-groove joined oak planks (approx. 20.2, 27.9 and 11.3 cm), approx. 0.8 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has plane marks and regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1627. The panel could have been ready for use by 1638, but a date in or after 1644 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends up to the edges of the support. The first, light grey layer consists of transparent and small white pigment particles and some fine black pigment particles. The second, slightly warmer grey ground is composed of similar but finer ground pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up from dark to light, and the figures were not left in reserve. The blue apron of the kitchen maid in the foreground was reserved in the brown skirt. The paint layers were applied wet in wet. In the background they were blended together smoothly, while those of the foremost maid and the compositional elements in the foreground have more discrete and defined brushstrokes. The paint surface is fairly smooth throughout, impasto having been used for only a few still-life elements in the foreground, such as the lantern and the vessel being scoured by the maid.
Anna Krekeler, 2024
Scientific examination and reports
- paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-1279/1-2, 14 February 2008
- technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 14 February 2008
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 10 June 2008
Condition
Fair. There is a small crack in the upper right corner of the panel. The paint of the fireplace mantel is slightly raised but stable, and there are some losses here. An L-shaped indentation is present in the paint layers at the upper right corner between the foremost maid and the mounted cabinet. The varnish is severely discoloured.
Provenance
...; donated by Abraham Willet (1825-1888), Amsterdam, to the museum, 18851
Object number: SK-A-1279
Credit line: Gift of A. Willet, Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Willem van Odekercken (? The Hague c. 1610-20 - Delft 1677)
The place and date of Willem van Odekercken’s birth are based on his enrolment as a pupil in the Guild of St Luke in The Hague in 1631 and the fact that his parents, the baker Ghysbrecht Tonisz van Odekercken and Judick Spronk, are recorded in a 1656 document as having lived in that city in the late 1620s. By 1640, the year in which he married Hilligonde Pelgrums van Nykerck, Van Odekercken had moved to Delft, where he spent the rest of his life. Although mentioned as a master painter there as early as 1641, he only joined the local Guild of St Luke in 1643, and not as an easel painter but as a kladschilder (decorative painter). In 1658, Maria Sasboutsdr van der Dussen became Van Odekercken’s second wife. The artist was buried in the Oude Kerk in Delft on 23 September 1677.
There is no information about Van Odekercken’s training, and only two of his extant paintings are dated, a 1638 Kitchen Maid Standing by a Table with Copper Pots, Pewter Plates and Other Objects,2 and a genre scene of a young couple playing cards from 1643.3 Only a handful of paintings by Van Odekercken are known, most of them depictions of kitchen maids, but also a few genre pieces and a solitary still life.4 Examples of his work as a kladschilder are the wall paintings he executed in 1663-64 for the Hof van Moerken estate in Mijnsheerenland near Dordrecht,5 and the 1672 documentation of payment from the city of Delft for painting a coat of arms and four standards.
Jonathan Bikker, 2024
References
F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], I, Rotterdam 1877-78, pp. 6, 38-39, 44; ibid., III, 1880-81, p. 200; ibid., IV, 1881-82, pp. 9, 34; ibid., VI, 1884-87, p. 25; A. Bredius, ‘Het schildersregister van Jan Sysmus, Stads-Doctor van Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 12 (1894), pp. 160-71, esp. p. 165; H. Wichmann, ‘Mitteilungen über Delfter Künstler des XVII. Jahrhunderts’, Oud Holland 42 (1925), pp. 60-71, esp. p. 69; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXV, Leipzig 1931, p. 560; J.M. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton 1982, p. 341; Löffler in E. Buijsen et al., Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw: Het Hoogsteder Lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag 1600-1700, exh. cat. The Hague (Haags Historisch Museum) 1998-99, p. 334; A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, p. 153; Bredius notes, RKD
Entry
Most of Willem van Odekercken’s surviving paintings are of kitchen maids, often scouring a vessel, as here. He apparently delighted in reproducing the gleaming surfaces of such objects. A likely source of inspiration was the work of the Delft artist Cornelis Jacobsz Delff (1571-1643), which Van Odekercken would have encountered when he moved to Delft, presumably in the 1630s. His earliest signed and dated painting of 1638 is of a scullery maid standing at a table covered with shiny pots and other kitchen utensils.6 The scale of the woman and her quite crudely rendered features are similar to those in the present panel and in Van Odekercken’s other treatments of the subject. A distinctive aspect of his style are the long fluid brushstrokes used to render the aprons. While most of his kitchen scenes show a solitary figure set close to the picture plane before an indeterminate background, the Rijksmuseum’s Woman Scouring a Vessel has a second maid in the background kneeling before a fireplace, with various utensils on the rear wall. The extremely clumsy perspective suggests Van Odekercken’s usual avoidance of elaborate background scenes.
Dendrochronology established that the panel was most probably ready for use by 1644.7 Comparison with Van Odekercken’s dated paintings, the aforementioned 1638 Kitchen Maid and a genre scene of a young couple playing cards from 1643,8 indicates that Woman Scouring a Vessel was probably executed not long after the panel became available.
A rather similar composition by Jan Steen in the Rijksmuseum reveals that Van Odekercken’s painting may have erotic connotations, with the vessel being scoured possibly representing the uterus.9 The shape of the opening of the pewter jug in Steen’s picture and the provocative way in which his lascivious kitchen maid holds it make the association rather more direct than it is here. But then Steen’s figure, with her décolleté and mischievous come-hither smile, is also of a different moral fibre from her respectable counterpart in Van Odekercken’s scene. Prominent in the foreground of both works is a brass lantern, the presence of which can be accounted for by more than just the fact that it is a metal object in need of cleaning. In an emblem first published around 1601 in Daniël Heinsius’s Quaeris quid sit Amor, the flames of the candle contained in such lanterns are equated with the flames of love. Significantly, the door to the lantern in Steen’s painting is open while that in the present one is closed.
Jonathan Bikker, 2024
See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
Literature
J. Becker, ‘Are These Girls Really so Neat?: On Kitchen Scenes and Method’, in D. Freedberg and J. de Vries (eds.), Art in History/History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, Santa Monica 1991, pp. 139-73, esp. p. 144
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 198, no. 1783; 1976, p. 423, no. A 1279
Citation
Jonathan Bikker, 2024, 'Willem van Odekercken, Woman Scouring a Vessel, c. 1644', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4873
(accessed 28 December 2024 03:29:24).