The Wine Connoisseurs

Entry

Four men and a woman are standing in a remarkably brightly lit cellar with casks lining the right wall. Scattered throughout the room are attributes associated with the wine trade: funnels, a spigot, a hose, a corkscrew, pitchers and buckets. The officer in the foreground is holding a glass of wine up to the light and is giving it an appraising look. Like so many other works by Jacob Duck of Utrecht, this painting betrays the influence of Pieter Codde. It is above all the sober palette, smooth execution and attention to the rendering of textures that recall the work of the Amsterdam master (cf. SK-A-4844), although Duck’s distinctive palette of greenish brown tints differs from Codde’s. Elements that are frequently found in Duck’s compositions are the L-shaped room and the carefully depicted still lifes in the foreground.

The subject of a wine cellar is rare in 17th-century Dutch painting. Duck depicted it on at least one other occasion.⁴ Standing in that painting are three men, one of whom is appraising wine while another laughs and makes a gesture towards the viewer that is difficult to interpret.

Rosen associated these two works by Duck with one of the few other paintings of the subject, by Nicolaes Knüpfer, now in Utrecht.⁵ The similarities between the wine cellars of these two Utrecht artists are so great that one of them probably influenced the other.

The dress of the officers in the Rijksmuseum work matches the fashion of the second half of the 1630s. Recent dendrochronological examination has shown, however, that the painting has to be placed a little later, and the date in the early 1640s proposed by Rosen is plausible.⁶

Duck quite often repeated figures in his paintings.⁷ The officer examining the wine is the mirror image of the man in his other wine cellar, and the officer with the cape over his shoulder in the middleground puts in other appearances in the artist’s oeuvre.⁸

It is remarkable that nothing has ever been written about the iconography of Duck’s Wine Connoisseurs, for as in his other wine cellar he appears to be making a joke. The woman in the background, who is probably a prostitute, judging by the feathers in her hair, appears to be laughing at the man with the glass. Whereas in other cases one can argue whether a woman is pregnant or is merely wearing loose-fitting clothes, the woman in this work is clearly expecting a child.⁹ The combination of the pregnant woman and the man in the foreground who is holding the clear liquid up to the light makes it difficult not to think of scenes of doctors examining urine. However, there are no such scenes in Duck’s oeuvre, so one can only conjecture whether the association was intentional.

Gerdien Wuestman, 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. 61.