Object data
oil on panel
support: height 50.4 cm × width 172.2 cm × thickness 1.6 cm
outer size: depth 5.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Pieter Meulener
Landscape with a Couple Dancing outside a Country Mansion
1645
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower centre: P:MEVLENER·1645
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: M. van de Laar / L. Akerlund, RMA, 23 August 2013
Conservation
- conservator unknown, 1885: worm holes repaired
- W.A. Hopman, 1886: repaired
Provenance
…; collection Johannes Hendricus Balfoort (1818-83), Schoonhoven and Utrecht, from whom, fl. 175, to the museum, 18841
Object number: SK-A-803
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Pieter Meulener (Antwerp 1602 - Antwerp 1654)
Born into a dynasty of Antwerp artists, Pieter (Peeter) Meulener, who specialized in small-scale figures mainly in military scenes, was baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk on 18 February 1602 and died on 27 November 1654; he was buried in the Antwerp Sint-Andrieskerk.2 Meulener was not enrolled as a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke until 1632/33,3 when he was forty; he had been taught presumably by his father, who may also have painted battle scenes,4 because he is not earlier recorded as having been registered as an apprentice. The reasons for the twenty-year delay in his enrolment are not known; his marriage may be calculated as having taken place soon after his entry into the guild as he had a daughter aged twenty when he died.5
Meulener’s style owed much to that of his near contemporary Peeter Snayers (1592-1666), with whom he collaborated in depicting an event which took place in 1634.6 His career was also overshadowed by this artist; he was not apparently patronized by either King Philip IV of Spain or by the Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and merited only a few lines in Cornelis de Bie’s Het gulden cabinet.7 His extant oeuvre consists in less than a hundred paintings – notable are his depictions of the Entry of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp8 of 1635 and his Siege of Magdeburg of 1650.9
REFERENCES
F.-C. Legrand, Les peintres flamands de genre au XVIIe siècle, Paris/Brussels 1963, pp. 211-12
Entry
Although chiefly known as a painter of military scenes, a number of landscapes by Pieter Meulener are recorded in seventeenth-century Antwerp inventories including a ‘stucxken op doeck … van Plaisantie …’.10 In such a vein is a Festive Meal Outside a Country Mansion of 1650.11 More comparable with the present painting is the Coach Party by a Country Mansion of 1648,12 and the Extensive Landscape with Travellers, a Country House Beyond.13
None of these has the idiosyncratic proportions of the Rijksmuseum painting (which is on a conifer wood support); it was described as the cover of a clavichord in the museum’s catalogue of 1903 (and indeed it is noted as such in the museum inventory book). Properly speaking, it was in all likelihood painted as the lid of a virginal; those of this period typically measure approximately 50 by 170 cm.14 The lids and front flaps of standard instruments made by the Ruckers family in Antwerp were decorated with woodblock printed papers painted with decorative motifs or Latin mottoes.15 Some, however, were painted:16 an Annunciation to the Shepherds is painted on the inside of the front flap of the virginal in the Museo Nacional del Prado Allegory of Hearing by Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) of 1617-1817 and the latter was famously commissioned to paint a front flap for an instrument acquired by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (d. 1633).18 The inventory of the collection of the artist’s sister-in-law, Susanna Fourment, and of her husband, Arnold Lunden, listed a ‘claverin par Deodat Delmonte [Deodatus Delmont (1582-1644)] (peint)’.19 A virginal of 1650, in the Antwerp Vleeshuis Museum, has a near contemporary lid decorated with a landscape in the style of David Teniers II (1610-1690).20
The present painting seems to have been the only such commission to Meulener to have survived, as no other extant painting by him has similar dimensions. That the commission was not for a substantial sum of money is perhaps suggested by the thin application of paint.
Gregory Martin, 2022
Collection catalogues
1887, p. 109, no. 914; 1903, p. 173, no. 1563; 1934, p. 185, no. 1563; 1976, p. 381, no. A 803 (incorrectly as acquired in 1883)
Citation
G. Martin, 2022, 'Pieter Meulener, Landscape with a Couple Dancing outside a Country Mansion, 1645', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9093
(accessed 23 November 2024 12:43:24).