A Man Dancing with a Dog

c. 1655 - c. 1665

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 26.5 cm × width 22.3 cm × thickness 1.4 cm
outer size: depth 6 cm (support incl. frame)

Technical notes

Support The single, horizontally grained, vertical oak plank is approx. 1 cm thick. The top, bottom and right edges have been trimmed. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1637. The panel could have been ready for use by 1648, but a date in or after 1654 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The smooth double ground does not extend over the edges of the support. The first, semi-opaque, off-white layer primarily fills the grain of the wood. The second, opaque, creamy white ground consists of large white and small brown, orange and black pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint does not extend over the edges of the support. The background was applied first in a thin, semi-opaque, mid-brown layer, consisting of small brown, orange, red, yellow and black pigment particles. After drying the man and dog were added wet in wet with fluid, thin, opaque paint and thicker red glazes and black scumbles to deepen the shadows. The highlights were created with strokes of slightly impasted white paint, adding to the modelling of these elements (the hair of the dog’s coat, for instance). The paint layers were sketchily but smoothly applied and brushstrokes are visible throughout.
Emma Boyce, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 February 2010
paint samples: E. Boyce, RMA, nos. SK-A-3500/1-2, 21 July 2010
technical report: E. Boyce, RMA, 22 July 2010

Condition

Fair. The paint layers are severely abraded, especially in the dark background, the right side of which has been entirely overpainted with a green-brown scumble. Horizontal dark cracks are apparent along the grain of the wood in the ground and paint layers, or are concealed by darkened retouchings. Throughout there are small losses of ground and paint as well as retouched areas.

Provenance

…; collection Dominicus Antonius Josephus Kessler (1855-1939) and Mrs A.C.M.H. Kessler-Hülsmann (1868-1947), Kapelle op den Bosch, near Mechelen;¹ donated by Mrs A.C.M.H. Kessler-Hülsmann, to the museum, as François Verwilt, with 17 other paintings, 1941, but kept in usufruct;² transferred to the museum, with 17 other paintings, 1947

Object number: SK-A-3500

Credit line: A.C.M.H. Kessler-Hülsmann Bequest, Kapelle op den Bosch

The artist

Hendrick Bogaert (? Amsterdam c. 1626 - Amsterdam in or after 1673)

Hendrick Bogaert is first documented on 27 October 1650, when he made a sworn statement to an Amsterdam notary on behalf of an innkeeper. He was 24 years old at the time, and since he said that he became betrothed to Marritje Centen at the age of 30 on 10 January 1657 it can be assumed that he was born in or around 1626. Nothing is known about his father apart from the fact that they shared the same forename. The artist’s place of birth was probably Amsterdam.

It is not recorded when nor with whom Bogaert trained. He left a small oeuvre, very little of which is signed. Genre subjects seem to predominate. His earliest works bearing a date are from the 1640s, a 1649 still life in a barn having the most reliable one.³ Bogaert later took up portraiture as well, and produced his last likeness with the year of execution in 1672, depicting a group in an interior.⁴

On 24 April 1657 it was stated that Bogaert had brought a black cloak to the loan office but that the people to whom he had given the proof of ownership had sold the garment in the meantime. The artist, in other words, had money worries. This could have been due to his addiction to drink, which is mentioned by Houbraken. Bogaert is said to have died in hospital in Amsterdam, although it is not know when. He was still alive when his wife Marritje Centen was buried in the Leidsekerkhof in 1673. Houbraken reports that Joseph Mulder was a pupil of Bogaert’s in 1672.

Richard Harmanni, 2022

References
A.D. de Vries, ‘Biografische aanteekeningen betreffende voornamelijk Amsterdamsche schilders, plaatsnijders, enz. en hunne verwanten’, Oud Holland 3 (1885), pp. 55-80, 135-60, 223-40, 303-12, esp. p. 67; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, I,
Leipzig/Vienna 1906, p. 125; Moes in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, IV, Leipzig 1910, p. 215; Grabach in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XII, Munich/Leipzig 1996, p. 229; A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, p. 41; Bredius notes, RKD

Entry

This unsigned small panel was attributed to François Verwilt when it entered the Rijksmuseum in 1947. Although that artist’s oeuvre comprises genre scenes, this man dancing with a dog differs so much in brushwork and modelling from his other work that the assessment is no longer tenable. The subject suggests that it is more likely to be by Hendrick Bogaert.⁵

Bogaert regularly produced interiors of inns with peasants making music, often with violins, and dancing. Leaving aside two such horizontal pictures with a person dancing,⁶ a small vertical panel that was auctioned in London in 1994 provides a reasonable point of comparison with the one in the Rijksmuseum.⁷ Bogaert’s scenes usually contain numerous figures, but in that simpler painting there are just three men around a hearth, one of them playing a violin, another dancing. The latter is as wooden as the one here. Bogaert depicted similar bearded men quite often, as in the two aforementioned horizontal pieces and in Inn with Brawling Peasants.⁸ The Amsterdam work is far more restrained than the panel sold in 1994. The difference can be explained by the worn condition of the paint. The dark passage in the right background proves to be a later intervention.

As Bogaert’s pictures eventually became more fluently done – a case in point being a 1672 group portrait⁹ – and the brushstrokes in the Rijksmuseum painting are still clearly visible, it seems plausible that Man Dancing with a Dog is from the middle years of Bogaert’s career, that is to say 1655-65, which fits in neatly with the dendrochronological results.¹⁰

Richard Harmanni, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Collection catalogues

1976, p. 577, no. A 3500 (as François Verwilt)

Citation

Richard Harmanni, 2022, 'Hendrick Bogaert, A Man Dancing with a Dog, c. 1655 - c. 1665', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6444

(accessed 12 November 2024 20:56:08).