Farmyard

Entry

This farmyard scene was first catalogued by the museum as from the school of David Teniers II (1610-1690); then an attribution to Adriaen Brouwer (1603/1605-1638) was considered, before it was described in 1934 as the work of the Utrecht artist Charles de Hooch (active 1628-35), an attribution rejected in 1940, ² and again by Blankert in 1968, who thought it best characterized as from the Flemish school. ³ Since then no other attribution has been proposed.

Although Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) depicted two farmyard scenes, ⁴ the motif was not taken up in the Southern Netherlands after its temporary popularity until about the middle of the seventeenth century. ⁵ The ostensible subject of the first of Rubens’s depictions, in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, was the Prodigal Son, and the treatment of that subject by the Utrecht master Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651) might have provided a source for the present painting.⁶ The open-ended wagon is a variant of a type which appears in Rubens's Summer: Peasants going to Market (British Royal Collection Trust),⁷ although the wheels are higher – more like those in Rubens’s study for a wagon in the J. Paul Getty Museum.⁸ In the present picture the wheels are not of equal height, which would seem to confirm that the artist was of mediocre calibre and unlikely to be identifiable.

Gregory Martin, 2022