Peasants Merrymaking in a Tavern
Artist/Maker
Material / Technique
Dimensionsh x w: Mått 59 x 95 cm
Inventory numberNM 623
Other titlesTitle (sv): Interiör med glatt sällskap Title (en): Peasants Merrymaking in a Tavern Label (en): Interior with Merry Company
DescriptionCatalogue raisonné: Description in Flemish paintings C. 1600-C. 1800 III, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2010, cat.no. 168: Provenance: Adolf Fredrik, no. 89; purchased 1771 by Gustav III from his father’s estate; Gustav III 1792, no. 64; KM 1816, no. 192. Bibliography: NM Cat. 1867, p. 45; Sander I, pp. 125, 133; II, p. 107; Göthe 1887, p. 234; Göthe 1893, pp. 288–289; Göthe 1900, p. 299; Zoege van Manteuffel 1915, p. 69; NM Cat. 1958, p. 178; Legrand 1963, p. 158; NM Cat. 1990, p. 322; Van Haute 1999, pp. 28, 81–82 no. A19, 88, 176, 178, 242, 249, pl. 19. A company of peasants have gathered in a dilapidated tavern interior. Standing at a ramshackle table in the centre foreground, an elderly man with a white beard fills his clay pipe with tobacco from a wrapper. A young woman seated at the table on the left nurses an infant. On the far side of the table an old peasant with a pipe stuck in his hat breaks into a wide grin as he raises his glass in a toast, while other drinkers sing or smoke. Two young children appear at the lower left before the large hearth, their backs turned to the viewer and the company of adults. A kitchen still life, grouped around a wooden barrel that partially blocks the landscape view through an open doorway, fills the lower righthand corner: a basket of eggs on a low bench; an overturned large brass pitcher on the floor, catching the light; a string of garlic; a broken egg; smoking paraphernalia; cabbages. A shelf attached to the back wall holds an assortment of domestic utensils, and a niche at the upper right contains further jars, bottles, and plates. Below, a man stands urinating against the wall. Scenes of peasant life, with their long tradition in art and literature, continued to be the most popular branch of genre painting in the southern Netherlands in the 17th century. The Dutch-born peasant painter Adriaen Brouwer was instrumental in the revival of the theme at Antwerp, where the appreciation of the public for peasant scenes led other artists to follow his example. In the early 1630s, he began to introduce new subjects, depicting the recent fashion of smoking in dark tavern interiors with drinking peasants. The number of paintings depicting tavern interiors with smoking and drinking peasants attributed to David Ryckaert III is astonishingly large. Although he painted the theme many times, he was rather inventive in preventing tedious repetition, as becomes apparent when comparing the present picture with his signed Tavern Interior of 1637 (present whereabouts unknown), in which the main group of peasants on the left shows the same basic composition.1 A closely related composition of c. 1638/1639 was on the British art market in 1937.2 The Stockholm tavern interior resembles Brouwer’s treatment of the theme in his late Peasant Quartet in Munich (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek), which includes a woman feeding (though not nursing) an infant, as well as two young children.3 Except for the two main figures in the foreground, Ryckaert uses Brouweresque peasant types with ugly beardless faces, grotesque in appearance and distorted in their movements. The facial features of the principal smoker in the centre foreground, an elderly bearded man with a wrinkled face, are more individualized and betray studies from a live model.4 Brouwer’s preoccupation with the exploration of human passions led him, in his later works, to concentrate on mimicry and expressive body language.5 This quality of overt emotional expression soon disappeared in Ryckaert’s paintings due to a progressive stylization of emotional attitudes into stereotypes. Like other peasant painters who followed Brouwer, including David Teniers II, Ryckaert came to favour a gentler, less insistently coarse and brutal type of peasant for his main characters. Their behaviour also becomes progressively more moderate and decent, perhaps more acceptable. Van Haute (1999) argued that the presence of the nursing mother and the children in this painting renders the moralizing message more acute, reflecting Ryckaert’s increasing aversion to the common behaviour of peasants. By depicting an owl – a nocturnal creature associated with spiritual darkness, ignorance, drunkenness, and debauchery – perched on a chair at the exact centre of the composition, the artist warns against overindulgence in alcohol and tobacco. Van Haute believed that this moralizing attitude indicates that the example set by Teniers exerted a growing influence on Ryckaert.6 According to Van Haute, the artist also incorporated elements in his work that suggest close observation of Teniers’ paintings of the 1630s, a tendency particularly discernible in his paintings of peasant interiors with still lifes of household goods.7 The iconography of these tavern interiors can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the particulars portrayed. Some authors believe they are to be regarded primarily as Vanitas pictures, as warnings against the transitoriness of all earthly things, including the pleasures of the senses. According to Klinge, many works of the genre are invested with this secondary meaning embodied in the figures of smoking and drinking peasants illustrating the “Five Senses”. The allegory of the senses also refers significantly to the meaning of the still lifes sometimes included as a Vanitas motif.8 Ember offers a closely related reading of these pictures as illustrations of the sinfulness of immoderate man. According to this interpretation the disorderly group of broken and dirty objects scattered about in the dilapidated interiors evokes, through the image of the “disorderly household”, the uncontrollable nature of immoderate man. Acknowledging the influence of 16th-century allegories of the Virtues and Vices, Ember established a link between the meaning of such still life elements and the sin of idleness: among the capital sins are Gula and Luxuria, the principal idea of which is immoderation, and these two sins, combined with Desidia or idleness, are followed by poverty.9 Whether the peasants are feasting or fighting, they always display the kind of excessive and coarse behaviour that should be avoided. Concerning the social function of the peasant genre generally, it is commonly agreed that these images served to satirize the lower classes for the amusement and edification of an urban elite. In order to educate the viewer, artists presented peasants both as objects of amusement for the higher social classes, and as exemplars of human depravity, carnality and foolishness. Zoege van Manteuffel (1915) dated the present work in the 1650s, in the artist’s mature period, while Van Haute (1999), based on the explicitly moralizing tone, the composition – the arrangement of a group of figures close to the foreground – and the type of staffage, regarded it as an early work, from c. 1638/1639. Van Haute lists a copy of the painting, executed by a pupil or follower of the artist.10 CF 1 Oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm, signed and dated “1637”, for which see Van Haute 1999, pp. 75 no. A7, 81-82 (under no. A 19), pl. 7. 2 Oil on wood, 53.3 x 81.3 cm, sale, London, Christie’s 12 March 1937, lot 148; see Van Haute 1999, p. 82 no. A20, pl. 20 (“c. 1638–39”). This picture shows the same figure of the standing elderly smoker with a white beard and a wrinkled face, as well as the old smoker with a pipe stuck in his hat. The embracing unequal couple included in this picture illustrates the point that activities such as overindulgence in alcohol and tobacco lead to illicit love. 3 Oil on wood, 43 x 57.3 cm, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. 109; see Renger and Denk 2002, pp. 36–37, illus. Cf. a painting attributed to David II Teniers, the Flemish Tavern of 1634 (formerly Coll. Markus Kappel, Berlin), which apparently illustrates the proverb “As the Old Ones Sing, so the Young Ones Pipe”, a theme also treated by Ryckaert beginning in the late 1630s. 4 See under n. 2 above. 5 See Renger 1986. 6 This was, however, not a consistent feature. In The Smokers (present whereabouts unknown), a variation of these two pictures, the reprimanding tone has been moderated, making place for an atmosphere of licentiousness. See Van Haute 1999, p. 82 no. A20, pl. 20. 7 The rustic kitchen or barn interior with an elaborate still life of household goods and utensils and/or groceries appeared as a theme in 1630 in Middelburg and Rotterdam simultaneously in closely related form. Herman Saftleven spent time in Antwerp from the early 1630s, where he would often work in collaboration with his elder brother, Cornelis, or with Teniers II. Whereas Zoege van Manteuffel (1915) was of the opinion that Ryckaert’s still lifes were imitations of those by the brothers Saftleven, according to Van Haute (1999) it seems more likely that he assimilated Saftleven’s manner via Teniers. 8 See Klinge−Gross 1976. 9 See Ember 1983. 10 Oil on canvas, 69 x 96.5 cm, sale, Cologne, Lempertz, 5 June 1975, lot 213; see Van Haute 1999, p. 179 no. C67.[End]
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