Object data
oil on panel
support: height 45.5 cm × width 62.5 cm
Sybrand van Beest
Vegetable Market
1646
Inscriptions
- signature and date, bottom right on the barrel (v and B ligated): S. vBeest / 1646
Technical notes
Support The panel consists of two horizontally grained oak planks (approx. 40 and 5.5 cm), 0.7 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that both planks are from the same tree and 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 smooth double ground extends over the edges of the support. The first, semi-opaque, off-white layer is followed by a semi-opaque, pale brown ground consisting of white, yellow, orange, red, brown and black pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends over the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front, with each layer applied wet in wet. The brown background colour of the buildings was left open to serve as a mid-tone in the figures and other foreground details. The fluid, opaque and semi-opaque paint was applied in thin, smooth layers with a little impasto created by the stiffer paint used for the highlights. The figures are fully worked up with careful blending, and brushstrokes are visible only in the sky. Cross-sections show that the darkest passages consist of semi-transparent, medium rich paint containing small opaque black, brown, red, orange and yellow, and large transparent red pigment particles. The grey passages in the sky consist of opaque white and black pigments only.
Emma Boyce, 2022
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: W. de Ridder / M. van de Laar, RMA, 10 February 1998
- paint samples: E. Boyce, RMA, nos. SK-A-1732/1-3, 27 July 2010
- infrared photography: E. Boyce, RMA, 28 July 2010
- technical report: E. Boyce, RMA, 29 July 2010
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 17 November 2010
Condition
Fair. There is a difference in level in the right-hand part of the join, running approx. 20 cm from the right. The ground and paint layers are cracked along the entire length of the join. There are microscopic drying cracks in the brown passages and the black paint layers are slightly abraded. Numerous crater-like holes, some filled with a glassy substance, probably metal soap protrusions, have formed all over the surface (although primarily in the sky and other pale passages). The thick varnish has significantly and unevenly yellowed, and although it retains its gloss it does not saturate well.
Provenance
…; bequeathed by Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-1898), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, to the museum, with 54 other paintings, 18981
Object number: SK-A-1732
Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Sybrand van Beest (? The Hague c. 1610 - Amsterdam 1674)
According to the notes about painters made by the Amsterdam city physician Jan Sysmus, Sybrand van Beest was 60 years old in 1670, which means that he was born around 1610, probably in The Hague, where he spent most of his life. In the 1620s he was working as a clerk to Pieter van Veen, with whom he lodged, and it was probably then that he learned the basic tricks of the trade. Van Veen was a lawyer who eventually became Pensionary at the Law Court of Holland, but he was also an amateur painter. He died in 1629 and Van Beest then moved in with his son Simon van Veen and remained there until the latter’s death in 1661. After that Van Beest went to Amsterdam, where he had close relatives, dying there in 1674.
The artist’s earliest dated work, of 1632, is of a vegetable market.2 In 1637 the armourer Claes van der Kay testified that he had entered into an agreement that Van Beest would give his son drawing lessons. This might be an indication that Van Beest had turned to painting after Pieter van Veen’s death and no longer worked as a clerk. He certainly joined the Guild of St Luke in The Hague in 1640, and in 1656 he was one of the founders of Confrerie Pictura. In 1661 he replaced a history scene of his in the society’s premises with one of a pig market.3 He was warden of Pictura from 1659 to 1662, when he was nominated but not elected as dean, and once more in 1663.
Van Beest’s output mainly consists of genre pieces, among them many market scenes, kitchens and stables. He also produced some figured landscapes and a few still lifes, although it is possible that the latter originally belonged to kitchen or stable interiors and had been cut out of them. He also painted several histories, both biblical4 and classical,5 as well as events from Dutch history. He seems to have ventured into the marine genre just once with a picture that is said to bear his signature.6 He also made a few highly finished drawings.
His last dated painting is from 1674, the year of his death, and shows a man and two women in a landscape with a display of fruit in the foreground.7 There is some discussion about the third digit, which is a little difficult to make out, but a seven seems to be the most plausible reading. Sybrand van Beest’s oeuvre has not yet taken firm shape, and in fact looks a little like a catch-all for pictures for which no obvious home can be found. That is partly due to the fact that he never developed a clearly recognizable style of his own but worked in the manner of several other artists of the day. His market scenes, for example, are similar to those by Gabriel Metsu and Hendrick Sorgh, while his jocular genre pieces recall the output of Isack van Ostade and his landscapes are in the style of Jan van Goyen. Dumas and Buijsen noted the influence of Adriaen van de Venne.8
Marrigje Rikken, 2022
References
A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, I, Leipzig/Vienna 1906, p. 72; Moes in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, III, Leipzig 1909, p. 173; P.C. Molhuysen and P.J. Blok (eds.), Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, II, Leiden 1912, p. 114; N.J. Pabon, ‘Iets over Mr. Pieter van Veen en zijn familie’, Oud Holland 41 (1923-24), pp. 240-49, esp. pp. 240-43; Dumas in C. Dumas and J. van der Meer Mohr, Haagse stadsgezichten 1550-1800: Topografische schilderijen van het Haags Historisch Museum, coll. cat. The Hague 1991, pp. 684-85; Römer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, VIII, Munich/Leipzig 1994, pp. 259-60; Buijsen 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, pp. 90-95; A. van der Willigen and F. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, pp. 32-33
Entry
Sybrand van Beest painted many kinds of market, not only for vegetables but also for fish, pigs, horses and cheese, and in wintertime too. The location is occasionally identified by the buildings in the background, mainly church towers. Most of the scenes are set in The Hague.9
Van Beest’s earliest dated work of this kind is from 1632 and is of a vegetable market,10 while his last one is from 1668 and features a pig market near the Sint-Jacobskerk in The Hague.11 This means that he painted this type of scene almost throughout his career. The Rijksmuseum’s picture is dated 1646, and most of the other ones are from both the 1640s and ’50s and display little if any stylistic development.
Van Beest was able to paint a relatively large number of markets by varying on the same composition over and over again. That is also the case with the wares on sale; the bunch of carrots and the green cabbages in the right foreground of this picture are found almost literally in several other works. However, he never repeated the staffage. Here the crowd on the square is set against the backdrop of some dilapidated houses. In the left and right foreground two scenes have been singled out for enlargement, as it were, with the figures being bigger and more clear-cut than the others. On the left an old woman and a child approach a young market seller seated with her merchandise beside her. A much better-dressed boy is looking at them. On the right a couple are standing behind their stall and selling vegetables to an elegantly attired lady.
The contrast between simply clad market folk and more neatly dressed members of the public is a recurring theme in Van Beest’s work. Although that distinction is also a feature of genre pieces by other artists from around the middle of the century, Van Beest was one of the few who made a point of highlighting it by enlarging the figures. This sets his scenes apart from those by Hendrick Sorgh and Gabriel Metsu, although they do recall Van Beest’s. They too painted different kinds of market with interplay between the public and the stallholders located in an urban surrounding. Sorgh’s compositions, though, are usually simpler than Van Beest’s, with any action shifted off to one side. Metsu’s figures are more refined than Sorgh’s and Van Beest’s. The latter usually have a pronounced colouration with eye-catching red accents, such as the blouse of the stallholder in the right foreground and the sleeves of the old woman on the left. The artist also paid loving attention to anecdotal details.12
Marrigje Rikken, 2022
See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
Literature
Dumas in C. Dumas and J. van der Meer Mohr, Haagse stadsgezichten 1550-1800: Topografische schilderijen van het Haags Historisch Museum, coll. cat. The Hague 1991, p. 684
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 43, no. 456; 1976, p. 107, no. A 1732
Citation
Marrigje Rikken, 2022, 'Sybrand van Beest, Vegetable Market, 1646', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5970
(accessed 10 November 2024 17:16:53).