Object data
oil on panel
support: height 74.3 cm × width 114 cm
outer size: depth 8 cm (support incl. frame)
Alexander Adriaenssen
Still Life with Fish, Plums, Artichokes and Dead Birds on a Partially Draped Table with a Cat
1632
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower left, on the table edge: Alex Adriaenssen / fe Aº 1632
Scientific examination and reports
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 3 April 2004
- technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 23 January 2006
Provenance
…; collection Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911), The Hague;1 from whom on loan to the museum, 1907-11 (SK-C-805); donated to the museum from his estate, 1912; on loan to the residence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, The Hague, 1929-40
Object number: SK-A-2544
Credit line: Gift of the heirs of C. Hoogendijk, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Alexander Adriaenssen, the second child of Emanuel (a celebrated composer and lutanist, who died in 1606) and Sibilla Aelin, was baptized in the Sint-Jacobskerk, Antwerp, on 16 January 1587. He was brought up in a house on the Meir, and in 1597/98 enrolled as a pupil of the obscure Artus van Laeck. He became a master, as a painter in watercolour, in the Antwerp guild of St Luke in 1610/11. He married in 1611; Peeter Snayers (1592-1667) and Isabella Brant, the wife of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), were among those who acted as godparents of his six children. He is recorded as having had only one apprentice (in 1632), and as having lived in several Antwerp addresses without ever having owned a house. The inscription on his tombstone in the Sint-Jacobskerk, copied in the nineteenth century, gave his date of death as 30 October 1661.
Adriaenssen’s still lifes are listed in Antwerp deceased estates from 1634. Owners were members of the wealthy bourgeoisie, for instance a cloth and a feather merchant, a surgeon and an innkeeper; the widow of a fishmonger owned at her death in 1655 two still lifes of shells and one of birds. His most prominent Antwerp admirer was his acquaintance Rubens, who owned at his death in 1640 two still lifes of birds and fruit.2 But the greatest testimony to his art took place not in Antwerp, but in Madrid, where in his will of 1652, but effectively during his lifespan, the statesman, great collector and lover of Flemish painting, Diego de Guzmán (1580-1655), Marqués de Leganés, gave six still lifes by Adriaenssen to the king, Philip IV; four of these have survived the vicissitudes of the Spanish royal collection and are in Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.3
There are some two hundred extant works by Adriaenssen, who has been described as perhaps the most productive fish still life painter in seventeenth-century Antwerp.4 Apart from fish he mostly depicted fruit, birds, flowers and game in cabinet paintings.
His portrait by Jacob Deneys (1644-1708) was engraved by Antoon van der Does (1609-1680).5 The rubric reads: ‘Florum Avium et Piscium Pictor Excellens Antverpiae’ (excellent painter of flowers, birds and fish from Antwerp). He was also a heraldic painter, in which capacity he participated in the decorations for the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand’s Joyous Entry into Antwerp in 1635.
REFERENCES
G. Spiessens, Leven en werk van de Antwerpse Schilder Alexander Adriaenssen (1587-1661), Brussels 1990, pp. 13-28
Entry
The vegetable is an artichoke, the fruit, plums; beyond are grey gurnard and a carp on a terracotta colander; in the centre are two partridges and a string of songbirds among which are a lark and a goldfinch. Beyond is a basket containing a snipe, duck, kingfisher and an Alpine crow. In a basket beside the table is a partially plucked woodcock.
Some of these motifs appear in other works by Alexander Adriaenssen. The carp on the colander recurs in the still life of 1631 in the Konstmuseum, Gothenburg 6 and the one in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes;7 the basket recurs in the still life of 1647 in the Národní Galerie, Prague;8 the right-hand partridge is to be found in a picture of 1640 (whereabouts unknown)9 and in the State Hermitage Museum painting of seven years later.10
An attentive cat seems to have been first introduced into Antwerp fish still lifes by Clara Peeters (1607-after 1634).11 In 1631, the earliest year of his dated production, Adriaenssen twice introduced the animal: in a work last recorded in a private German collection,12 and in the still life in the York City Art Gallery.13 Unlike the cat in the Rijksmuseum Prodigal Son by Hieronymus Francken II (1578-1623) and Frans Francken II (1581-1642; SK-C-286, no particular significance should be attached to its presence14 other then as an amusing observation of the likely goings-on in a larder or kitchen. Artichokes were occasionally included in Adriaenssen’s still lifes; Vergara has traced their growing popularity in paintings from the 1580s onwards.15
The inscribed date of 1632 is within the estimate of the dendrochronological calculation for the use of the support.16
Gregory Martin, 2022
Literature
G. Spiessens, Leven en werk van der Antwerpse Schilder Alexander Adriaenssen (1587-1661), Brussels 1990, no. 8
Collection catalogues
1911, p. 1, no. 3a; 1976, p. 78, no. A 2544
Citation
G. Martin, 2022, 'Alexander Adriaenssen, Still Life with Fish, Plums, Artichokes and Dead Birds on a Partially Draped Table with a Cat, 1632', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5751
(accessed 25 April 2024 13:12:12).