ADRIAEN JANSZ. VAN OSTADE (Haarlem 1610- 1685 Haarlem)

Peasants Drinking and Making Music in a Barn Interior

oil on panel
13 ¼ x 10 ¾ inches (33.7 x 27.3 cm.)

Provenance:
Bought by Jacques Odet (?), July 26, 1698 (according to a text on the reverse of the frame);
Private Collection, Belgium;
Sale, Sotheby’s, November 6, 2001, lot 32.

Literature:
W. Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution, New Haven, 2004, p. 42, fig. 32.


In a ramshackle barn interior, five peasants delight in the merriment of drinking and making music.  A theatrical spotlight draws the viewer’s attention to the middle foreground, where a man entertains his fellow country bumpkins by dancing and smoking a pipe.  The inebriated spectator reclining in the chair before him is joined by two men making music, one of whom is depicted with a hurdy-gurdy; a stringed instrument, often associated with the lower classes; it is played by rotating the wooden wheel at the top.¹  The colors of the peasants’ attire—light rose, delicate blue and soft gray—provide a subtle contrast to the monochromatic tones of the shadowy barn interior.

According to Hiltrant Doll, who is preparing a monograph on Ostade, Peasants drinking and making music in a barn interior is a characteristic work from the artist’s early career, dating from the mid-1630s.  The son of a linen-weaver in Haarlem, Ostade was first recorded in the Guild of Saint Luke in 1634; he would later become commissioner in 1647 and eventually dean in 1662.  Arnold Houbraken states that Ostade trained beside the Antwerp painter Adriaen Brouwer (1606-1638) in the studio of Frans Hals (1581/5-1666).  Although there is no extant documentation substantiating Houbraken’s claim, Ostade’s early work reveals the pronounced influence of Brouwer.  By the middle of the seventeenth century, Ostade had developed his own unique style as he brought to full fruition his trademark theme of low-life genre scenes and peasantry depictions.

Throughout his long and prolific career, Ostade’s style evolved in accordance with Dutch preferences and market demands.  His work was avidly collected by the Dutch bourgeois of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was also included in a great number of princely collections.  A conversation between the French art dealer Esmé-François Gersaint and a Dutch collector, regarding a work by Ostade which was purchased in 1750 for a record sum, aptly conveys what eighteenth century clientele found so appealing about the artist.  “We love works of this kind,” the collector said to Gersaint, “which truthfully show us what we are accustomed to seeing every day.  We recognize in them the customs, pleasures and cares of our peasants.  Their simplicity, their amusements, their joy, their sorrow, their characters, their passions, their attire…The peasants are painted according to their nature.  We believe that we see and hear them.”² Indeed, Ostade’s extraordinary talent for rendering the vivid facial expressions and animated gestures of his peasants continues to delight his modern day viewers.