A poultry dealer and a young woman with an array of fruit, vegetables, fish and game on a table before a house

This monumental market scene is a testament to the praise that Karel van Mander lavished on Joachim Beuckelaer when he wrote of him as ‘one of the most excellent masters, executing his works with great skill, as it were without effort’ (quoted in L. Campbell, The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600, London, 2014, p. 92). According to van Mander, Beuckelaer trained in the workshop of his uncle Pieter Aertsen, ‘who made him develop the habit of painting everything after life: vegetables, fruit, meat, fowl, fish and suchlike things’ (loc. cit.). This panel, dating to 1566, aligns closely with several works by Beuckelaer painted in the second half of the decade, when he was at his artistic and inventive zenith, including his Couple selling poultry and vegetables (Antwerp, Rockoxhuis) and Two women and a man selling poultry (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; fig. 1), both dated to 1567.

Large in scale and meticulous in their rendering, paintings by Beuckelaer would have made for expensive acquisitions for contemporary patrons, commissioned or purchased on the open market by the wealthy urban elite. Indeed, according to van Mander, so popular were his works, that in the 1570s they were changing hands for as much as twelve times their purchase price (Campbell, ibid, p. 92). Catering to educated audiences, whose pastime pleasures came to include the dissection and interpretation of images, the multifaceted nature of the painted scenes allowed for a multiplicity of readings: from moralising Christian implications and implied sexual improprieties, to elucidating references of classical writers like Pliny and Cicero and contemporary Humanists, like Erasmus. Such sources, read and available to learned elites collecting Beuckelaer’s work, add further to an understanding of how viewers may have understood or elucidated the present picture. Cicero’s De officiis, for example, which had a relatively widespread readership in the early modern Netherlands, discussed honourable and dishonourable trade. The professions so often depicted in Beuckelaer’s paintings fell under the latter classification in Cicero’s view as they encouraged pleasures of the body and palate (G. Irmscher, ‘Ministrae voluptatum: Stoicizing Ethics in the Market and Kitchen Scenes of Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer’, Simiolus, XVI, no. 4, 1986, p. 221). Erasmus himself was an enthusiastic reader of Cicero, even learning De officiis by heart, and similarly discussed the dangers of excessive eating, frequently linking food and sexual desire in his writings.

Many of Beuckelaer’s works, as with those of Pieter Aertsen, expanded the meaning of their subjects with the inclusion of background religious scenes, frequently taken from the ministry of Christ, with the purpose of reflecting a ‘moral’ choice for the viewer. In the foreground, laden tables of bountiful produce acted as temptations of earthly satisfactions, yet viewers were encouraged, through the painting’s scrutiny, to move beyond the plenty and towards the spiritual food offered by Christ beyond. Scenes of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha proliferated, showing Christ visiting the sisters at their home in Bethany, and reprimanding Martha for busying herself with household affairs rather than listening to his words. While this religious scene is absent in the present picture, the idea is still somewhat maintained, encouraging the viewer to bypass the tempting wares and enter the calm interior beyond.

Viewers will have been mindful of such associations when looking at the male figure in this picture, holding aloft a large chicken and standing suggestively close to the young woman. The bird itself was frequently linked with male genitalia and sexuality, and also associated with the Dutch word ‘vogel’ (bird), then being contemporary slang for sexual intercourse (‘vogelen’). Infrared reflectography reveals that the man’s hand was in fact originally positioned with its palm open, inviting the viewer to inspect the wares laid out on the table, before the artist adjusted it to hold a chicken, suggesting a deliberate adoption of the sexually suggestive interaction between the figures (fig. 2). This covert reading of is made more explicit in works painted directly after the present panel, like the Vienna Poultry sellers or the Antwerp Couple, where the sexual relationships between the figures is made much more overt.

In his conception of the composition, Beuckelaer laid out a relatively extensive scheme of underdrawing. While the artist is likely to have retained a large collection of studies of vegetables, animals, meat and figures in his workshop for use in his paintings, he rarely appears to have used them as transfers into designs, instead sketching freely from his stock of drawings and adapting, scaling and reversing them as necessary. In the present panel, Beuckelaer used two different media to plan his composition, with a thicker liquid medium in the hair of the figures and face of the young woman, and one finer in other areas like the details of the costume, still life and hands. Along with the positioning of the male figure’s hand, similar changes were made to the right hand of the young woman, which moved in several stages from an aloft position to resting on the handle of the fruit basket (which, in itself, was originally filled only with cherries).

Dendrochronological analysis reveals that additional panels were appended to the original between around 1660 and before 1700 in order to extend the composition across the bottom, right and top of the original panel (Ian Tyers, May 2023, available upon request), perhaps to fit within a desired space by the panel’s then owner. Indeed, when understood without them (as illustrated), the format of the composition, intimately focused on the sellers and their produce, aligns yet more closely with other paintings made by the artist in the years after 1556, with the dating of the four original eastern Baltic boards compatible with this date.