Elisha Mocked by the Little Children (II Kings 2:24-25)

Entry

The story illustrated in this painting involves the prophet Elisha who, while on his way to Bethel, was mocked by little children who shouted at him ‘Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head’ (II Kings 2:23). Elisha responded to their jeers by cursing them in the name of the Lord, whereupon ‘came two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them’ (II Kings 2:24). The mocking scene is shown in the foreground, while in the background a young boy runs for his life from the bears, which are not depicted, however. Elisha mocked by the little children was occasionally the subject of landscape paintings in the 17th century. Van Zijl’s painting stands out for the minor role allotted to the landscape and the monumental treatment of the figures.

When it was purchased by the museum in 1894 it bore a false Frans Hals monogram (‘F.H.f.’) on the stone in the lower right corner, and was extensively overpainted, especially on the left side (fig. a). The corner of a building had been painted in, replacing the figure of Elisha. The background had been transformed into a body of water, a bridge and a group of Spanish soldiers, so that it appeared that the children were mocking them. The painting was given the title The Young Patriots. The young boys and the architecture behind them had also been considerably altered. Judging from the reconstructed figure of Elisha, the composition was also cut down at the top. By 1903, it was known that the painting had been considerably reworked and that the Hals monogram was false.⁴ The overpaint and false monogram were removed and the figure of Elisha reconstructed in 1916.⁵

With the realization in 1903 that the Hals monogram was false, the painting was removed from the Haarlem artist’s oeuvre and catalogued as anonymous Dutch school.⁶ A few years later, Bredius published Kronig’s opinion that it was an early work by Jan Miense Molenaer.⁷ It was not until the museum’s 1976 catalogue that the painting acquired the convincing attribution to Roeloff van Zijl.⁸ The composition, blocked off on the right by architecture, the landscape, and especially the figure types and their costumes, compare well with Van Zijl’s Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus with Children’s Bacchanal dated 1629.⁹ Hofstede de Groot, who published the 1629 picture, saw parallels in it with Werner van den Valckert’s style.¹⁰ While this comparison is not so apparent to the present author, the hard modelling of the faces, the red noses and cheeks, and the bright, acidic colours of the costumes in the present painting call to mind Dirck van Baburen’s style.

Jonathan Bikker, 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. 351.