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Lot Essay
Religious scenes are rare in the work of the Haarlem painter of the Dutch Golden Age Jan Miense Molenaer. Strongly influenced by Frans Hals (1580-1666), with whom he shared a lively brushwork and a keen attention to expression, Molenaer is best known for genre scenes depicting daily life, village festivities, musicians, and domestic interiors, often infused with a humorous or moral undertone.
As in The Denial of Saint Peter, held at the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest (inv. 57.26), Molenaer transposes this episode from the Old Testament to the setting of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic: with the exception of the Virgin Mary, the women wear white headscarves reminiscent of Breughelian compositions, while young boys with blond curls lean over the cradle of the newborn. Their faces display a range of expressions revealing their thoughts: tenderness, surprise, curiosity, and devotion. Above them looms a group of onlookers, a compositional element already present in the Budapest painting.
While the shepherds are rendered with quicker strokes and more muted colours, the figures in the foreground, illuminated by a mysterious light source, stand out from the crowd. Evoking the tronies so beloved in Dutch painting, the faces of the Virgin, Saint Joseph and the shepherd on the right receive particular attention in the modelling of their features. The Virgin’s face, in particular, recalls Rubens’s influence in its rounded, soft, and rosy treatment of the flesh tones. This same attention to detail is evident in the depiction of the two lambs, the poultry, and the woven wicker basket, forming an almost still-life passage within the religious composition. Rare within the artist’s corpus, the painting is all the more remarkable in that it appears to offer a synthesis of Dutch painting at the height of the Golden Age.
As in The Denial of Saint Peter, held at the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest (inv. 57.26), Molenaer transposes this episode from the Old Testament to the setting of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic: with the exception of the Virgin Mary, the women wear white headscarves reminiscent of Breughelian compositions, while young boys with blond curls lean over the cradle of the newborn. Their faces display a range of expressions revealing their thoughts: tenderness, surprise, curiosity, and devotion. Above them looms a group of onlookers, a compositional element already present in the Budapest painting.
While the shepherds are rendered with quicker strokes and more muted colours, the figures in the foreground, illuminated by a mysterious light source, stand out from the crowd. Evoking the tronies so beloved in Dutch painting, the faces of the Virgin, Saint Joseph and the shepherd on the right receive particular attention in the modelling of their features. The Virgin’s face, in particular, recalls Rubens’s influence in its rounded, soft, and rosy treatment of the flesh tones. This same attention to detail is evident in the depiction of the two lambs, the poultry, and the woven wicker basket, forming an almost still-life passage within the religious composition. Rare within the artist’s corpus, the painting is all the more remarkable in that it appears to offer a synthesis of Dutch painting at the height of the Golden Age.