Dancing Party in the Forecourt of an Imaginary Palace with a Capriccio View of Venice in the Distance

Entry

The present painting was donated as by Pieter Schey (?), and published as such in 1901.² This attribution was later rightly rejected, it having not gained currency at the museum where an early proposed Dutch origin was widened to Netherlandish in 1976, the date of execution having been narrowed to the first quarter of the seventeenth century in 1951.

The attribution to ‘Schey’³ presupposed that the work was made as a lid for a key board instrument, like the harpsichord top in the Rijksmuseum collection (SK-A-4279) which is signed with a similar name, Phil[ip] Schei. Such a usage was postulated in earlier museum catalogues; indeed it is about the same size as a panel by Pieter Meulener (1602-1654; e.g. SK-A-803), which, it is suggested, was originally most likely the lid of a virginal. However, the support of the present painting is recorded as oak, supposedly not a species found in keyboard instruments of the period. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that paintings with this format were sometimes depicted as hung so as to form a frieze in formal chambers of Antwerp houses in the early decades of the seventeenth century. ⁴

As discussed further below, this imaginary view could well be the work of at least two hands, with the figures added by a collaborator, both active in Antwerp circa 1615. The artists have not been identified. Clearly evident is the Venetian idiom suggested by the gondolas, the very inaccurate reminiscence of the Bacino di San Marco, and the hair worn in divided, piled curls by some of the elegant, female protagonists. The robustly executed architecture and the Venetian accent evident here are also characteristics of paintings which have been attributed to Louis de Caullery (c. 1580-1621), among them the paintings at Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen, where the scene is depicted full-on⁵ and in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper, ⁶ where the setting is very comparable. In the latter, the figures are rendered delicately with pinpoint eyes in a manner very like those in Caullery’s signed Five Senses of 1620 in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Cambrai, ⁷ and thus are quite different to those in the present painting.

The Rijksmuseum view can be associated with a further group in which the architecture is similarly rendered, but the figures differ from those in the above-mentioned paintings. It comprises four capriccio (i.e. imaginary) views: in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; ⁸ in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; ⁹ on the London art market in 1972; ¹⁰ and with Hoogsteder, The Hague, in 1994, where exhibited anonymously. ¹¹ In these the handling of both figures and architecture is reminiscent of Sebastiaen Vrancx (1573-1647), a connection strengthened by the recurrence three times of a large, centrally placed, arched and pierced pergola included by Vrancx in his Dives and Lazarus, engraved by Jacob Matham (1571-1631) and published in 1606, ¹² in which gondolas and a silhouette of a town also bring Venice to mind. Vrancx’s practice was to execute both the setting and the figures, but that this was not the case with the Rijksmuseum painting is suggested by the figures not being reserved.

A highpoint of this as yet anonymous dual partnership is perhaps the Odysseus and his Companions at Circe’s Court on the London market in 1984. ¹³ That the (?) third artist, who executed the view in the present painting, was not of the first order can be inferred from the less than convincing alignment of the gaff-rigged yacht with the embankment, the yacht’s misunderstood awning, and the woeful evocation of Venice on the horizon.

The portico on the left in the Rijksmuseum painting is taken directly from that in Paul Vredman de Vries’s Dorica Auditus¹⁴ in his series of the Five Orders and Senses engraved by Hendrik Hondius (1573-1650) of 1606/07, where the building is shown on the right. In a subsequent edition published by Justus Sadeler (1583-after 1620) it stands on the left. In place of the woman singing to the lutanist in the print, three couples are dancing to music made by a lutanist and a cellist. The main elements beyond the garden are also inspired by motifs from other prints in the same series: the leafy curved pergola piercing the arched espalier appears with slight differences before a similar imposing building in Corinthia Gustus,¹⁵ while the temple-like approach behind the line of trees by the water has its counterpart in Composita Tactus.¹⁶ In these cases the perspective viewpoint is closer to the first state of the engravings of 1606/07.

The idea of placing this elegant social event in pseudo-Venetian environs may have been inspired by the print by Pieter de Jode I (1573-1634) after Lodewyck Toeput’s (1560-1603) Venetian Carnival Scene on a Terrace,¹⁷ itself perhaps inspired by Hendrik Goltzius’s (1558-1617) print of 1584, ¹⁸ or by Matham’s print after Vrancx’s Dives and Lazarus. But the linear foreground arrangement of figures before the portico most likely derives from Vredeman de Vries, father and son. The Venetian-style coiffure could have been gleaned from prints by Giacomo Franco (1550-1620) of 1610, published in 1614. ¹⁹

Gregory Martin, 2022