…; collection Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911), The Hague;¹¹H. Henkels, ‘Cézanne and Van Gogh in het Rijksmuseum voor Moderne Kunst in Amsterdam. De collectie van Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911)’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 41 (1993), no. 3/4, pp. 155-287, esp. pp. 159, 161, fig. 107. from whom on loan to the museum, 1907-11; donated to the museum from his estate, 1912; on loan to the Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch, since 1999

Object number: SK-A-2575

Credit line: Gift of the heirs of C. Hoogendijk, The Hague

This farmyard scene was first catalogued by the museum as from the school of David Teniers II (1610-1690); then an attribution to Adriaen Brouwer (1603/1605-1638) was considered, before it was described in 1934 as the work of the Utrecht artist Charles de Hooch (active 1628-35), an attribution rejected in 1940, ²²G. Böhmer, Der Landschafter Adriaen Brouwer, Munich 1940, pp. 118-19, fig. 50. and again by Blankert in 1968, who thought it best characterized as from the Flemish school. ³³Written correspondence, 25 July 1968, object file RMA. Since then no other attribution has been proposed.

Although Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) depicted two farmyard scenes, ⁴⁴R. Oldenbourg, P.P. Rubens: Des Meisters Gemälde: in 538 Abbildungen (Klassiker der Kunst V), Stuttgart/Berlin 1921, pp. 182, 238. the motif was not taken up in the Southern Netherlands after its temporary popularity until about the middle of the seventeenth century. ⁵⁵G. Martin, ‘The Maitre aux Béguins: A Proposed Identification’, Apollo 133 (1991), pp. 112-15; G. Martin, ‘Abraham Willemsens (Again)’, Apollo 137 (1993), pp. 97-100. The ostensible subject of the first of Rubens’s depictions, in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, was the Prodigal Son, and the treatment of that subject by the Utrecht master Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651) might have provided a source for the present painting.⁶⁶See M. Roethlisberger and M.-J. Bok, Abraham Bloemaert and his Sons: Paintings and Prints, 2 vols., Doornspijk 1993, I, no. 71; also of influence may have been for instance his engraved series of farmhouses and farmyards of 1613-14, numbered 230 to 249. The open-ended wagon is a variant of a type which appears in Rubens's Summer: Peasants going to Market (British Royal Collection Trust),⁷⁷C. White, The later Flemish Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, coll. cat. London 2007, no. 67. although the wheels are higher – more like those in Rubens’s study for a wagon in the J. Paul Getty Museum.⁸⁸Illustrated in C. White, The later Flemish Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, coll. cat. London 2007, fig. 67. In the present picture the wheels are not of equal height, which would seem to confirm that the artist was of mediocre calibre and unlikely to be identifiable.

Gregory Martin, 2022

H. Henkels, ‘Cézanne and Van Gogh in het Rijksmuseum voor Moderne Kunst in Amsterdam. De collectie van Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911)’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 41 (1993), no. 3/4, pp. 155-287, esp. pp. 159, 164, fig. 107

1911, p. 360, no. 2298c (as school of Teniers); 1921, p. 919, no. 2298c (as school of Teniers, with a tentative attribution to Brouwer); 1934, p. 277, no. 2298c (attributed to Charles de Hooch); 1976, p. 692, no. A 2575 (as Southern Netherlandish school, c. 1640)

G. Martin, 2022, 'anonymous, Farmyard, Southern Netherlands, c. 1650', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200108413