Peasant Family Singing

Entry

Three adults and two children are in the kitchen of a peasant’s home, where a woman is chopping up herbs or vegetables. The seated man is playing a fiddle, one of the boys is singing, and the standing man with the beer tankard appears to be doing the same. There is a mass of household utensils around the group, and initially there were even more of them, for several were painted out by the artist.¹⁰ This smooth and detailed picture is inscribed ‘PVSlingerland Fecit’ on a cupboard in the centre of the composition, and for a long time it was thought to be an important work in the oeuvre of the Leiden genre painter Pieter van Slingelandt.¹¹ The incorrect spelling of his name (with an ‘r’ added in the middle) and the odd position of the signature did not arouse any suspicion for more than two centuries or perhaps even longer.

In 1978 Willem van de Watering attributed this Peasant Family Singing to the obscure Rotterdam master Pieter Duyfhuysen.¹² There are indeed striking parallels with a few other works by that artist, who produced peasant interiors with massed displays of household utensils in the tradition of Pieter de Bloot and Hendrick Sorgh.¹³ For instance, the female figure is almost identical to the one, accompanied by a young boy, in a signed kitchen piece by Duyfhuysen in Winterthur.¹⁴ The same model reappears in several other of his paintings, among them a kitchen scene with a woman scraping carrots, also with a child, signed and dated 1665.¹⁵

Technical examination carried out in 2011 seems to confirm Van de Watering’s attribution. Infrared reflectography combined with microscopic inspection demonstrated that an inscription was removed at the bottom left beneath the long strip of retouching on the floor. The length of it and the areas where the upper and lower loops of letters were scraped off make it very likely that this is where Duyfhuysen’s name was, who very often signed with his name in full.¹⁶ The painting must also have borne a date, the last digit of which, a ‘4’, is still visible. Given the marked resemblance to the 1665 kitchen scene mentioned above,¹⁷ this Peasant Family Singing could have been made in 1664.¹⁸

The fact that in the third quarter of the seventeenth century Duyfhuysen was still painting a type of peasant interior that had mainly been popular in the first half of the century indicates that he was not a very innovative artist.¹⁹ There is some slight development, though, for his late work is clearly more refined than that of his early period. His relative anonymity led to many of his pictures ultimately being preserved under other names. Prior to the middle of the eighteenth century the Rijksmuseum scene was attributed to the better-known and more fashionable Pieter van Slingelandt. Duyfhuysen’s signature must have been removed and replaced by Van Slingelandt’s by then, which makes it a strikingly early example of deliberate forgery.²⁰

The high regard it enjoyed at the time is clear from the fact that Johan Georg von Freese tried to buy it from Adriaan Leonard van Heteren for his patron, Wilhelm VIII, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel.²¹ However, the Dutchman did not want to part with it, so it stayed put until the Rijksmuseum acquired his collection more than 60 years later.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2025

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements