Ludolf de Jongh (Overschie 1616 – 1679 Hillegersberg)

Paying the Hostess

signed indistinctly on the seat of the overturned stool lower center: L D Jongh
oil on panel
26 x 25 ¾ inches (66 x 65.4 cm.)

Provenance:
Probably Dr. Bragge; sale, Sotheby’s, London, March 19-21, 1751, lot 41 (as Ludolf de Jongh, An Officer Paying his Landlady); Jocelyn Beauchamp, Langley Park, Norwich; sale, Christie’s, London, June 11, 1956, lot 117 (as “G van Tilburg”), bought by Sabin;Emile Wolfe, New York; sale, Sotheby’s, New York, January 28, 2000, lot 28.

Exhibited:
Waltham, MA, Rose Art Museum, 17th Century Paintings from the Low Countries, February 27-March 27, 1966, no. 19, illus.; Norfolk, VA, The Chrysler Museum; Providence, R.I., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; Tampa, FL, The Tampa, FL, The Tampa Museum, The Discovery of the Everyday; Dutch Paintings from the Wolf Collection, 1982-83, no. 21, illus.; Tokyo, Japan, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vermeer and the Delft Style, August 2, 2008-December 14, 2008, no. 24, illus.

Literature:
R. E. Fleischer, “Ludolf de Jongh and the Early Work of Pieter de Hooch,” in Oud Holland, vol. 92, 1978, pp. 49-67 (as Ludolf de Jongh); P.C. Sutton, Pieter de Hooch, 1980, p. 141, no. D20, pl. 182, as Ludolf de Jongh; P.C. Sutton, “Masters of Dutch Genre Painting”, in Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting, Philadelphia/Berlin/London, 1984, p. LI, fig. 88; R. E. Fleischer, Ludolf de Jongh, 1989, p. 69, pl. 80; R. E. Fleischer and S. Reiss, “Attributions to Ludolf de Jongh, some old, some new”, in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 135, no. 1087, October 1993, pp. 668-9, fig. 1; W. Franits, Dutch Seventh-Century Genre Painting, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 193-94, illus. 178.


The following note was written by Peter Sutton for the Vermeer and the Delft Style exhibition catalogue, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art

According to Arnold Houbraken (1718-21), the chronicler of artists’ lives, Ludolf de Jongh studied with a series of artists that worked in a wide variety of styles and subjects.  These included Cornelis Saftleven in Rotterdam, who specialized in peasant genre and landscape, Anthonie Palamedes in Delft, who was primarily a specialist in guardroom paintings, and Jan van Bijlert in Utrecht, who was a painter in the international tradition of the followers of Caravaggio, producing life-size history paintings and genre scenes as well as cabinet-sized depictions of both.  Clearly de Jongh was schooled in a wide variety of styles and subjects.  This undoubtedly contributed to the fact that he was an artist of exceptional versatility and range.  The artist was an accomplished painter of many genre types, including hunting and riding scenes, portraits, courtyards and gardens, and cityscapes and landscapes.

The scene depicts a stable or barn with an officer and a serving woman apparently disputing charges, presumably for his stay and for the quartering of his horse, which could be the spotted-grey piebald horse (called a schimmel in Dutch and German) being led out of the barn door on the left by a stable hand in a tall hat.  The soldiers seem to have marching orders since one of their company, visible through the doorway and wearing a steel harness and feathered hat, already sits astride his horse.  Apparently they are leaving temporary accommodations, which, given the uncertainty and untimely delivery of military wages during most of the war for the independence of the United Provinces, must have created many an occasion for disputes over the final reckoning.  Military figures, especially officers, were the brunt of satire in theatrical performances and art throughout this period, especially after the 12-Year Truce in the 80 Years War revealed public fatigue with the war.  With the signing of the Treaty of Munster in 1648 and the establishment of genuine peace for the first time after so many years, the satirical view of the military remained but was sometimes tempered by a more respectful regard for officers.

The present work was probably executed in the first half of the 1650s.  The officer—wearing an armored chest plate, buff jerkin, and neutral expression—has his hand in his pocket, but lingers before withdrawing it, as the tavern hostess harangues him with urgent expression and open palms.  Before them is a comical semi-military figure in floppy red beret, red shirt, sash and coat, with buff jerkin and open-mouthed boots.  He squats, holding a small liquor bottle in one hand and a clay pipe in the other, while looking back with an amused expression directly at the viewer.  A tradition in Dutch genre painting (traceable most recently to works by Jacob Duck and Nicholaes Maes) introduced figures that actively address the viewer.  (This seems to have had precedents in the theatre, where figure appearing on the proscenium acted as intermediaries to [or narrators of] the action).  De Jongh’s figure smiles and puts his finger to the side of his nose, pulling down the lower lid of his right eye—a humorous gesture that we encounter in the satirical works of Jan Steen as well as in Karel Dujardin’s so-called Story of the Soldier (Louvre, Paris; a copy is in the Yale University Art Gallery).  It seems to signal bemused incredulity, as in the modern expression in English, “my eye!”  Thus, he would comment on the tavern mistress’s protests and the officer’s laconic prevaricating.

On the overturned three-legged stool in the center foreground, the painting bore a false signature of “P d. hooch”—that is until a recent cleaning revealed that had been altered from the original “L.D. Jongh,” now once again visible.  No doubt an unscrupulous restorer altered it to make it more saleable as the work of de Hooch.  Another interesting (but in this case original) change to the panel that probably was initiated by de Jongh himself, is an addition of approximately 15 cm. to the top of the image which converted it from a horizontal stable scene to the more popular upright format that came into fashion in the early to mid ‘50s.  Since the addition begins at the top of the open and lighted barn door, it creates a more dramatic perspective on the left-hand side of the design.  The young Pieter de Hooch’s debt to this type of stable interior design is very clear in paintings like Soldiers and Serving Woman with a Trumpeter (Betty and David M. Koetser Foundation, Kunsthaus, Zurich) and A Man Offering a Woman a Glass of Wine (The Hermitage, St. Petersburg), although the younger artist tended to favor larger figures.  De Hooch would also return to the theme of paying a tavern hostess in what is probably a public house in one of his prime “Delft period” pictures (Private Collection; see catalogue Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vermeer and the Delft Style, cat. 22) as well as in a later scene, once again returned to the stable, from his Amsterdam period (Metropolitan Museum of Art; see catalogue, op. cit., cat. 23).