Boy Playing the Flute Accompanied by a Dancing Girl

Entry

In 1739 Diederik van Leyden II (1695-1764) commissioned Jan Baptist Xavery (1697-1742) to make a monumental, sculpted rococo mantelpiece for the great chamber of Huis van Leyden, his canal house at 48 Rapenburg in Leiden. At the corners of this splendid chimney breast, which is now housed in the Rijksmuseum (BK-1995-3), he placed two seated figures of children: a young shepherd playing the flute and a young shepherdess banging the tambourine. The present terracotta involves a pair of children bearing a remarkable resemblance to these figures. The clothing is largely similar, as well as the physiognomy and the instrument played by the boy: the flute. However, it is by no means an uninspired repetition. The figures here are standing and, instead of accompanying her companion with a tambourine, the girl is dancing and singing, with one arm round his shoulder in sisterly fashion. In her other hand she is holding a bunch of flowers. Leeuwenberg’s conjecture that this was not Xavery’s own work, but an imitation of the children on the Leiden fireplace,¹ seems unfounded, even though the group is not signed in Xavery’s usual way. The group has the same charm and liveliness that characterize his other works, and the modelling that Leeuwenberg considered not crisp enough for attribution to Xavery, corresponds exactly with other terracottas Xavery made, such as the signed model for an allegorical garden sculpture of three children representing Summer (BK-1965-21). In addition, the wet clay of the bases has been treated with a serrated spatula in a similar way.

Although popular in paintings in the Dutch Republic, light-hearted themes like these were found only occasionally in sculpture from that nation. Sculptures were generally limited to more elevated mythological or allegorical subjects. However, early on in the city of Leiden there was already a market for such everyday topics and genre figures when it came to small-scale sculpture. And terracottas by the late-seventeenth-century sculptors Pieter Xaveri en Johannes Arentsz Smeltzing, who specialized in such work, were still sought-after collectors’ items in the eighteenth century, as corroborated by references in leading Leiden collections, like those of Johan van der Marck (cf. BK-1978-36) and Leonardus van Heemskerk (cf. BK-NM-5667). The present terracotta may be viewed as a continuation of that tradition. It is an attractive idea that Xavery might have made it as a gift for his Leiden maecenas when the chimneypiece was completed. However, since another, related, standing girl playing a tambourine in terracotta exists which can be tentatively ascribed to Xavery, such pastoral figures of children might in fact have been part of his standard repertoire.² In that case, Xavery could have made the present group separately from the Leiden project, and perhaps not even as an autonomous sculpture, but as a scale model for a larger (garden?) sculpture. There is an interesting parallel for garden use of a group with the same theme: a marble pair of young shepherds of around 1740-45 made by Jan van Logteren (1709-1745), an Amsterdam contemporary of Jan Baptist Xavery’s.³ It is the earliest known set of garden sculptures of the Northern Netherlands with this light-hearted, pastoral theme depicted by children.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025