Cows in a Stable; Witches in the Four Corners

1615

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 30.2 cm × width 30.6 cm
outer size: depth 4.1 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower centre, on the milk bucket: R. SAVER[...] / 1615

Technical notes

The support is a single oak plank with a horizontal grain bevelled on all sides. It seems to have been cut down slightly, specifically at the top, since the painted circle is interrupted by the top and bottom edges, and the bevel at the top is smaller. The ground layer seems to be whitish and thin. The paint layers are hard to judge because of the strongly discoloured varnish.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 23 September 2002

Condition

Fair. The varnish has discoloured severely, and is desiccated and crazed.

Provenance

...; sale, G.H. Schregardus (†) et al., Haarlem (W. Hendriks et al.), 7 October 1814, no. 44 (‘Een stal met beesten, waarin een boerin zit te melken, hoog 12, breed 11.5 duim [30.8 x 29.6 cm]’), fl. 18, to C. Gerling;¹...; sale, Adriaan Holtzman (1839-1905) et al., Amsterdam (C.F. Roos), 31 October 1905, no. 103, fl. 157, to the museum

Object number: SK-A-2211

The artist

Roelant Savery (Kortrijk c. 1578 - Utrecht 1639)

Roelant Savery was born in Kortrijk around 1578, going by the statements of his age in two attestations of 1618 and 1629. When the town fell to the Spanish in 1580 the family moved to Bruges, and then to Haarlem around 1585. According to Van Mander, Roelant was trained by his elder brother Jacob, who settled in Amsterdam in 1591. Roelant was living with him when the two brothers drew up their wills in 1602. After Jacob’s death in 1603, Roelant moved to Prague to work for Emperor Rudolf, and is first documented there in 1604. Between 1606 and 1608 he travelled to Tirol to make drawings of the landscapes there for the emperor. After Rudolf’s death in 1612, Savery carried on working for his successor, Matthias. In 1613 he was paid for a trip to Amsterdam, where in 1614 he made arrangements for the disposal of his brother’s estate after his widow’s death. He travelled back to Prague in 1615, but returned to Amsterdam in 1616 for the marriage of his nephew Salomon. The following year he is recorded as being a landscape painter in Amsterdam, and in 1618 he may have spent some time in Haarlem. He is also documented that same year in Utrecht, where he joined the Guild of St Luke in 1619. In 1621 he bought a house in Boterstraat that he shared with several members of his family, among them his nephew Hans II (1589-1664). It can be assumed that the latter, a landscape painter, who was also in Prague in 1615, was trained by his uncle, and that he worked closely with him, beginning in the 1620s. Roelant made another will in 1624 in which he left all his paintings and related drawings to Hans II.

Documents show that Roelant made good money with his brush. In 1626, the States of Utrecht paid 700 guilders for a painting that was presented to Amalia van Solms on the occasion of her marriage to Frederik Hendrik. In 1628 or 1629 he received 400 Reichsthalers for two paintings for the collection of the Elector of Liechtenstein. Nevertheless, he was declared bankrupt in 1638. Financially ruined and in a state of mental confusion in his closing years, he was buried in the Buurkerk in Utrecht on 23 February 1639.

Roelant Savery left a large oeuvre. From his early Amsterdam period came landscapes, animal, flower and genre pieces influenced by his brother Jacob, Hans Bol, Gillis van Coninxloo and Pieter Brueghel. In Prague he found himself in a very artistic milieu, and made countless drawings of such subjects as the landscape in the Tirol, peasants, and views of Prague. After his return to the Dutch Republic he concentrated mainly on such successful subjects as landscapes with exotic animals. His output became less balanced from the 1620s on as a result of his collaboration with Hans II. His followers included Gillis de Hondecoeter, Jacob Marel and Allaert van Everdingen.

Yvette Bruijnen, 2007

References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 260v; De Bie 1661, pp. 125-26; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 132, 175-76, 242, 250; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 248-51; Erasmus 1908, pp. 3-13; Briels 1976, pp. 281-301; Spicer-Durham 1979, pp. 11-42; Dudok van Heel/Bok 1990; Bok in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 315-16; Briels 1997, pp. 377-79

Entry

This work, signed and dated 1615, occupies a special place in Savery’s oeuvre, not just because of the unusual subject of the main scene, but also for the witches and fabulous animals breathing fire in the four corners. There is only one other painting of a stable interior by Savery,² while the combination of a circular main scene with four depictions in the corners is also rare in his work.³

The Rijksmuseum stable is populated with cattle and livestock: cows, a ram, a goat and some sheep, and a sleeping dog.⁴ Smaller animals, such as a lizard and a frog, were added as secondary details. Raupp has given an erotic interpretation to the woman milking the cow in the foreground and the shepherd playing the wind instrument in the doorway.⁵ His argument is based on the only other stable interior by Savery, in which the erotic allusion is supposedly more obvious because a man and a woman are leaving the stable together while an old man remains behind to keep an eye on the cattle. However, the four corner scenes with witches in the present painting point in another direction. Müllenmeister believes that they have the apotropaic function of warding off evil. According to the superstition of the day, one of the ways witches caused trouble was by spreading disease among cattle, so Müllenmeister felt that the corner vignettes were intended to avert that.⁶ However, the addition of witches in order to ward them off is contradictory, and not very plausible, so as yet there is no satisfactory explanation of this puzzling scene.

The stable interior originated with the Christian iconography of the Nativity.⁷ There are no religious elements in the Rijksmuseum painting, so it must be regarded as one of the earliest secular depictions of the interior of a stable. Savery’s innovation paved the way for later profane variants by artists like Aelbert Cuyp, Paulus Potter and Isaac and Adriaen van Ostade.⁸

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. 265.

Literature

Erasmus 1908, pp. 60-61, no. 5; Müllenmeister 1985; Müllenmeister in Cologne-Utrecht 1985, p. 90, no. 15; DaCosta Kaufmann 1986, p. 252, note 18; Müllenmeister 1988, pp. 191-92, no. 15; Jansen in Dordrecht-Leeuwarden 1988, pp. 111-13, no. 5

Collection catalogues

1907, p. 239, no. 2134a; 1934, p. 257, no. 2134a; 1960, p. 278, no. 2137; 1976, p. 499, no. A 2211; 2007, no. 265

Citation

Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Roelant Savery, Cows in a Stable; Witches in the Four Corners, 1615', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20026268

(accessed 9 December 2025 17:14:33).