Peasants in an Interior, known as ‘The Skaters’

c. 1656

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 44 cm × width 35.2 cm
frame: height 60.5 cm × width 52.2 cm × thickness 8.5 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower right: Av. ostade 165[6 ?]

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 1.2 cm thick. The upper edge has been trimmed slightly. A wooden strip (approx. 0.8 cm) was added to the right at a later date. The reverse is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1614. The panel could have been ready for use by 1625, but a date in or after 1631 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, off-white ground extends over the left edge of the support, but not over the top, bottom and right edges. It consists of white pigment particles with a minute amount of black and red pigments.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The semi-transparent brown initial lay-in has remained visible locally, especially in the thinly executed ceiling. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light, leaving the main figures in reserve. The darker areas and the floor were thinly applied and are rather transparent, whereas the light areas are more opaque. A cross-section taken from the window shows that the rather thick blue sky, consisting of blue and white and a small amount of black, orange and red pigment particles, was applied on top of the first lay-in. Thin, dark lines imitating the lead latticework of the windows were subsequently added. Overall there is minimal impasto, slightly more so in the foreground and wooden ceiling, and few brushstrokes are visible.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 20 June 2008
infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 20 June 2008
paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-2332/1-2, 20 June 2008
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 12 December 2010

Condition

Fair. The ground and paint layers have some small losses at bottom centre. The paint surface is slightly abraded throughout, although more so in the fireplace, which is covered with overpaint and retouching. The purple glazed waistcoat of the man sitting in the right foreground has faded somewhat. The very thick varnish has yellowed, appears whitish at centre right and saturates moderately; a few drips can be detected in raking light. The varnish was partly cleaned in the past.

Provenance

...; ? sale, Hendrik Sorgh (1666-1720, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (auction house not known), 28 March 1720, no. 37 (‘Het soo bekende Schaetserydertje, door Adriaen van Ostade, extra puyk’), fl. 95;¹…; sale, Amateur de Monnikendam, Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 26 June 1799, no. 14 (‘Haut 1 pied 6 pouces, large 1 pied 3½ pouces [43.7 x 37.3 cm]. Bois. [...] Des patineurs de rétour dans une maison rustiques sont autour d’une large cheminée. Un homme débout vu de face, le dos tourné au feu, a un jeune homme à côté de lui: il parle à un autre qui assis vers le milieu, tient sa pipe, et des épirées de l’autre man, des patins sont près d’eux à terre. Un peu plus vers la droite est une vielle assise, donnat à boire à un enfant, tandis quelle parle à un vieillard qui se chauffe; celui ci a derriere lui un fumeur, et deux autres sont assis près du feu. Un barbet, des balances en bois, une chaise garnie d’un pot d’étain, sont sur le devant du tableau; une table est sous les fenêtres, on y voit du pain et du jambon. Ce tableau un des plus soignées de van Ostade doit avoir eu du temps même de l’Auteur, une préférence marquée, puisque C. Visscher en a tiré sa belle estampe, connu sous la dénomination des Patîneurs. [...].’), fr. 1,700, to Smit;...; collection Pieter van Winter (1745-1807), Amsterdam;² his daughter, Lucretia Johanna van Winter (1785-1845), Amsterdam;³ her husband, Jonkheer Hendrik Six (1790-1847), Lord of Hillegom, Amsterdam; his sons, Jonkheer Jan Pieter Six (1824-1899), Lord of Hillegom, and Jonkheer Pieter Hendrik Six (1827-1905), Lord of Vromade; from whose heirs, with 38 other paintings, fl. 751,400, to the museum, with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt, 1908

Object number: SK-A-2332

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Adriaen van Ostade (Haarlem 1610 - Haarlem 1685)

Adriaen van Ostade was the fifth child of the weaver Jan Hendricx van Ostade and Janneke Hendricx. He was baptized in the Reformed Church in Haarlem on 19 December 1610. According to Houbraken, whose information may not be reliable, he was a pupil of Frans Hals at the same time as Adriaen Brouwer. While Hals left no discernable imprint on his oeuvre, the influence of Brouwer, who lived in Haarlem from 1623/24 to 1631/32, is very apparent in Van Ostade’s early work. His activity as an artist is documented only in 1632, when he had already reached the age of 22. Peasants Playing Cards from a year later is Van Ostade’s earliest signed and dated picture.⁴ He first appears on the Guild of St Luke’s contribution list in 1634. On 30 March 1640, in settlement of a debt to Salomon van Ruysdael, the Court of Petty Sessions ordered him to pay three days’ worth of board at a guilder a day and to spend five hours producing a painting with a value of seven guilders. It is not known whether Adriaen van Ostade himself had lived in Van Ruysdael’s house and received instruction from him.

Van Ostade married twice, first to Machteltje Pietersdr, who was a Catholic, so he probably converted to her religion at the time of their wedding in 1638. Fifteen years after Machteltje’s death in 1642, Anna Ingels became his wife, a scion of a prominent Amsterdam Catholic family. The painter spent his entire life in his native city and appears to have been relatively well-off. In 1647 and 1662, he served as warden of the Guild of St Luke, and in 1662-63 as dean. From 1633 to 1669 he was a member of the third platoon of the second company of the St George Civic Guard. Living to the age of 74, Van Ostade had a long and productive career. He was interred in the family grave in the Grote Kerk in Haarlem on 2 May 1685.

Several hundred paintings by Adriaen van Ostade have survived, mostly depictions of peasant life but also a few landscapes, biblical scenes and portraits. More than 400 drawings, including over 50 detailed watercolours executed in the period 1672-84, have been preserved. A renowned printmaker in his own day, 50 of his etchings have come down to us. The Haarlem landscape artist Evert Adriaensz Oudendijck is recorded as his apprentice in 1663. According to Houbraken, Van Ostade’s younger brother Isack (1621-1649) was also his pupil, as were Jan Steen (1626-1679), Cornelis Bega (c. 1631-1664), Michiel van Musscher (1645-1705) and Cornelis Dusart (1660-1704). Van Gool also mentions that Willem Doudyns (1630-1697) trained with him.

Jonathan Bikker, 2022

References
C. de Bie, Het gulden cabinet van de edel vrij schilder const, inhoudende den lof vande vermarste schilders, architecte, beldthowers ende plaetsnijders van deze eeuw, Antwerp 1662, p. 258; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, pp. 347-49; J. van Gool, De nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en schilderessen: Waer in de levens- en kunstbedryven er tans levende en reets overleedene schilders, die van Houbraken, noch eenig ander schryver, zyn aengeteekend, verhaelt worden, I, The Hague 1750, p. 359; A.P. van der Willigen, Geschiedkundige aanteekeningen over Haarlemsche schilders en andere beoefenaren van de beeldende kunsten, voorafgegaan door eene korte geschiedenis van het schilders- of St. Lucas Gilde aldaar, Haarlem 1866, pp. 170-74; Fritz in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXVI, Leipzig 1932, pp. 74-75; A. Bredius, ‘Een en ander over Adriaen van Ostade’, Oud Holland 56 (1939), pp. 241-47; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lucasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1798, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, passim; B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle: Gesamtdarstellung mit Werkkatalogen, I, Hamburg 1981, pp. 28-33, 36-47; Schnackenburg in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XXIII, New York 1996, pp. 609-12; I. van Thiel-Stroman, ‘Biographies 15th-17th Century’, in P. Biesboer et al., Painting in Haarlem 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 99-363, esp. pp. 258-60; A. Ebert, Adriaen van Ostade und die komische Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2013, pp. 19-22; Seelig in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XCIII, Munich/Leipzig 2017, pp. 528-30

Entry

It was with pictures like The Skaters that Adriaen van Ostade secured his fame as the foremost painter of the peasant genre in the northern Netherlands. Far removed from the uproarious low-life revelries of the 1630s, much of Van Ostade’s output from the last three decades of his career casts the peasant in a new, positive light.⁵ The placid figures in these works, and the touching motifs of domesticity such as the child eagerly trying to drink from a glass held by her mother in the Rijksmuseum scene, are the complete opposite of the coarse and stupid boors from the onset. The initially schematic caricatures have also made room for more detailed depictions. Nevertheless, the figures’ facial features, behaviour and clothing clearly define them as peasants. For example, as Roodenburg has demonstrated, the way the man on the left stands, with his feet planted firmly on the ground and his hands held behind his back, was considered peasant-like at the time.⁶ Van Ostade had previously used this pose in an etching from around 1647⁷ and in a painting from the 1630s,⁸ and Rembrandt also employed it in a 1631 etching of a half-length peasant in profile and in another one of around 1630 with a full-length figure seen frontally.⁹ The latter print may very well have served Van Ostade as a source of inspiration for the standing man in The Skaters, who, like Rembrandt’s more corpulent bumpkin, has a knife hanging from his waist and a shirt sloppily unbuttoned at his belly.

Something else that sets this work apart from those of the first decade of Van Ostade’s career is that the peasants are no longer in a barn but an inn. This type of interior, with a diagonally placed side wall, a back wall and a ceiling was first employed by Van Ostade in paintings and etchings in 1646 and 1647, and would remain a stock formula since.¹⁰ Much more subtle than the spotlighting in the early pictures, the chiaroscuro in the present scene divides the composition into two planes, the foreground illuminated by light from the window and the background cast in shadow. Another characteristic of Van Ostade’s output from after about 1647 is the predominantly brown overall colouration with bright local accents, such as the red shirt worn by the standing figure. The interiors are also richly detailed. In The Skaters, for example, there is a lidded pewter jug and a pipe on the three-legged chair on the left, and a meal of ham and bread on the table before the window. Someone’s order has even been chalked up on the wooden plank surrounding the chimney. Scales are lying in the foreground, and there is a pair of skates at the feet of the standing man and his seated companion. It is, of course, this feature to which the painting owes its anecdotal title, and as the entry in the 1799 auction catalogue informs us, Cornelis Visscher’s engraving after Van Ostade’s composition was published under the same title.¹¹

The last digit of the date ‘165[.]’on The Skaters is not clearly legible. While it has always been interpreted as ‘0’ in the Rijksmuseum’s collection catalogues, Biesboer has read it as ‘6’, and Schnackenburg has said that the painting should be placed significantly later than 1650.¹²

That not all of Van Ostade’s works from the 1650s are of well-behaved peasants can be illustrated by a painting in which some are fighting with knives over a card game and that accompanied The Skaters in the 1799 auction.¹³ That picture has a similar composition, is also on panel and has the same dimensions as The Skaters, and according to the sale catalogue could readily serve as its pendant. Hofstede de Groot, however, read the date on it as ‘1658’,¹⁴ which would mean that it was executed two years after The Skaters if, indeed, the year on the latter work is to be interpreted as ‘1656’.

Jonathan Bikker, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, I, London 1829, p. 163, no. 202; C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, III, Esslingen/Paris 1910, pp. 335-36, no. 621; Biesboer in P. Biesboer and M. Sitt (eds.), Satire en vermaak: Schilderkunst in de 17de eeuw: Het genrestuk van Frans Hals en zijn tijdgenoten 1610-1670, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum)/Hamburg (Kunsthalle) 2003-04, pp. 196-97, no. 48, with earlier literature; A. Ebert, Adriaen van Ostade und die komische Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2013, pp. 110, 119, 152, 155, 163, 164

Collection catalogues

1909, p. 393, no. 1816a; 1934, p. 216, no. 1816a (as dated 1650); 1960, p. 234, no. 1820 A1 (as dated 1650); 1976, pp. 429-30, no. A 2332

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, Peasants in an Interior, known as ‘The Skaters’, c. 1656', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4900

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