A Baker Sounding his Horn

c. 1648

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 29 cm × width 23.7 cm × thickness 1.7 cm
outer size: depth 7.0 cm (support incl. frame)

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.8 cm thick. Wooden strips (approx. 1 cm) were added on all sides at a later date. The reverse is bevelled at the top, left and right, and has regularly spaced saw marks. The bevels on the left and right were slightly altered when the strips were added. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1618. The panel could have been ready for use by 1629, but a date in or after 1635 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, off-white ground does not extend over the edges of the support and barely fills the grain of the wood. It consists of white and very few minute orange pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
SK-A-301 A Baker Sounding his Horn
Paint layers The paint does not extend over the edges of the support. The initial lay-in of the figure was executed in a rather transparent greyish-brown paint, consisting of large white pigment particles and some small black, orange, ochre-coloured and blue pigments. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light, leaving the figure in reserve. His right hand, though, was added over the half-open door. The flesh colours, the white shirt and the leaves are opaque, whereas the rest of the painting is more transparently executed, with slight brushstrokes visible along the contours and some impasto in the leaves.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 11 June 2008
paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-301/1-2, 20 June 2008
technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 20 June 2008
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 10 November 2009

Condition

Poor. The paint surface is very abraded, especially on top of the higher parts of the grain of the wood. The paint has cracked locally and appears whitish. The red glaze used in the basket on the left has faded somewhat. The varnish is very thick and has yellowed severely.

Provenance

...; ? sale, D. van R. (†), Leiden (A. Delfos), 13 June 1801, no. 7 (‘Dit Stukje, vertoonende een Bakker, die in zijn hemd op den onderdeur van zijn huis leund, met een hoorn in zijn hand, schijnende te blaazen, terwijl het brood nevens hem in een mande legt, en wijngaard bladen hangen, op paneel, hoog 10½, breed 8½ duimen [27 x 22 cm]’.), fl. 200, to A. Delfos, for Leiden;…; sale, Arend van der Werff van Zuidland (1741-1807, Dordrecht), Dordrecht (M. Versteegh et al.), 31 July 1811 sqq., no. 78 (‘Door een Boeren Luiffel of Vengsterdeur, staat ten halven lijve een Bakker, in zijn Hembd, met een Muts op het hoofd, op een grooten Hoorn te blazen. Ter zijde van het Vengster, staat een Korf of Ben, waar boven eenige Wijngaardsbladen afhangen. op paneel, hoog 10 1/2, breed 8½ duim [27 x 22 cm].’), fl. 155, to Pieter de Heere van Holy (1768-1824), Dordrecht;¹ his sale, Rotterdam (W. van Leen and A. Lamme), 31 August 1824, no. 7 (‘Un Boulanger en chemise, devant sa boutique donnant du cor […]. Haut 2 palms, 6 mêtres, large 2 palmes 2 mêtres [26 x 22 cm], sur panneau’), fl. 706, to Johannes Rombouts (1772-1850), Dordrecht;² his nephew, Leendert Dupper Willemsz (1799-1870), Dordrecht, 1850;³ by whom bequeathed to the museum, with 63 other paintings, 12 April 1870⁴

Object number: SK-A-301

Credit line: Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht

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.⁵ 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

Curiously, Adriaen van Ostade, the master of the peasant genre, never depicted his figures cultivating the land, bringing in the harvest or mucking out a pigsty.⁶ On the other hand, he etched and painted a variety of tradespeople, such as the cobbler,⁷ the knife grinder,⁸ and the fishmonger,⁹ at work in village settings. The rough-hewn wooden architecture in A Baker Sounding his Horn is very similar to that in a number of peasant scenes by Van Ostade,¹⁰ and suggests that here too we are being presented with a village tradesman. His cap and plain open shirt were apparently the standard clothes worn by bakers, whether their businesses were located in villages or towns, as Jan Steen showed the Leiden baker Arent van Oostwaert dressed in the same apparel.¹¹ In Van Ostade’s picture he is blowing a horn to announce the fresh batch of bread in the basket beside him. This was practice in the Netherlands until 1912, when a Bakeries Act led to the abandonment of this means.¹² The composition of a figure seen close up leaning on a half-open door with the architecture set on a diagonal was employed several times by Van Ostade,¹³ and was probably derived from prints and paintings by Rembrandt and his circle.¹⁴

The Rijksmuseum panel and Steen’s Portrait of the Leiden Baker Arent van Oostwaert and his Wife Catharina van Keijserswaert of around 1658 are just two of the seven seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of bakers known today.¹⁵ Van Ostade himself made a second version, this time including a young boy, which is now in St Petersburg.¹⁶ The others are a 1650 work by Christiaen van Couwenbergh,¹⁷ one from around 1660-63 by Gabriel Metsu,¹⁸ and two by Job Berckheyde, one of them dated 1681.¹⁹ Slatkes has argued that all four are self-portraits, and that, combined with the fact that Steen’s painting is also an actual likeness, one should take seriously the possibility that Van Ostade depicted his younger brother Jan in the present panel.²⁰ And indeed, the latter was a baker until the end of 1650, when he became a weaver,²¹ but the lack of a documented image of him makes it impossible to verify Slatkes’s hypothesis.

It does seem likely, though, that the Van Ostade in the Rijksmuseum was the first to show the unusual iconographic theme of a baker blowing his horn.²² Neither the Amsterdam nor the St Petersburg paintings are dated. Van Ostade made an etching with the composition of the present picture in reverse, but it too does not bear the year of execution. Schnackenburg and others have assigned the Rijksmuseum work to around 1648,²³ while considering the etching after it to be from a much later period, namely the 1660s.²⁴ However, research into the watermarks in Van Ostade’s prints published in 1998 established that his etched Baker Sounding his Horn must have been made in 1648.²⁵ Schnackenburg’s early dating of the painting is supported by the dendrochronological examination of the Rijksmuseum panel conducted in 2009, which indicates that it was most probably ready for use in or after 1635.²⁶

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. 109, no. 8; C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, III, Esslingen/Paris 1910, p. 156, no. 29; J.A. Welu, ‘Job Berckheyde’s “Baker”’, Worcester Art Museum Bulletin 6 (1977), no. 3, pp. 1-9, esp. p. 3; B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle: Gesamtdarstellung mit Werkkatalogen, I, Hamburg 1981, p. 46; Slatkes in S.W. Pelletier, L.J. Slatkes and L.A. Stone-Ferrier, Adriaen van Ostade: Etchings of Peasant Life in Holland’s Golden Age, exh. cat. Athens (Georgia Museum of Art)/Lawrence (Spencer Museum of Art)/Ann Arbor (University of Michigan Museum of Art) 1994-95, p. 56; Slatkes in P. van der Coelen (ed.), Everyday Life in Holland’s Golden Age: The Complete Etchings of Adriaen van Ostade, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 1998, pp. 97-98; A. Ebert, Adriaen van Ostade und die komische Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2013, pp. 201-02

Collection catalogues

1870, p. 239, no. XXXVIII; 1880, p. 239, no. 263; 1887, p. 128, no. 1073; 1903, p. 201, no. 1815; 1934, p. 216, no. 1815; 1960, p. 233, no. 1815; 1976, p. 431, no. A 301

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, A Baker Sounding his Horn, c. 1648', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4906

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