The Merry Peasant

c. 1646

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 16.4 cm × width 13.9 cm
outer size: height 21.6 cm × width 19.1 cm × depth 1.8 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, upper right: Av. o[…]

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 1.3 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1521. The panel could have been ready for use by 1532, but a date in or after 1538 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, rather thick, off-white ground extends over the edges of the support. It consists of white pigment with a minute addition of orange and black pigment particles.
Underdrawing Infrared photography revealed some sketchy lines in a dry medium, also partly visible to the naked eye. They do not appear to bear any resemblance to the final painting.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The figure was left in reserve in the semi-transparent brown initial lay-in. The composition was loosely and sketchily built up with lean, translucent brownish-grey paints, applied thinly with a rather coarse brush. In the final stage small, white highlights were added on the rim and handle of the jug and in the figure’s collar. Slight impasto is particularly apparent in the left background, along the contours and in the figure itself.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 11 June 2008
paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-302/1-2, 17 June 2008
technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 17 June 2008
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 9 September 2008

Condition

Fair. The paint layers have become slightly transparent. On top of the higher parts of the grain of the wood, in particular, the paint is somewhat abraded. The varnish is thick and has yellowed, and saturates moderately. It shows matte areas, most notably in the lower right corner.

Conservation

M. Bijl, 1978: complete restoration

Provenance

…; from G. van der Hooft, fl. 31.10, to Gerrit van der Pot (1732-1807), Lord of Groeneveld, Rotterdam, 1782;¹ his sale, Rotterdam (Gebr. Van Ryp), 6 June 1808 sqq., no. 98, as Isack van Ostade (‘Hoog 6¼, en breed 5¼ duim [16 x 13.5 cm]. Pnl. Een lagchenden Boer, eene aarden kan in de handen houdende. […]’), fl. 36, to J.M. Jorissen, for the museum²

Object number: SK-A-302

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

Adriaen van Ostade’s oeuvre includes several half-length paintings and etchings of individual peasants.⁴ The painted ones are usually rendered with a limited palette of browns and blacks, and are often shown, as here, with their bodies leaning to the right or left. Their simple, and in some instances torn clothing identify them as peasants. The present figure holds a broken stoneware jug, which obviously contains the source of his merriment. Van Ostade’s earliest dated picture of a peasant half-length is from 1637.⁵ The sketchy treatment in the Rijksmuseum panel is very close to that in the Head of a Laughing Peasant by Van Ostade now in Rotterdam, the inscribed year of which, as Lammertse has persuasively argued, should be read as ‘1646’.⁶ Were it not for the fact that the figures in both the Amsterdam and Rotterdam paintings lean in the same direction, one could readily imagine that they were conceived as pendants, given their similar brushwork and dimensions.

Two of Van Ostade’s etched peasant tronies are very similar to engraved ones in two series which, according to the inscriptions, were conceived by Pieter Brueghel I.⁷ For his painted versions, however, Van Ostade seems to have been particularly indebted to the work of Adriaen Brouwer. The latter’s extant tronies are assigned by scholars to his Antwerp period (c. 1631-38),⁸ but their presence in some seventeenth-century Dutch inventories suggests that Van Ostade could have seen examples in the northern Netherlands as well.⁹ Prints after Brouwer’s pictures, especially a series of engravings of half-length peasants from about 1634 attributed to Coenraad Waumans, were probably even more instrumental in Van Ostade’s knowledge of the Flemish master’s designs.¹⁰

In his Schilder-boeck of 1604, Karel van Mander praised Pieter Brueghel’s ability to capture the ‘boorish stupidity’ (‘Boerigh dom wesen’) of peasants.¹¹ This quality can also be found in abundance in many of Van Ostade’s paintings of the subject, especially the early ones. An example is a 1640 tronie in which the figure’s alcohol consumption has rendered him truly stupid – he is squinting and his tongue is lolling out of the side of his mouth.¹² Despite his crude facial features, the country bumpkin in the Rijksmuseum picture has nothing of this ‘boorish stupidity’ about him. The laughter brought on by his inebriation is almost infectious, inviting the viewer to take pleasure in the peasant’s merriment rather than laugh at his oafish demeanour.

Van Ostade’s peasant tronies may have served an educational function in his studio. Johan van Gool reports in his Nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en schilderessen that during his training Willem Doudyns ‘had painted half-length peasants by Van Ostade which he gave to his pupils to copy’.¹³ Another apprentice of Van Ostade, Cornelis Dusart, acquired the contents of his master’s workshop upon the latter’s death in 1685.¹⁴ As Hirschfelder has pointed out, almost half of the paintings by Van Ostade himself in the studio estate were tronies, which reinforces the hypothesis that they were used for instruction.¹⁵ A seventeenth-century copy after the present picture at auction in Vienna in 1993 also supports this supposition.¹⁶ The Merry Peasant would, in that event, have provided an example for learning how to render facial expressions, in this case laughter.

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. 188, no. 138; D. Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2008, pp. 186, 228, 419, no. 367; A. Ebert, Adriaen van Ostade und die komische Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2013, pp. 107, 148, 150

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 53, no. 229 (as Isack van Ostade); 1843, p. 45, no. 236 (as Isack van Ostade; ‘the oak visible’); 1853, p. 21, no. 207 (fl. 300); 1858, p. 104, no. 230 (as Isack van Ostade); 1880, p. 240, no. 264; 1887, p. 128, no. 1074; 1903, p. 202, no. 1816; 1934, p. 216, no. 1816; 1960, p. 234, no. 1816; 1976, p. 430, no. A 302

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, The Merry Peasant, c. 1646', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4904

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