Object data
oil on panel
support: diameter 10.2 cm
outer size: depth 4.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Adriaen van Ostade
Portrait of a Boy
c. 1648 - c. 1655
Technical notes
Support The single, circular, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.4 cm thick. The reverse has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1631. The panel could have been ready for use by 1642, but a date in or after 1648 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, greyish ground extends over the edges of the support and barely fills the grain of the wood. It consists of large white and small ochre-coloured and black pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The background was thinly and smoothly executed, leaving the figure in reserve. A cross-section from a darker greyish area reveals that the background was applied in one layer and consists of large white, small ochre-coloured and black pigment particles. The ground shows through along the contours of the figure, especially along the left side of the head, and has remained partly visible. The boy’s face was built up from dark to light, leaving the shadowed part semi-transparent, whereas the paint in the illuminated area is more dense and opaque. Brushstrokes are visible in the hat and to some extent in the face, and impasto was used for the highlights.
Anna Krekeler, 2022
Scientific examination and reports
- infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 11 June 2008
- paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, no. SK-A-4049/1, 11 June 2008
- technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 11 June 2008
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 9 September 2008
Condition
Good. The paint layer has minor losses along the upper right edge, and there are some small areas of discoloured retouching in the background. The varnish has slightly yellowed and appears rather dull.
Conservation
- H.H. Mertens, 1961: complete restoration
Provenance
...; sold by the Duchess of Rutland, Belvoir Castle, 1911;1...; from the dealer Paul Cassirer & Co., fl. 2,000, to Isaac de Bruijn (1872-1953), 1933;2 donated by Isaac de Bruijn and his wife, Johanna Geertruida van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Spiez and Muri, near Bern, to the museum, 1949, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum, December 1961
Object number: SK-A-4049
Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland
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.3 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
Adriaen van Ostade painted very few likenesses in his long career. Two group portraits by him are known, one of the artist himself with the De Goyer family in Museum Bredius,4 and another of an unidentified family in the Louvre.5 Portrait of a Collector, also kept in the Rijksmuseum,6 and the present picture of a young boy shown at bust length in three-quarter profile are among the scant single-figure likenesses in Van Ostade’s extant oeuvre. That this painting should be regarded as a portrait rather than an anonymous tronie is indicated by the lack of attributes, the sitter’s commonplace, bourgeois clothing and individualized facial features. The most striking item of his apparel, the hat with upturned and pinned brim, can also be seen in other pictures with figures wearing contemporary urban dress, such as Jan Miense Molenaer’s Woman Playing the Virginal,7 in which it is also worn by a young boy.
Van Ostade may have modelled this portrait on Frans Hals’s circular depictions of young boys executed in the first half of the 1620s, such as the one now in the Mauritshuis.8 Apart from the round format, the loose execution of Hals’s paintings may have inspired Van Ostade’s relatively sketchy technique, which is especially noticeable in the boy’s hair and hat. It is also this free brushwork that corroborates the dendrochronological dating of the picture to around the middle of the seventeenth century.9
Two circular portraits by Van Ostade were auctioned in Rotterdam in 1825.10 Unfortunately, it has not been possible to trace them, and the sale catalogue does not specify the age or gender of the sitters. It does, however, indicate that Van Ostade used this distinct format more frequently. Other records suggest that the Rijksmuseum painting is not the only one in which Van Ostade portrayed a boy. Two pendants of the artist’s sons are listed in French auction catalogues from 1793, 1800 and 1822, and Hofstede de Groot mentioned the presence of a bust-length likeness of a boy by Van Ostade in the Jussopoff collection in St Petersburg.11
Jonathan Bikker, 2022
See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
Collection catalogues
1976, p. 431, no. A 4049
Citation
Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, Portrait of a Boy, c. 1648 - c. 1655', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4909
(accessed 21 September 2024 14:55:30).