A Wedding Feast, traditionally called ‘The Wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler’, 1616

Entry

When this painting was donated to the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap in 1878, much of the paint surface, including the signature, was obscured by overpainting. It has been attributed to various artists, including Herman Berntsz van Byler,⁴ Johann Liss,⁵ Pieter Codde and Jan Miense Molenaer,⁶ until Bredius attributed it to Willem Cornelisz Duyster on the basis of stylistic similarities to The Tric-trac Players (SK-A-1427) in the Rijksmuseum.⁷ Bredius’s attribution was not confirmed until 1972, almost a century later, when the overpainting was removed during restoration, revealing the original background and the tiled floor with Duyster’s signature.⁸

Datings of the painting range from shortly after 1620⁹ to c. 1630.¹⁰ Playter gives both 1623 and 1625,¹¹ while Van Thiel placed it c. 1625-28 on the evidence of the style and the costumes.¹² The lack of dated works in Duyster’s oeuvre makes it difficult to arrive at a precise date, but in view of the clothing one around the middle of the 1620s is plausible.

The subject is a problem that is still unresolved. Seated on the right are a man and woman with their hands entwined, while on the left musicians are accompanying a round dance. There are several portraits in the group on the right and among the dancers. One particularly striking figure is the man in the left foreground, who is wearing a gold medal of honour on a two-stranded gold chain. The musicians and the couple kissing in the background are bit players.¹³

When the painting was in the collection of Cornelis Ploos van Amstel at the end of the 18th century the subject was already being identified as the wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler. Adriaen Ploos (1585-1639), who had the word Amstel added to his surname in 1636, held a number of important political offices, including delegate from Utrecht at the States-General. On 29 July 1637 he was one of the signatories to the official ‘States Translation’ of the Bible.¹⁴ However, the marriage of Adriaen Ploos and Agnes van Bijler (d. 1661) took place on 6 August 1616, some ten years before the painting could have been made. It is also unlikely that Duyster was commemorating the couple’s tin wedding, since only one child is shown, and they had several. The suggestion by a descendant that this may be a record of another family wedding is speculative.¹⁵

The question is whether the subject of this painting by Duyster, who lived in Amsterdam, should even be sought in the history of the Ploos family of Utrecht. Cornelis Ploos van Amstel, the former owner of the group portrait, passed himself off as a descendant of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel, but he was not a direct descendant, and it is also far from certain that the painting was passed down through the family.¹⁶ It would not be the first time that Ploos van Amstel sowed confusion by over-eagerly identifying portrait sitters.¹⁷

According to Playter, the man standing behind the seated couple appears in other works by Duyster, and may be a self-portrait.¹⁸ Van Thiel, who came to the same conclusion on the evidence of the man’s pose and the direction of his gaze, suspects that the now indistinct scene of a helmeted horseman and three other figures on the tapestry in the right background might explain the reason for the celebrations.¹⁹ That hypothesis, though, is untenable, since examination of the paint layer during restoration in the early 1970s showed that the dark layer applied on top of the tapestry was painted by the artist himself.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

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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. 63.