All works in Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum

Nicolaes Knupfer

Messalina and Silius before the Return of Claudius ?

c. 1645 - c. 1650

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 59.7 cm × width 74.4 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

  • signature, bottom left, near the grapevine: NKnupfer
  • inscription, on the reverse: St. CLOUD TABLEAU RECLAMÉ

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of two horizontally grained, butt-joined oak planks (18.5-20 and 41.2-39.7 cm), approx. 1 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1628. The panel could have been ready for use by 1639, but a date in or after 1645 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, warm pinkish ground extends partially over the edges of the support. It consists of mostly translucent white pigment particles with earth 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. A first lay-in in the form of a dark, fluid sketch in dilute, transparent browns defined the contours of the background and figures, and introduced some modelling. It has remained most visible in shadowy areas, for example in the hair on the neck of Gaius Silius lying on the bed, and was also used to create mid-tones by partially covering it with a transparent, light, cool scumble, as can be seen in the legs and arms of the figures. The composition was generally built up from the back to the front and from dark to light, using reserves for most elements, the edges of which were left open and visible in various places. Contour shifts were made in the final stage, particularly in fabrics and figures. Pentimenti include the leg and arm positions of the intertwined figures on the table top, the extension of the bed on the right, and the shortening of the bench in the foreground. The illuminated flesh tones are impasted and were blended wet in wet. The consistency of the upper paint layer is medium rich. The wooden ceiling and fringes of the canopy bed display decorative patterns scratched into the wet paint with the butt end of a brush, as well as parallel straight-edge lines. The latter were used for the window partitions as well, occasionally emphasized with additional thin brown strokes carefully laid into the incised grooves. Intermittent dark contour lines on top make final corrections to redefine forms.
Gwen Tauber, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

  • infrared photography: G. Tauber, RMA, 20 November 2009
  • paint samples: G. Tauber, RMA, nos. SK-A-4779/1-2, 20 November 2009
  • technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 20 November 2009
  • dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 8 January 2010

Condition

Fair. A canvas strip was glued along the length of the join on the reverse. There is a hole in the panel on the top, approx. 35 cm from the left, possibly related to a former hanging system. The grain of the wood has become disturbingly apparent, due to the increased transparency of the ground and paint layers. The dark top paint layer shows traction cracks, primarily in dark hair, notably in that of the lutenist. Final glazes are strongly abraded throughout, as is the signature. There are numerous scratches in the figures and two minuscule deep gouges have removed the pupils of the woman in the centre.

Provenance

…; collection Louis Philippe Joseph (1747-1793), Duc d’Orléans, Palais Royal, Paris, after 1788;1 from whom, with the other Dutch and Flemish paintings in his collection, fr. 350,000, to Thomas Moore Slade, London, 1792/93;2 his sale, London, Pall Mall (auction house not known), April 1793, no. 251, as J.B. Weenix (‘The debauch’);3…; ? sale, Auguste-Louis-César-Hipolite-Théodore de L’Espinasse de Langeac, Comte d’Arlet, Paris (Constantin), 4 January 1815 sqq., no. 204, as N. Knupfer (‘L’enfant prodigue avec ses maîtresses, ou peut-être un musico hollandaise, sur bois’);…; sale, William Wilkins (1778-1839, Cambridge), London (Christie’s), 22 May 1830, no. 2, as Jan Baptist Weenix (‘The Prodigal Son, or La Gaieté bacchique, as it was denominated when in the Orléans collection. An inscription on the back of the panel states it to have been one of the Tableaux reclamés de St. Cloud, from which palace it had been surreptitiously abstracted. Houbraken, in his Lives of the Painters, notices this picture as being one of the most celebrated of this master’), bought in at 40 gns;4…; collection Count André Mniszech (1823-1905), Paris;5…; collection Adolphe Schloss (c. 1842/43-1910) and his wife, Lucie Schloss (1858-1938), Paris; confiscated by the Nazis from their children, Château de Chambon, near Tulle, 1943; restituted to the Schloss family after World War II; their sale, Paris (Galerie Charpentier), 25 May 1949, no. 28, fr. 480,000;6…; private collection, Le Verviers, near Liège;7…; sale, The Duke of Beaufort et al., London (Sotheby’s), 10 December 1980, no.18,000, to the dealer Hoogsteder; from whom purchased by the museum, as a gift from the Rijksmuseum-Stichting, 1981

Object number: SK-A-4779

Credit line: Gift of the Rijksmuseum-Stichting

Copyright: Public domain

The artist

Entry

Kuznetzow states that this picture used to have the false signature ‘B. We….x’,11 and was thus attributed to Jan Baptist Weenix when it was in the collection of the Duc d’Orléans in the eighteenth century. This led to it being wrongly identified at an auction in 1830 as a work described by Houbraken in his biography of Weenix as ‘a merry company, the Prodigal Son according to some’.12

Until recently it was thought that the subject was indeed the Prodigal Son, but then in 2004 Schoemaker came up with the interesting hypothesis that it is an episode from the secret marriage described by Tacitus of the nymphomaniac Messalina, wife of Emperor Claudius, and the consul designatus Gaius Silius.13 When the emperor’s counsellors told him about this extramarital deception it was feared that a coup was imminent, so Claudius travelled to Rome to sort things out. His wife and Gaius Silius were indulging in a bacchanal at which drink flowed in abundance, people gave themselves over to ecstatic dancing and similar debauchery. They fled (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to escape the emperor’s wrath when they heard that he was approaching. According to Schoemaker, Nicolaes Knupfer depicted the moment when the people on the table in the background saw a violent storm lashing distant Ostia, which was a harbinger of Claudius’s arrival. Knupfer was often very familiar with the written sources for his classical subjects, some of which were rather obscure.14 The identification of the scene with the story in Tacitus explains the odd group on the table and the man drawing his sword in the foreground.

Although this identification provides an attractive explanation of this unusual work, several caveats are in order. One also finds a figure on a table in a painting of the Prodigal Son attributed to Johannes Baeck in which a standing man holding a glass is pointing at something outside the picture.15 The debauchery in a drawing of a group of people in a brothel in the Rijksmuseum,16 which is traditionally attributed to Knupfer, is emphasized by a man on a table.17 In addition, Knupfer omitted several other elements associated with Tacitus’s subject, which is unique in art history. Messalina has not let her hair down, for instance, she is not holding a thyrsus, there are no overflowing wine casks, Gaius Silius does not have an ivy wreath, the women are not wearing animal skins, and Vettius Valens has not climbed a tree to observe the metaphorical storm approaching. Schoemaker suggested, not very convincingly, that these details are missing because the artist based the scene on a play about Messalina and Gaius Silius by Joost van den Vondel that was never published.18

Knupfer borrowed many elements from the countless depictions of the Prodigal Son in the brothel, such as the wine cooler, the plumed bonnet, the man raising his glass in a toast, the woman playing the lute, the prostitutes and the playing cards on the floor. The biblical story was treated in a similarly light-hearted way by artists from Knupfer’s circle like Jan van Bijlert, Maerten Stoop, Gabriel Metsu and Jan Steen.19 There are three other paintings of merry companies or brothels in Knupfer’s oeuvre which are in the same licentious vein as the Rijksmuseum picture but whose subjects cannot be determined precisely.20 The present panel has been variously dated to around 1638/39, the 1640s and around 1650.21 On the evidence of the dendrochronology it can be assigned to the second half of the 1640s.22

In the eighteenth century the work belonged to Louis Philippe Joseph, Duc d’Orléans (1747-1793), a cousin of King Louis XVI. He had inherited the bulk of his paintings from his great-grandfather, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans (1674-1723), but he very probably bought this one himself, after 1788 and before his collection was sold in 1792/93.23 It is clear from the old inscription ‘St. CLOUD TABLEAU RECLAMÉ’ in large black letters on the reverse that the picture hung near Paris in the Château de Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine) at the time. In order to raise money for his political ambitions, the almost bankrupt duke sold all his Dutch and Flemish paintings in 1792/93 for 350,000 francs to the English collector and art speculator Thomas Moore Slade.24 The description in the 1830 auction catalogue of the English architect and archaeologist William Wilkins states that the present panel was ‘surreptitiously abstracted’ from Saint-Cloud,25 which probably accounts for the term ‘reclamé’ inscribed on the back. This could have something to do with the stealthy way in which Slade shipped the works from France to England at night in 1793 in order to prevent French art lovers from trying to keep them in the country.26 Slade offered his Orléans collection for sale in the rooms of the Royal Academy in Pall Mall in London from March to June 1793,27 but it is not known who bought the Rijksmuseum painting.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

J.I. Kuznetzow, ‘Nikolaus Knupfer (1603?-1655)’, Oud Holland 88 (1974), pp. 169-219, esp. pp. 188-89, no. 51 (as The Prodigal Son in the Brothel); Rohe in J.A. Spicer and L.F. Orr (eds.), Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age, exh. cat. San Francisco (Fine Arts Museum)/Baltimore (The Walters Art Gallery)/London (The National Gallery) 1997-98, pp. 265-69 (as Bordello); K. Schoemaker, ‘Het huwelijk van Messalina en Gaius Silius ofwel bigamie in het oude Rome, geschilderd door Nicolaus Knupfer’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 52 (2004), pp. 173-76; J. Saxton, Nicolaus Knupfer: An Original Artist: Monograph and Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Drawings, Doornspijk 2005, pp. 122-24, no. 28, with earlier literature (as The Prodigal Son in the Brothel); J. Saxton, ‘Bigamie in het oude Rome, of toch een bijbels bordeel? Nogmaals over het onderwerp van het schilderij van Nicolaus Knupfer’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 53 (2005), pp. 204-08 (as The Prodigal Son in the Brothel); K. Schoemaker, ‘De verloren zoon verliest: Een reactie op Jo Saxtons interpretatie van Knupfers schilderij’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 53 (2005), p. 209

Collection catalogues

1992, pp. 61-62, no. A 4779

Citation

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022, 'Nicolaes Knupfer, Messalina and Silius before the Return of Claudius ?, c. 1645 - c. 1650', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.12052

(accessed 10 November 2024 00:47:20).

Footnotes