Object data
oil on panel
support: height 58 cm × width 85 cm
Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot
St Martin Cutting Off Part of his Cloak for a Beggar
1623
Inscriptions
- signature and date, upper left, under the window of the house: Joost. Cornel. / Drooch. Sloot. 1623
Technical notes
The support consists of two horizontally grained oak planks, each with a pronounced convex warp. (The painting was examined in a climate box.)
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 25 November 2004
Condition
Fair. The varnish has discoloured somewhat. The figure in the middleground and the trees are abraded. A number of retouchings are visible. The roofs of the buildings have their own very distinct craquelure.
Provenance
...; from William Burroughs Hill, Southampton, fl. 603, to the museum, December 1900; on loan to the Limburgs Museum, Venlo, since 2000
Object number: SK-A-1930
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot (Utrecht c. 1586 - Utrecht 1666)
It is assumed that Droochsloot was born in 1586, the year his parents married, or shortly thereafter and that his place of birth was Utrecht, where his father had settled by 1581. He painted imaginary village scenes, topographical views and history pieces. It is not known with whom he trained, although the resemblance of his peasant figures with those of David Vinckboons indicates that it might have been with the latter. Droochsloot’s first dated painting Village Kermis,1 and his etchings are highly reminiscent of Vinckboons. The influence of Esaias van de Velde and Adriaen van de Venne is also discernible in Droochsloot’s oeuvre, and two of his early paintings include topographical views of The Hague,2 where Van de Velde had settled in 1618 and Van de Venne in 1625. Droochsloot’s first dated work is an etching from 1610.3 Although his first dated painting is from 1615, he did not register as a master-painter in the Utrecht painters’ guild until 1616. Two years later he married Agnietgen van Rijnevelt in the Reformed Church. In 1623, 1641 and 1642 he was elected dean of the painters’ guild. A respected burgher, he also filled other public positions: in 1638 he was elected a lifelong regent of the St Job’s Hospice, in 1642 deacon of the Reformed Church, and in 1650 and 1651 sergeant in the Utrecht militia. Financial success eluded Droochsloot later in his career, and he was forced to take out several mortgages on his house. Beginning in the 1620s, he gave drawing lessons. His pupils included Jacob Duck (c. 1600-67) in 1621, a number of painters about whom nothing else is known (Jan Petersen, Peter van Straesborgh, Steven de Leeuw, and Cornelis Duck), as well as his own son, Cornelis Droochsloot (1630-after 1673), who continued his workshop after his death in 1666.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Houbraken III, 1721, p. 288; Lilienfeld in Thieme/Becker IX, 1913, pp. 574-75; Van Luttervelt 1947; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 380-81; Luijten in Amsterdam 1997, pp. 113, 171-73, no. 31; Beaujean in Saur XXIX, 2001, p. 489
Entry
A large part of Droochsloot’s oeuvre is composed of village scenes with coarsely executed Brueghelian peasants. Acts of charity also constituted a considerable amount of his production. The present painting is the first of three showing the Christian nobleman, St Martin, dividing his cloak with a beggar. Unlike the other versions, St Martin wears a suit of armour in the Rijksmuseum painting. The contrast between the orderly peasants on the right and the brawling peasants on the left is common to all three works. The leafless trees and grey atmosphere evoke a winter setting; St Martin’s feast day was considered the first day of winter.4
The composition, including the partially seen building cast in shadow that acts as a repoussoir on the left, is typical for Droochsloot. The twisted trees, with their oddly stunted uppermost branches, are another standard feature in his work, and remind one of the trees in certain landscape etchings by Willem Buytewech5 and Jan van de Velde II.6 David Vinckboons’s peasant types were likely Droochsloot’s immediate model. As Houbraken first commented, Droochsloot’s peasants all appear to have been cast from the same mould.7 Indeed, his figure types are as repetitive as his bizarre leafless trees.
Spicer’s hypothesis that the present painting is the one described in Peter Wtewael’s 1661 estate inventory cannot be substantiated, as the description does not include the work’s dimensions and, as mentioned above, there are three works of this theme by Droochsloot.8
Jonathan Bikker, 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. 56.
Literature
Spicer in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 225-28, no. 31, with selected earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 86, no. 808; 1934, p. 85, no. 808; 1960, p. 86, no. 808; 1976, p. 199, no. A 1930; 2007, no. 56
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Joost Cornelisz. Droochsloot, St Martin Cutting Off Part of his Cloak for a Beggar, 1623', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8329
(accessed 15 November 2024 02:30:31).