Satire on Dutch Politics around 1619

c. 1619 - c. 1620

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 63.7 cm × width 101.9 cm × thickness 0.9 cm
outer size: depth 5.0 cm

Inscriptions

signature, bottom right: AMOOR

Technical notes

The support consists of three oak planks with a horizontal grain and is bevelled on all sides. The ground layer, the broad brushstrokes of which are visible, is probably light or whitish. Scanning with infrared reflectography revealed some fragments of underdrawing. There are some straight lines in the upper left corner that do not correspond with the painted architecture. The posture of the white dog in the foreground was changed in the course of painting. The painting is smoothly executed in a rather rigid style.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: L. Sozzani, RMA, 16 December 2002

Condition

Fair. The join between the upper two planks is loose. The paint is abraded and the varnish severely discoloured.

Conservation

H.H. Mertens, 1967: complete restoration

Provenance

...; sale, [J.B. Bicker], Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 19 July 1809, no. 59, as E. van den Velden (‘Deze rijke zinspelende Ordonnantie vol gewoel, vertoont in een landschap een Vorstelijk Persoon, zittende bij eene Tafel, als bezig een Kat de bel om de hals te binden, verder schijnt hij verzeld van Vorstelijken Staats en andere Lieden, ter zijde in ’t verschiet ziet men het Binnenhof in s’Hage. [...] hoog 24, breed 39½ duim [62 x 102 cm]’), fl. 35, to the museum¹

Object number: SK-A-434

The artist

Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (Delft c. 1589 - The Hague 1662)

According to Cornelis de Bie, Adriaen van de Venne was born into a southern Netherlandish immigrant family in Delft in 1589. De Bie also states that he was taught drawing and illumination by the Leiden goldsmith and painter Simon de Valck, and was then apprenticed to the grisaille painter Jeronymus van Diest, both of whom are now otherwise unknown.

Van de Venne is first documented in 1614 in Middelburg, where he remained until around 1625. It was in 1614 that he married the daughter of a Zeeland sea captain, Elisabeth de Pours. Dating from that same year are his earliest known paintings, Fishing for Souls (SK-A-447) and two summer and winter pendants.² On the evidence of an affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, it has been assumed that he spent some time in Antwerp before 1614. However, the local Middelburg painters were already working in Brueghel’s style at that time. The fact that he married a woman of Zeeland, and that his father and his brother Jan had settled in the town in 1605 and 1608 respectively, make it likely that he was in Middelburg before 1614. In 1618, his brother Jan opened a shop selling paintings and set up a publishing business, in which Adriaen played an important role as a print designer, poet, and illustrator of books by Jacob Cats, among other authors. Starting in 1618 he also designed several propaganda prints supporting the House of Orange and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Van de Venne is last documented in Middelburg on 30 June 1624. He then moved to The Hague, where he is recorded as a resident on 22 March 1625. His departure from Middelburg roughly coincided with the death of his brother Jan, and his decision to settle in The Hague probably had something to do with the presence of the court there, which played an important part in the subjects he chose. Among his earliest works in The Hague were the prints and paintings of Prince Maurits Lying in State (SK-A-446), several impressions of which were ordered by the States-General on 21 July 1625.³ He enrolled in the Guild of St Luke in 1625, and a year later acquired his Hague citizenship. He retained his house in Middelburg, and in 1630 bought another one in The Hague, from which he sold his prints and books. He was warden of the guild from 1631 to 1633 and from 1637 to 1639, and filled the post of dean from 1639 to 1641. He was also a member of the Ionghe Batavieren (Young Batavians) chamber of rhetoric. His fame was such that he was included in Johannes Meyssens’s book, Image de divers hommes desprit sublime, where it is stated that the Prince of Orange owned several works by him. In 1656, Van de Venne was also involved in setting up a new confraternity, the Confrerie Pictura, which broke away from the Guild of St Luke. At the end of his life he ran into financial difficulties. He made his will in 1660 after falling ill, and died on 12 November 1662. Two of his sons, Pieter (c. 1615-57) and Huijbregt (1634/35-after 1682), were also painters.

Van de Venne’s painted oeuvre can be divided into his Middelburg and Hague periods. In Middelburg he produced some of his most ambitious, meticulously painted works with politico-allegorical subjects, as well as many landscape scenes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder. In The Hague he concentrated almost exclusively on grisailles for the open market, most of them genre pieces with a comical, moralistic slant with inscribed banderoles, but he also made religious, allegorical works and a few large-scale equestrian portraits of rulers. He abandoned the meticulous style of his Middelburg period for a freer, sometimes even sketchy technique, which enabled him to boost his output to ‘hundreds of monochrome pieces, both known and desired by devotees of art’, as J. Campo Weyerman put it.

Yvette Bruijnen, 2007

References
Meyssens 1649; De Bie 1661, pp. 234-46; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, pp. 857-58; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 136-37; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 340-41; Franken 1878, pp. 7-30; Obreen II, 1879-80, pp. 108-09, III, 1880-81, pp. 258, 272, 275, IV, 1881-82, pp. 59, 128, 148, V, 1882-83, pp, 68-69, 71-74, 96, 102, 133, 153, VI, 1884-87, pp. 52, 226; Bredius II, 1916, pp. 374-93, VII, 1921, pp. 240-45; Bol 1958; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 37-74; Bol 1989; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, p. 321; Briels 1997, pp. 394-95; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 255-62, 354

Entry

This satire on Dutch politics around 1619 was auctioned as a work by Esaias van de Velde in 1809.⁴ That attribution was retained in the museum until it was labelled ‘Manner of Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne’ in the 1976 catalogue of the Rijksmuseum’s paintings,⁵ probably because of the satirical and political nature of the scene, and the similarity of the portraits of Maurits and Frederik Hendrik to Van de Venne’s engraved portraits of them.⁶ Closer examination, however, revealed the signature ‘AMOOR’, an unknown artist with no other works to his name.⁷

The painting is a compilation of several scenes, some of them copied from prints. It centres on the conflict between Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Advocate of Holland, and Prince Maurits during the Twelve Years’ Truce.⁸ In the centre foreground Maurits is belling a cat in a literal depiction of the saying taken from one of Aesop’s fables about a young mouse at a general council of mice proposing that a bell be hung around a cat’s neck to give prior warning of its approach. The significance of the motif in this painting is that it was Maurits who took the first step in the conflict. The outcome is shown in the left background in the form of Van Oldenbarnevelt’s execution on the Binnenhof in The Hague, a scene which is a literal copy of the print IVSTITIE AEN IAN VAN OLDENBARNEVELT GESCHIET, den 13 Maij 1619 (RP-P-OB-77.318) by Claes Jansz Visscher (fig. a). Instead of a human being, however, it is the cat that is being beheaded in the painting. Given the topical nature of the painting, it can be dated around 1619-20.

The different scenes have been brought together in a crowded, unbalanced composition, with the figures inserted like marionettes in rigid poses without any facial expressions. The painting is clearly more interesting as a historical document than as an art-historical object.

Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 306.

Literature

De Bie Leuveling Tjeenk-Brands 1970; Janssen in Amsterdam 2000a, p. 385, no. 216 (as circle of Van de Venne)

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 73, no. 314 (as Esaias van de Velde); 1843, p. 62, no. 323 (as Esaisas van de Velde; ‘a piece inserted in the panel’); 1858, p. 147, no. 328 (as Esaias van de Velde); 1880, pp. 309-10, no. 361 (as Esaias van de Velde); 1887, p. 174, no. 1490 (as Esaias van de Velde, old copy); 1903, p. 11, no. 97 (as manner of Esaias van de Velde); 1934, p. 10, no. 97 (as manner of Esaias van de Velde); 1976, pp. 567-68, no. A 434 (as manner of Van de Venne); 2007, no. 306

Citation

Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'follower of Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Satire on Dutch Politics around 1619, c. 1619 - c. 1620', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6808

(accessed 10 November 2024 20:58:28).

Figures

fig. a Claes Jansz Visscher, *The Execution of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt at the Binnenhof, The Hague, on 13 May 1619*, 1619. Engraving, 202 x 371 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-OB-77.318.