Object data
oil on panel
support: height 54 cm × width 74.7 cm
Pieter Codde
Family Group
1642
Inscriptions
- signature, in ligated monogram, on one of the books on the table: PC
- date, above the door: 1642
Technical notes
The support is a horizontally grained plank of tropical wood that probably came from Brazil (Hymenolobium sp., with the trade name Angelim or Sapupira). It is bevelled on all sides. The smooth ground layer appears to be whitish. There is possibly some underdrawing with the brush indicating the outlines of the tiles in the tile floor. The paint was applied smoothly. Most of the figures were reserved in the background, but the man in the door opening was partly painted on top of the background. There are some pentimenti in the figures, for example in the female sitter’s hands and in the sleeve of the second boy from the left. The fringe of the tablecloth was also altered. The back of the panel is coated with a translucent layer of beige paint on which letters appear that resemble the painter’s monogram.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 2 June 2003
Condition
Fair. There are three horizontal cracks and several smaller checks in the panel. The paint has become transparent, and there is abrasion in the tile floor and in the woman’s skirt. There is overpaint in the background. The varnish is discoloured and has crazed.
Provenance
...; collection John Howard Galton (1794-1862), Hadzor House, Worcestershire;1 his son, Theodor Howard Galton (1820-81), Hadzor House, Worcestershire, as Jan le Duc, 1850;2 his wife, Mrs Galton, London;3 sale (sold by order of her son, Captain Hubert Galton), London (Christie’s), 22 June 1889, no. 55, as C. Pot, £ 220 10s, to S.H. Fraser, Sunderland;4...; sale, London (Christie’s), 7 May 1904, no. 18, £ 283 10s,5 to the dealer Frederik Muller;...; private collection, 1906;6...; sale, P[...] and N[...], Paris et al., Amsterdam (F. Muller), 13 April 1920, no. 76, fl. 9,680, to the museum
Object number: SK-A-2836
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Pieter Codde (Amsterdam 1599 - Amsterdam 1678)
Pieter Jacobsz Codde was baptized in Amsterdam on 11 December 1599. His father was an assistant to the collector of beaconage, a form of harbour dues. It has been speculated that he studied with Frans Hals, Cornelis van der Voort or Barend van Someren. Codde is first recorded as a painter in the 27 October 1623 registration of his marriage to Marritje Aerents. He also moved in literary circles. Elias Herckmans dedicated his tragedy Tyrus to him in 1627, and a pastoral love poem written by Codde was published in Hollands Nachtegaelken in 1633.
Codde was involved in several unpleasant affairs. In 1625 he attacked the genre painter Willem Cornelisz Duyster during a quarrel in a place called Meerhuysen. In 1636, he was accused of raping his 22-year-old servant, for which he and the servant were locked up in Amsterdam Town Hall. In the same year he separated from his wife, which led to his inventory being drawn upon 5 February 1636.
In 1637, Codde was commissioned to complete the large civic guard painting, the so-called Meagre Company (SK-C-374), begun four years earlier but left unfinished by Frans Hals. Codde was one of the artists consulted by the art dealer Gerrit Uylenburgh in 1672 to value a group of Italian paintings. He made his will on 8 October 1669, and died nine years later. He was buried in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam on 12 October 1678.
Codde painted merry companies related in style to those by Anthonie Palamedesz. In addition to his genre scenes, Codde painted small-scale portraits in the manner of Thomas de Keyser, and history pieces. His earliest known dated work is A Seated Woman Holding a Mirror of 1625.7 There are few dated works after 1645. A painter named Albert Jansz is recorded as his pupil.
Gerdien Wuestman, 2007
References
Dozy 1884; Bredius 1888a; Playter 1972, pp. 14-25; Van Eeghen 1974; Beaujean in Saur XX, 1998, pp. 95-97
Entry
A couple with their children are depicted in a fairly plain interior against a greyish, undefined background. The youngest child is holding a piece of bread and appears to have just tossed a bit of it on the floor for the dog. The two older boys and their father are gesturing. Books lie on the table around a globe. It is not known which family this is, but the attributes on the table suggest that the seated man is a scholar.
The provenance is of no assistance in identifying the sitters. In the 19th century the painting was in the English Hadzor collection, where it hung in the library as a work by Johan le Ducq.8 It may have been acquired by the connoisseur Joseph Strutt, who assembled the Hadzor collection.9
In the 19th century, the painting was exhibited in Manchester,10 London11 and Leeds.12 In Manchester, where it was displayed as a work by ‘Jan le Duc’, it was seen by the French art critic Théophile Thoré, who scoffed (although without proposing another attribution): ‘Un prétendu Jan Leduc, daté 1642. Le peintre avait six ans’.13 Wilhelm von Bode, who saw it in the Bethnal Green Branch Museum in 1879, recognized it as a work by the genre and portrait painter Pieter Codde.14
Codde painted more such small-figured portraits of couples or family groups, some of which have the genre-like nature of the one in the Rijksmuseum. The composition of the Amsterdam portrait is very similar to that of a family group in London that was painted two years earlier.15 There, too, a man is seated by a table surrounded by members of his family, all of them standing. What is particularly striking is the correspondence in the poses of the sitters, such as the nonchalant posture of the man, with his legs apart, the child on the left, who appears to be walking forward, tilting his head slightly. Recurring, status-laden elements in Codde’s interiors are the ornate pediments of the door-frames, and the table with the oriental carpet.16 Laarman has pointed out that there is an identical still life of books and a globe in an undated portrait of a young man by Codde.17
This type of group portrait probably originated under the influence of Thomas de Keyser, who began making similar works in the 1620s, such as his Portrait of Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk of 1627.18 Also comparable to the present painting is a group portrait in the Rijksmuseum attributed for the first time to Willem Duyster in the present catalogue (SK-A-203).19
Codde chose an unusual type of wooden support on several occasions in the 1640s. Here it is a tropical wood, and his Adoration of the Shepherds (SK-A-789) in the Rijksmuseum, which was painted three years later, is on another type of wood, possibly walnut.20
Gerdien Wuestman, 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. 48.
Literature
Von Bode 1883, p. 149; Torresan 1975, p. 19; Laarman 2002, p. 68
Collection catalogues
1934, p. 71, no. 700 a; 1960, p. 72, no. 700 a 1; 1976, p. 171, no. A 2836; 2007, no. 48
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Pieter Codde, Family Group, 1642', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8151
(accessed 10 November 2024 08:01:51).