Harpsichord Lid Decorated with a Merry Company near a Country Mansion

Entry

This painting on the inside of a lid of a harpsichord is signed and dated 1626; but no artist with the name Schey or Schei is recorded. The artist has been assumed, most recently by De Maere and Wabbes, with no qualification, to be Flemish; but the patronymic seems not common in the southern Netherlands – or at least in Antwerp² – and does not occur in the registers of the Antwerp guild of St Luke.³ It is possible that, as the surname is succeeded by a colon in the inscription, it is an abbreviation like the Christian name. Thieme and Becker record a Ph. [Philip] Scheidam active in Hamburg in 1623;⁴ this otherwise unknown artist seems to be the only candidate⁵ who could be identified from printed sources with the signatory of the present work.

Maybe it was only because the Ruckers family⁶ – the most famous makers of harpsichords in northern Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century – was Antwerp-based that the artist responsible for the painted decoration of this lid was assumed to be active in that city. But the style of execution of this outdoor festivity is not typical of the Antwerp school in the 1620s.

The pictorial idiom is rather to be associated with the northern than the southern Netherlands in this decade; a stylistic point of departure might have been, for instance, the paintings of David Vinckboons I (1576-1631/33).⁷ Gierveld has suggested⁸ that the instrument may have been imported to the northern Netherlands – implying that the decoration was done there – by observing that the flag on the rowing boat, right, is the Dutch tricolour, inverted. This suggestion is likely to be correct as Giovanni Paolo Di Stefano believes that the harpsichord was indeed most probably a Ruckers instrument.⁹ His evidence is based on the shape of the impressions in the paint towards the bottom edge of the front/top of the lid (the reverse of the side with which this entry is concerned) made by the branches of three hinges after their removal. The outline of these imprints and the number and placement of the pinholes conform with those of the branches of typical Ruckers main lid strap hinges.¹⁰ Of course this evidence is not conclusive as other makers could have used similar-shaped hinges. In this case they were removed presumably when the lid was detached from the instrument perhaps during a refurbishment (grand ravalement).¹¹ How and where an artist such as Philip Scheidam, referred to above, was commissioned to decorate the lid must remain a matter of speculation.

Gierveld has described the present object as ‘a very fine painted lid’,¹² but the handling and the composition seem both naive and coarse belying the pretentious formulation of the inscription. And worthy of note is the absence of any comparable embellishment of a lid. A particular curiosity is the fictive, convex framing element: the strapwork-diapered panels with acanthus leaf centres and corners, the reposes decorated with trailing flower sprays applied with gold-coloured paint enhanced with black, are motifs most in favour around 1700.¹³

This object is about the same size as three other harpsichord tops in the museum (SK-A-4263, SK-A-4288, and SK-A-4947. Taking the Ruckers’s formulae as a guide, these lids, placed above the soundboard, would have been most likely made for an achtvoet, double manual harpsichord.¹⁴ The painted view would have been visible when the lid was open; this acted as an amplifier while the instrument was being played. Often hinged to the spine or long side of the lid was a flap to protect the key-well, which would be folded back over it when open.

Gregory Martin, 2022