Object data
oil on panel
support: height 34.8 cm × width 49.8 cm
outer size: depth 7 cm
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne
‘A Miserable End’
1632
Inscriptions
- signature and date, top right (A and D ligated): [.]632 / AD: v: Venne.
- inscription, upper left: Ellenden-eind (A miserable end)
Technical notes
The oak support consists of a single horizontally grained plank. The panel was planed down to 4 mm thickness and cradled, but parts of the bevels are still visible on the left and right sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1621. The panel could have been ready for use by 1627, which is in accordance with the date 1632 on the painting. The ground layer has a grey-greenish tone, possibly containing the pigment umber. Infrared reflectography reveals an underdrawing for the complete composition, probably executed in a dry medium. While all the figures were prepared in the underdrawing, the space itself is not defined; just some of the important objects in the space, like the chimney, the ladder, the barrel and some of the vertical beams were drawn in. Details like the hanging baskets on the wall and the jug on the floor are not worked out in the underdrawing, neither is the closet in the right corner. The underdrawing restricts itself to the position of the figures and objects, and does not define shading or modelling. While the group of figures on the right was drawn with single contour lines, the artist was still searching for the right position for Death and the old man on the left; here the underdrawing has multiple contour lines, which show up thicker and darker in the infrared reflectograms. Two changes were made: the dog, passively seated in the underdrawing, was changed in the paint layers and given a more active role, barking at Death. The cat at the feet of the dying man replaced a foot-stove in the underdrawing. X-radiography did not provide any additional information, due to the obstruction of the cradle. The grisaille was executed with a few paint layers in a relatively quick and economical way.
Scientific examination and reports
- infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, 29 May 2001
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 February 2002
- X-radiography: A. Truyen, RMA, SRAL, 15 January 2003
- technical report: K. Schreuder, RMA, SRAL, 15 January 2003
Condition
Fair. The paint layers are slightly abraded, while the varnish has discoloured and is uneven.
Provenance
...; bequeathed to the museum by Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-98), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, 1898; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, since 2002
Object number: SK-A-1770
Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet
Copyright: Public domain
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.1 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 1625.2 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
Up until now the date on this painting has been read as 1622 and thus wrongly placed in Van de Venne’s Middelburg period. According to the dendrochronology, however, the painting could not have been made before 1627, and the date 1632 is clearly legible under the stereomicroscope.3 This places the painting within the group of grisailles that Van de Venne produced in large numbers in his Hague period, which began in 1625. Usually they show ordinary people in all kinds of situations, and have sayings or homonyms in banderoles that comment on the action. Painted rapidly and economically, with careful attention to the effects of light and shade, this grisaille fits in with Van de Venne’s other work of the 1630s.
The inscription ‘Ellenden-eind’ is an allusion to the dying man in the left foreground, whom Death is freeing from his miserable existence. Death as a deliverance for the poverty-stricken had been depicted in print as early as 1565.4 It was also a recurring theme in contemporary literature, and one that Van de Venne himself dealt with in his 1634 collection of poems, Sinne-vonck op den Hollandsche Turf (Symbolic spark on Dutch peat).5
As Plokker pointed out, the presence of a baby in the painting may anticipate Van de Venne’s own words in his Tafereel van de belacchende werelt (Picture of the ridiculous world) of 1635: ‘One person’s death is another person’s life’. Seen in that context, the child’s chances of survival improve, because the old man’s death means that there is more food available. That idea is also depicted in Death in the Barn, which is attributed to Van de Venne, where the death of a woman coincides with bread being given to a child.6
The interior in ‘A Miserable End’ is barely defined at all. The back wall runs parallel to the picture surface, but the angle it makes with the wall on the right and the wall itself are not indicated. It is also unclear what kind of light source is illuminating the space from behind Death’s back. Klessmann assumed that some of the details of the interior, such as the beams with straw hanging from them, the tools on the wall and the group around the hearth, influenced the peasant interiors of Adriaen van Ostade.7
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. 303.
Literature
Franken 1878, p. 58, no. 34; Plokker 1984, pp. 102-05, no. 36; Bol 1989, p. 82
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 279, no. 2502; 1934, p. 296, no. 2502; 1976, p. 565, no. A 1770; 2007, no. 303
Citation
Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, ‘A Miserable End’, 1632', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6399
(accessed 11 November 2024 23:49:52).