A Festive Company

Entry

A merry group of revellers are seated around a covered table and drink, talk, sing or make music. Several of the figures look out at the viewer. The elegant pair on the far right appear to have been set somewhat apart from the rest, and on that evidence De Jongh has suggested that they are the portraits of an engaged couple.² There are quite a few 17th-century paintings in which genre-like scenes seem to have been combined with portraits. Jan Miense Molenaer, for instance, regularly placed a distinguished pair off to one side of the main scene, looking on. Sometimes these are portraits, sometimes not. That the two people on the right of Elyas’s painting are not married but betrothed is clear from their relative positions, the man being on the heraldic left and the woman on the heraldic right.³ These positions are usually reversed in portraits of married couples.

It is likely that the other figures, who are engaged in a variety of actions, symbolize the five senses. The lutenist probably represents Hearing, the man singing on the left with a text in his hand stands for Sight, the man holding a glass upside down Taste, the young man standing with a hat in one hand and a glass in the other Feeling, and the woman with a dog on her lap Smell.⁴

There is a long tradition of depictions of the five senses, which were usually represented by stock personifications and attributes in the 16th century, but in the 17th century could be symbolized in a variety of ways. That is one reason why it is often difficult to realize that the figures personify the senses. In addition, they were increasingly shown in contemporary dress and settings, as is the case here.⁵

Scenes of the five senses were often moralistic and admonitory. The paintings hanging on the walls behind this merry company indicate that this might be the case here, for The Flood and The Battle between the Israelites and the Moabites can be taken as warnings to the viewer, as well as to the elegant couple on the right against excessive sensual pleasures.⁶

Until now the date on Elyas’s panel was wrongly read as 1620, but examination under the microscope has shown that it is 1629. There are no other genre paintings by the artist, but the style and composition bear some resemblance to those of Willem Buytewech and Dirck Hals. It is possible that the composition of Buytewech’s Elegant Couples on a Terrace (SK-A-3038) may have served as a model.⁷

Based on the similarities between the present painting and Jan Miense Molenaer’s Allegory of Marital Fidelity,⁸ Weller has suggested that Elyas may have been Molenaer’s teacher.⁹ Although there is indeed a resemblance between the two paintings, the lack of comparable works makes it impossible to put Weller’s hypothesis to the test.

Everhard Korthals Altes, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 69.