Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 35.9 cm × width 40 cm
outer size: depth 6.1 cm (support incl. frame)
Adriaen van Ostade
The Fishwife
1672
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower centre, on the base of the column: Av. ostade / 1672
Technical notes
Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. The tacking edges have been partially preserved. Cusping is clearly visible at the bottom and on the right, and vaguely at the top and on the left.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, light grey-brown ground extends over the tacking edges.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends over the tacking edges. A first lay-in was made with translucent brown paint and the composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light, leaving the figure in reserve. The fishwife’s white collar was executed on top of the dark grey dress. Most of the tree behind the stall was reserved in the sky; details, such as smaller branches and leaves, were applied over the sky and roofs, and in the final stage several light blue dots in the treetop were placed to make the foliage appear less dense. The fish were first painted in a uniform grey before darker details and dotted highlights were added. The foreground in particular, with the main figure, was executed finely and in detail and with a variety of colours. Mainly opaque paint was used and appears to be rather densely applied. The paint surface is very smooth, with hardly any visible brushstrokes.
Anna Krekeler, 2022
Scientific examination and reports
- infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 20 June 2008
- paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-3246/1-2, 20 June 2008
- technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 20 June 2008
Condition
Fair. The paint surface shows a whitish haze and has a few small areas of loss, both especially along cracks. Residues of old varnish are noticeable, especially in the lighter areas. The varnish is very thick and has yellowed severely.
Conservation
- L. Sozzani, 2004: wax residues on surface removed; varnish layer reduced; minor retouching
Provenance
...; collection Gerret Braamcamp (1699-1771), Amsterdam, by 1752;1 his sale, Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 31 July 1771, no. 155 (‘Hoog 14, en breed 15½ duim [36 x 40 cm] Dk. Op den Voorgrond ziet men een Vischverkoopster, zy is bezig een Schelvisch schoon te maaken; men ziet ’er verscheide Visschen op den Bank liggen daar zy achter staat: het verschiet verbeeldt eene volkryke Vischmarkt en een Kerktoren. [...].’), fl. 1,705, to the painter and dealer Pieter Oets (1720-1790), Amsterdam;...; sale, Pieter de Smeth van Alphen (1753-1810, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 1 August 1810 sqq., no. 70 (‘op doek, hoog 13½, breed 15½ duimen [35 x 40 cm] Doek. Eene bevallige Vischvrouw, staande voor hare Bank, waarop onderscheidene Visschen geplaatst zijn, voor dezelve een Jongen met eene Mand aan den arm, verder andere lieden, en een Dorp in het verschiet.’), fl. 3,010, to the dealer Cornelis Sebille Roos; from whom, fl. 4,000, to Jeronimo de Vries, for Lucretia Johanna van Winter (1785-1845), Amsterdam;2 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; sale, Six collection, Amsterdam (A.W.M. Mensing), 16 October 1928, no. 34, fl. 47,000, to Sir Henri W.A. Deterding (1866-1939), London; by whom donated to the museum, with 17 other paintings, 19363
Object number: SK-A-3246
Credit line: Gift of H.W.A. Deterding, London
Copyright: Public domain
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
The subject of fish markets and fishmongers had already been treated in the second half of the sixteenth century by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Bueckelaer, and it took on a new lease of life in the northern Netherlands around 1650 in the work of Sybrand van Beest, Quiringh van Brekelenkam, Gabriel Metsu, Hendrick Sorgh and Emanuel de Witte, among others. Adriaen van Ostade painted several kitchen maids preparing fish and fishmongers peddling their wares door to door,5 but the Rijksmuseum picture and one of 1659 in the Louvre6 are the only two in his oeuvre that feature a fishmarket.
In the present canvas, the pictorial space and the viewer’s space become one as the slanting lines formed by the roof of the stall, and by the table and the base of the column extend to the corners of the composition on the right, while a boy seen from behind seemingly runs out of the scene on the left along the lower diagonal. The illusionism is further heightened by the fishwife herself, who looks at us as if at a customer, holding up a fish for our inspection. Some of these devices – the obliquely placed table and the woman’s seeming interaction with the viewer – already occur in the 1659 Van Ostade in the Louvre. Nevertheless, one wonders whether he knew Emanuel de Witte’s Fishmarket of around 1661-63,7 and was inspired by its energetic composition to intersect his diagonally placed stall with the right edge of the painting. That Van Ostade was fond of such illusionistic ploys is demonstrated not only by his two fishmarket scenes but by many other works as well. Obvious examples are those in which a single or more figures lean out of a window or doorway that is shown parallel to the picture plane.8
Comparison with a 1692 painting by Gerrit Berckheyde of the fishmarket next to Sint-Bavokerk in Haarlem,9 and a preparatory drawing for it,10 indicates that the architecture of Van Ostade’s fish stall, with its low roof and simple Doric columns, was probably derived from the buildings on the main square of his home town.11 The location, however, is definitely not the Grote Markt in Haarlem. The half-timbered houses and modest church spire in the background seem more suited to a village setting. A closely related version of the Fishwife in Budapest12 has been viewed as a collaborative work by Van Ostade and his pupil Cornelis Dusart,13 an attribution that is unlikely, given the quality of the execution. However, the fact that Dusart was influenced by the present scene is clear from a 1683 picture of his in the Rijksmuseum,14 and the preparatory drawing for it in Brussels.15 An undated painting of a fishwife by Job Berckheyde is probably also indebted to Van Ostade for its diagonal composition and cropped rendition of the fish stall, but has none of the enchanting illusionism and immediacy of The Fishwife under discussion here.16
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. 119, no. 42 (as dated 1667); ibid, IX, 1842, p. 117, no. 126; C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, III, Esslingen/Paris 1910, p. 185, no. 130; Robinson in P.C. Sutton et al., Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, exh. cat. Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art)/Berlin (Gemäldegalerie)/London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1984, pp. 287-88, no. 92, with earlier literature; De Jongh in L.M. Helmus (ed.), Vis: Stillevens van Hollandse en Vlaamse meesters 1550-1700, exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum)/Helsinki (Amos Anderson Art Museum) 2004, pp. 338-39, no. 58
Collection catalogues
1960, p. 234, no. 1820 A2; 1976, p. 430, no. A 3246
Citation
Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, The Fishwife, 1672', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4907
(accessed 22 November 2024 15:02:37).