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Lot Essay
Having only resurfaced in 1985, this magnificent painting is an important addition to the painted oeuvre of one of the most renowned Dutch artists, Hendrick Goltzius. The composition was previously known exclusively from a print by the Haarlem publisher and art dealer, Adriaen Matham, of circa 1625-31 and two copies in oil. Lawrence W. Nichols first recognized the painting as Goltzius’ original when it was offered in the 1985 Zurich sale with an attribution to Christiaen van Couwenbergh.
Goltzius was born to a family of artists in the German Rhineland and moved to Duisburg at the age of three. According to his friend and earliest biographer, Karel van Mander, Goltzius trained as a young boy with his father, a glass painter. In 1574-75 he was apprenticed to Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, marking the start of a career that would see him become arguably the most important draftsman and engraver of late sixteenth-century Europe.
In 1600, at the age of forty-two, Goltzius appears to have given up engraving and turned to painting instead, possibly on account of the encouragement of van Mander. Fewer than sixty paintings by Goltzius are known today, only about a dozen of which remain in private hands. Dated 1615, this work was executed toward the end of Goltzius’ most prolific period as a painter. The largest number of the artist’s paintings were executed between 1613 and 1616, a period when, as here, he appears to have had a preference for compositions with only one or two figures, generally shown at half-length before a neutral background.
The theme of Unequal Lovers had a long history dating back to Classical Antiquity, with Cicero, Plutarch, Ovid and Plautus all having written comedies dealing with the theme. Northern European artists continued the tradition in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with printmakers like the Hausbuchmeister and Israhal van Meckenem having produced engravings of the subject. The subject’s popularity exploded at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, notably under the influence of Boccaccio’s Decameron (completed 1353), Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494) and Erasmus' Praise of Folly (1509). Painters, among them Jan Massys and Lucas Cranach the Elder, were particularly fond of the subject. The pairing of a somewhat grotesque old man and a knowing, youthful beauty under the guise of a morality lesson provided cover for artists to depict such a licentious subject.
Goltzius was intimately familiar with the theme, which he and his workshop had previously treated in several prints before 1600 as well as a painting dated 1614 showing an old woman and a young man (fig. 1; Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai). The present painting differs from the earlier examples, which tended to show the figures three-quarter or full-length in an interior. By stripping the composition only to its essential elements, Goltzius has here increased the visual impact of the central narrative in which the bag of coins passes from the elderly, syphilitic man to his young companion. That the young woman is a prostitute is confirmed by her coiffure with braids wound into a cone, her gesture of sticking a finger inside her clothing (a change Goltzius made during the painting process) and the rather phallic shape of bag of money.
Wayne Franits has described this painting as ‘surely ranking among the earliest genre pictures produced in the Dutch Republic’ (loc. cit.), marking it as a work that, in conjunction with Flemish art of the sixteenth-century, would come to influence subsequent generations of Dutch genre painters.
Goltzius was born to a family of artists in the German Rhineland and moved to Duisburg at the age of three. According to his friend and earliest biographer, Karel van Mander, Goltzius trained as a young boy with his father, a glass painter. In 1574-75 he was apprenticed to Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, marking the start of a career that would see him become arguably the most important draftsman and engraver of late sixteenth-century Europe.
In 1600, at the age of forty-two, Goltzius appears to have given up engraving and turned to painting instead, possibly on account of the encouragement of van Mander. Fewer than sixty paintings by Goltzius are known today, only about a dozen of which remain in private hands. Dated 1615, this work was executed toward the end of Goltzius’ most prolific period as a painter. The largest number of the artist’s paintings were executed between 1613 and 1616, a period when, as here, he appears to have had a preference for compositions with only one or two figures, generally shown at half-length before a neutral background.
The theme of Unequal Lovers had a long history dating back to Classical Antiquity, with Cicero, Plutarch, Ovid and Plautus all having written comedies dealing with the theme. Northern European artists continued the tradition in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with printmakers like the Hausbuchmeister and Israhal van Meckenem having produced engravings of the subject. The subject’s popularity exploded at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, notably under the influence of Boccaccio’s Decameron (completed 1353), Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494) and Erasmus' Praise of Folly (1509). Painters, among them Jan Massys and Lucas Cranach the Elder, were particularly fond of the subject. The pairing of a somewhat grotesque old man and a knowing, youthful beauty under the guise of a morality lesson provided cover for artists to depict such a licentious subject.
Goltzius was intimately familiar with the theme, which he and his workshop had previously treated in several prints before 1600 as well as a painting dated 1614 showing an old woman and a young man (fig. 1; Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai). The present painting differs from the earlier examples, which tended to show the figures three-quarter or full-length in an interior. By stripping the composition only to its essential elements, Goltzius has here increased the visual impact of the central narrative in which the bag of coins passes from the elderly, syphilitic man to his young companion. That the young woman is a prostitute is confirmed by her coiffure with braids wound into a cone, her gesture of sticking a finger inside her clothing (a change Goltzius made during the painting process) and the rather phallic shape of bag of money.
Wayne Franits has described this painting as ‘surely ranking among the earliest genre pictures produced in the Dutch Republic’ (loc. cit.), marking it as a work that, in conjunction with Flemish art of the sixteenth-century, would come to influence subsequent generations of Dutch genre painters.