A Ferry Departs as St Peter Finds a Coin in the Mouth of a Fish

Entry

The wax-resin lined support of this painting is made up of seven pieces of canvas.⁵ The two inner, horizontally aligned pieces measure (from the left): approx. 61.9 x 49.1-55.8 cm and approx. 61.9-60.9 x 121.5 cm; at the top are two horizontally aligned pieces (from the left): approx. 33 x 22.1-23.5 and 33-34.1 x 150.1 cm; at the bottom are two pieces, similarly aligned (from the left): approx. 22.5 x 49 cm and 22.5-22.6 x 121.2 cm. At the left is a vertically placed piece: approx. 117.4 x 26.3 cm. There are remains of the tacking edge used as a turnover canvas at the top, left and bottom, and at the right the tacking edge is thus used. Cusping is evident in the canvas weave along the bottom. The grounds of the two inner pieces of the support are similar, first a layer of chalk and then one of lead white with black charcoal. On the two top pieces of canvas the ground is of chalk. The ground is a beige colour on the bottom two portions of canvas, while that on the vertical strip of canvas at the left is grey in colour. The figures are mostly painted with reserves, but notably not the youth or horse in the bows of the boat.

There are pentiments in the peasant travellers: the right arm of the milkmaid leaning forward to hand down the churn has been lowered, a cow beneath and slightly to the left of the churn, seen nearly full on, has been suppressed by the youth’s costume and right leg. The cow whose head is in profile has also been added as an afterthought. Very likely, too, is that the boat itself has been extended with the grey (horse) and that the pointing youth was not part of the original composition but later introduced. The rigging and the bay (horse) were painted at the end of the campaign, though the last touches may have been to the curls of the hair of the sailor, who pushes on the punt pole.

On the right-hand side of this scene showing a heavily laden ferry getting under way is depicted the discovery by St Peter of the ‘piece of money’ – which was to serve as the temple tribute money – in the mouth of a fish as predicted by Christ in Matthew 17:24-26.

Why Jacques Jordaens should have combined these two events remains obscure. Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575) had established a tradition in Antwerp of depicting genre scenes in which an apparently unrelated New Testament subject was introduced as a subsidiary event.⁶ A key element in Matthew’s account required a stretch of water as the fish was found at the seashore near Capernaum; so suggestive for Jordaens may have been the obvious fact that a ferry boat was a common sight on the waterways round Antwerp. In the museum painting – as with Aertsen – the peasant travellers are oblivious of the miracle enacted life-size beside them. However, some of the townsfolk above watch with interest, thus Jordaens had sought to give the Biblical event a contemporary topicality, as had, notably, Pieter Brueghel I (c. 1525-1569) on several occasions, for instance in the Vienna Procession to Calvary of 1564 or the Budapest Preaching of St John the Baptist of two years later.⁷ Indeed the concept of temple tribute money had an immediate relevance in Antwerp because in 1611 the aldermen had prescribed that money be collected at celebrations of the Mass for the restoration of the city’s churches.⁸

From the formal point of view Jordaens’s point of departure for the configuration of the miracle would most likely have been the left-hand wing of Peter Paul Rubens’s triptych of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe-over-de-Dijlekerk, Mechelen, executed in 1618-19.⁹ Ferry boats at country landing stages were quite commonly a subject rendered on a small scale by Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625) for the bigger treatment here, Jordaens brought all his inventive originality to bear.

The make-up of the composite, canvas support of the Rijksmuseum painting is of six horizontally aligned pieces, with a seventh joined vertically at the left (there are four different grounds with that on the vertically aligned canvas the outlier).¹⁰ The present picture is closely related to a far larger work, the great masterpiece by Jordaens in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv. no. KMS 3198). Both were the result of a complex painting process and of the two, the latter had a much more complicated evolution.¹¹ It is now generally agreed that the Rijksmuseum picture is a derivation amplified by the inclusion of the spectators on the quay and the view of the estuary and distant shore. Unlike the Copenhagen picture, the Rijksmuseum work is signed in an abbreviated form that Jordaens sometimes used on the relatively few occasions when he signed his work.¹² The letters are not written with the sureness of touch that might be expected, but they were not questioned during the recent cleaning¹³ and so the signature is here accepted with some qualification. This does not mean that the work is to be considered autograph as Jordaens had a seemingly relaxed attitude regarding authenticity as his testimony in the dispute of 1648 with Martinus van Langenhoven makes clear.¹⁴ In fact the present picture has always been accepted as autograph, although since Held’s observations published in 1933¹⁵ both the make-up of the support (as far as Held could determine it) and the detected differences in handling have led to suggestions that it was not the result of a single painting campaign. Indeed, following Held’s proposal, it has been assumed that it resulted from two distinct campaigns at the easel separated by a number of years,¹⁶ a not unique occurrence in Jordaens’s career¹⁷ (or Rubens’s for that matter).¹⁸ The first campaign may have been of a lengthy duration.

Verhave, responsible for the recent conservation treatment, has proposed that the main part of the composition was executed on the two central pieces of canvas.¹⁹ It is also possible, as she concedes, that the original support consisted of these two pieces plus the two below. Certainly added later are the two top pieces, on which were introduced the upper tier of the jetty, the quay with its buildings and onlookers. Probably already present on the inner core was the dark-haired apostle and his companion at the rear of the lower tier of the jetty, even if they were introduced later than the other protagonists, and adjusted when the additional canvases were added at top and bottom during the first campaign.

The recent cleaning has confirmed the contrasts in handling. The townsfolk on the upper tier of the jetty and the two apostles at the rear on the lower platform are fluently rendered and are most likely the work of Jordaens himself circa 1650.²⁰ Also by him may well be the youth in the bow of the boat and the right arm of the milkmaid embarking at the stern. Less worthy of an attribution to Jordaens himself are the onlookers on the stone quay, and the buildings beyond, and both the horses (granted the one by the tower being an out of proportion, ghost-like afterthought).²¹

Also less certainly by Jordaens are the horse and two cows in the boat; all the other figures there, St Peter and his two immediate companions on the lower platform of the wooden jetty and the sail and rigging cannot be his work as the brushwork is insufficiently vigorous. The estuary, distant view, water as far as the surf beneath St Peter and the feeble leeboard may be by yet another hand.²² Very probably Jordaens worked from right to left in the Copenhagen painting circa 1621-23²³ and the derivation in its early stages followed the prototype as work progressed towards the bow. This is established by the presence of both the youth reaching up for the churn and the cowherd resting on his charge as this latter was introduced in the Copenhagen painting in order to supplant the former motif (because of this the ferry in the Amsterdam picture is longer abaft).

Not all of Jordaens’s pupils were recorded in the registers of the guild during his career, but listed were probably the first, Charles du Val, in 1620/21, and second, Pierre du Moulyn, in 1621/22.²⁴ Both could be candidates for making the copy of the Copenhagen picture while it was being executed.

The two nearly naked sailors, the crying child, the bearded man and two hatted youths immediately astern of the mast are repetitions, other motifs abaft the mast in the Amsterdam picture record those which were suppressed in the larger work: the milkmaid handing the churn to the youth as she embarks (not fully understood in the Amsterdam picture as she is not shown holding the handle of the churn), the sheep before the mast and the physiognomies of St Peter (whose hold on the fish is not well understood) and his two companions.²⁵ In one instance, a suppressed motif in the derivation occurs undisturbed in the prototype: the cow’s head seen nearly full on.²⁶ The head of the young peasant woman by the mast has not been detected at any stage in the execution of the Copenhagen painting.

What appears before the mast in the Amsterdam painting is much simpler and less extensive than the intricate group of ideas finally arrived at in the prototype. X-radiographs of both works indicate that the bow was originally placed beneath the sailor’s lower arm, or, in the case of the Amsterdam picture, beneath the milkmaid with her arm resting on the churn. While the sheep behind her can be made out in x-radiographs of the prototype, this figure cannot be detected. She may first have been intended to occupy the boat in both the Copenhagen painting and the derivation.

The configuration of the milkmaid stepping onto the boat seems to have no precedent in Jordaens’s oeuvre, it may owe something to the tilt of Herse’s body in Rubens’s The Discovery of Erichthonius (Vaduz-Vienna, The Princely Collections).²⁷ The model may have been the same as that in the similarly placed daughter of Cecrops in Jordaens’s 1617 treatment of the theme in Antwerp.²⁸ The model for the youth may have been the same as that in the centre of the Adoration of the Shepherds of 1616 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.²⁹ Of the other travellers abaft, the young peasant woman may have depended on the same hypothetical head-study which Jordaens used for the peasant’s wife in the Satyr and Peasant Family of circa 1620-21 at Gothenburg.³⁰ The source of the silhouette for the cow’s head may have been two of the studies in the sketch at Lille of the early 1620s.³¹

The scantily clad St Peter is reminiscent of Jordaens’s early life studies of men covered only for modesty’s sake of which two are extant,³² while his white-haired head focused on the coin and the way the fish is held recalls that adopted by Rubens in the Mechelen altarpiece. The dark bearded apostle seems similar to a favourite Jordaens type, who early appears, for instance, as Zachariah in the Raleigh Virgin and Child with St John and his Parents of circa 1616-17.³³ For the milkmaid in profile in the bows reliance may have been placed on a hypothetical head study, perhaps used for Atalanta in the Prado Meleager and Atalanta³⁴ of the early 1620s.

Most likely Jordaens himself later extended the composition of the copy by adding the youth leaning on the basket – as has already been mentioned – after the insertion of the horse, neither of which was reserved. The youth was given the new role of making fun of the sailor pushing on his punt pole. His pointing gesture was a favourite idiom, employed by Jordaens in various modes, as in the Kassel Satyr and Peasant³⁵ and much later repeated in the gouache drawing in the Brussels Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, of ‘He who embraces too much, hugs poorly’ (Qui trop embrace mal étreint).³⁶ The youth’s face is handled in a manner reminiscent of St John in the Pietà of circa 1650 in the Hamburg Kunsthalle.³⁷ For the horse, perhaps painted under Jordaens’s direction, reference may have been made to the same hypothetical drawing or modello, which had earlier been the basis for that in the Copenhagen prototype and in the Madrid Homage to Ceres of 1623-25.³⁸

In the background the circular tower and spire are reminiscent of Antwerp structures, for instance the Bakkerstooren and the spire of the Sint-Walburgiskerk as depicted by Sebastiaen Vrancx (1573-1647) in SK-A-1699. These buildings emphasize the difference between the prototype in Copenhagen and the derivation, as the scene depicted in the former took place at a country landing stage. The onlookers on the upper platform of the jetty recall those in the upper right of the Kassel Adoration of the Magi³⁹ of 1644, while the woman with a basket on her head brings to mind the figure (in reverse) on the left in the Adoration of the Shepherds⁴⁰ of circa 1645-50 in the Louvre. The dark-haired apostle behind St Peter may have been the same model used for Christ in drawings of circa 1645 and circa 1650 of Christ before Pilate and Christ and the Pharisees.⁴¹

Although it has been suggested that the Rijksmuseum picture played some kind of role in the evolution of the masterpiece in Copenhagen,⁴² this is very unlikely. And the fact that both paintings were probably in Amsterdam at least by the eighteenth century may be no more than a coincidence, but it is thought-provoking nevertheless. While it is not the place here to speculate as to whether the Copenhagen painting was commissioned by Louis de Geer I (1587-1652),⁴³ it seems most likely that the Rijksmuseum derivation was initially executed as a copy, which Jordaens later reworked with the speculative intention of selling it in much the same way as he had retouched copies that he had sold to Van Langenhoven.

Gregory Martin, 2022