Dancing Couple

c. 1635

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 38.3 cm × width 52.2 cm

Inscriptions

signature, bottom left: Av ost[...]

Technical notes

Support The single, horizontally grained oak plank is approx. 0.6 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends over the edges of the support. The first, off-white layer consists of mostly white pigment particles and barely fills the grain of the wood. The second ground, which is thicker and coarser, is pinkish white and consists of white pigment with an addition of fine black and fine red pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The first lay-in was very thinly and sketchily applied with translucent brown paint, allowing the ground to show through locally. This undermodelling has remained visible in the dark areas. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light. The main scene was worked up with a light grey paint, leaving the figures in reserve. More opaque paints and a broader range of colours were used for the figures and the adjacent area. In the final stage, the wooden beams and boards, and the straw were added, as well as smaller details, such as the fiddler’s bow and the feather on his hat. The figures and light areas are slightly impasted.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 15 September 2008
paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-2568/1-2, 15 September 2008
technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 15 September 2008

Condition

Fair. There are two old, stable horizontal cracks in the upper right corner and a short one halfway down the right edge. An old, glued crack in the lower half runs across the entire width of the plank. A small piece of wood is missing in the lower left corner, and there are several small areas of paint loss. The paint surface is abraded throughout, and the signature even heavily so. Discoloured retouching is present along old cracks. The varnish is very thick, has yellowed and saturates moderately; it has been partially removed.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1951: varnish removed

Provenance

…; collection Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911), The Hague;¹ from whom on loan to the museum, 1907-11;² donated from his estate to the museum, May 1912

Object number: SK-A-2568

Credit line: Gift of the heirs of C. Hoogendijk, The Hague

The artist

Adriaen van Ostade (Haarlem 1610 - Haarlem 1685)

Adriaen van Ostade was the fifth child of the weaver Jan Hendricx van Ostade and Janneke Hendricx. He was baptized in the Reformed Church in Haarlem on 19 December 1610. According to Houbraken, whose information may not be reliable, he was a pupil of Frans Hals at the same time as Adriaen Brouwer. While Hals left no discernable imprint on his oeuvre, the influence of Brouwer, who lived in Haarlem from 1623/24 to 1631/32, is very apparent in Van Ostade’s early work. His activity as an artist is documented only in 1632, when he had already reached the age of 22. Peasants Playing Cards from a year later is Van Ostade’s earliest signed and dated picture.³ He first appears on the Guild of St Luke’s contribution list in 1634. On 30 March 1640, in settlement of a debt to Salomon van Ruysdael, the Court of Petty Sessions ordered him to pay three days’ worth of board at a guilder a day and to spend five hours producing a painting with a value of seven guilders. It is not known whether Adriaen van Ostade himself had lived in Van Ruysdael’s house and received instruction from him.

Van Ostade married twice, first to Machteltje Pietersdr, who was a Catholic, so he probably converted to her religion at the time of their wedding in 1638. Fifteen years after Machteltje’s death in 1642, Anna Ingels became his wife, a scion of a prominent Amsterdam Catholic family. The painter spent his entire life in his native city and appears to have been relatively well-off. In 1647 and 1662, he served as warden of the Guild of St Luke, and in 1662-63 as dean. From 1633 to 1669 he was a member of the third platoon of the second company of the St George Civic Guard. Living to the age of 74, Van Ostade had a long and productive career. He was interred in the family grave in the Grote Kerk in Haarlem on 2 May 1685.

Several hundred paintings by Adriaen van Ostade have survived, mostly depictions of peasant life but also a few landscapes, biblical scenes and portraits. More than 400 drawings, including over 50 detailed watercolours executed in the period 1672-84, have been preserved. A renowned printmaker in his own day, 50 of his etchings have come down to us. The Haarlem landscape artist Evert Adriaensz Oudendijck is recorded as his apprentice in 1663. According to Houbraken, Van Ostade’s younger brother Isack (1621-1649) was also his pupil, as were Jan Steen (1626-1679), Cornelis Bega (c. 1631-1664), Michiel van Musscher (1645-1705) and Cornelis Dusart (1660-1704). Van Gool also mentions that Willem Doudyns (1630-1697) trained with him.

Jonathan Bikker, 2022

References
C. de Bie, Het gulden cabinet van de edel vrij schilder const, inhoudende den lof vande vermarste schilders, architecte, beldthowers ende plaetsnijders van deze eeuw, Antwerp 1662, p. 258; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, pp. 347-49; J. van Gool, De nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en schilderessen: Waer in de levens- en kunstbedryven er tans levende en reets overleedene schilders, die van Houbraken, noch eenig ander schryver, zyn aengeteekend, verhaelt worden, I, The Hague 1750, p. 359; A.P. van der Willigen, Geschiedkundige aanteekeningen over Haarlemsche schilders en andere beoefenaren van de beeldende kunsten, voorafgegaan door eene korte geschiedenis van het schilders- of St. Lucas Gilde aldaar, Haarlem 1866, pp. 170-74; Fritz in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXVI, Leipzig 1932, pp. 74-75; A. Bredius, ‘Een en ander over Adriaen van Ostade’, Oud Holland 56 (1939), pp. 241-47; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lucasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1798, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, passim; B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle: Gesamtdarstellung mit Werkkatalogen, I, Hamburg 1981, pp. 28-33, 36-47; Schnackenburg in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XXIII, New York 1996, pp. 609-12; I. van Thiel-Stroman, ‘Biographies 15th-17th Century’, in P. Biesboer et al., Painting in Haarlem 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 99-363, esp. pp. 258-60; A. Ebert, Adriaen van Ostade und die komische Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2013, pp. 19-22; Seelig in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XCIII, Munich/Leipzig 2017, pp. 528-30

Entry

Dancing Couple is composed in the same manner as most of Adriaen van Ostade’s paintings from the mid-1630s: a sharply illuminated group of figures in the centre is surrounded by shadow on all sides.⁴ The setting is invariably a barn and the peasants are usually shown drinking and smoking. Sometimes a couple are dancing to the accompaniment of a bagpiper or a fiddler, as in the present scene, or country bumpkins fighting with their fists and knives. Despite its lowly subject matter, this picture is very artfully constructed. The triangular design, the left side of which is formed by the dancing man and the right one by the rough-hewn planks of a pen, was used more often by Van Ostade in the 1630s.⁵ The main compositional diagonals are reinforced by the slanted positioning of the figures, such as the smoker on the right, and the beam rising above the fiddler. The triangle formed by the arms of the dancing pair on the left is cleverly inverted on the right in the lines marked out by the seated peasants’ heads and the planks on the one hand and the pass glass (the tall beer glass) on the other. This carefully thought-out placement of diagonals allows the rhythm of the dancing couple to be carried through the entire painting.

Whether or not Houbraken’s claim that Adriaen Brouwer and Adriaen van Ostade, who was roughly five years younger, were pupils in Frans Hals’s studio at the same time is correct, there can be little doubt that Van Ostade’s peasant revelries from the 1630s are indebted to Brouwer, whose earliest surviving paintings were probably executed in Haarlem around 1625-27. The latter has the distinction of being the first artist in the Netherlands to treat the theme of villagers smoking, drinking and fighting indoors.⁶ Before that they were usually placed in the open air, in kermis settings. Not only did Van Ostade adopt Brouwer’s subject matter, he also derived his boisterous figures and their pastel-coloured clothing from him. However, his example never depicted them in barns. Van Ostade’s peasants are moreover smaller in relation to their surroundings, and their faces are less individualized. What most distinguishes his paintings from those of his Flemish colleague is the use of spotlighting and deep shadows. As has often been pointed out in the literature, this employment of chiaroscuro was borrowed from Rembrandt’s early Leiden output.⁷ Of particular importance for Van Ostade was the silhouetted Saviour in Rembrandt’s Christ at Emmaus from around 1629.⁸ Two of Van Ostade’s early works include repoussoir figures totally shrouded in shadow in the manner of this picture.⁹ Rembrandt’s early etchings, such as the 1630 Christ Disputing with the Doctors,¹⁰ in which strong light comes from the upper left and the lower left corner remains in the dark, were probably also inspirational for Van Ostade.¹¹ It speaks to the Haarlem artist’s creativity that he adopted a type of illumination mostly used in history paintings and etchings, where it was put to dramatic effect, and applied it in a completely different genre.

Known as grollitjes or grillen in the seventeenth century, paintings like the present one showing clodhoppers drinking to excess, smoking and dancing were intended to both amuse and educate the cultivated burgher.¹² Jan Miense Molenaer’s Dance in a Village Street of around 1630-31 can perhaps be seen as an illustration of both the jocular and prescriptive meanings of depictions of dancing villagers.¹³ It shows a peasant couple moving to the music provided by a fiddling dwarf. The man holds a large tankard in his left hand and an empty jug can be seen in the foreground, with a rake, shovel and saw lying abandoned at his feet. A well-dressed urban couple look on from the sidelines, commenting on the scene with gestures and facial expressions. The man is amused, but the woman is clearly not impressed by this display of the lower class’s overindulgence and neglect of its responsibilities.¹⁴ Although peasants remained his main subject throughout his career, Van Ostade abandoned the base figure types of his early works for more sympathetic ones later on, and moved them out of barns and into more respectable inns and houses.

Jonathan Bikker, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, III, Esslingen/Paris 1910, p. 318, no. 557; M. Bouffard-Veilleux and H. Roodenburg, ‘Voetenwerk: Hoe de zeventiende-eeuwse schilders hun feestvierders lieten dansen’, in A. Tummers (ed.), De Gouden Eeuw viert feest, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum) 2011-12, pp. 28-39, esp. p. 31; Hillegers in A. Tummers (ed.), De Gouden Eeuw viert feest, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum) 2011-12, p. 56, no. 2

Collection catalogues

1912, p. 383, no. 1821b; 1934, p. 216, no. 1821b; 1960, p. 235, no. 1820 A3; 1976, p. 429, no. A 2568

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, Dancing Couple, c. 1635', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4896

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