Card Fight outside a Country Tavern

c. 1628 - c. 1630

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 26.1 cm × width 34.2 cm

Inscriptions

inscription, indistinct (remnant of a monogram), bottom right: B

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype / C. Wittop Koning, RMA, 25 September 2007
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 23 March 2010

Conservation

J.J. Susijn, 1982: paint consolidated

Provenance

…; sale, Thomas Count of Fraula (1646-1738, Brussels), Brussels (auction house not known), 21 July 1738 sqq., no. 208 (‘Een Ordonnantie vervult met figuren, daar men met de kaart Speelt, ende daar men de Degen trekt, door Adriaan Brouwer, h. 10 en een half d. br. 13 en een half d. [27.5 x 35.3 cm]’), fl. 37, to De Roore for Willem Lormier (1682-1758), The Hague;¹ his sale, The Hague (A. Franken), 4 July 1763, no. 39 (‘Vegtende Boeren en Boerinnen, door denzelven; P.P. breet an 1 voet 1 duim, hoog 10 duim [26.2 x 34.1 cm]’), fl. 60, to Adriaan Leonard van Heteren (1724-1800), The Hague;² his third cousin and godson, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren Gevers (1794-1866), Rotterdam, (‘Un pendant. [to SK-A-64] Plusieurs paysans buvant et de querellant, bois, h. 10 l. 12½ [26.2 x 32.7 cm]’);³ from whom, fl. 100,000, with 136 other paintings en bloc (known as the Kabinet van Heteren Gevers), to the museum, by decree of Lodewijk Napoleon King of Holland, and through the mediation of his father Dirk Cornelis Gevers (1763-1839), 8 June 1809;⁴ on loan to the Mauritshuis, The Hague, since 1954

Object number: SK-A-65

The artist

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).⁵ 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.⁶ Bullart also states that he was born in Oudenaarde which would substantiate references in the 1640s⁷ and in 1662⁸ 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 1613.⁹

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.¹⁰ 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,¹¹ 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.¹² Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) attested on 4 March 1632 that he had bought a Peasant Dance from Brouwer about a year previously.¹³ 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,¹⁴ and his work was being copied as early as 1632.¹⁵

But by October 1632 he was in debt; an inventory of his possessions shows his exiguous circumstances.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ In May 1634 he became a lodger with the engraver Paulus Pontius (1603-1658) in the Everdijstraat.¹⁸ In 1634/35, with Pontius, he joined the rederijkerkammer, De Blom Violiere, and renewed his membership the next year.¹⁹ 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.²⁰ The rubric beneath his portrait in Van Dyck’s Iconography described him as ‘Gryllorum Pictor’ (painter of comic figures).²¹ His paintings were collected by both Rubens²² and Rembrandt van Rijn (1609-1669), who also owned drawings by him.²³ 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.²⁴ 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;²⁵ 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

Entry

Irrespective of the status of the indistinct initial, there is no reason to doubt Adriaen Brouwer’s authorship of this painting, the authenticity of which has never been questioned. However, it should be pointed out that the two groups of figures, by the fallen tree trunk and round the wagon in the middle distance, are oddly out of scale with the dilapidated fence beneath the ruined tower and may not be autograph. In comparison the seated figure by the skittle pins also seems out of proportion.

The work is generally thought to have been painted while Brouwer was active in Haarlem between circa 1625 and 1630,²⁶ and usually placed early in this period. An indication is provided by the dendrochronological dating of the single-member support, which was from an oak tree from the Baltic/Polish area; the timber would have been ready for use at the earliest in 1622, plausibly from 1628. It would be reasonable to take the latter date as an approximate terminus post quem. The more tonal colouring would seem to support this dating. The integrated action of the two sets of fighting men anticipates Brouwer’s style in the 1630s. It would thus be earlier than his two other extant renderings of quarrels over cards, at Munich²⁷ and Dresden;²⁸ the former contains a figure copied by Pieter de Bloot (c. 1601/1602-1658) in 1633 and therefore was probably painted late in Brouwer’s sojourn in Haarlem.²⁹

Renger³⁰ has placed the present composition in the tradition of the print by Erhard Schön (c. 1491-1542) of the Four Properties of Wine.³¹ The effects of drunkenness, which fuels anger, is suggested by him as Brouwer’s subject, a view supported by Jacob Matham’s (1571-1631) prints of the Consequences of Drunkeness of circa 1621.³² The pigs entering the scene support this interpretation.³³

Pinpointing a closer visual precedent in Haarlem or the northern Netherlands in the first decades of the century has so far proved elusive. This may be an indication of Brouwer’s inventiveness; the tenuous similarity between the courtly guard drawing his sword against the oncoming swarm of death in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s (c. 1525-1569) Triumph of Death³⁴ and the man drawing his dagger may be fortuitous.

The church and old, fortified manor house have not been identified; they are probably not wholly imaginary, and their setting in hilly country could not have been inspired by the environs of Haarlem.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

G. Knuttel, Adriaen Brouwer: The Master and his Work, The Hague 1962, pp. 78, figs. 40-43, p. 190; Van Suchtelen in A. van Suchtelen et al., Genre Paintings in the Mauritshuis, coll. cat. The Hague 2016, no. 6

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 13, no. 56; 1843, p. 12, no. 52 (with no. 64); 1853, p. 7, no. 50 (valued at fl. 1,000); 1858, p. 191, no. 430 (unknown); 1880, p. 75, no. 59; 1887, p. 25, no. 204; 1903, p. 66, no. 641; 1934, p. 65, no. 642; 1976, p. 152, no. A 65

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'Adriaen Brouwer, Card Fight outside a Country Tavern, c. 1628 - c. 1630', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6661

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