Object data
oil on panel
support: height c. 34.7 cm × width c. 60.7 cm
outer size: depth 7.7 cm (support incl. frame and climate box)
Esaias van de Velde
Elegant Company Dining in the Open Air
1615
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower left: E. VANDEN.VELDE. / .1615.
Technical notes
The oak support consists of two horizontally grained planks and is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1593. The panel could have been ready for use by 1604, but a date in or after 1610 is more likely. The ground is off-white. Some underdrawing is visible in the couple on the left. There are several small changes to the original design, for example in the position of the woman’s head, which was turned slightly towards the viewer in the design. The figures were reserved in the landscape. The paint was applied smoothly and opaquely, with impasted highlights.
Scientific examination and reports
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 8 April 2002
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 29 November 2004
Condition
Fair. The paint layers are severely abraded. There is an area of discoloured retouching at lower right. The greens of the background appear to have darkened. The varnish layer was unevenly applied and is matte at the retouchings.
Conservation
- L. Sozzani, 16 February 1995: damaged area along the left edge retouched
Provenance
...; collection Carel Vosmaer (1826-88), The Hague, 1872;1 his widow;2 from whom to Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-98), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, 1896;3 by whom bequeathed to the museum, June 1898
Object number: SK-A-1765
Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Esaias van de Velde (Amsterdam 1587 - The Hague 1630)
Esaias van de Velde was born in Amsterdam in 1587 as the son of the painter and art dealer Hans van de Velde, who hailed from Antwerp. His teacher was probably Gillis van Coninxloo, although the name of David Vinckboons is also mentioned in the literature, both of whom, like the Van de Veldes emigrated from the southern Netherlands to Amsterdam. In 1609, he, his mother and sister went to live in Haarlem with his brother-in-law, the painter Jacob Martens. Cathelijn Martens, the woman Van de Velde married two years later, was Martens’s sister. In 1612, he, Hercules Segers and Willem Pietersz Buytewech joined the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem. He was also a member of the Wijngaardranken chamber of rhetoric in 1617-18. On 22 April 1618 he moved to The Hague and joined the painters’ guild there the same year. In 1620 he gained citizenship of The Hague. According to Houbraken, Van de Velde’s paintings were expensive and popular, which is confirmed by contemporary mentions of prices. One of his patrons was the stadholder, Prince Maurits. Several documents of January 1626 reveal that there was a problem relating to the payment of 200 guilders for a painting commissioned by the Stadholder’s Court. Van de Velde was buried in the St Jacobuskerk in The Hague on 18 November 1630.
Esaias van de Velde was a painter of landscapes, battle scenes and merry companies in the open air, as well as being a draughtsman and an etcher. His earliest dated paintings are winter landscapes and companies out of doors from 1614. His early landscapes have a colourful palette, but the later ones are more naturalistic. He must have been in great demand as a specialist in staffage. He painted the figures in works by Bartholomeus van Bassen (SK-A-864). Pieter de Molijn, François van Knibbergen and other artists. Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) and Pieter de Neyn (1597-1639) were taught by him in his Haarlem studio. Other pupils or followers included Jan Asselijn (after 1610-1652), Pieter van Laer (1599-in or after 1642) and Palamedes Palamedesz (1607-38).
Gerdien Wuestman, 2007
References
Buchelius 1583-1639 (1928), pp. 50, 67; Orlers 1641, pp. 373, 374; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, p. 847; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 182; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 171, 173, 275, 303; Miedema 1980, II, p. 1036; Briels 1984, pp. 20-26; Briels 1997, p. 392; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 250-54; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 314-15
Entry
This painting of 1615 with a festive group of people in a garden is one of the earliest dated works in the oeuvre of Esaias van de Velde. Four couples are eating, drinking, playing music and courting in a more or less symmetrical composition in which the page pouring wine behind the table occupies the central position. Van de Velde treated a similar subject the previous year in a painting that is now in the Mauritshuis.4
The theme of elegant people out in the open air was a popular one in late 16th-century printmaking, but in painting it was mainly the preserve of Haarlem artists in the 1610s and the first half of the 1620s.5 The Flemish immigrant David Vinckboons played an important part in popularizing the genre (cf. SK-A-2109). Various authors have drawn attention to Vinckboons’s influence on this painting,6 but here Van de Velde adopted his own approach to the subject. The figures in Vinckboons’s outdoor scenes, as well as in Van de Velde’s Mauritshuis painting, are seen in a park with a castle in the distance, but here the focus is on the group around the table. Keyes believes that the young artist may have been inspired by a lost painting in Vinckboons’s style by Van de Velde’s fellow townsman Frans Hals,7 while Kloek comments on the affinities with the work of Willem Pietersz Buytewech, who worked in Haarlem for a while from 1612 and who painted at least one outdoor gathering.8
Although not set in an elegant garden, this scene clearly belongs in the visual tradition of the Garden of Love.9 The man seated to the left of the table is holding hands with the woman sitting beside him and is resting his leg on her knee, while the seated man on the right has caught hold of the clothing of the woman standing before him. According to Keyes, who draws attention to the negative connotations of the wine cooler and the peacock pie, the scene has to be interpreted in a moralistic light.10 Kolfin, on the other hand, says that scenes of this kind by Esaias van de Velde should be taken more light-heartedly.11
Gerdien Wuestman, 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. 285.
Literature
Keyes 1984, pp. 81-82, 135, no. 59, with earlier literature; Kloek in Amsterdam 1993, p. 618, no. 289
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 273, no. 2451; 1934, p. 289, no. 2451; 1960, p. 314, no. 2451; 1976, p. 558, no. A 1765; 2007, no. 285
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Esaias van de Velde, Elegant Company Dining in the Open Air, 1615', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6360
(accessed 22 September 2024 21:14:00).