The Quacksalver

1648

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 29 cm × width 23.7 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower right (A and v ligated): Av. ostade 1648

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.6 cm thick. Wooden strips (approx. 1 cm) were added on all sides at a later date. The reverse is bevelled at the top and bottom, and has regularly spaced saw marks.
Preparatory layers The single, very thin, off-white ground extends up to the edges of the support and barely fills the grain of the wood. It consists of fine white pigment particles.
Underdrawing An underdrawing in an unidentified medium is partly visible with infrared reflectography in areas where the final painting obviously deviates.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. A first lay-in of most of the composition was made with translucent dark brown paint, while the sky received an initial light grey layer, leaving the foreground figures, building and tent in reserve. The trees as well as the house and two figures in the background, by contrast, were painted over the sky. Some contours, for instance along the left side of the hat worn by the peasant with folded arms, were slightly adjusted with the same light blue that was subsequently applied to the sky. Infrared reflectography revealed minor compositional changes, for example the child to the left of the peasant with folded arms originally looked in the same direction as the boy in front of him. The paint was very thinly applied, except in the trees and sky. The dark brown initial lay-in was often only covered by thin grey scumbles to give definition and colour to the illuminated passages, or was even left exposed in order to serve as shadows, for instance in the hats worn by the peasant with folded arms and the boy seen from behind. There is some visible brushmarking in the foliage, but otherwise the paint layers are fairly smooth.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 8 December 2010
paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-300/1-2, 8 December 2010
technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 8 December 2010

Condition

Fair. There is a crack approx. 7.5 cm long at bottom centre. The paint layer is rather abraded and has a winding scratch of approx. 8 cm at upper left. The varnish looks uneven, has yellowed and saturates poorly.

Provenance

…; ? sale, Pieter Leendert de Neufville (1707-1759, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (J.M. Cok), 19 June 1765, no. 73 (‘Een Boere Buitenhuisje; een Kwakzalver die zyn Geneesmiddelen den Omstanders aanbied. P. 10½, 8 [27 x 20.5 cm]’), with pendant, no. 74 (‘Een Boere Binnehuisje, met rookende en speelende boertjes; zynde een weerga. P. 10½, 8 [27 x 20.5 cm]’), fl. 405, to Cornelis Ploos van Amstel;…; ? sale, Bicker and Wijkersloot [section Jan Bernd Bicker (1746-1812, Amsterdam)], Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 19 July 1809, no. 41 (‘hoog 10½, breed 8½ duim [27 x 22 cm]: Paneel. In een Dorpgezicht voor eene Boeren Woning bij Geboomte, ziet men een Kwakzalver voor een Tent aan Huislieden en bij staande Kinderen zijn Geneesmiddelen aanprijzen. […]’), fl. 425, to Teengs;¹ ? sale, D. Teengs, Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 24 April 1811, no. 98 (‘In een Dorpgezicht voor eene Boeren Woning bij Geboomte, ziet men een Kwakzalver voor een Tent aan Huislieden bij staande Kinderen zijn Geneesmiddelen aanprijzen. […]’), fl. 530, to De Lelie;…; collection Johannes Rombouts (1772-1850), Dordrecht;² his nephew, Leendert Dupper Willemsz (1799-1870), Dordrecht, 1850;³ by whom bequeathed to the museum, with 63 other paintings, 12 April 1870⁴

Object number: SK-A-300

Credit line: Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht

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.⁵ 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

Quacksalvers were already being depicted at the end of the fifteenth century, and the subject occurs regularly in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Dutch peasant scenes. Adriaen van Ostade was preceded by a number of Haarlem artists, including Jan Miense Molenaer and Isack van Ostade, when he executed this panel in 1648. A painting of the subject by Adriaen Brouwer – which must predate 1638, his year of death – mentioned in Cornelis Dusart’s probate inventory may have served the copyist of a picture now preserved in Karlsruhe.⁶ Van Ostade’s composition differs from these earlier works most notably in his concentration on just a few figures: the quack himself and a handful of peasants. Unlike the charlatan in his younger brother’s scene of 1640,⁷ who is removing a patient’s tooth, Adriaen van Ostade’s mountebank is attempting to sell a vial of medicine to the dim-witted public who have gathered before his display laid out on a makeshift table composed of a wooden plank on a barrel. Among the objects is a large, official-looking certificate. Such documents, often with outsized seals, feature in many scenes of quacks, including Molenaer’s picture of the first half of the 1630s,⁸ and Gerrit Dou’s celebrated painting from 1656 in Rotterdam.⁹ Like his counterparts in the earlier works, and indeed later ones such as Dou’s, Van Ostade’s charlatan wears a very fancy outfit. His beret and frilly collar and cuffs are theatrical costume elements in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte.¹⁰

The motif of a young boy holding a hoop in the present scene was probably derived from Molenaer’s painting from the early 1630s, in which he faces the viewer and smiles knowingly. In Van Ostade’s picture he has his back to us, so it is impossible to determine whether he is taken in by the quack’s sales pitch or not. In addition to children, the audience consists of an old woman and a very stupid-looking peasant, who has his left hand tucked into his jacket, a gesture associated with idleness.¹¹

Van Ostade made an etching of this composition in the same year as the painting.¹² It was probably from this print that Jan Steen derived the motif of the boy with the hoop in two of his pictures of quacks,¹³ and other borrowings from Van Ostade’s scene are to be found in his oeuvre. Frans van Mieris I also included the boy with a hoop and further elements from Van Ostade’s Quacksalver in a panel now in the Uffizi.¹⁴ It has also been argued that he adapted Van Ostade’s child in a painting of a peasant interior, in which the figure with his hand in his jacket also appears.¹⁵ The pose of the man in the latter work and that of the young boy with a hoop in the Uffizi are in the same direction as Van Ostade’s present quacksalver, which indicates that Van Mieris based himself on the Rijksmuseum picture rather than on the etching after it.

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. 266, no. 402; Slatkes in P. van der Coelen (ed.), Everyday Life in Holland’s Golden Age: The Complete Etchings of Adriaen van Ostade, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 1998, pp. 148-49

Collection catalogues

1870, p. 238, no. XXXVII; 1880, p. 239, no. 262; 1887, p. 128, no. 1072; 1903, p. 201, no. 1814; 1934, p. 215, no. 1814; 1976, p. 429, no. A 300

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, The Quacksalver, 1648', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6754

(accessed 17 November 2024 17:45:11).