Object data
oil on panel
support: height 28.5 cm × width 43.7 cm
outer size: depth 3.4 cm (support incl. frame)
David Vinckboons
The Fête Champêtre
c. 1610
Technical notes
The support is a single oak panel with a horizontal grain. The irregular back of the panel has bevels on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1581. The panel could have been ready for use by 1592, but a date in or after 1598 is more likely. The thin ground layer, visible at the edges, has a light colour. Scanning with infrared reflectography revealed that the composition was prepared with a sketchy underdrawing that roughly positioned the compositional elements. Heads of figures are suggested with just one line, defining the pose of the head. The painting is delicately executed, and is enlivened by the application of sketchy visible brushstrokes, particularly in the costumes, and deftly placed highlights in impasto.
Scientific examination and reports
- X-radiography: RMA, nos. 1669a-b, 14 August 1995
- infrared reflectography: R. Gerritsen, RMA, September 1995
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 25 February 2002
- technical report: L. Sozzani, RMA, 6 May 2002
Condition
Good.
Conservation
- M. Zeldenrust, 1993: complete restoration
Provenance
...; sale, Amsterdam (C.F. Roos), 31 March 1903, no. 26, as Dirk Hals, fl. 462.25, to the museum
Object number: SK-A-2109
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
David Vinckboons (Mechelen 1576 - Amsterdam 1630/33)
David Vinckboons was baptized in Mechelen on 13 August 1576. His father, the watercolourist Philip Vinckboons, was probably his only teacher. The family lived in Antwerp from 1579 to 1586 before emigrating to the northern Netherlands for religious reasons. At first they lived in Middelburg, but in 1591 they settled permanently in Amsterdam. His father died in 1601, and in 1602 in Leeuwarden David Vinckboons married the wealthy Agneta van Loorn, the daughter of a notary and solicitor. It is known from archival records that he had pupils, probably including his sons and Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630). In 1611 he bought a house in St Anthonisbreestraat in Amsterdam, which after his death served for a long time as a studio for his sons. Pieter, Philips, Johannes, Justus and David the Younger worked mainly as architects and cartographers; only his eldest son Philips was a painter as well. David Vinckboons died between 1630, the date of his latest painting, and 12 January 1633, when his wife was recorded as a widow by the municipal orphanage.
David Vinckboons specialized in landscapes with small-figured scenes of biblical episodes, peasants and groups of people out of doors. He also made a few history paintings with large figures, and probably large watercolour canvases in his father’s tradition. He occasionally added small figures to paintings by other masters, such as Gillis van Coninxloo. Vinckboons’s surviving oeuvre consists largely of drawings, chiefly designs for print series, book illustrations and the border decorations of maps of the world.
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 299r-v; Thieme/Becker XXXIV, 1940, pp. 387-88; Van Eeghen 1952; Goossens 1954, pp. 2-5; Lammertse 1989, pp. 13-41; Briels 1997, pp. 400-01; Schapelhouman in Turner 1996, XXXII, pp. 586-88
Entry
Young, elegantly clad couples have sought out an idyllic spot in the woods to give themselves over to the pleasures of music-making, drinking, eating and courtship. The fête champêtre is a theme that recurs frequently in Vinckboons’s oeuvre. In 1608 he included a merry company out of doors in a drawing of the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son as a design for a print series.1 His earliest painted Fête champêtre is from 1610,2 and it is also his first treatment of the theme that does not include a specific reference to the biblical story of the Prodigal Son. The Rijksmuseum’s Fête champêtre is usually dated around the same year.3
The theme of the fête champêtre is rooted in the southern Netherlandish visual tradition of 15th- and 16th-century calendar miniatures for the months of April and May, all showing well-to-do couples playing music and courting out of doors. Those motifs were further developed by artists like Hans Bol in moralistic scenes of the parable of the Prodigal Son and other works. It was from this background that Vinckboons introduced a new theme in the northern Netherlands with his fêtes champêtres. His depiction of the landscape was inspired by the work of another Flemish immigrant, Gillis van Coninxloo.
There are several elements indicating that this Fête champêtre should be regarded as a moralistic scene.4 They are the peacock pie, the playing cards and the gnawed bones lying on the ground, which are traditional symbols respectively of pride and lechery, a passion for gambling and the decay of the flesh. It has been suggested that The fête champêtre was a companion piece to Vinckboons’s Preaching of St John the Baptist in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-1782) with the latter symbolizing that even the sinful people in The fête champêtre can repent.5 This, though, is very unlikely, as is explained in the entry on The Preaching.
Vinckboons’s Fêtes champêtres were a major source of inspiration for paintings of similar subjects by Dutch contemporaries like Esaias van de Velde (SK-A-1765), Willem Buytewech (SK-A-3038) and Dirck Hals (SK-A-1796; SK-A-1722).
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. 313.
Literature
Goossens 1954, pp. 95-98; Amsterdam 1976, p. 273, no. 72; Amsterdam 1989a, p. 101, no. 6; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 616-17, no. 288; Kolfin 2005, p. 103
Collection catalogues
1903, pp. 285-86, no. 2559; 1934, p. 303, no. 2559; 1960, p. 329, no. 2559; 1976, p. 580, no. A 2109; 2007, no. 313
Citation
Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'David (I) Vinckboons, The Fête Champêtre, c. 1610', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6457
(accessed 22 November 2024 17:23:10).