A Musical Company

c. 1635 - c. 1645

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 35.5 cm × width 55.7 cm
outer size: depth 7 cm

Technical notes

The support is a single oak plank with a horizontal grain bevelled on all sides. It may have been cut down a little at the top side, as evidenced by the careless finish. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1618. The panel could have been ready for use by 1629, but a date in or after 1635 is more likely. The panel was prepared with a thin white ground, followed by a grey imprimatura, which – as is clearly visible in the infrared reflectogram assembly – was roughly executed with broad brushstrokes from top to bottom. This imprimatura somewhat obstructs the view of the underdrawing in the infrared reflectogram assembly, which seems to define the figures with confident, mostly single contour lines. The foreground figures are meticulously executed, while the shaded figures are painted in a sketchier manner.

Scientific examination and reports

infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, 29 May 2001
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 25 February 2002
X-radiography: A. Truyen, RMA, 14 January 2003
technical report: K. Schreuder, RMA, 15 January 2003

Condition

Fair. The panel has a 10 cm crack at top right, which is stable. There is some abrasion and the varnish is discoloured.

Conservation

B. Graf, 1973: retouchings reworked and revarnished

Provenance

...; bequeathed to the museum by Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-98), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, 1898; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, since 2002

Object number: SK-A-1769

Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet

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.¹ 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 1625.² 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

This musical company is an exception in the large group of grisailles that Van de Venne produced in his Hague period from 1625 on.³ His grisailles generally depict working-class people, but here it is well-to-do burghers who are the subject. The customary banderole with a homonym or proverb is missing, as are allusions to immoral behaviour. The restrained poses of the musicians and other figures do not reveal whether we are looking at a sensual scene.

The grisaille has been articulated in a refined way. The emphasis is on a few highlighted figures, notably the lutenist on the left and the lavishly attired woman on the right. These two figures are quite detailed, with considerable attention being paid to the finer points of their clothing, but the figures in the shaded passage have been left sketchy. Without seeking to reproduce a natural fall of light, Van de Venne gave free rein to the interplay of light and shade – a characteristic element in his grisailles. The cello leaning against a table in the left foreground is a repoussoir comparable to the dying man and Death in ‘A Miserable End’ of 1632 (SK-A-1770).

According to the literature, this grisaille is dated 163[.], but there is no longer any trace of that to be found.⁴ Dendrochronology has shown that the painting can probably be dated after 1635.⁵ A similar interior by Van de Venne with the same motif of the hanging drapery at top left, in which, by contrast, there are numerous references to licentious behaviour, is dated 1645.⁶ In that scene the artist introduced a standing figure seen from the back, which appears again in another variant of the Rijksmuseum painting as a woman singing to the accompaniment of the musicians (fig. a). These similarities argue for a dating of the present painting between 1635 and 1645.

The back wall covered with canvas in the latter variant extends all the way up to the ceiling. The lack of this uppermost part of the composition in the Rijksmuseum painting, together with the coarsely sawn edge at the top, indicate that the painting has been cut down slightly. The ‘floating’ lamp would thus have been fully visible in the original composition.

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. 304.

Literature

Bol 1989, pp. 98, 103

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 279, no. 2501; 1934, p. 296, no. 2501; 1976, p. 567, no. A 1769; 2007, no. 304

Citation

Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, A Musical Company, c. 1635 - c. 1645', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6392

(accessed 23 November 2024 10:20:06).

Figures

fig. a Adriaen van de Venne, *A Musical Company*, c. 1645. Oil on panel, 40 x 60 cm. Present whereabouts unknown. Photo: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, image no. 1001234934.