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拍品專文
When Cornelis Hofstede de Groot catalogued this picture in the third volume of his Catalogue Raisonné, he favourably described it as ‘A fine picture of the good period; warm in tone’ (op. cit.). In the seventeenth century, hurdy-gurdy players were often, as here, roving musicians, having lost some of their prior status as court or cloister musicians in the Renaissance. These travelling minstrels were often from the poorest ranks of society – the blind among them – and their presence in towns and villages was seen by some contemporaries as a nuisance. By the middle of the century, municipalities required travelling musicians to obtain a license authorising them to perform in public.
Adriaen van Ostade’s charming genre scene places the viewer at the threshold of the interior, looking out at the ragtag group through a modest arched wooden doorway. Van Ostade’s use of such an archway to frame his composition was a favoured device among a diverse group of genre painters in the second half of the seventeenth century, among them the Leiden fijnschilders Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris, the Rotterdam-born Jacob Ochtervelt and the peripatetic Eglon van der Neer. The popularity of such images in the period was aided by their wide dissemination in print form, with the present composition having been engraved by Cornelis Visscher, arguably the most talented reproductive engraver of his generation (fig. 1). Visscher’s engraving was probably made in the first half of the 1650s, as he departed his native Haarlem for Amsterdam in the middle of the decade, and provides a terminus ante quem for van Ostade’s painting.
In part due to the renown spurred on by Visscher’s print, this painting enjoyed a particular appeal in the eighteenth century. It may well have been the painting of this subject that belonged to Cornelis van Dijck, a collector in The Hague, at the beginning of the century. Some decades later, its continued resonance can be seen in works like Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich’s Wandering Musicians of 1745 (fig. 2; London, The National Gallery), which clearly takes van Ostade’s painting as its point of departure.
Adriaen van Ostade’s charming genre scene places the viewer at the threshold of the interior, looking out at the ragtag group through a modest arched wooden doorway. Van Ostade’s use of such an archway to frame his composition was a favoured device among a diverse group of genre painters in the second half of the seventeenth century, among them the Leiden fijnschilders Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris, the Rotterdam-born Jacob Ochtervelt and the peripatetic Eglon van der Neer. The popularity of such images in the period was aided by their wide dissemination in print form, with the present composition having been engraved by Cornelis Visscher, arguably the most talented reproductive engraver of his generation (fig. 1). Visscher’s engraving was probably made in the first half of the 1650s, as he departed his native Haarlem for Amsterdam in the middle of the decade, and provides a terminus ante quem for van Ostade’s painting.
In part due to the renown spurred on by Visscher’s print, this painting enjoyed a particular appeal in the eighteenth century. It may well have been the painting of this subject that belonged to Cornelis van Dijck, a collector in The Hague, at the beginning of the century. Some decades later, its continued resonance can be seen in works like Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich’s Wandering Musicians of 1745 (fig. 2; London, The National Gallery), which clearly takes van Ostade’s painting as its point of departure.