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Lot Essay
The composition relates to that of the painting of Seventy-One Netherlandish Proverbs by Bijlaert in the collection of the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, Leiden, on loan to the Rijksuniversitaet, Leiden (hung in the University Library).
The tradition of depictions of Proverbs, individually and in group compositions, in Netherlandish art is well-documented, its most famous exponent being undoubtedly Pieter Bruegel I. He did not himself invent the idiom, however, as earlier sources exist, including one of the first known, an incomplete engraving of 1558 by a contemporary of Bruegel, Frans Hogenberg. By the eighteenth century, however, the subject had lost much of its popularity, and examples of that date, such as the present painting, are comparatively rare.
Bijlaert, born in Rotterdam, settled in Leiden as an engraver and a drawing teacher; he is best known for his work in the 1760s as one of the pioneers experimenting with 'prenttekeningen' or 'print-drawings', a method for colour-printing, some dozens of which survive today. Bijlaert explained his method in a bilingual French-Dutch book published in 1772, a German translation of which appeared a year later in Leipzig as well as in Amsterdam.
The tradition of depictions of Proverbs, individually and in group compositions, in Netherlandish art is well-documented, its most famous exponent being undoubtedly Pieter Bruegel I. He did not himself invent the idiom, however, as earlier sources exist, including one of the first known, an incomplete engraving of 1558 by a contemporary of Bruegel, Frans Hogenberg. By the eighteenth century, however, the subject had lost much of its popularity, and examples of that date, such as the present painting, are comparatively rare.
Bijlaert, born in Rotterdam, settled in Leiden as an engraver and a drawing teacher; he is best known for his work in the 1760s as one of the pioneers experimenting with 'prenttekeningen' or 'print-drawings', a method for colour-printing, some dozens of which survive today. Bijlaert explained his method in a bilingual French-Dutch book published in 1772, a German translation of which appeared a year later in Leipzig as well as in Amsterdam.