Object data
oil on panel
support: height 54.2 cm × width 68.4 cm
outer size: depth 6.7 cm (support incl. frame)
Pieter Codde
Cavaliers and Ladies
1633
Inscriptions
- signature, in ligated monogram, on a mirror on the table: PC
- date, above the door: 1633
Technical notes
The support is comprised of two horizontally grained oak planks and is bevelled on all sides, only slightly along the right edge. The panel has been thinned and cradled. The off-white ground layer and the paint layers were applied thinly, smoothly and transparently, allowing the colour of the wooden support to show through. Brushmarks are visible, and there is some impasto in the highlights.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 23 March 2003
Literature scientific examination and reports
Kolfin 2005, pp. 122-23
Condition
Good. There is a disturbing area in the hair of the seated woman in the centre, either due to an earlier restoration or to the increased transparency of the paint layer.
Provenance
...; collection Van Essen, Vik, Sweden;1...; collection Carl U. Palm, Djursholm, 1911;2...; collection William Gibson, Jonsered, Sweden;3...; sale, the Albright Leasing Corporation et al. [anonymous section], London (Christie’s), 30 November 1973, no. 94;...; collection Mr L.G. Holtom, Harbledown (Canterbury);4 from whom on loan to the Rijksmuseum, through the mediation of the dealer Richard Green, London, 1974-86; from whom, £ 150,000, to the museum, through the mediation of the dealer Richard Green, London, with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Rijksmuseum-Stichting, 1986
Object number: SK-A-4844
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Rijksmuseum-Stichting
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Pieter Codde (Amsterdam 1599 - Amsterdam 1678)
Pieter Jacobsz Codde was baptized in Amsterdam on 11 December 1599. His father was an assistant to the collector of beaconage, a form of harbour dues. It has been speculated that he studied with Frans Hals, Cornelis van der Voort or Barend van Someren. Codde is first recorded as a painter in the 27 October 1623 registration of his marriage to Marritje Aerents. He also moved in literary circles. Elias Herckmans dedicated his tragedy Tyrus to him in 1627, and a pastoral love poem written by Codde was published in Hollands Nachtegaelken in 1633.
Codde was involved in several unpleasant affairs. In 1625 he attacked the genre painter Willem Cornelisz Duyster during a quarrel in a place called Meerhuysen. In 1636, he was accused of raping his 22-year-old servant, for which he and the servant were locked up in Amsterdam Town Hall. In the same year he separated from his wife, which led to his inventory being drawn upon 5 February 1636.
In 1637, Codde was commissioned to complete the large civic guard painting, the so-called Meagre Company (SK-C-374), begun four years earlier but left unfinished by Frans Hals. Codde was one of the artists consulted by the art dealer Gerrit Uylenburgh in 1672 to value a group of Italian paintings. He made his will on 8 October 1669, and died nine years later. He was buried in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam on 12 October 1678.
Codde painted merry companies related in style to those by Anthonie Palamedesz. In addition to his genre scenes, Codde painted small-scale portraits in the manner of Thomas de Keyser, and history pieces. His earliest known dated work is A Seated Woman Holding a Mirror of 1625.5 There are few dated works after 1645. A painter named Albert Jansz is recorded as his pupil.
Gerdien Wuestman, 2007
References
Dozy 1884; Bredius 1888a; Playter 1972, pp. 14-25; Van Eeghen 1974; Beaujean in Saur XX, 1998, pp. 95-97
Entry
In the 1620s, Codde began specializing in merry companies in the tradition of Haarlem artists like Dirck Hals.6 He invariably placed his figures in interior settings which, mainly in the 1630s, often have Renaissance-style wainscoting and door-frames.7
The well-preserved painting in the Rijksmuseum, which is rightly considered to be a highlight in Codde’s oeuvre, is a typical work from the first half of the 1630s. Among its noteworthy stylistic features are the superb rendering of textures, the smooth brushwork and the cool silver greys and browns. As he so often did, Codde tucked his monogram away on an object on a table, in this case a mirror, and he put the date 1633 on the pediment over the door.8 Stylistically, this work is perhaps closest to Codde’s painting of the same year in Vienna.9
The figures in his merry companies of the 1630s are usually amusing themselves by making music, dancing and conversing. Sometimes they display fairly explicit sexual behaviour, as in the signed painting of 1632 in Winterthur.10 The Rijksmuseum painting, which at first sight appears to be an innocent scene of two hunters returning with the game they have killed, also has a double meaning. De Jongh has argued persuasively that the two elegantly clad gentlemen ostentatiously holding up a dead hare and two dead partridges have erotic intentions.11 ‘Hunting the hare’ and ‘birding’ were 17th-century synonyms for making love. The insistent presence of the bed with the opened hangings points in the same direction. The three courtesans with their costly attire in the left half of the composition, the embroidered cloth on the table,12 jewellery, mirror and knick-knacks may be intended to underline the futility of people indulging in earthly pleasures.13
Gerdien Wuestman, 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. 47.
Literature
De Jongh 1968, pp. 41-43; Torresan 1975, pp. 14-15; Van Thiel 1989
Collection catalogues
1976, p. 170, no. C 1578 (as dated 1635); 1992, p. 47, no. A 4844; 2007, no. 47
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Pieter Codde, Cavaliers and Ladies, 1633', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8152
(accessed 29 March 2025 07:20:31).Footnotes
- 1 Granberg I, 1911, p. 110, no. 485.
- 2 Granberg I, 1911, p. 110, no. 485.
- 3 Stockholm 1967, p. 40.
- 4 Note RMA.
- 5 London, The National Gallery; illustrated in coll. cat. London 1991, II, pl. 70.
- 6 Kolfin 2005, p. 110.
- 7 Several are illustrated in Philadelphia etc. 1984, pp. 176-79.
- 8 An earlier, incorrect reading of 1635, published in coll. cat. 1976, p. 170, continues to do the rounds, despite being corrected in coll. cat. 1992.
- 9 Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste. Trnek in coll. cat. Vienna 1992, p. 99, noted that the artist used the same model there as the one for the standing woman in the Amsterdam painting, but many of the faces of Codde’s women appear to be variants of the same type.
- 10 Rathaus, Stiftung Jacob Biner; illustrated in Oberlin etc. 1989, p. 53.
- 11 De Jongh 1968, pp. 41-43; see also Amsterdam 1976, pp. 77-79, no. 23.
- 12 On the cloth see Mulder-Erkelens 1975; Wardle 2003, p. 344.
- 13 De Jongh 1995, p. 57; for the gesture that the seated woman is making see De Jongh 1975, p. 78, note 42.