Landscape with Figures and a Village Kermis

1615

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 35 cm × width 55 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, bottom right: [...] NE 1615

Technical notes

The support is a single horizontally grained oak plank. The panel has been cradled with lap joins, probably in the 19th century. The cradle covers the entire panel, which wasprobably thinned for this procedure. A wooden strip approximately 2.5 cm wide was added at the top, possibly at a later date. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1524. The panel could have been ready for use by 1535, indicating that Van de Venne used a very old panel. The painting has a light ground layer. Examination with infrared reflectography shows no underdrawing. The painting is meticulously executed.

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 27 October 1995
infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, 26 July 2002
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 27 July 2002

Condition

Fair. The paint layers are slightly abraded.

Conservation

H. Kat, 1995: retouched and revarnished

Provenance

...; purchased by Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-98), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, 30 March 1893;¹ by whom bequeathed to the museum, 1898

Object number: SK-A-1767

Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet

The artist

Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (Delft c. 1589 - The Hague 1662)

According to Cornelis de Bie, Adriaen van de Venne was born into a southern Netherlandish immigrant family in Delft in 1589. De Bie also states that he was taught drawing and illumination by the Leiden goldsmith and painter Simon de Valck, and was then apprenticed to the grisaille painter Jeronymus van Diest, both of whom are now otherwise unknown.

Van de Venne is first documented in 1614 in Middelburg, where he remained until around 1625. It was in 1614 that he married the daughter of a Zeeland sea captain, Elisabeth de Pours. Dating from that same year are his earliest known paintings, Fishing for Souls (SK-A-447) and two summer and winter pendants.² On the evidence of an affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, it has been assumed that he spent some time in Antwerp before 1614. However, the local Middelburg painters were already working in Brueghel’s style at that time. The fact that he married a woman of Zeeland, and that his father and his brother Jan had settled in the town in 1605 and 1608 respectively, make it likely that he was in Middelburg before 1614. In 1618, his brother Jan opened a shop selling paintings and set up a publishing business, in which Adriaen played an important role as a print designer, poet, and illustrator of books by Jacob Cats, among other authors. Starting in 1618 he also designed several propaganda prints supporting the House of Orange and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Van de Venne is last documented in Middelburg on 30 June 1624. He then moved to The Hague, where he is recorded as a resident on 22 March 1625. His departure from Middelburg roughly coincided with the death of his brother Jan, and his decision to settle in The Hague probably had something to do with the presence of the court there, which played an important part in the subjects he chose. Among his earliest works in The Hague were the prints and paintings of Prince Maurits Lying in State (SK-A-446), several impressions of which were ordered by the States-General on 21 July 1625.³ He enrolled in the Guild of St Luke in 1625, and a year later acquired his Hague citizenship. He retained his house in Middelburg, and in 1630 bought another one in The Hague, from which he sold his prints and books. He was warden of the guild from 1631 to 1633 and from 1637 to 1639, and filled the post of dean from 1639 to 1641. He was also a member of the Ionghe Batavieren (Young Batavians) chamber of rhetoric. His fame was such that he was included in Johannes Meyssens’s book, Image de divers hommes desprit sublime, where it is stated that the Prince of Orange owned several works by him. In 1656, Van de Venne was also involved in setting up a new confraternity, the Confrerie Pictura, which broke away from the Guild of St Luke. At the end of his life he ran into financial difficulties. He made his will in 1660 after falling ill, and died on 12 November 1662. Two of his sons, Pieter (c. 1615-57) and Huijbregt (1634/35-after 1682), were also painters.

Van de Venne’s painted oeuvre can be divided into his Middelburg and Hague periods. In Middelburg he produced some of his most ambitious, meticulously painted works with politico-allegorical subjects, as well as many landscape scenes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder. In The Hague he concentrated almost exclusively on grisailles for the open market, most of them genre pieces with a comical, moralistic slant with inscribed banderoles, but he also made religious, allegorical works and a few large-scale equestrian portraits of rulers. He abandoned the meticulous style of his Middelburg period for a freer, sometimes even sketchy technique, which enabled him to boost his output to ‘hundreds of monochrome pieces, both known and desired by devotees of art’, as J. Campo Weyerman put it.

Yvette Bruijnen, 2007

References
Meyssens 1649; De Bie 1661, pp. 234-46; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, pp. 857-58; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 136-37; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 340-41; Franken 1878, pp. 7-30; Obreen II, 1879-80, pp. 108-09, III, 1880-81, pp. 258, 272, 275, IV, 1881-82, pp. 59, 128, 148, V, 1882-83, pp, 68-69, 71-74, 96, 102, 133, 153, VI, 1884-87, pp. 52, 226; Bredius II, 1916, pp. 374-93, VII, 1921, pp. 240-45; Bol 1958; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 37-74; Bol 1989; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, p. 321; Briels 1997, pp. 394-95; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 255-62, 354

Entry

The date on this painting was wrongly read as 1625 until Royalton-Kisch rightly deciphered it as 1615.⁴ The meticulous style of painting, with the slightly stiff little figures and the close attention to landscape details, meshes perfectly with Van de Venne’s other landscape paintings of the period, such as an Autumn of the same year,⁵ and the Summer Landscape of 1614.⁶ A distinctive feature of these early landscapes is the compositional programme derived from the Flemish tradition of a clump of trees on one side and a broad vista to a high horizon. The present painting is particularly close to the landscapes of Jan Brueghel the Elder, not only as regards the composition and the painstaking manner, but also in specific elements, such as the large number of villagers in anecdotal situations, the ducks on a pond with reeds in the foreground, and the covered wagon with horses. Comparable works by Jan Brueghel are the Village Landscape with Self-Portrait,⁷ the Country Road with Travellers,⁸ and the Fish Market on the Bank of a River.⁹ Although there are as yet no indications that Van de Venne lived in Antwerp prior to 1614, this painting does show that he knew Jan Brueghel’s work. It is not surprising, then, that the painting used to bear a fake Brueghel signature, no trace of which now remains.¹⁰

As Knuttel rightly remarked, the group on horseback in the left foreground recurs in a slightly modified form in the centre foreground of Van de Venne’s Departure of a Dignitary from Middelburg (SK-A-1775), which is also dated 1615.¹¹ The two riders at the back are almost identical in both paintings, and are accompanied by a page. The two other riders have different poses, but in both paintings the one at the front is the only one on a white horse. The latter horseman in the present painting has until now been regarded as a self-portrait of Adriaen van de Venne.¹² However, given the small size it is difficult to make out the physical likeness, and anyway a self-portrait in the form of such an equestrian portrait would be highly unusual. It is more likely that this is some dignitary, local or otherwise, with his retinue.

The painting was probably commissioned by the couple with their daughter in the left foreground. The greetings being exchanged by them and the riders might be a demonstration of their loyalty to and personal acquaintanceship with the dignitary. As yet it is not known whether the artist depicted a specific village.

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. 292.

Literature

Knuttel 1917, pp. 70-71, no. 24; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 47, 121, note 85; Middelkoop in Perth etc. 1997, pp. 26-27, no. 1

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 278, no. 2496; 1976, pp. 565-66, no. A 1767 (as dated 1625); 2007, no. 292

Citation

Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Landscape with Figures and a Village Kermis, 1615', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6401

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