Lot Essay
Long titled "Le Menage Hollandois", this charming image of a peasant family playing with their children at home is one of several domestic scenes that Adriaen van Ostade painted, the closest of which in conception is the painting dated seven years later in the collection of H.M. Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace (see C. White, The Dutch Pictures in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen, 1982, p. 87, no. 132, pl. 111); compare also the domestic scenes in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Inv. no. 550, dated 1660); in the Wallace Collection, London (Inv. no. P169, dated 1663; see J. Ingamells, The Wallace Collection: Dutch and Flemish Pictures, 1992, IV, pp. 253-4, no. P169); formerly in the Schloss collection, Paris (C. Hofstede de Groot, op. cit., no. 487, undated) and the painting dated the same year as the present work that was in Lord Ashburton's Collection, The Grange (ibid., no. 462) and later appearing in the Marcus Kappel sale, Berlin, November 25, 1930, lot 14. As Adams observed (see under Exhibited: New York, National Academy of Design 1988, p. 99), details of the wonderfully ramshackle interior here depicted recur in the Queen's painting and in Ostade's watercolor, Peasants in an Inn dated 1674 (Teylers Stichting, Haarlem, Inv. no. P81).
Middle class images of parental devotion had been painted earlier by Dirk Hals and Judith Leyster and were a specialty in the 1650's of those famous celebrants of domesticity, Nicolaes Maes and Pieter de Hooch. As William Robinson has shown in his discussion of the Queen's painting (see the catalogue of exhibition, Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Royal Academy, London, 1984, pp. 285-86, no. 91), Adriaen and his brother Isaack (see especially the latter's drawing, Prayer before the Meal, dated 1644, Teylers Stichting, Haarlem, Inv. no. P82) were innovators in applying these themes to the lower classes in scenes set in the interiors of modest cottages. Adriaen had certainly taken up this subject by 1647, the date on his engraving known as "The Family" (Bartsch, 1, no. 46; a preparatory drawing is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Inv. no. III, 195), and executed several pen and wash drawings of the theme during these years and later (see, as examples, Bernard Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade, Zeichnungen und Aquarelle, 1981, nos. 48-50, 91-2, and 236). Robinson concluded that the Ostades' images implied that the values of domestic virtue championed for middle and upper class families by Jacob Cats and other Dutch moralists of the period also pertained to the peasantry. A seventeenth century print after one of Ostade's lost paintings of a peasant family at home bore the inscription, "Yet we love our little child from the heart and that is no trifle/Thus we regard our miserable hovel as a splendid mansion" (for the Dutch text, see Schnackenburg, op. cit., p. 58, no. 55). The implication is that the joys of family life compensated for the deprivations of poverty.
This picture has resided in several of the most important private collections of Dutch painting ever compiled and has been consistently praised. It was owned by the Count van Wassenaar-van Obdam, an important eighteenth century Dutch collector who owned no less than eleven Ostades, and later passed into the collection of Louis XVI's minister of War and Foreign Affairs, Etienne Francois Duc de Choiseul (1719--85). His catalogue commended the painting's composition, execution and details: 'les accessoires de toute la chambre ornent beaucoup ce tableau - dont la composition & l'exécution sont très agréable.' Subsequently it was part of the vast holdings of the Prince de Conti, who owned more than 300 Northern paintings and assembled one of the finest and most influential collections gathered in pre-revolutionary France. It was characterized in the catalogue as "d'un grand mérite, son effet est tranquille & la fonte de couleur belle." The artist A.J. Paillet who compiled the catalogue of the famous Choiseul-Praslin collection sale in Paris in 1793, singled it out ("cet precieux interieur") in his Introduction and commended its naturalism ("l'illusion de vérité est portée au plus haut degré de perfection"); of the 114 Dutch and Flemish paintings in that sale (including five other Ostades), it was surpassed in price only by works by Rubens and Rembrandt and those darlings of eighteenth century taste, Gerard Dou, Paulus Potter and Philips Wouwerman. In his important catalogue raisonné, John Smith wrote of it in 1829, "It is impossible to speak too highly of this gem: in luminous effect, and brilliancy of color and finish, it has never been surpassed." Reviewing the vast exhibition held in Manchester in 1857, the connoisseur, critic and friend to the Impressionists, Thoré Bürger, singled it out for commendation ("excellente peinture"). It had been lent to that show by Robert Stayner Holford (1808-1892), whose collection was assessed by the peripatetic Dr. G.F. Waagen in 1854 as second in Great Britain only to that of the Marquis of Hertford, now preserved in the Wallace Collection, London, but possessing "a far greater universality of taste." The author characterized the present picture as "Remarkable for its sunny light, and as harmonious as it is transparent and powerful in color." The Holford sale held at Christie's in 1928 is still regarded as one of the most momentous dispersals of Old Masters to occur in this century. The morning session of the Holford sale, consisting of 78 lots fetched the enormous sum of #364,094, and it remained the most valuable collection ever sold at auction until the Second World War
Middle class images of parental devotion had been painted earlier by Dirk Hals and Judith Leyster and were a specialty in the 1650's of those famous celebrants of domesticity, Nicolaes Maes and Pieter de Hooch. As William Robinson has shown in his discussion of the Queen's painting (see the catalogue of exhibition, Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Royal Academy, London, 1984, pp. 285-86, no. 91), Adriaen and his brother Isaack (see especially the latter's drawing, Prayer before the Meal, dated 1644, Teylers Stichting, Haarlem, Inv. no. P82) were innovators in applying these themes to the lower classes in scenes set in the interiors of modest cottages. Adriaen had certainly taken up this subject by 1647, the date on his engraving known as "The Family" (Bartsch, 1, no. 46; a preparatory drawing is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Inv. no. III, 195), and executed several pen and wash drawings of the theme during these years and later (see, as examples, Bernard Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade, Zeichnungen und Aquarelle, 1981, nos. 48-50, 91-2, and 236). Robinson concluded that the Ostades' images implied that the values of domestic virtue championed for middle and upper class families by Jacob Cats and other Dutch moralists of the period also pertained to the peasantry. A seventeenth century print after one of Ostade's lost paintings of a peasant family at home bore the inscription, "Yet we love our little child from the heart and that is no trifle/Thus we regard our miserable hovel as a splendid mansion" (for the Dutch text, see Schnackenburg, op. cit., p. 58, no. 55). The implication is that the joys of family life compensated for the deprivations of poverty.
This picture has resided in several of the most important private collections of Dutch painting ever compiled and has been consistently praised. It was owned by the Count van Wassenaar-van Obdam, an important eighteenth century Dutch collector who owned no less than eleven Ostades, and later passed into the collection of Louis XVI's minister of War and Foreign Affairs, Etienne Francois Duc de Choiseul (1719--85). His catalogue commended the painting's composition, execution and details: 'les accessoires de toute la chambre ornent beaucoup ce tableau - dont la composition & l'exécution sont très agréable.' Subsequently it was part of the vast holdings of the Prince de Conti, who owned more than 300 Northern paintings and assembled one of the finest and most influential collections gathered in pre-revolutionary France. It was characterized in the catalogue as "d'un grand mérite, son effet est tranquille & la fonte de couleur belle." The artist A.J. Paillet who compiled the catalogue of the famous Choiseul-Praslin collection sale in Paris in 1793, singled it out ("cet precieux interieur") in his Introduction and commended its naturalism ("l'illusion de vérité est portée au plus haut degré de perfection"); of the 114 Dutch and Flemish paintings in that sale (including five other Ostades), it was surpassed in price only by works by Rubens and Rembrandt and those darlings of eighteenth century taste, Gerard Dou, Paulus Potter and Philips Wouwerman. In his important catalogue raisonné, John Smith wrote of it in 1829, "It is impossible to speak too highly of this gem: in luminous effect, and brilliancy of color and finish, it has never been surpassed." Reviewing the vast exhibition held in Manchester in 1857, the connoisseur, critic and friend to the Impressionists, Thoré Bürger, singled it out for commendation ("excellente peinture"). It had been lent to that show by Robert Stayner Holford (1808-1892), whose collection was assessed by the peripatetic Dr. G.F. Waagen in 1854 as second in Great Britain only to that of the Marquis of Hertford, now preserved in the Wallace Collection, London, but possessing "a far greater universality of taste." The author characterized the present picture as "Remarkable for its sunny light, and as harmonious as it is transparent and powerful in color." The Holford sale held at Christie's in 1928 is still regarded as one of the most momentous dispersals of Old Masters to occur in this century. The morning session of the Holford sale, consisting of 78 lots fetched the enormous sum of #364,094, and it remained the most valuable collection ever sold at auction until the Second World War