Modelled and fired.

Lead-glazing flecks on the back; the front of the hat’s brim has been restored.

…; sale collection John Keegan (Dunwoody[Bv1] , Georgia), New York (Christie’s), 10 January 1995, no. 40, to the dealer Michael Hall Fine Arts, New York; donated to the museum by Michael E. Hall Jr, New York, in honour of William R. Valentiner, 2000

Object number: BK-2000-18

Credit line: Gift of M.E. Hall, New York

The subject of this convincing, briskly modelled farcical depiction of a barefooted itinerant dressed in rags is an obscenity conveyed in the form of a commoner’s gesture. The man makes a mocking grimace by pressing the thumb of his left hand against his nose, while raising the skirt of his coat, almost imperceptibly, with his other hand. The pushed-up tip of the nose gives his face a snout-like, beastly expression, somewhat resembling that of a pig. Yet the same gesture is also associated with a gesture of provocation referred to as ‘thumbing one’s nose’ or ‘cocking a snook’, used when making fun of (‘taking a grinder’) or deriding others. While best known when conveyed with the fingers splayed, a closed hand variant also exists, here corresponding with the vagrant’s facial expression.

In combination with the raising of the skirt of the coat, this motif has an even more specific connotation conveying the man’s unsavoury intentions: it refers to the expression ‘Kiss my ass’, the origins of which date from the sixteenth century. As recounted in Paradin’s De antiquo Burgundiae statu (Lyon, 1542), and shortly later by François Rabelais, the vanquisher Emperor Frederick Barbarossa subjected the defeated populace of Milan to public humiliation. To escape the death sentence, all citizens were forced to remove a fig with their mouths from the hind end of a female donkey.¹¹G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, New York, 1968, p. 152. My thanks to Dr Lizzy Marks, who brought this source to my attention (written communication 16 September 2018). The form of punishment decreed was in fact retribution for the Milanese people for having previously driven the empress out of the city riding a donkey seated back to front. Their penance ultimately gave rise to the expression ‘kiss my ass’ and its Italian equivalent vaffanculo, a bastardisation of Vai a fare in culo (‘do it in the ass’). The motion of the terracotta itinerant’s right hand can therefore be interpreted as an invitation to kiss his behind, thus identifying, as it were, with the donkey with the fig. Undoubtedly, the donkey’s fig also relates to the much older obscene manu fica gesture, commonly known as the fig sign. In the Low Countries, Rabelais’s version of the story reached a wide audience via Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa’s translation (written under the pseudonym ‘Claudio Gallitalo’).²²‘(...) Those of Milan, while the Emperor was far from there, had conspired against him: and had driven the Empress out of the city with great reproach and shame, sitting on an old female mule named Thacor, riding back to front, that is, with her back turned towards the Mule’s head, facing the tail. When the Emperor returned, conquered the Milanese and had them in his power, he was so full of fervour that he retrieved the renowned mule Thacor. Then in the middle of the large square, on the Emperor’s orders, a fig was inserted into the genitals or pee-hole of the mule by the Executioner, where the imprisoned citizens were standing and could see it; thereafter the Executioner declared on behalf of the Emperor and accompanied by the sound of trumpets, that all who wished to escape death, had to publicly remove the same fig with their teeth from there, and then conceal it once again in the same place, without any use of the hands: and anyone who refused to do so, would be hung and strangled by him (the Executioner) right then and there. Some of them were so ashamed and shocked by such a humiliating penalty, that they saw the fear of death as less, and preferred to be hung. In others, the fear of death had greater power, than the shame and disgrace; who, after carefully removing the fig with their teeth, publicly showed it to the executioner and said (“Ecco lo fico”) “Behold here the fig”.’ Transl. from the Dutch, from Alle de geestige werken van mr. François Rabelais, Genees-Heer (...) Met groote vlijt uyt het Fransch vertaelt door Claudio Gallitalo, 2 vols., Amsterdam 1682, vol. 2, book 4, chapter 45 (Pantagruel landt aan ’t Eyland van de Papefijgen (transl: ‘How Pantagruel Landed on the Island of Popefigs’), pp. 170-72.

Another possible interpretation of the Flatulist’s pose, however, focuses on the act of lifting up the coatskirt, with the left thumb’s placement on the nose alluding to the odorous scent produced by the man releasing a bout of intestinal gas. In this case, the terracotta belongs to literary and pictorial traditions emerging as early as the late Middle Ages, by which the public exposure of the lower regions of the body so as to emit a fart – along with urinating and defecation – became an acknowledged visual idiom in the farcical (in Dutch: boertige) genre. In both satire and humoristic imagery, scatological themes and flatulence play a major role in defining the self-esteem, morals and social mores of the burgher and upper classes by means of an exemplum contrarium, in this case the uninhibited, unscrupulous behaviour of vagrants, beggars and peasants.³³For discussions of this theme in general, see P. Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere, vertoog over het zelf. Over wilden en narren, boeren en bedelaars, Antwerp 1987, passim. On flatulence, see H. Pleij, Het gilde van de Blauwe schuit: Literatuur, volksfeest en burgermoraal in de late middeleeuwen, Amsterdam 1979, pp. 56-59, and G. Komrij, Komrij’s Kakafonie oftewel encyclopedie van de stront (...), Amsterdam 2006, pp. 152-89. Besides the odour associated with such emissions, the audible aspects of passing wind were likewise regarded as a source of entertainment. Over the centuries, flatulence therefore gave rise to a steady stream of publications, poems, and anecdotal material, but also written works of pseudoscientific research such as the Physiologia crepitus ventris et risus [...] (Frankfurt 1607) or the French L’art de péter. Essai théori-physique et méthodique from 1776.⁴⁴G. Komrij, Komrij’s Kakafonie oftewel encyclopedie van de stront (...), Amsterdam 2006, pp. 162, 165. If indeed belonging to this tradition, the terracotta Flatulist could then be seen as a farcical personification of Smell from a series of comical depictions representing the Five Senses.

The Flatulist has in the past been attributed to the Antwerp sculptor Pieter Xaveri (1647-1673) based on the modelling style, farcical theme and the figure’s facial expression. On closer consideration, however, this attribution proves unconvincing.⁵⁵Sale New York (Christie’s), 10 January 1995, no. 40; I. van der Giesen, Pieter Xavery: Genre in zeventiende-eeuwse beeldhouwkunst, 1997 (unpublished thesis, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam), no. 37. The naturalistic but nervous modelling deviates from Xaveri’s concise style. Moreover, given that all the sculptor’s known surviving terracottas bear his signature and date, their absence here is circumspect. Acknowledging an origin in Xaveri’s native city of Antwerp, a somewhat later dating must be deemed more probable, placing the terracotta at the end of the seventeenth or the first half of the eighteenth century. This better reflects the sculpture’s sketch-like modelling, but also the striking agreement between the flatulist’s grimace and the grotesque facial expression of the left-hand figure in the terracotta group of Two Drunkards by the Antwerp sculptor Jan Pieter van Baurscheit I (BK-2006-19).⁶⁶See also E. Bijzet, ‘Waer in den Aert en Stand zijn uitgedrukt heel stout: Pieter van Baurscheits Drinkebroers en de boertige kunst in de Nederlanden’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 56 (2008), pp. 424-45, esp. fig. 5. Both also share the obtrusive, pushed-up nose and the frontally exposed nasal cavities. Comparable, though substantially less expressive statuettes of beggars were also produced by the little-known Antwerp sculptors Joseph Gillis (1724-1773)⁷⁷M. Jonker et al., In beeld gebracht: Beeldhouwkunst uit de collectie van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1995, nos. 226, 227 (two terracotta child beggars or Savoyards, signed I GILLS); F. Baudouin (ed.), Terracotta’s uit de 17de en 18de eeuw. De verzameling Van Herck, Brussels, s.a. (1999), pp. 161 (no. 14), 170 (nos. 104a-c). Joseph Gillis was admitted to the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1752. Besides small-scale terracottas, he also produced monumental stone sculptures, including those adorning the facade of the wealthy merchant Joan Alexander van Susteren’s palatial city residence on the Meir from 1757, a building designed by the sculptor-architect Jan Pieter van Baurscheit II for Joseph Gillis see RKDartists. and his contemporary Joseph Willems (1716-1766). Born in Brussels, Willems worked as a modeller of porcelain statuettes for a period of time in Tournai (end of 1739-1748) and Chelsea (1748 to c. 1765).⁸⁸J. Van der Linden, ‘Joseph Willems, un artiste bruxellois du XVIIIe siècle’, Annales de la Société d’Archéologie de Bruxelles 11 (1897), pp. 437-47; W.H. Tapp, ‘Joseph Willems China Modeller - D. 1766’, Connoisseur 101 (1938), pp. 176-82; A. Lane, ‘Chelsea Porcelain Figures and the Modeller Joseph Willems’, Connoisseur (May 1960), pp. 245-251. Various porcelain versions of his creations survive today, among them a beggar from circa 1755 wearing a headdress similar to that worn by the Flatulist. ⁹⁹New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 2013.600. Also see a pair of terracotta models of a man and woman dancing, signed ‘Willems’ and dated 1749 in Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, inv. nos. WA1959.23.1 and WA1959.23.2. My thanks to Bieke van der Mark, 27 March 2023. Somewhat reminiscent, though more subdued, is a terracotta statue of a standing black man dressed in rags and holding a bowl in his hand, measuring 74 centimetres high. Signed by Willems and inscribed with the date 1736, this work is possibly a portrait produced ‘from life’ in the studio.¹⁰¹⁰New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 2013.601. My thanks to Bieke van der Mark, 27 March 2023.] Overall, Willems’s statues look rather static and posed, and invariably stand on rectangular bases, with or without cut-off corners. The Flatulist’s dynamic, expressive figure and naturalistically rendered base rule out an attribution to this sculptor. Nevertheless, an origin in the milieu of eighteenth-century Antwerp, in which Willems and Gillis were both active, remains tenable.¹¹¹¹Cf. F. Baudouin (ed.), Terracotta’s uit de 17de en 18de eeuw: De verzameling Van Herck, Brussels, s.a. (1999), pp. 168 (nos. 81a, b).

The Flatulist was donated to the Rijksmuseum in 2000 by Michael E. Hall Jr in the honour of William R. Valentiner (1880-1958), former director of the Detroit Institute of Arts.¹²¹²For Valentiner, see M. Sterne, The Passionate Eye: The Life of William R. Valentiner, Detroit 1980. In a letter dated 5 February 1999 addressed to Frits Scholten, the art dealer Michael Hall offered to donate the present sculpture to the Rijksmuseum should it proceed with the acquisition of Johan Gregor van der Schardt’s Self-Portrait (BK-2000-17). With the sale finalised in June 2000, the statuette was donated as per agreement. In the same year, Hall also donated three other works to two American museums, likewise in Valentiner’s honour.¹³¹³A bronze cast of Le fumeur by Jean Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) to the Detroit Institute of Arts and a bronze portrait bust of Louis XVIII attributed to Baron François Joseph Bosio (1768-1845) and a drawing of an arcadian landscape by George Barret (1767-1842) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (resp. inv. nos. 2000.630.4 and 2000.220).

Frits Scholten, 2025

Frits Scholten, 2025

I. van der Giesen, Pieter Xavery: Genre in zeventiende-eeuwse beeldhouwkunst, 1997 (unpublished thesis, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam), no. 37

F. Scholten, 2025, 'anonymous, The Flatulist (or ‘Kiss my Ass’), Antwerp, c. 1680 - c. 1750', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20067048