Shrove Tuesday in a Country Village

c. 1625

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 72.1 cm × width 93 cm
sight size: height 68 cm × width 90.5 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, bottom right: [...] / [...]nne hage

Technical notes

The support consists of three planks with a horizontal grain and is bevelled on the left, right and bottom. There are gouge marks on the top and bottom planks. Strips of wood were added at the top and bottom, probably in the 19th or 20th century, and the joins were strengthened with linen strips. The ground layer is whitish and thin. Infrared reflectography did not reveal any underdrawing. The painting is smoothly and swiftly executed.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: R. Hoppenbrouwer, RMA, SRAL, 9 December 2002
infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, 25 February 2003

Condition

Fair. There are two horizontal cracks in the upper and lower plank, and the varnish has discoloured.

Conservation

W. Hesterman, 1972: revarnished; additional glue added at the join; the reverse cleaned

Provenance

...; collection J. Striening Jr, Rotterdam, 1894;¹...; from Jonkheer H. Tedingh van Berckhout, Baarn, fl. 1,800, to the museum, 1900;² on loan to the Limburgs Museum, Venlo, since 2000

Object number: SK-A-1931

Credit line: Gift of Jonkheer H. Teding van Berkhout, Baarn

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.³ 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 1625.⁴ 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 attribution of this painting was only doubted in the 1976 catalogue of the Rijksmuseum’s collection,⁵ possibly because of the rather incoherent composition and the obstructive effect of the discoloured varnish. However, there is no reason to question the autograph nature of the painting. The assured and swift manner is of a piece with that of certain works of 1625-26, while the multi-figured composition with a high horizon recalls Van de Venne’s early Middelburg paintings.

Several motifs can also be found in the Four Seasons series of 1625 (SK-A-1771, SK-A-1772, SK-A-1773 and SK-A-1774), and in the album ’tLants Sterckte (The land’s fortress and strength) of 1626.⁶ The figure and the dog, both defecating under the bridge in the left middleground, also appear in Winter (SK-A-1774), as does the woman who has fallen over, exposing her bare buttocks. The dog sitting in the left foreground appears in Autumn (SK-A-1773) Royalton-Kisch has observed that the motif of the peasant and the cooper fighting in the right foreground reappears on folio 78 in ’tLants Sterckte.⁷ In the painting, a woman and a girl are trying to separate them. Other motifs can also be found in the album, such as the woman wearing a man’s coat and pulling her skirt up between her legs, and the dancing figure up on his toes.⁸

This practice of reusing motifs within his own oeuvre is particularly prevalent in works executed around 1625-26,⁹ which enables this painting to be dated c. 1625.¹⁰ It is not just the signature with the mention of ‘hage’ (The Hague) but also the church in the background, which looks very much like the Oude Kerk in Rijswijk, that indicate that the painting was made after Van de Venne’s move to The Hague.¹¹

The cooper’s broken hoops, which lie on the ground in both the album and the painting, are probably an allusion to the Dutch phrase ‘uit de band springen’, meaning to get out of hand.¹² An overturned basket of eggs was added in the painting, possibly in reference to the phrase ‘het van eieren maken’, meaning to go too far. Van de Venne had already used the motif of a basket with broken eggs near a couple quarrelling in a Summer Landscape of 1614.¹³

In keeping with the subjects of his painted and literary work, Van de Venne appears to be making a point of depicting the boorish and often ridiculous behaviour of peasants in this painting. The two well-dressed couples in the centre and the right middleground are pointing meaningfully at the men fighting. The colourful carnival procession also contains many indecorous elements, such as the woman who has fallen over, exposing her buttocks, the man defecating and the woman urinating under the bridge, the woman with a man’s coat around her shoulders, and the man vomiting from the window of a house. Small, carefully wrought details are characteristic of Van de Venne, such as the birds in the tree and the squirrel, as well as more macabre motifs like the two dead birds on the ice.

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. 301.

Literature

Knuttel 1917, p. 74, no. 33; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 105, 290, 296, 298

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 278, no. 2497; 1934, p. 295, no. 2497; 1976, p. 567, no. A 1931 (as attributed to Van de Venne); 2007, no. 301

Citation

Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Shrove Tuesday in a Country Village, c. 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6405

(accessed 22 November 2024 18:16:13).