Cavaliers and Ladies

The support is comprised of two horizontally grained oak planks and is bevelled on all sides, only slightly along the right edge. The panel has been thinned and cradled. The off-white ground layer and the paint layers were applied thinly, smoothly and transparently, allowing the colour of the wooden support to show through. Brushmarks are visible, and there is some impasto in the highlights.

Kolfin 2005, pp. 122-23

Good. There is a disturbing area in the hair of the seated woman in the centre, either due to an earlier restoration or to the increased transparency of the paint layer.

...; collection Van Essen, Vik, Sweden;¹¹Granberg I, 1911, p. 110, no. 485....; collection Carl U. Palm, Djursholm, 1911;²²Granberg I, 1911, p. 110, no. 485....; collection William Gibson, Jonsered, Sweden;³³Stockholm 1967, p. 40....; sale, the Albright Leasing Corporation et al. [anonymous section], London (Christie’s), 30 November 1973, no. 94;...; collection Mr L.G. Holtom, Harbledown (Canterbury);⁴⁴Note RMA. from whom on loan to the Rijksmuseum, through the mediation of the dealer Richard Green, London, 1974-86; from whom, £ 150,000, to the museum, through the mediation of the dealer Richard Green, London, with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Rijksmuseum-Stichting, 1986

ObjectNumber: SK-A-4844

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Rijksmuseum-Stichting

In the 1620s, Codde began specializing in merry companies in the tradition of Haarlem artists like Dirck Hals.⁶⁶Kolfin 2005, p. 110. He invariably placed his figures in interior settings which, mainly in the 1630s, often have Renaissance-style wainscoting and door-frames.⁷⁷Several are illustrated in Philadelphia etc. 1984, pp. 176-79.

The well-preserved painting in the Rijksmuseum, which is rightly considered to be a highlight in Codde’s oeuvre, is a typical work from the first half of the 1630s. Among its noteworthy stylistic features are the superb rendering of textures, the smooth brushwork and the cool silver greys and browns. As he so often did, Codde tucked his monogram away on an object on a table, in this case a mirror, and he put the date 1633 on the pediment over the door.⁸⁸An earlier, incorrect reading of 1635, published in coll. cat. 1976, p. 170, continues to do the rounds, despite being corrected in coll. cat. 1992. Stylistically, this work is perhaps closest to Codde’s painting of the same year in Vienna.⁹⁹Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste. Trnek in coll. cat. Vienna 1992, p. 99, noted that the artist used the same model there as the one for the standing woman in the Amsterdam painting, but many of the faces of Codde’s women appear to be variants of the same type.

The figures in his merry companies of the 1630s are usually amusing themselves by making music, dancing and conversing. Sometimes they display fairly explicit sexual behaviour, as in the signed painting of 1632 in Winterthur.¹⁰¹⁰Rathaus, Stiftung Jacob Biner; illustrated in Oberlin etc. 1989, p. 53. The Rijksmuseum painting, which at first sight appears to be an innocent scene of two hunters returning with the game they have killed, also has a double meaning. De Jongh has argued persuasively that the two elegantly clad gentlemen ostentatiously holding up a dead hare and two dead partridges have erotic intentions.¹¹¹¹De Jongh 1968, pp. 41-43; see also Amsterdam 1976, pp. 77-79, no. 23. ‘Hunting the hare’ and ‘birding’ were 17th-century synonyms for making love. The insistent presence of the bed with the opened hangings points in the same direction. The three courtesans with their costly attire in the left half of the composition, the embroidered cloth on the table,¹²¹²On the cloth see Mulder-Erkelens 1975; Wardle 2003, p. 344. jewellery, mirror and knick-knacks may be intended to underline the futility of people indulging in earthly pleasures.¹³¹³De Jongh 1995, p. 57; for the gesture that the seated woman is making see De Jongh 1975, p. 78, note 42.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 47.

De Jongh 1968, pp. 41-43; Torresan 1975, pp. 14-15; Van Thiel 1989

1976, p. 170, no. C 1578 (as dated 1635); 1992, p. 47, no. A 4844; 2007, no. 47

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Pieter Codde, Cavaliers and Ladies, 1633', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8152