BALTHASAR VAN DEN BOSSCHE (ANTWERP 1681-1715)
BALTHASAR VAN DEN BOSSCHE (ANTWERP 1681-1715)
BALTHASAR VAN DEN BOSSCHE (ANTWERP 1681-1715)
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BALTHASAR VAN DEN BOSSCHE (ANTWERP 1681-1715)
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Property from the Orange Blossom Collection
BALTHASAR VAN DEN BOSSCHE (ANTWERP 1681-1715)

A painter's studio with an elegant couple; and A sculpture's studio with a well-dressed visitor

Details
BALTHASAR VAN DEN BOSSCHE (ANTWERP 1681-1715)
A painter's studio with an elegant couple; and A sculpture's studio with a well-dressed visitor
both signed 'B.V. Bossche' (lower center)
oil on canvas
38 ¼ x 45 ½ in. (97.2 x 115.6 cm.)
Provenance
Private collection, New York.

Brought to you by

Taylor Alessio
Taylor Alessio Junior Specialist, Head of Part II

Lot Essay

Balthasar van den Bossche studied under the Flemish genre painter Gerard Thomas, and was influenced by his teacher's interior genre scenes, especially the latter's depictions of well-furnished bourgeois rooms and conversation pieces. Van den Bossche established his own reputation for such works, and favored portraying the interiors of collectors' galleries and artists' studios, with the latter symbolising the arts that they practised; as evidenced in this pair of pictures representing a painter and sculptor's studio respectively.

The black man in the painter's studio wears a padlocked collar around his neck indicating that he may have been an enslaved person, or more likely the servant of the well-dressed woman beside him. A black boy is similarly collared in a portrait of a lady by Nicolas de Largillierre in the National Gallery, London. As explained by Rik van Welie, there is little evidence for the presence of African enslaved people in the Low Countries from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (R. van Welie, ‘Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial Empire: A Global Comparison’, NWIG: Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, LXXXII, no. 1/2 , 2008, pp. 47-96). There were instances of enslaved people being brought back to Antwerp – even though this was illegal – where they would often become personal servants, though their daily tasks differed little from those of domestic enslaved people in the colonies.

We are grateful to Dr. Jan de Maere for endorsing the attribution to Balthasar van den Bossche on the basis of photographs.

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