The Robbery

1616

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 36.7 cm × width 50.1 cm
depth 4.5 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower right: E. VANDEN / VELDE. 1616

Technical notes

The support is a horizontally grained oak plank and is bevelled on all edges except for the irregular top. Traces of paint on the top edge nevertheless indicate that this edge is original. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1600. The panel could have been ready for use by 1611, but a date in or after 1617 is more likely. A painted strip was added along the bottom edge at a later date, enlarging the painted surface by 1.1 cm. Losses reveal that the panel was primed with a thin off-white ground layer. Traces of underdrawing are visible. The buildings, which were reserved in the background, were made larger than was planned. The landscape and the houses were painted with broad brushstrokes, but the figures were painted in a smooth manner with carefully placed highlights. The figures were painted on top of the landscape, after the background had dried.

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 25 February 2002
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 29 November 2004

Condition

Fair. The figures are abraded. There is some paint loss near the signature and in the sky at upper left, and small losses along the edges and centre left. The very yellowed varnish layer is abraded in the sky.

Provenance

...; bequeathed to the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap by Mrs Mariane A. Domela Nieuwenhuis, née Meijer, Amsterdam, 1886; on loan to the museum from the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap since 1917

Object number: SK-C-1533

Credit line: On loan from the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap

The artist

Esaias van de Velde (Amsterdam 1587 - The Hague 1630)

Esaias van de Velde was born in Amsterdam in 1587 as the son of the painter and art dealer Hans van de Velde, who hailed from Antwerp. His teacher was probably Gillis van Coninxloo, although the name of David Vinckboons is also mentioned in the literature, both of whom, like the Van de Veldes emigrated from the southern Netherlands to Amsterdam. In 1609, he, his mother and sister went to live in Haarlem with his brother-in-law, the painter Jacob Martens. Cathelijn Martens, the woman Van de Velde married two years later, was Martens’s sister. In 1612, he, Hercules Segers and Willem Pietersz Buytewech joined the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem. He was also a member of the Wijngaardranken chamber of rhetoric in 1617-18. On 22 April 1618 he moved to The Hague and joined the painters’ guild there the same year. In 1620 he gained citizenship of The Hague. According to Houbraken, Van de Velde’s paintings were expensive and popular, which is confirmed by contemporary mentions of prices. One of his patrons was the stadholder, Prince Maurits. Several documents of January 1626 reveal that there was a problem relating to the payment of 200 guilders for a painting commissioned by the Stadholder’s Court. Van de Velde was buried in the St Jacobuskerk in The Hague on 18 November 1630.

Esaias van de Velde was a painter of landscapes, battle scenes and merry companies in the open air, as well as being a draughtsman and an etcher. His earliest dated paintings are winter landscapes and companies out of doors from 1614. His early landscapes have a colourful palette, but the later ones are more naturalistic. He must have been in great demand as a specialist in staffage. He painted the figures in works by Bartholomeus van Bassen (SK-A-864). Pieter de Molijn, François van Knibbergen and other artists. Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) and Pieter de Neyn (1597-1639) were taught by him in his Haarlem studio. Other pupils or followers included Jan Asselijn (after 1610-1652), Pieter van Laer (1599-in or after 1642) and Palamedes Palamedesz (1607-38).

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

References
Buchelius 1583-1639 (1928), pp. 50, 67; Orlers 1641, pp. 373, 374; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, p. 847; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 182; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 171, 173, 275, 303; Miedema 1980, II, p. 1036; Briels 1984, pp. 20-26; Briels 1997, p. 392; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 250-54; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 314-15

Entry

Two riders are being attacked by four men outside a farmhouse. One of the horsemen is trying to beat off his attackers, while the other one lies lifeless on the ground as his horse gallops off into the distance. If one looks closely at the figures one immediately understands why Van de Velde was so much in demand for painting the figures in works by other artists. Here they have been depicted swiftly and convincingly, and the horse seen from the back on the right is a virtuoso piece of work.

Van de Velde painted many scenes of robbery and plundering like this one, most of them in the 1620s.¹ The Rijksmuseum’s painting is one of the few from his Haarlem period. There is a precedent in his river landscape dated 1615 in which a village is being sacked,² but the present work is the first in which a violent subject is depicted so prominently.³ Van de Velde used a similar composition with buildings on the left for his Village Being Looted at Night in Copenhagen, which is dated 1620.⁴

Van de Velde was one of the earliest practitioners of this genre in the northern Netherlands.⁵ The source of inspiration usually cited is the work of the Antwerp painter Sebastiaen Vrancx, in which the landscape plays quite an important part, as it does with Van de Velde.⁶ Another artist who may have served as an example is David Vinckboons, who worked in Amsterdam.⁷

The subject must have appealed to the imagination of Van de Velde’s contemporaries, for freebooters (regular soldiers who had deserted or been dismissed from service, and adventurers) had terrorized the country for decades, attacking people and looting.⁸ Van de Velde painted The Robbery during the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-21), which was a period of relative peace and quiet.⁹ The ruined state of the farmhouse in the foreground can nevertheless be seen as a reference to the war with Spain.

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. 286.

Literature

Keyes 1984, pp. 104-05, 131, no. 44; Van Maarseveen 1998b, p. 143; Van Maarseveen in Delft 1998, pp. 317-18, with earlier literature

Collection catalogues

1934, p. 289, no. 2450a; 1960, p. 314, no. 2452 A 1; 1976, p. 558, no. C 1533; 2007, no. 286

Citation

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Esaias van de Velde, The Robbery, 1616', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6359

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