Beskrivning: Se även beskrivning i den engelska versionen

Catalogue 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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David III Ryckaert | Interiör med glatt sällskap | Nationalmuseum