Object data
oil on panel
support: height 38 cm × width 50 cm
outer size: depth 8 cm (support incl. frame)
Adriaen Brouwer (manner of)
c. 1700
oil on panel
support: height 38 cm × width 50 cm
outer size: depth 8 cm (support incl. frame)
…; ? anonymous sale [Armand-Fredéric-Ernest de Nogaret (1734-1806)], Paris (A.C. Chariot and J.-B.P. Lebrun), 2 June 1780 sqq., no. 15 (‘ADRIEN BRAUWER. L’Intérieur d’une Tabagie. On y voit un personnage principal vuidant un pot de bierre en présence de huit autres assis autour d’une table, qui ont les yeux fixés sur lui: dans le coin à droite, & auprès d’une cheminée, sont deux hommes & une femme, un troisième paroît dans le fond, debout sur le seuil d’une porte en arcade qui est ouverte […] Hauteur 13 pouces, Largeur 18 pouces [35.2 x 48.8 cm] B.’), frs. 999.19, to the dealer Alexandre-Joseph Paillet;1…; collection Maurice Kann (1839-1906), Paris, before 1908;2…; sale, Dr James Simon (1851-1932, Berlin), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25 October 1927, no. 7, as by Adriaen Brouwer, to Isaac de Bruijn (1872-1953) and his wife Johanna Geertruida van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Spiez and Muri, near Bern; by whom donated to the museum, with a life interest, December 1961; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2002-10
Object number: SK-A-4041
Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland
Copyright: Public domain
Adriaen Brouwer (Oudenaarde (?) 1603-05 - Antwerp 1638)
The genre and landscape painter, Adriaen Brouwer, or Adriaen de Brouwer, is best documented in the last eight years or so of his life which were spent in Antwerp. He was buried in the Carmelite monastery there on 1 February 1638. Isaac Bullart, in Peintres illustres du Pays Bas of 1682, states that he was thirty-two years old when he died; thus the year of his birth would be 1605 or 1606 (but see further below).3 His engraved portrait by Schelte Adamsz Bolswert (1584/1588-1659) after Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) for The Iconography, modelled probably in the early 1630s, shows the artist in his late twenties or so.4 Bullart also states that he was born in Oudenaarde which would substantiate references in the 1640s5 and in 16626 to his being a Fleming, a view corroborated by recent research. It has placed his date of birth between 1603 and 1605, and provides evidence that he moved with his family to Gouda after 1613.7
Brouwer is first heard of in Amsterdam in 1626 when he witnessed a notarial deposition; he may have been living in the house of the deponent, the art dealer Barend van Someren, who was to own drawings by the artist.8 The following year a play was dedicated to the ‘richly artistic and famous young man, Adriaen Brouwer, painter of Haarlem’ (Den Constrijcken en Wijtberoemden Ionghman, Adriaen Brouwer, Schilder tot Haerlem). Houbraken states that he was apprenticed to Frans Hals (c. 1581-1666) in Haarlem,9 for which there is no contemporary corroboration; but in fact he became a member also in 1626 of the Haarlem chamber of rhetoric, the Wijngaertrancken, and was to enrol in the city’s guild of St Luke. Paintings by him are confidently dated to around this time.
In the guild accounting year from September 1631 to September 1632, Brouwer was admitted to the Antwerp guild of St Luke.10 Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) attested on 4 March 1632 that he had bought a Peasant Dance from Brouwer about a year previously.11 His reputation as an artist may have thus preceded him, as also in that year Jan Baptist Dandoy (active 1631-38) was enrolled as a pupil of Brouwer,12 and his work was being copied as early as 1632.13
But by October 1632 he was in debt; an inventory of his possessions shows his exiguous circumstances.14 In February a year later, he is recorded as incarcerated in the Antwerp Kasteel in which he may have remained until the spring of the following year.15 In May 1634 he became a lodger with the engraver Paulus Pontius (1603-1658) in the Everdijstraat.16 In 1634/35, with Pontius, he joined the rederijkerkammer, De Blom Violiere, and renewed his membership the next year.17 No mortuary fee was paid to the guild, so he may have died impoverished or more likely without relatives in Antwerp.
Renger has estimated Brouwer’s extant oeuvre at some sixty paintings; none is dated.18 The rubric beneath his portrait in Van Dyck’s Iconography described him as ‘Gryllorum Pictor’ (painter of comic figures).19 His paintings were collected by both Rubens20 and Rembrandt van Rijn (1609-1669), who also owned drawings by him.21 A further measure of his contemporary reputation may be estimated by a comparison of prices paid for his work with those for other masters; thus Arnold Lunden (d. 1656) paid 400 guilders for a Village Fête as against the 1,000 guilders that Rubens’s masterpiece The Farm at Laeken had cost him.22 Campo Weyerman described Brouwer in his Levensbeschryvingen as the ‘Democritus of painters’ (Demokriet der Schilders) – Democrites being traditionally considered the ‘laughing philosopher’, laughing at human folly;23 anecdotes arising from his scepticism are relayed by his early biographers. Some at least may have had a basis of truth.
REFERENCES
F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, pp. 847ff; J.H.W. Unger, ‘Adriaan Brouwer te Haarlem’, Oud Holland 2 (1884), pp. 161-69; G. Knuttel, Adriaen Brouwer: The Master and his Work, The Hague 1962, pp. 9-27; Jager et al. in K. Lichtert (ed.), Adriaen Brouwer, Master of Emotions: Between Rubens and Rembrandt, published to accompany the exhibition held at the MOU-Museum van Oudenaarde en de Vlaamse Ardennen, 2018, pp. 37-44
The painting was published by Schmidt-Degener in 190824 as a work of Adriaen Brouwer and accepted by subsequent authorities25 – indeed Bode described it as a masterpiece.26 The attribution was first rightly questioned by Cleveringa in 196127 and was rejected by Knuttel in 1962.28 The 1976 museum catalogue described it as in Brouwer’s manner; indeed, it would appear to be an ambitious pastiche, perhaps executed circa 1700 (taking measurements of the single-member oak support for dendrochronological purposes was not possible).
That Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, the leading expert in Paris of his generation, accepted Brouwer’s authorship of the present painting (indeed in the Nogaret catalogue he guaranteed its authenticity)29 as did prominent twentieth-century connoisseurs, is a matter worthy of note in the history of expertise, as the work is remarkable for the expression of a sentimental view of ‘low-life’ in place of Brouwer’s uncompromising realism, see for instance SK-A-64 and SK-A-65.
Gregory Martin, 2022
J.L. Cleveringa, ‘Catalogus van de schilderijen’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 9 (1961), pp. 63-67, esp. p. 63, no. 4
1976, p. 153, no. A 4041
G. Martin, 2022, 'manner of Adriaen Brouwer, Drinking Bout in a Tavern, c. 1700', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6306
(accessed 14 November 2024 07:39:20).