Hurdy-Gurdy Player

Entry

The Antwerp sculptor Pieter Xaveri (1647-1673) is first documented in the Dutch Republic on 20 June 1670. Listed as twenty-three years of age, ‘Petrus Xaverinus Antwerpiensis’ officially enrolled as a student of mathematics at the Leidse Academie (university) in Leiden, where he likely entered the engineering programme under Petrus van Schooten, a highly esteemed mathematician in his day.⁵ Xaveri’s decision to study mathematics – a seemingly odd combination for a budding sculptor – may have been motivated by his desire to follow a career in engineering or architecture, two professions highly suited to his background as a sculptor. However, the possibility also exists he enrolled for no other reason than to obtain certain privileges reserved for students only, e.g. an exemption from paying taxes on alcohol. Regardless, Xaveri was undoubtedly capable of making a living from selling the small terracotta sculptures for which he was later renowned. Approximately six months following his enrolment at the college in Leiden, ‘Petrus Savoriex, sculptor from Antwerp’, residing on Hogewoerd in Leiden, filed his marriage to Geertruyt Jan Willemsdr. Buyscher, of the Roman Catholic faith, on 11 November 1670.⁶ The last documented record of Xaveri’s life occurs only four years later, with the baptism of his daughter Petronella, on 22 June 1674, an event that followed the sculptor’s death in the autumn of 1673, having scarcely attained the age of twenty-six.⁷

Xaveri’s production as a sculptor during his years in Leiden is certain to have been substantial: in total, approximately thirty or more statuettes and groups are documented as autograph works, excluding a wide range of disputable attributions. A majority of these works are signed and dated terracottas, frequently genre tableaux centring on themes with a somewhat facetious or satirical tint. Such figural groups were typically made as cabinet sculptures, aimed to appeal to collectors’ sense of humour. The demand for these works chiefly came from individuals living in a relatively small area in and around the city of Leiden, where Xaveri’s terracottas continued to surface on the art market well into the eighteenth century.⁸ François de le Boe Sylvius, a professor of medicine residing at 31 Rapenburg, was among the earliest collectors in Leiden, with a total of fifteen modelled sculptures in the upper backroom of his house. As described in the inventory of his estate, compiled on 6 April 1673, one may conclude that all were potentially autograph works by Pieter Xaveri. ⁹

The last year of Xaveri’s life, 1673, was also his most productive. Besides the sandstone façade from the building ‘In den Vergulden Turk’, on the Breestraat in Leiden, he also made works such as the twenty-three figures depicting members of the city’s Vierschaar, of which a number are today preserved at the Museum de Lakenhal (Leiden) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). The present terracotta Hurdy-Gurdy Player also dates from this same year.

Hurdy-gurdy players and other street musicians were viewed as people working in disreputable professions, as were street performers, rat catchers, quack doctors, peddlers, scissors-sharpeners, etc. When represented in art, such members of the social underclass were commonly grouped together with the ‘bona fide’ beggars.¹⁰ Not only did they form the prototypes of the blind beggars in Flemish and Netherlandish art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but they also regularly appeared in French and Spanish painting.¹¹ In most cases, the impoverished street musician was accompanied by young assistant and/or a dog. In the art of the Low Countries, representations of peasants, beggars and vagrants initially served as negative models – notions upheld by and intended for the social upper class largely to confirm their own superiority. As civic culture and the sense of moral propriety grew in importance among members of the citizenry – rooted as it was in concepts of social stability, family life and industriousness – beggars were increasingly seen as social misfits. Such marginal figures were not only associated with deformity, disability and poor character, but also with lunacy and foolishness. Consequently, representations of them came to be viewed as comical and entertaining. Parallel to the growth of civic culture, the theme of the beggar in Northern Netherlandish art first emerged in the late fifteenth century as a negative social model. By the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, however, the genre was undergoing a process of aestheticization. What began as a crude, topsy-turvy self-image became a picturesque and comical theme.¹²

Xaveri’s Hurdy-Gurdy Player is a work to be categorized in this latter category of sculpture, intended for amusement. He no longer displays the typical traits – sloppily dressed, worn-out clothing and a repulsive grimace – traditionally associated with beggars and street musicians (cf. BK-2006-25). This smiling and friendly-looking young musician is depicted wearing acceptable, even if somewhat outdated attire: a wide-brimmed hat, a jerkin and chemise with lying collar and white sleeves, puffed breaches, stockings and slinking boots. He sits on his cloak, which partly drapes over his back and left arm. Left of the tree stump, a small dog or monkey peaks out. While the work clearly functions as an autonomous composition, a pendant figure may once have existed. In the same year, Xaveri is also known to have modelled an old, bearded Bagpipe Player, accompanied by his dog and a young assistant, and an as yet unpublished terracotta statuette of a man playing a so-called friction drum.¹³ Although several centimetres larger than the present Hurdy-Gurdy Player, this latter work would have formed a suitable pairing centring on dichotomy as its thematic basis (young/old, beardless/with beard, neat/sloppy). Accordingly, the two pieces could quite conceivably have been originally created as a set, a finding supported by a shared provenance, with both works purportedly originating from the Van Heemskerck collection in 1771.¹⁴

Frits Scholten, 2025