Mooy-Aal and her Suitors (G.A. Bredero, ‘Moortje’, 1615)

Entry

On the basis of the inscription on the female figure’s collar, Van Thiel has identified the subject as being derived from Bredero’s farce, Moortje, staged for the first time in 1615 in Amsterdam.⁵ The woman is the strumpet Mooy-Aal, who tries to balance the demands of her lover Ritsert, the young man standing in the background holding a glass of wine, and those of the old sea captain, Roemert, who has offered her a maid. Roemert is clearly the seated old man in the painting wearing a fur hat and holding a sack full of money. The fourth figure, on the left with his arm around Mooy-Aal, is more difficult to identify with one of the characters in the play on the evidence of his appearance. Nevertheless, as Van Thiel has shown, he can only be the sly flatterer Kackerlack, who cleverly suggests to Ritsert that he share Mooy-Aal’s affections with the wealthy but (judging by the empty money bag on the table) impotent Roemert. While his identification of the figures is convincing, Van Thiel’s suggestion that Moeyaert implied a confrontation between country folk, represented by Kackerlack and Mooy-Aal, and city folk, represented by Ritsert and Roemert, is not, and even flies in the face of Kackerlack’s facilitative role in the play.⁶

The four figures in the painting never appear together in Bredero’s farce. Van Thiel has shown that rather than representing an actual scene in the play, Moeyaert based the painting on Bredero’s preface, in which he divides the moral of his play into four lessons of life, each one being illustrated by one of the four figures that Moeyaert chose to depict.

With its large-scale, three-quarter length figures grouped around a table, the painting is quite unlike the history scenes set in landscape surroundings that Moeyaert usually painted. Most scholars have pointed out the Haarlem and Utrecht influences discernible in the work.⁷ In 1876, Kaiser was the first scholar to distrust the Metsu signature and assign the painting to Moeyaert.⁸ Indeed, Moeyaert’s monogram has clearly been altered into Metsu’s name by a later hand.

Without explaining why, Astrid Tümpel has dated the painting to 1628.⁹ Van Thiel, on the other hand, dates it ten years later, to 1638.¹⁰ A clue to how the painting should be dated, as Van Thiel has shown, is the costume worn by Ritsert. His flat falling band, edged with lace, came into fashion around 1630, and the slashed doublet he wears was popular between about 1625 and 1640. A good example of these two fashion elements being worn together (as well as a broad-brimmed hat) is the standard-bearer in Frans Hals and Pieter Codde’s so-called Meagre Company, executed between 1633 and 1637 (SK-C-374). To support his dating of the painting late within the range suggested by Ritsert’s costume, Van Thiel compared the spatial arrangement of the figures to Moeyaert’s 1640 Regents and Regentesses of the Almshouse for Old Men and Women.¹¹ However, the 1640 work is Moeyaert’s only known group portrait, and there is nothing else with which the present painting can be compared. Moreover, some of the figures were probably added to this portrait at a late stage.¹² A more convincing, albeit non-stylistic, argument for Van Thiel’s dating of the picture, is Moeyaert’s close association with the theatre from 1637 on.¹³

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

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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. 212.