Object data
oil on panel
support: height 25 cm × width 42.3 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne
Skaters
1625
Inscriptions
- signature and date, bottom left (A and V ligated): Avan de Venne 1625
Technical notes
The support consists of a single horizontally grained oak plank bevelled on all sides. Remnants of sealing wax on the four corners suggest that the panel was once sealed in the frame. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1613. The panel could have been ready for use by 1625, which is in accordance with the date on the painting. The ground layer is light, probably whitish. The lower half of the composition was painted directly onto the ground layer, while a grey underpaint was applied in the sky. Research with infrared reflectography revealed an underdrawing in some of the figures, mainly on the left side of the composition, consisting primarily of contour lines. In the background are some drawn lines for a building, which was not executed in paint. Some changes were made during the painting process in the branches of the trees on the left. The paint was applied quickly in a relatively simple paint-layer structure.
Scientific examination and reports
- infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, 26 July 2002
- technical report: L. Sozzani, RMA, 29 July 2002
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 23 June 2003
Condition
Fair. The painting is abraded, and some areas of paint appear wrinkled.
Conservation
- L. Sozzani, 1997: retouched and revarnished
Provenance
...; sale, Fedor Zschille (†) (Dresden), Cologne (J.M. Heberle), 27 (28) May 1889 sqq., no. 107, as Vincent Laurenszen van der Vinne, DM 400, to Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-98), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet;1 by whom bequeathed to the museum, 1898
Object number: SK-A-1768
Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (Delft c. 1589 - The Hague 1662)
According to Cornelis de Bie, Adriaen van de Venne was born into a southern Netherlandish immigrant family in Delft in 1589. De Bie also states that he was taught drawing and illumination by the Leiden goldsmith and painter Simon de Valck, and was then apprenticed to the grisaille painter Jeronymus van Diest, both of whom are now otherwise unknown.
Van de Venne is first documented in 1614 in Middelburg, where he remained until around 1625. It was in 1614 that he married the daughter of a Zeeland sea captain, Elisabeth de Pours. Dating from that same year are his earliest known paintings, Fishing for Souls (SK-A-447) and two summer and winter pendants.2 On the evidence of an affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, it has been assumed that he spent some time in Antwerp before 1614. However, the local Middelburg painters were already working in Brueghel’s style at that time. The fact that he married a woman of Zeeland, and that his father and his brother Jan had settled in the town in 1605 and 1608 respectively, make it likely that he was in Middelburg before 1614. In 1618, his brother Jan opened a shop selling paintings and set up a publishing business, in which Adriaen played an important role as a print designer, poet, and illustrator of books by Jacob Cats, among other authors. Starting in 1618 he also designed several propaganda prints supporting the House of Orange and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Van de Venne is last documented in Middelburg on 30 June 1624. He then moved to The Hague, where he is recorded as a resident on 22 March 1625. His departure from Middelburg roughly coincided with the death of his brother Jan, and his decision to settle in The Hague probably had something to do with the presence of the court there, which played an important part in the subjects he chose. Among his earliest works in The Hague were the prints and paintings of Prince Maurits Lying in State (SK-A-446), several impressions of which were ordered by the States-General on 21 July 1625.3 He enrolled in the Guild of St Luke in 1625, and a year later acquired his Hague citizenship. He retained his house in Middelburg, and in 1630 bought another one in The Hague, from which he sold his prints and books. He was warden of the guild from 1631 to 1633 and from 1637 to 1639, and filled the post of dean from 1639 to 1641. He was also a member of the Ionghe Batavieren (Young Batavians) chamber of rhetoric. His fame was such that he was included in Johannes Meyssens’s book, Image de divers hommes desprit sublime, where it is stated that the Prince of Orange owned several works by him. In 1656, Van de Venne was also involved in setting up a new confraternity, the Confrerie Pictura, which broke away from the Guild of St Luke. At the end of his life he ran into financial difficulties. He made his will in 1660 after falling ill, and died on 12 November 1662. Two of his sons, Pieter (c. 1615-57) and Huijbregt (1634/35-after 1682), were also painters.
Van de Venne’s painted oeuvre can be divided into his Middelburg and Hague periods. In Middelburg he produced some of his most ambitious, meticulously painted works with politico-allegorical subjects, as well as many landscape scenes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder. In The Hague he concentrated almost exclusively on grisailles for the open market, most of them genre pieces with a comical, moralistic slant with inscribed banderoles, but he also made religious, allegorical works and a few large-scale equestrian portraits of rulers. He abandoned the meticulous style of his Middelburg period for a freer, sometimes even sketchy technique, which enabled him to boost his output to ‘hundreds of monochrome pieces, both known and desired by devotees of art’, as J. Campo Weyerman put it.
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
References
Meyssens 1649; De Bie 1661, pp. 234-46; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, pp. 857-58; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 136-37; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 340-41; Franken 1878, pp. 7-30; Obreen II, 1879-80, pp. 108-09, III, 1880-81, pp. 258, 272, 275, IV, 1881-82, pp. 59, 128, 148, V, 1882-83, pp. 68-69, 71-74, 96, 102, 133, 153, VI, 1884-87, pp. 52, 226; Bredius II, 1916, pp. 374-93, VII, 1921, pp. 240-45; Bol 1958; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 37-74; Bol 1989; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, p. 321; Briels 1997, pp. 394-95; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 255-62, 354
Entry
Although the signature and date are almost entirely overpainted, this is undoubtedly an autograph painting of 1625. The composition, subject and style are fully in accord with certain works of 1625 and 1626. Compared with Van de Venne’s earlier work from his Middelburg period, the vantage point has been lowered, the number of figures reduced, and the execution is far more rapid and draughtsman-like. There are parallels, above all, with Winter (SK-A-1774) from the 1625 series of the Four Seasons. Some of the figures in that work are seen here in a slightly modified form, such as the couple skating in the foreground. The man skating with a pole over his shoulder in the left middleground is the mirror image of the one in Winter. The same man, but now with a boat-hook and bucket, appears on folio 99 of Van de Venne’s album ’tLants Sterckte (The land’s fortress and strength) of 1626.4 In addition, the skater with his hands on his back and one leg raised in front of him is found in mirror image in Winter. Contrary to what is asserted in the literature,5 the rapid execution and relationships with Van de Venne’s early Hague works indicate that this painting was made there.
This painting is less carefully elaborated than the Four Seasons series. It was probably made for the open market, perhaps with a summer scene as a pendant. One possible candidate for the companion piece is a River Landscape of 1625 (fig. a), which is a little higher, but matches it perfectly in iconography and composition.6
Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 295.
Literature
Indianapolis-San Diego 1958, no. 72; Royalton-Kisch 1988, p. 338
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 278, no. 2498; 1976, p. 566, no. A 1768; 2007, no. 295
Citation
Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Skaters, 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6400
(accessed 13 November 2024 05:51:29).Figures