The Parable of the Unworthy Wedding Guest (Matthew 22:1-14)

c. 1644

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 129.5 cm × width 155.5 cm

Technical notes

Support The support consists of two pieces of plain-weave canvas with a horizontal seam at approx. 8 cm from the top, and has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been preserved. Cusping is visible along the bottom of the seam and very vaguely on the left and right. An imprint of an earlier strainer is visible at approx. 2 cm from the outer edges.
Preparatory layers The triple ground extends up to the tacking edges. The first layer is a bright orange containing some black pigment particles. The second ground is a warm beigeish grey and consists of white and some orange and yellow pigment particles. The third layer is a cooler whitish grey and is mostly composed of white and some black pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the tacking edges. An initial lay-in in the form of a dark, rather linear sketch is clearly visible with the naked eye here and there, for example in the turned face of the man sitting at the table in the centre. The composition was built up from the back to the front using reserves, the edges of which were left uncovered in many places. The figures in the background were swiftly and only thinly indicated, those in the middle ground in slightly thicker paint and with a bit more detail, some of their facial features being accentuated with dark lines. The king, by comparison, was meticulously and thickly executed, and his reserve completely obscured. Glazes were used for several of the reds and are especially striking in the king’s robe. The fluid paints, loosely applied wet in wet, show hardly any brushmarking. The highlights consist of countless small dots, especially in the brocades. The hands and positioning of the fingers of the unwelcome guest being carried away were shifted, and the contour of the king’s hand was modified.
Willem de Ridder, 2023

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: W. de Ridder, RMA (no image available), 2010
paint samples: W. de Ridder, RMA, nos. SK-A-157/1-2, 6 September 2010
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 6 September 2010

Condition

Fair. The seam of the canvas is raised, but stable. The paint layer is abraded in the darker, more transparent areas, and especially on the tops of cracks. Small areas of damage in the centre, apparently caused by the firing of lead shot, were filled and retouched during the most recent restoration. The paint layer, or varnish, shows a greyish haze in the lower left. The varnish has yellowed and lost its saturation.

Conservation

P.C. Huybrechts, 1806: canvas lined; cleaned; filled and retouched
J.A. Hesterman, 1874: varnish regenerated
conservator unknown, 1887: canvas relined
L.D. Vercouteren: complete restoration

Provenance

…; from the dealer Dirck van der Aa, The Hague, with SK-A-455, fl. 1,280, to the museum, as Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, 17 November 1802;¹ on loan to the Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, since 1977

Object number: SK-A-157

The artist

Simon Kick (Delft c. 1603 - Amsterdam 1652)

Simon Kick’s date of birth can be placed around 1603 on the evidence of his statements that he was about 43 years old on 15 July 1646 and 48 on 13 June 1651. He was a son of the Delft pedlar and silk merchant Willem Anthonisz Kick and Anna de Brey. It is not known with whom he trained. He was living in Amsterdam by 1624 and is documented there several times before his death. On 5 September 1631 he became betrothed to Christina (Stijntje) Cornelisdr Duyster, the sister of the artist Willem Duyster, who in his turn married Kick’s sister. Both couples lived together in a house called ‘De Duystere Werelt’ (The Duyster World, also The Dark World) in Amsterdam’s Koningsstraat. Kick was buried in the city’s Zuiderkerk on 26 September 1652. According to Houbraken, who calls him ‘a fine figure painter’, he taught his son Cornelis Kick (1631-1681), who specialized in still lifes.

Kick made his name primarily with guardrooms and merry companies, but he also produced a few portraits, character heads and history pieces. His work was part and parcel of Amsterdam genre art of the 1620s and ’30s by painters like Pieter Codde and Willem Duyster. Kick’s earliest known picture, from 1637, is An Old Man in a Turban.² His latest ones include Soldiers in a Stable and A Lady at her Toilet of 1648,³ which are also his first traceable forays into genre, although he would have tried his hand at such scenes before then.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2023

References
A.D. de Vries, ‘Biografische aanteekeningen betreffende voornamelijk Amsterdamsche schilders, plaatsnijders, enz. en hunne verwanten’, Oud Holland 3 (1885), pp. 55-80, 135-60, 223-40, 303-12, esp. p. 76; A. Bredius, ‘Iets over Pieter Codde en Willem Duyster’, Oud Holland 6 (1888), pp. 187-94, esp. pp. 192-93; A. Bredius and W. von Bode, ‘Der Amsterdamer Genremaler Symon Kick’, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 10 (1889), pp. 102-09, esp. pp. 104-05; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, III, The Hague 1917, pp. 793-94; ibid., VII, 1921, p. 31; Hofstede de Groot in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XX, Leipzig 1927, pp. 254-55; C.M.R. Davidson, ‘Het geslacht Kick, Breda-Delft-Amsterdam’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 27 (1973), pp. 44-65, esp. pp. 62-63; Von Bogendorf Rupprath in P.C. Sutton et al., Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, exh. cat. Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art)/Berlin (Gemäldegalerie)/London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1984, p. 226; J. Rosen, ‘A Great Minor Master: The Robbery by Simon Kick in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie: With an Appendix Including a Complete Catalogue of Paintings by Simon Kick (1603-1652)’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 49 (2007), pp. 85-98; Wegener in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXX, Munich/Leipzig 2014, p. 201

Entry

The Parable of the Unworthy Wedding Guest was bought in 1802 as a Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, and it was accordingly catalogued after the painting was transferred from the Nationale Konst-Gallery in The Hague to the Koninklijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1808.⁴ For a long time after that it was thought to be by Samuel van Hoogstraten until Hofstede de Groot assigned it to Claes Moeyaert in 1899.⁵ Astrid Tümpel suggested an artist from the circle of Salomon de Bray,⁶ and lately the names of Jacob Backer and, most recently, Dirck van Santvoort came up.⁷ All of these attributions failed to convince.

The composition is actually closely related to Simon Kick’s signed Elisha Refusing Naaman’s Gifts of 1644 (fig. a),⁸ in which he showed off his talents as a history painter in a large format. Apart from the similarities between the prophet Elisha and the king in the Rijksmuseum picture there is Kick’s typical practice of placing the protagonist on the right and shown from the side, as he did in several genre pieces.⁹ In a drawing attributed to Kick there is a biblical figure seen from the same vantage point.¹⁰ Both paintings also share a comparable rendering of the velvet of the cloaks. There are also correspondences in the horizontal design with a fairly large number of people, all at equal height, in the group on the far right, in the central view through to the background, and in the fall of light accentuating parts of the scene. In addition to these arguments for assigning The Parable of the Unworthy Wedding Guest to Kick, the characterization of the figures also fits neatly within the artist’s oeuvre.¹¹ Many of his pictures from the first half of the 1640s are in dark, brownish tones, while the protagonist’s attire is in bright and more opaque colours. The present work will have been made at roughly the same time as Elisha Refusing Naaman’s Gifts.

The Old Testament parable of the unworthy guest tells of a king who gives a feast to celebrate his son’s wedding. When many of the invitees refuse to come, and even insult and murder some of his staff, he flies into a rage, punishing those who has been ungrateful and giving orders to ask passers-by to join the banquet instead. One of them, though, is not suitably dressed. ‘Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Matthew 22:13). The first group in the parable stands for those who reject the call to become Christians, while the second one is welcomed into the kingdom of God with open arms, provided they have prepared themselves properly.¹² The story was not often depicted, and when it was, the artist devoted as much attention to the banquet as to the ejection of the unworthy guest.¹³ Kick, though, focuses on the man’s removal and follows the visual tradition based on Matthew by showing him being carried out horizontally, tied hand and foot.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

C. Hofstede de Groot, ‘Kritische opmerkingen omtrent eenige schilderijen in ’s Rijksmuseum’, Oud Holland 17 (1899), pp. 163-70, esp. pp. 167-68 (as Nicolaes Moeyaert); A. Tümpel, ‘Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert’, Oud Holland 88 (1974), pp. 1-163, 245-90, esp. p. 285, no. A39 (as circle of Salomon de Bray), with earlier literature; I.V. Linnik, Gollandskaja živopisʹ XVII veka i problemy atribucii kartin, Leningrad 1980, p. 125 (as Dirck van Santvoort); R. Schillemans, Bijbelschilderkunst rond Rembrandt, Utrecht 1989, pp. 101-03 (as Dirck van Santvoort ?); J. Dijkstra, P.P.W.M. Dirkse and A.E.A.M. Smits, De schilderijen van Museum Catharijneconvent, coll. cat. Utrecht 2002, pp. 254-55 (as Dirck van Santvoort); Van Eck in C.J.F. van Schooten and W.C.M. Wüstefeld (eds.), Goddelijk geschilderd: Honderd meesterwerken van Museum Catharijneconvent, coll. cat. Utrecht 2003, pp. 203-04 (as Dirck van Santvoort)

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 21, no. 86 (as Gerbrand van den Eeckhout); 1843, p. 19, no. 85 (as Gerbrand van den Eeckhout; ‘irreparably damaged, not worth the expense of doing anything to it. Taken to the attic’); 1858, pp. 62-63, no. 126 (as Samuel van Hoogstraten); 1880, pp. 156-57, no. 160 (as Samuel van Hoogstraten); 1887, p. 82, no. 690 (as Samuel van Hoogstraten, with a note that it was probably not by him); 1903, p. 180, no. 1634 (as attributed to Claes Moeyaert); 1934, p. 193, no. 1634 (as attributed to Claes Moeyaert); 1976, pp. 93-94, no. A 157 (as attributed to Jacob Backer)

Citation

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2023, 'attributed to Simon Kick, The Parable of the Unworthy Wedding Guest (Matthew 22:1-14), c. 1644', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5866

(accessed 13 November 2024 02:30:21).

Figures

fig. a Simon Kick, *Elisha Refusing Naaman’s Gifts*, 1644. Oil on canvas, 124.2 x 202.2 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: bpk/Gemäldegalerie, SMB/Jörg P. Anders