The Peasant’s Misfortune

Entry

The Peasant’s Misfortune (shown here) shows a peasant’s house being overrun by soldiers and their hangerson. In the companion piece, The Peasant’s Pleasure (see SK-A-1352) the soldiers are being driven out of the house again. These scenes belong to a southern Netherlandish tradition of small-figured depictions of villages being plundered that reflects the contemporary conflict between soldiers and peasants.² Vinckboons’s compositions are innovative compared to the landscapes in that tradition. He considerably reduced the number of figures and placed them closer to the picture plane, heightening the viewer’s involvement in the action. The pendant form and the emphasis on narrative was also new.³ Fishman was the first to point out the connection with contemporary literature about the Twelve Years’ Truce, which dealt at length with the problematic relationship between peasant and soldier.⁴ Fishman assumed that the personal dialogue form in the literary treatments of the theme may have influenced the form chosen by Vinckboons, which is an attractive theory, given Vinckboons’s connections with the literary world of Amsterdam.⁵

Vinckboons often returned to the subject, and there is at least one other pair of companion pieces.⁶ Prince Wladyslaw Zygmunt had a version of The Peasant’s Pleasure in his collection, for it features in a painting of part of the Polish prince’s art cabinet dated 1626.⁷ The artist also supplied designs for a four-part suite of prints of 1610 in which the subjects of the peasant’s misfortune and pleasure are the second and third in the series.⁸ The series opens with a print in which soldiers force their way into a peasant’s house, and closes with a scene of reconciliation between soldiers and peasants, some details of which presage a resumption of hostilities. That cyclical approach of fighting and reconciliation is not found in the painted pendants. Given the close relationship to the print series, Goossens theorized that the two paintings in the Rijksmuseum belonged to a larger series.⁹ There is not the slightest evidence that that is the case, and as Moiso-Diekamp has pointed out, The Peasant’s Misfortune and The Peasant’s Pleasure are only mentioned as a pair in 17th-century inventories.¹⁰

The attribution of the Rijksmuseum pair to Vinckboons is doubtful. A version of The Peasant’s Pleasure of 1609 monogrammed by Vinckboons is, judging by a photograph, of superior quality and may have been the model for the Rijksmuseum version.¹¹ Although the Rijksmuseum’s companion pieces have also been dated c. 1609 in the past,¹² dendrochronology gave a much later terminus post quem, the most likely date of The Peasant’s Misfortune being in or after 1619. The rather crude style of both paintings, with their caricatural, stereotype faces and the outsized hands raise doubts about the autograph nature of the works. It is possible that the mysterious ‘W’ or ‘VV’ on the axe wielded by the peasant in the right foreground of The Peasant’s Pleasure might provide a clue to the correct attribution of these pendants, but for the time being they can be regarded as workshop products.

Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 315.