Card Players with Woman Smoking a Pipe

c. 1635 - c. 1640

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 38 cm × width 28 cm
support: depth 5 cm (support incl. SK-L-6134)

Inscriptions

signature, lower left (P and Q ligated): PQuast

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.8 cm thick. The right edge has probably been trimmed. The reverse has regularly spaced saw marks and is bevelled on all sides. The bevel on the left is narrower and slightly jagged. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1623. The panel could have been ready for use by 1634, but a date in or after 1640 is more likely. The plank is from the same tree as the one for Quast’s Foot Operation (SK-A-1756).
Preparatory layers The single, thin, cream-coloured ground extends up to the edges of the support. It is slightly translucent and no individual pigment particles are visible.
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 the back to the front. First the figures were indicated with a brownish sketch in dense, opaque paint, still visible through the overlying layers. Modelling was achieved by working from mid-tone to shadows to highlights. The paint was applied mostly wet in wet within distinct elements of the composition, leaving the surrounding areas untouched. Stiff paint with visible brushmarking was used in relatively thick layers in the faces and clothing, for example in the highlights of the yellow skirt and the white feather on the hat. The background and occasionally the shadows were executed with thinner, more fluid and smooth paints. Although some areas appear rather detailed, they were done quite efficiently: a few brushstrokes suggest the bushy moustache of the man on the left, and the lace fringe on his sash was incised in the wet paint, as was the embroidery on the woman’s bodice. The signature was also scratched in the wet paint. A finger seems to have been used to blot the thin brown paint in the shadows of the boots at lower left. During the painting process the hands of the man on the left were shifted closer together, the toe of his boot was shortened and the hem of the woman’s skirt was adjusted.
Meta Chavannes, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: M. Chavannes, RMA, nos. SK-A-1298/1-3, 20 May 2009
technical report: M. Chavannes, RMA, 20 May 2009
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 10 November 2009

Condition

Fair. The plank has a short, vertical crack in the lower left corner. The wood grain has become visible, particularly in the more thinly painted background, due to abrasion. The blue of the man’s sash appears to have faded. Metal soap protrusions have formed in the sash and elsewhere. The varnish layers are thick, have severely yellowed and show a fine craquelure that interferes with the painting’s legibility.

Provenance

…; sale, C.F. Berré (†), Leiden (C.F. Roos), 7 September 1885, no. 69, as J. Uchtervelt, fl. 147, to Roos, for the museum,¹ or fl. 171, to the museum²

Object number: SK-A-1298

The artist

Pieter Jansz Quast (Amsterdam c. 1605/06 - Amsterdam 1647)

It can be deduced that Pieter Jansz Quast was probably born in Amsterdam in 1605 or 1606 from the posting of his marriage banns on 29 June 1632, in which he stated that he was 26 years old. His father may have been Hans Quast from Antwerp. Documents show that the painter’s marriage to Annetie Splinters of The Hague only took place under the threat of fines and other sanctions. It was ultimately solemnized on 19 December 1632.

It is not known with whom Quast trained. In 1634 he enrolled in the Guild of St Luke in The Hague, the city where he lived until his return to Amsterdam in 1643. Annual financial disputes over unpaid bills in the period 1640-44 show that his life was not always plain sailing, and court cases in 1643 and 1644 suggest that arguments and physical assault were not uncommon in the Quast household. The artist was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam on 29 May 1647. His pupils were Jan Jansz Buesem (c. 1599/1600-in or after 1653) and Dirck Cornelisz de Hoogh (1613-1651). A sketchbook belonging to Prince Willem II containing drawings after works by Quast and a portrait that the artist drew of him was for a long time thought to show that he gave the young prince drawing lessons, but there is no other evidence for this.

Pieter Quast was a painter, draughtsman, etcher and woodcarver who is best known for his peasant and tavern scenes, which often have a satirical undertone. In 1632 a list was made of all the paintings he owned, and they included a remarkable number of his own histories. He also rendered theatrical subjects, tavern brawls, tronies, as well as a few portraits and landscapes. The quality of his work is variable. His highly detailed graphite and chalk drawings on vellum were a valuable contribution to the seventeenth-century graphic arts. His earliest signed and dated paintings include a 1628 Vertumnus and Pomona and Stable Interior with an Officer;³ a late picture is The Triumph of Folly of 1643.⁴ Quast’s oeuvre, with its often caricature types and simple spatial constructions, is reminiscent of that of genre painters like Adriaen van Ostade and Adriaen Brouwer, whose names were often wrongly attached to his works.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 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.], III, Rotterdam 1880-81, p. 263; A. Bredius, ‘Aus den haager Archiven’, Kunstchronik 17 (1882), cols. 553-55, 573-75, 667-68, 686-89, 747-50, esp. cols. 667-68; A. Bredius, ‘Pieter Jansz. Quast’, Oud Holland 20 (1902), pp. 65-82; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, I, The Hague 1915, pp. 273-74; Juynboll in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXVII, Leipzig 1933, p. 502; B.A. Stanton-Hirst, The Influence of the Theatre on the Works of Pieter Jansz. Quast, diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison 1978, pp. 46-49; B.A. Stanton-Hirst, ‘Pieter Quast and the Theatre’, Oud Holland 96 (1982), pp. 213-37, esp. pp. 234-36; J.G.C.A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, p. 370; Härting in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XCVII, Munich/Leipzig 2018, pp. 253-54

Entry

Interiors with soldiers, women and low-life types amusing themselves drinking, smoking, gambling and making music were typical elements in Pieter Quast’s output from the early 1630s on. These subjects were part of the tradition of merry companies meeting indoors as found in the oeuvre of such Haarlem artists as Willem Buytewech, Dirck Hals and Hendrick Pot, and of an Amsterdam master like Pieter Codde.⁵ A 1632 list of Quast’s paintings mentions a ‘moderren’ (modern) work,⁶ which was the term for pictures with figures in contemporary dress, as here.

This group of caricature types embodies Quast’s usual light-hearted, satirical commentary on their behaviour: smoking, drinking and playing cards.⁷ It is clear from the fact that the woman is holding a pipe and has a plunging neckline that she is a prostitute. The red object in her left hand can be identified as a purse due to its similarity to one in a costume print by Salomon Savery after Quast.⁸ The hat with the large feather on her knee belongs to the standing officer and shows that he has set his sights on her.⁹ The men may be playing cards for the woman’s favours (the score is being kept on the side of the table), but this pastime was anyway associated with suspect love, so it is a suitable activity in this context.¹⁰

Bredius claimed in 1902 that the woman’s face had been reworked,¹¹ but technical examination revealed that it is almost entirely original. Features that are typical of Quast are the solid paint structure in the passages with a lot of white, and the incisions with which he drew the patterns in the dress and the man’s stocking. The positioning of the woman’s body is repeated from a picture dated 1633,¹² and, in mirror image, in another one in Budapest.¹³ A red chalk study by Quast shows the same caricature head of the man with the hooked nose on the right.¹⁴ He is the kind of figure that Quast employed on many occasions, an example being a 1636 drawing of Til Uilenspiegel in Berlin.¹⁵ It bears an identical type of signature as the present Card Players with Woman Smoking a Pipe, which is in Quast’s style of the 1630s.¹⁶ The man’s boots and the rosette on the woman’s shoe were fashionable in the middle of that decade. Dendrochronology has shown that the panel could have been ready for use by 1634, and given the costumes and style it can therefore be dated between around 1635 and 1640.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

E. Kolfin, The Young Gentry at Play: Northern Netherlandish Scenes of Merry Companies 1610-1645, diss., Leiden University 2005, p. 153; Z. Kovács, ‘“The Witty Pieter Quast”: The Works of an Amsterdam Master in Hungary Then and Now’, Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts, no. 104 (2006), pp. 101-28, esp. p. 109

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 137, no. 1151; 1903, p. 216, no. 1934; 1934, p. 232, no. 1934; 1976, p. 459, no. A 1298

Citation

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024, 'Pieter Jansz. Quast, Card Players with Woman Smoking a Pipe, c. 1635 - c. 1640', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5188

(accessed 26 December 2024 08:30:21).