A Riding School

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been preserved and there are selvedges on the left and right. Cusping is visible on all sides, although less so at the top and bottom.
Preparatory layers The single, yellowish-brown ground extends over the tacking edges. It consists of orange, brown and some white pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends over the tacking edges. The composition was built up in only one or two thin layers on top of the ground, holding most of the figures and animals in reserve, whereas smaller elements and the trees and ivy on the right were added on top of the background. A cross-section shows that the blue sky was applied in two layers; the first being a greyish blue consisting of white and some blue pigments, followed by a blue layer containing finely ground, deep blue pigment particles. The dark brown foreground, allowing the ground to show through, was executed in a single, thin layer composed of fine black, orange and some white pigment particles. Minor adjustments were made to the contours of the figures, for example in the hat of the man on the white horse and the couple in the right background. The paint surface is smooth, with some impasto applied with small brushstrokes in the leaves of the trees and in the highlights of the clothing and faces.
Ige Verslype, 2022

Fair. The paint surface is slightly abraded and shows a greyish haze in the highest parts of the paint of the blue shirt of the man on the white horse, the greyish sleeves of the man next to him and the blue blanket on the horse on the far right.

...; sale, Jacques Meyers, Rotterdam (auction house not known), 9 September 1722, no. 110 (‘Een Picqeur met Paerden en verdere Beelden [¼]. h. 1 v. 6 d., br. 1 v. 10 en een half d. [47.1 x 58.8 cm]), fl. 330, to Hendrik van Heteren (1672-1749), The Hague;¹¹K. Jonckheere, The Auction of King William’s Paintings, 1713: Elite International Art Trade at the End of the Golden Age, Amsterdam 2008, p. 298, no. 110. The names of the buyers of nos. 110 and 111 were mistakenly transposed in this publication; written communication Koenraad Jonckheere, 9 September 2009. his son, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren (1724-1800), The Hague (‘Een reyschool, waar in de Piqueur aan verscheiden Discipelen les geeft [...] h. 17 en een agste d., br. 23 en 5 agste d. [44.7 x 61.7 cm] D.’);²²‘Catalogus van Schilderyen, In’t Kabinet van den Heer Bewindhebber, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren, in ’s Hage’, in G. Hoet, Catalogus of naamlyst van schilderyen, met derzelver pryzen zedert een langen reeks van jaaren zoo in Holland als op andere plaatzen in het openbaar verkogt: Benevens een verzameling van lysten van verscheyden nog in wezen zynde cabinetten, II, The Hague 1752, pp. 451-62, esp. p. 461. his third cousin and godson, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren Gevers (1794-1866), Rotterdam (‘Très bon tableau, représentant un manège avec plusieurs chevaux et plusieurs figures. Toile, h 18 l 24 [46.3 x 61.7 cm]’);³³Catalogue raisonné d’une collection de tableaux appartenant à Monsieur A.L. Gevers, Page de Leurs Majestés le Roi et la Reine de Hollande 1808; transcr. in E.W. Moes and E. van Biema, De Nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum, Amsterdam 1909, pp. 145-51, esp. p. 151, no. 134. from whom, with 136 other paintings (known as ‘Kabinet van Heteren Gevers’), fl. 100,000, to the museum, by decree of Louis Napoleon, King of Holland, and through the mediation of his father, Dirk Cornelis Gevers (1763-1839), 8 June 1809;⁴⁴T.L.J. Verroen, ‘‘Een verstandig ryk man’: De achttiende-eeuwse verzamelaar Adriaan Leonard van Heteren’, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 4 (1985), pp. 17-61, esp. p. 17, notes 2, 3. on loan to the National Gallery, Washington, 1981-85; on loan to the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, since 2005

ObjectNumber: SK-A-477

The grey horse between the two posts in the middle is practising the capriole, a well-known dressage exercise in which the animal has all four feet off the ground, kicking out its hind legs and then landing with them.⁷⁷D.J. Kok, Wahrheit und Dichtung in den Reiter- und Pferdegemälden und Zeichnungen berühmter holländischer Maler des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts: Mit spezieller Berücksichtigung der betreffenden Kunstwerke Haarlemer Maler, Würzburg 1933, p. 91. Similar leaps can be seen in many of Philips Wouwerman’s paintings, such as the levade in a work in St Petersburg,⁸⁸The State Hermitage Museum; B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, I, Doornspijk 2006, pp. 172-73, no. A9; ibid., II, 2006, pl. 9. and the courbette in a version in Budapest.⁹⁹Museum of Fine Arts; B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, I, Doornspijk 2006, p. 171, no. A6; ibid., II, 2006, pl. 6.

These ‘riding schools’, as such pictures are called, were a typically Dutch subject in the second half of the seventeenth century, and like hunting scenes they recorded the amusements of the elite. Wouwerman was not the only one to produce paintings of dressage,¹⁰¹⁰See, for example, Aelbert Cuyp’s Riding Lesson of c. 1660 in the Toledo Museum of Art; illustrated in W. Liedtke, The Royal Horse and Rider: Painting, Sculpture, and Horsemanship 1500-1800, New York 1989, p. 302, pl. 185. And Karel Dujardin’s Riding School of 1678 in Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland; J.M. Kilian, The Paintings of Karel du Jardin 1626-1678: Catalogue Raisonné, Amsterdam 2005, p. 226, no. 158, pl. 31. As well as the one by Johannes Lingelbach in the Rijksmuseum, SK-A-224. but he was one of the earliest and most important artists to adopt the genre.

Liedtke associated paintings of this subject with prints like the Maneige Royal of 1623 by Antoine de Pluvinel, illustrations by Crispijn de Passe, and the 22-piece Exercise of Cavalry of 1607 by Jacques de Gheyn.¹¹¹¹W. Liedtke, The Royal Horse and Rider: Painting, Sculpture, and Horsemanship 1500-1800, New York 1989, p. 102, note 29. On De Pluvinel see M. Platte, Die ‘Maneige Royal’ des Antoine Pluvinel, Wiesbaden 2000. Schumacher believes that Wouwerman owned De Gheyn’s standard work; B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, I, Doornspijk 2006, p. 126. However, the naturalism of Wouwerman’s horses makes it clear that there was no question of any direct borrowings from those publications. He probably used drawn preliminary studies, few of which have survived.¹²¹²For instance, the study in sale, London (Sotheby’s), 18 April 1994, no. 94 (ill.). For Wouwerman’s lost drawings see Buvelot in Q. Buvelot (ed.), Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668), exh. cat. Kassel (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister)/The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2009-10, p. 138.

Wouwerman continued painting riding schools over a long period. The first ones are from the early 1650s,¹³¹³The Horseman in a Courtyard dated 1649 in Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, was the forerunner of this subgenre, even if it is not a riding school, strictly speaking; see B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, I, Doornspijk 2006, p. 328, no. A399; ibid., II, 2006, pl. 370. and the last one from the mid-1660s. Schumacher allocates the Rijksmuseum canvas to the late 1650s or around 1660,¹⁴¹⁴B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, I, Doornspijk 2006, pp. 70 and 169 respectively. which agrees with the elegant setting and the refined use of colour. There are two documented copies, both slightly smaller than the original.¹⁵¹⁵B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, I, Doornspijk 2006, p. 169.

The earliest known record of A Riding School is in the 1722 sale of the collection of the Rotterdam collector and art dealer Jacques Meyers.¹⁶¹⁶K. Jonckheere, The Auction of King William’s Paintings, 1713: Elite International Art Trade at the End of the Golden Age, Amsterdam 2008, p. 116. He owned no fewer than 19 paintings by Wouwerman on his death.¹⁷¹⁷On Meyers and his collection see K. Jonckheere, The Auction of King William’s Paintings, 1713: Elite International Art Trade at the End of the Golden Age, Amsterdam 2008, pp. 90-116, 276-310.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, I, London 1829, p. 333, no. 454; C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, II, Esslingen/Paris 1908, p. 263, no. 44; B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, I, Doornspijk 2006, pp. 70, 169, no. A1, with earlier literature

1809, p. 83, no. 356; 1843, p. 72, no. 363 (‘warped cracks, worn all round on the edges of the frame, overpainted in the sky on the left, a worn spot on the rostrum’); 1853, p. 31, no. 335 (fl. 7,000); 1858, pp. 164-65, no. 365; 1880, p. 352, no. 413; 1887, p. 193, no. 1651; 1903, p. 304, no. 2713; 1934, p. 324, no. 2713; 1960, p. 347, no. 2713; 1976, p. 614, no. A 477

Gerdien Wuestman, 2022, 'Philips Wouwerman, A Riding School, c. 1658 - c. 1660', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6603