Object data
oil on panel
support: height 45 cm × width 64.7 cm
outer size: depth 5 cm (support incl. frame)
Sebastiaen Vrancx
A Woman Mounts her Robber’s Horse: ‘De Gestrafte Rover’
c. 1635
Inscriptions
- signature, in monogram, bottom left: SV
- mark, on the reverse, indistinct, of a panelmaker's mark
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: W. de Ridder / L. Nijkamp, RMA, 16 March 2006
Provenance
…; collection H.M. Otto, Amsterdam; anonymous sale [section H.M. Otto], Amsterdam (C.F. Roos), 5 November 1895 sqq., no. 43, as D. Vinckboons, fl. 20, to De Souza;1…; donated by Victor de Stuers to the museum, 18952
Object number: SK-A-1637
Credit line: Gift of Jonkheer V. de Stuers
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Sebastiaen Vrancx (Antwerp 1573 - Antwerp 1647)
The versatile painter of small-scale figures and landscapes, Sebastiaen (Sebastiaan) Vrancx, was baptized in the Antwerp Sint-Jacobskerk on 22 January 1573, the son of Jan Vrancx, a merchant, and Barbara Coutereau. There is no record of his apprenticeship; but Karel van Mander, writing at second-hand early in Vrancx’s career, stated that he had been taught by the prominent Antwerp master Adam van Noort (1562-1641).3
The earliest record of his activity is a fluently executed sketch in pen and ink of an ex libris, dated 1594; it is evidence of his literary proclivity and also of his membership of the rhetoricians’ chamber De Violieren with whose motto it is also inscribed.4 In his later years, Vrancx was active as a playwright.5 He also embarked on a project to produce an illustrated edition of Virgil’s Aeneid translated into Dutch.6 The bookplate was presumably drawn in Antwerp. A drawing of the Colosseum is dated 1596 and is the earliest evidence of the artist’s stay in Rome, the foremost product of which was a series of some forty sketches of Roman views made in a now dismembered sketchbook begun in the following year.7 One of these drawings is dated 1601; it must have been made early in that year, as Vrancx was back in Antwerp to register as a master in the guild before the end of the accounting year, 25 September 1601.
One of his earliest assignments was to record the violent skirmish between cuirassier opponents in the Eighty Years’ War which had taken place outside ’s-Hertogenbosch in February 1600 (see SK-A-1409). His drawing was engraved by Johannes van Doetecum II (c. 1560-1630) then active in Rotterdam; it was most likely Vrancx’s first depiction of a martial subject, a genre which he popularized and which reflected his personal interest in the exercise of arms. In 1613 he became dean of the fencers’ guild, and in 1626 he was appointed captain of the Antwerp civic guard, a distinction which was commemorated in the rubric of the engraved portrait in Anthony van Dyck’s Iconography.8
Vrancx’s Massacre of the Innocents of 1600 is his earliest, extant dated painting.9 The artist was later to prove adept at creating architectural capriccio’s as settings for elegantly described biblical and allegorical subjects, town views and country festivals. As an acute observer of the everyday scene, he was of a calibre comparable with Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625), with whom he collaborated on rare occasions, as he did with Tobias Verhaecht (c. 1560-1631) and Joos de Momper II (1564-1634/35) among others.
Vrancx was an active member of the painters’ guild, of which he was nominated dean for the year 1612/13; he was later to be dean of the exclusive Confraternity of Peter and Paul. He is recorded as having taken on two pupils in 1607/08 and 1612/13; but his most famous pupil, Peeter Snayers (1592-1667), was never registered with the guild. He was reportedly averse to having studio copies made after his work.10
Vrancx married the daughter of an art dealer, Maria Pamphi, in 1612; she and their daughter predeceased him in 1639. He was buried in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk on 16 May 1647.
REFERENCES
P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, ondere zinspreuk: ‘Wt Ionsten Versaemt’, 2 vols., Antwerp/The Hague 1864-76 (reprint Amsterdam 1961), I, 412, 474, 483, 490, 511, 524, 539; II, 108, 185; F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, pp. 469-74; Vander Auwera in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., Basingstoke 1996, pp. 898-99
Entry
The monogram stamped on the reverse has been described as a ‘C’ or ‘G’ on a triangle or probably an ‘A’; this is the monogram of the panel maker Guilliam Aertsen (active 1617-died 1638).11 The oak support has not been dated.
There is no reason to doubt Sebastiaen Vrancx’s authorship of this work, which is signed with his monogram. When offered in 1895, it was described as by David Vinckeboons I (1576-1631/33); Vrancx’s monogram was spotted and recorded by Hofstede de Groot in his copy of the sale catalogue.12
A reference applied to the reverse identifies the incident as one recounted in Simon de Vries’s continuation of Johann Ludwig Gottried, Historische kronyck, 1698-1700, vol. 2, p. 1345: ‘The Spanish Netherlands did not only have to suffer the barbarities of the French, but the locals were also troubled with their own soldiers, who stole within the cities everything they could, and made every road unsafe. Here something remarkable happened. A Spanish horseman between S. Truyen and Thienen happened upon a woman, whom he forced by pistol to give everything she had with her, she even had to take of her clothes, except for her vest. After she had done this, the horseman got off his horse, and tied the package up, on his knees. In the meantime the woman jumped on the horse and rode off. After a while she got the coat of the horseman, still tied to the back of the horse, put it on, and arrived to everyone’s admiration in S. Truyen, having the horse for that which she had lost’.13
St Truyen or St Trond, and Thienen, or Tirlemont, are to the east of Leuven about 20 km apart. A similar incident recounted in the Wekelijcke Tijdingen of 12 March 1631, published by Abraham Verhoeven, was recognized as germane by Kunzle14 and Arblaster.15 This account told of an incident some 20 km south-east of Brussels in which a peasant woman from Turbize rode off on a man’s horse as he looked for her purse which she had thrown into a hedge so as to forestall his theft of it. The source for De Vries’s report has not been traced.
Vrancx shows the soldier cutting reeds with which he would presumably tie up the clothes into a bundle or use them to conceal the pile of clothes; he omits any reference to the soldier’s cloak. The church spire of, presumably, St Truyen is on the horizon at right.
The account refers to French troops; France entered the war against the Spanish Netherlands in 1635, which provides a terminus post quem for the date of execution of the picture. A date of circa 1635 is borne out by the uniform of the soldier.
During war, women were vulnerable at the least to having their clothes stolen by marauding soldiers, while their menfolk were led away presumably for ransom as Vrancx himself depicted.16
Gregory Martin, 2022
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 291, no. 2596; 1934, p. 309, no. 2596; 1976, p. 590, no. A 1637
Citation
G. Martin, 2022, 'Sebastiaen Vrancx, A Woman Mounts her Robber’s Horse: ‘De Gestrafte Rover’, c. 1635', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6489
(accessed 10 November 2024 16:29:58).