Object data
oil on panel
support: height 98.5 cm × width 187.8 cm
sight size: height 97 cm × width 186.7 cm
frame: height 121.1 cm × width 211 cm
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne
1614
oil on panel
support: height 98.5 cm × width 187.8 cm
sight size: height 97 cm × width 186.7 cm
frame: height 121.1 cm × width 211 cm
The oak support consists of four planks with a horizontal grain and is bevelled on all sides, the top only slightly. The ground layer, visible at the unpainted edges, has a light-grey tone and was applied with broad brushstrokes that are visible through the paint layers. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1598. The panel could have been ready for use by 1609, but a date in or after 1615 is more likely. Two of the planks were cut from the same tree. Infrared reflectography reveals some general underdrawing lines, particularly in the heads of the figures on the left and right banks. It also reveals changes during the painting process, such as the positions of hands and heads. The figures in the net of the Catholic boat were painted later in the rapid and sketchy manner, characteristic of Van de Venne’s style in the 1640s or 50s. These additions were executed in such a remarkably transparent way that the objects originally painted in the net are still visible. The two children and the old man with a beard near the Protestant boat also seem to have been painted later. Several pentimenti are present, for example in the figures in the water in the foreground. There is a difference in execution between the carefully elaborated heads of the figures on the left bank and the more crudely executed ones on the right bank.
Good.
...; collection Joan Fox and Johanna Tiers, Amsterdam, 22 March 1689 (‘De geestelijk visscherije Vander Ven’);1...; sale, Marinus de Jeude, The Hague, 18 April 1735, no. 91, as Jan Bruegel the Elder (‘Een kapitael Stuk, zeer uytvoerig en vol werk, verbeeldende een Rivier vol Schuytjes, waar in veel Geleerde Mannen Visschen, terwyl andere op de Wal staen, zynde aen de eene zyde de Gereformeerde, waer onder zig de Famielje van den Prins van Orange en de opwassende Spruyt bevind, Visschende met de Wet en het Evangelium, en aen de andere zyde Roomschgesinde Visschende met hunnen Ceremonien en Kerkgebruyken, zeer talryk van Volk, en alles geschilderd door den Fluweelen Breugel’), fl. 760,2 possibly to Prince Willem IV;3...; estate inventory Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn, 1757-63 (‘Een fraay stuk van alderhande religie in de manier van Bruegel, hoog 3v 5d, breet 6v 6d [98 x 185 cm]’);4...; first recorded in the museum in January 18005
Object number: SK-A-447
Copyright: Public domain
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (Delft c. 1589 - The Hague 1662)
According to Cornelis de Bie, Adriaen van de Venne was born into a southern Netherlandish immigrant family in Delft in 1589. De Bie also states that he was taught drawing and illumination by the Leiden goldsmith and painter Simon de Valck, and was then apprenticed to the grisaille painter Jeronymus van Diest, both of whom are now otherwise unknown.
Van de Venne is first documented in 1614 in Middelburg, where he remained until around 1625. It was in 1614 that he married the daughter of a Zeeland sea captain, Elisabeth de Pours. Dating from that same year are his earliest known paintings, Fishing for Souls (shown here) and two summer and winter pendants.6 On the evidence of an affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, it has been assumed that he spent some time in Antwerp before 1614. However, the local Middelburg painters were already working in Brueghel’s style at that time. The fact that he married a woman of Zeeland, and that his father and his brother Jan had settled in the town in 1605 and 1608 respectively, make it likely that he was in Middelburg before 1614. In 1618, his brother Jan opened a shop selling paintings and set up a publishing business, in which Adriaen played an important role as a print designer, poet, and illustrator of books by Jacob Cats, among other authors. Starting in 1618 he also designed several propaganda prints supporting the House of Orange and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Van de Venne is last documented in Middelburg on 30 June 1624. He then moved to The Hague, where he is recorded as a resident on 22 March 1625. His departure from Middelburg roughly coincided with the death of his brother Jan, and his decision to settle in The Hague probably had something to do with the presence of the court there, which played an important part in the subjects he chose. Among his earliest works in The Hague were the prints and paintings of Prince Maurits Lying in State (SK-A-446), several impressions of which were ordered by the States-General on 21 July 1625.7 He enrolled in the Guild of St Luke in 1625, and a year later acquired his Hague citizenship. He retained his house in Middelburg, and in 1630 bought another one in The Hague, from which he sold his prints and books. He was warden of the guild from 1631 to 1633 and from 1637 to 1639, and filled the post of dean from 1639 to 1641. He was also a member of the Ionghe Batavieren (Young Batavians) chamber of rhetoric. His fame was such that he was included in Johannes Meyssens’s book, Image de divers hommes desprit sublime, where it is stated that the Prince of Orange owned several works by him. In 1656, Van de Venne was also involved in setting up a new confraternity, the Confrerie Pictura, which broke away from the Guild of St Luke. At the end of his life he ran into financial difficulties. He made his will in 1660 after falling ill, and died on 12 November 1662. Two of his sons, Pieter (c. 1615-57) and Huijbregt (1634/35-after 1682), were also painters.
Van de Venne’s painted oeuvre can be divided into his Middelburg and Hague periods. In Middelburg he produced some of his most ambitious, meticulously painted works with politico-allegorical subjects, as well as many landscape scenes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder. In The Hague he concentrated almost exclusively on grisailles for the open market, most of them genre pieces with a comical, moralistic slant with inscribed banderoles, but he also made religious, allegorical works and a few large-scale equestrian portraits of rulers. He abandoned the meticulous style of his Middelburg period for a freer, sometimes even sketchy technique, which enabled him to boost his output to ‘hundreds of monochrome pieces, both known and desired by devotees of art’, as J. Campo Weyerman put it.
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
References
Meyssens 1649; De Bie 1661, pp. 234-46; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, pp. 857-58; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 136-37; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 340-41; Franken 1878, pp. 7-30; Obreen II, 1879-80, pp. 108-09, III, 1880-81, pp. 258, 272, 275, IV, 1881-82, pp. 59, 128, 148, V, 1882-83, pp, 68-69, 71-74, 96, 102, 133, 153, VI, 1884-87, pp. 52, 226; Bredius II, 1916, pp. 374-93, VII, 1921, pp. 240-45; Bol 1958; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 37-74; Bol 1989; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, p. 321; Briels 1997, pp. 394-95; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 255-62, 354
One of Adriaen van de Venne’s earliest dated and at the same time most ambitious and celebrated paintings, Fishing for Souls was described during his lifetime by Cornelis de Bie as ‘a depiction of the spiritual fishery of human souls, replete with detail’.8
The lack of a signature, and the stylistic affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, led to the painting being sold as a Brueghel in 1735.9 From the beginning of the 19th century the figures were ascribed to Hendrik van Balen,10 until Thoré-Bürger attributed them to Van de Venne and saw Brueghel’s hand solely in the landscape details.11 Franken rightly regarded the entire painting as the work of Van de Venne, a view that has never been questioned since,12 not only because De Bie called it Van de Venne’s ‘master piece’ in 1661, but also because the meticulous style of painting is entirely consistent with the artist’s other early work. In addition, Van de Venne added his self-portrait prominently in the left foreground, perhaps as an alternative signature.
Fishing for Souls is an allegory of the contemporary struggle between the Reformed and Catholic Churches in the form of a literal illustration of Christ’s words: ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men’.13 There are references to these Bible passages in the open book on the left in the leading boat. This combination of word and image is unique in Van de Venne’s polychrome paintings from his Middelburg period, and he would only employ it again in his grisailles after 1625, albeit in a very different context.14 On the water, Reformed fishermen on the left vie with the Catholics on the right to harvest the most souls. The inscriptions state that the Reformed fishermen catch their souls with faith, hope and charity, the Ten Commandments and the true gospel. They are guided by God himself, as indicated by the words ‘IEHOVAE IVDICIVM’ on the tiller of the boat. The Catholics, led by the pope,15 lure the souls with music and incense.16 Initially they did so in vain, because they had caught not a single one in the original version of the painting. The figures in their net may have been added later by Van de Venne himself in his characteristic rapid, sketchy style of the 1640s or 1650s, toning down the hostility towards the Catholics,17 possibly because of the altered times or a change of owner. The sympathy for the Reformed Church in Fishing for Souls is evident not only from the fact that they have the biggest catch, but also that all of their fishermen are portraits, while their Catholic counterparts are depicted as caricatures without individualized features.
There are great crowds of people on both banks, dozens of them portraits. Most of those at the front are dignitaries, while in the middleground are the political leaders on each side. Although attempts have been made to identify the portraits, most of them are speculative.18 In the foreground groups, Adriaen van de Venne can be picked out on the Reformed side and Father Johannes Neyen on the Catholic, while the sumptuously clad court dwarf may be Theodore Rodenburgh, of whom calumny had it that he had converted to Catholicism. The Middelburg preacher Willem Teelinck appears in the guise of a fisherman in the leading boat.19 In the middleground, Prince Maurits is recognizable on the left, in exactly the same pose as in Van de Venne’s Allegory of the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1616.20 Other leading figures of the day include Frederik Hendrik, Frederick V with Elizabeth Stuart, her father James I, and the Danish king, Christian IV. Recognizable on the Catholic side are Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella, with their commander-in-chief Ambrogio Spinola. The important part played by Maurits in the Reformed camp is underlined by the small orange-tree with his motto. The inscription ‘Psalm I’ on the tree on the bank undoubtedly refers to his righteous authority or to the justice of the Reformed cause.21 That psalm deals with ‘the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly. (...) And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, (...) his leaf also shall not wither’. Whereas the tree on the Reformed side is in full leaf, the one by the Catholics is bare. Although the old woman by the withered tree with the words ‘VERVS CATOLICA’ written on her skirt is sometimes seen as an allusion to the sectarian Rosicrucians,22 she could also symbolize the Catholic Church as an old, ramshackle institution. That concept is also represented by the sunken church in the net of the fishermen in the last Catholic boat.
The contrast between the righteous and the ungodly in Psalm 1, and the reference to the Last Judgement (‘Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment’), may explain the archaic composition of Fishing for Souls, which recalls traditional scenes of the Last Judgement, in which the saved souls are on the left and the damned on the right.23 The symbolic landscape elements like the green tree on the left and the withered one on the right, the bright blue sky on the left and the menacing clouds on the right, and the overarching rainbow are also allusions to early Last Judgement scenes.24 Van de Venne followed those examples by placing the Reformed camp on the preferential side. The rainbow might also be a reference to Genesis 9:16, where it stands for the covenant between God and all living creatures,25 or it can be regarded as a general symbol of peace. If the latter is the case, Fishing for Souls would mirror the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-21) in proclaiming a politics of peace.
Although the date 1614 on the open book in the leading boat is an unusual way of dating, the meticulous style is fully in accord with that of Van de Venne’s earliest works. There are also one or two compositional peculiarities that reveal that this was a young painter at work. Knuttel, for example, drew attention to the inconsistent perspective, with that of the group portraits in the foreground being viewed from a higher viewpoint than those in the middleground.26 Finally, the date is not contradicted by the panel’s dendrochronology, which gives an earliest possible date of 1609.
The unusual manner of dating this painting has persuaded some authors to see it as a reference to a topical political event, such as the ‘Resolution for the peace of the church’ adopted by the States of Holland in 1614, which could explain the harmony reigning within the Reformed group in the painting.27 The renewed threat of war in that year has also been proposed.28 These hypotheses will have been prompted in part by the polemical nature of the painting, analogous to contemporary pamphlets in which the subject of fishing for souls is also found.29 In the painting itself, though, there are no specific references to these events, so for the time being the painting must be regarded as an intellectual satire from the Protestant standpoint during the Twelve Years’ Truce.
It has been suggested that the young Van de Venne painted Fishing for Souls in order to show off his talents to potential patrons.30 The fact that De Bie called this a ‘proefstuck’, a word normally applied to a work submitted to the guild in order to be recognized as a master-painter, supposedly supports this.31 However, a close reading reveals that De Bie used the word ‘proefstuck’ in the sense of evidence ‘of his great intellect’, and as a second example he cites a work ‘painted in black and white’.32 Moreover, the political tenor of Fishing for Souls would not have made it the most suitable calling card in his oeuvre, since it could have cost him potential Catholic patrons in the southern Netherlands. Fishing for Souls is, however, Van de Venne’s most ambitious painting, in which he not only managed to combine portraits, landscape and genre in a convincing way, but also demonstrated his virtuosity with artifices like the trompe l’oeil fly in the water on the left.33 Reference should be made in this context to the two prominent male figures in the foreground with their hands joined in prayer. Their central position, individualized features, and striking yellow and red cloaks suggest that they might be the patrons.34
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 290.
De Bie 1661, p. 234; Thoré-Bürger I, 1858-60, p. 61, note 1 (as Van de Venne and Jan Brueghel); Franken 1878, pp. 34-35, no. 3; Knuttel 1917, pp. 13-56; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 42-48; Bol 1989, pp. 34-41; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 536-37, no. 210
1801, p. 48, no. 31 (as Hendrik van Balen and Jan Brueghel); 1809, p. 5, no. 13 (as Hendrik van Balen and Jan Brueghel); 1843, p. 6, no. 13 (as Hendrik van Balen and Jan Brueghel; ‘panel separated into three pieces and glued’); 1858, p. 151, no. 338 (as Van de Venne and Jan Brueghel); 1880, pp. 319-21, no. 374; 1887, p. 177, no. 1521; 1903, p. 277, no. 2486; 1934, p. 294, no. 2486;1960, p. 321, no. 2486; 1976, p. 565, no. A 447; 2007, no. 290
Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Fishing for Souls: Allegory of the Jealousy between the Various Religious Denominations during the Twelve Years’ Truce between the Dutch Republic and Spain, 1614', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6813
(accessed 8 November 2024 21:59:34).