Dancing Couple

Support The single, horizontally grained oak plank is approx. 0.6 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends over the edges of the support. The first, off-white layer consists of mostly white pigment particles and barely fills the grain of the wood. The second ground, which is thicker and coarser, is pinkish white and consists of white pigment with an addition of fine black and fine red pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The first lay-in was very thinly and sketchily applied with translucent brown paint, allowing the ground to show through locally. This undermodelling has remained visible in the dark areas. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light. The main scene was worked up with a light grey paint, leaving the figures in reserve. More opaque paints and a broader range of colours were used for the figures and the adjacent area. In the final stage, the wooden beams and boards, and the straw were added, as well as smaller details, such as the fiddler’s bow and the feather on his hat. The figures and light areas are slightly impasted.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Fair. There are two old, stable horizontal cracks in the upper right corner and a short one halfway down the right edge. An old, glued crack in the lower half runs across the entire width of the plank. A small piece of wood is missing in the lower left corner, and there are several small areas of paint loss. The paint surface is abraded throughout, and the signature even heavily so. Discoloured retouching is present along old cracks. The varnish is very thick, has yellowed and saturates moderately; it has been partially removed.

…; collection Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911), The Hague;¹¹H. Henkels, ‘Cézanne en Van Gogh in het Rijksmuseum voor Moderne Kunst in Amsterdam: De collectie van Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911)’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 41 (1993), pp. 155-287, esp. pp. 217, 236, 242. from whom on loan to the museum, 1907-11;²²Verslagen omtrent ’s Rijks verzamelingen van geschiedenis en kunst 1907 (annual report of the Rijksmuseum), p. 19, SK-C-870. donated from his estate to the museum, May 1912

ObjectNumber: SK-A-2568

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

Dancing Couple is composed in the same manner as most of Adriaen van Ostade’s paintings from the mid-1630s: a sharply illuminated group of figures in the centre is surrounded by shadow on all sides.⁴⁴For Van Ostade’s early peasant interiors see especially B. Schnackenburg, ‘Die Anfänge des Bauerninterieurs bei Adriaen van Ostade’, Oud Holland (1970), pp. 158-69; B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle: Gesamtdarstellung mit Werkkatalogen, I, Hamburg 1981, pp. 28-31; A. Ebert, Adriaen van Ostade und die komische Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2013, pp. 81-88. The setting is invariably a barn and the peasants are usually shown drinking and smoking. Sometimes a couple are dancing to the accompaniment of a bagpiper or a fiddler, as in the present scene, or country bumpkins fighting with their fists and knives. Despite its lowly subject matter, this picture is very artfully constructed. The triangular design, the left side of which is formed by the dancing man and the right one by the rough-hewn planks of a pen, was used more often by Van Ostade in the 1630s.⁵⁵See, for example, Peasant Wedding, 1633, present whereabouts unknown; illustrated in R. Klessmann, ‘Die Anfänge des Bauerninterieurs bei den Brüdern Ostade’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 2 (1960), pp. 92-115, esp. p. 107, fig. 12. The main compositional diagonals are reinforced by the slanted positioning of the figures, such as the smoker on the right, and the beam rising above the fiddler. The triangle formed by the arms of the dancing pair on the left is cleverly inverted on the right in the lines marked out by the seated peasants’ heads and the planks on the one hand and the pass glass (the tall beer glass) on the other. This carefully thought-out placement of diagonals allows the rhythm of the dancing couple to be carried through the entire painting.

Whether or not Houbraken’s claim that Adriaen Brouwer and Adriaen van Ostade, who was roughly five years younger, were pupils in Frans Hals’s studio at the same time is correct, there can be little doubt that Van Ostade’s peasant revelries from the 1630s are indebted to Brouwer, whose earliest surviving paintings were probably executed in Haarlem around 1625-27. The latter has the distinction of being the first artist in the Netherlands to treat the theme of villagers smoking, drinking and fighting indoors.⁶⁶P.C. Sutton, ‘Masters of Dutch Genre Painting’, in P.C. Sutton et al., Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, exh. cat. Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art)/Berlin (Gemäldegalerie)/London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1984, pp. XIII-LXVI, esp. p. XXXV. Before that they were usually placed in the open air, in kermis settings. Not only did Van Ostade adopt Brouwer’s subject matter, he also derived his boisterous figures and their pastel-coloured clothing from him. However, his example never depicted them in barns. Van Ostade’s peasants are moreover smaller in relation to their surroundings, and their faces are less individualized. What most distinguishes his paintings from those of his Flemish colleague is the use of spotlighting and deep shadows. As has often been pointed out in the literature, this employment of chiaroscuro was borrowed from Rembrandt’s early Leiden output.⁷⁷See, for example, W. von Bode, Studien zur Geschichte der holländischen Malerei, Braunschweig 1883, p. 207; K. Bauch, Der frühe Rembrandt und seine Zeit: Studien zur geschichtlichen Bedeutung seines Frühstils, Berlin 1960, p. 234; H. Gerson, ‘Rembrandt en de schilderkunst in Haarlem’, in H. Miedema, R.W. Scheller and P.J.J. van Thiel (eds.), Miscellanea I.Q. van Regteren Altena 16.V.1969, Amsterdam 1969, pp. 138-42, esp. pp. 140-41; B. Schnackenburg, ‘Die Anfänge des Bauerninterieurs bei Adriaen van Ostade’, Oud Holland (1970), pp. 158-69, esp. p. 165; B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle: Gesamtdarstellung mit Werkkatalogen, I, Hamburg 1981, pp. 30-31. Disagreed, however, by A. Ebert, Adriaen van Ostade und die komische Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2013, p. 86, note 507. Of particular importance for Van Ostade was the silhouetted Saviour in Rembrandt’s Christ at Emmaus from around 1629.⁸⁸Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André; illustrated in E. van de Wetering, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited: A Complete Survey, Dordrecht 2015, p. 89. Two of Van Ostade’s early works include repoussoir figures totally shrouded in shadow in the manner of this picture.⁹⁹Both of Van Ostade’s paintings, the present whereabouts of which are unknown, are illustrated and discussed in B. Schnackenburg, ‘Die Anfänge des Bauerninterieurs bei Adriaen van Ostade’, Oud Holland (1970), pp. 158-69, esp. pp. 159, 162, figs. 5, 6. Rembrandt’s early etchings, such as the 1630 Christ Disputing with the Doctors,¹⁰¹⁰S.S. Dickey (ed.), The Illustrated Bartsch, L, New York 1993, no. 66. in which strong light comes from the upper left and the lower left corner remains in the dark, were probably also inspirational for Van Ostade.¹¹¹¹B. Schnackenburg, ‘Die Anfänge des Bauerninterieurs bei Adriaen van Ostade’, Oud Holland (1970), pp. 158-69, esp. pp. 165-66. It speaks to the Haarlem artist’s creativity that he adopted a type of illumination mostly used in history paintings and etchings, where it was put to dramatic effect, and applied it in a completely different genre.

Known as grollitjes or grillen in the seventeenth century, paintings like the present one showing clodhoppers drinking to excess, smoking and dancing were intended to both amuse and educate the cultivated burgher.¹²¹²On grillen see H. Miedema, ‘Grillen van Rembrandt’, Proef 3 (1974), pp. 74-75, 84-86; J. Bruyn, ‘Problemen bij grillen’, Proef 3 (1974), pp. 82-84; E. de Jongh, Tot lering en vermaak: Betekenissen van Hollandse genrevoorstellingen uit de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1976, pp. 256-57. Jan Miense Molenaer’s Dance in a Village Street of around 1630-31 can perhaps be seen as an illustration of both the jocular and prescriptive meanings of depictions of dancing villagers.¹³¹³LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn; illustrated in D.P. Weller, C. von Bogendorf Rupprath and M. Westermann, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, exh. cat. Raleigh (North Carolina Museum of Art)/Indianapolis (Indianapolis Museum of Art)/Manchester (Currier Museum of Art) 2002-03, p. 81. It shows a peasant couple moving to the music provided by a fiddling dwarf. The man holds a large tankard in his left hand and an empty jug can be seen in the foreground, with a rake, shovel and saw lying abandoned at his feet. A well-dressed urban couple look on from the sidelines, commenting on the scene with gestures and facial expressions. The man is amused, but the woman is clearly not impressed by this display of the lower class’s overindulgence and neglect of its responsibilities.¹⁴¹⁴See Weller in D.P. Weller, C. von Bogendorf Rupprath and M. Westermann, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, exh. cat. Raleigh (North Carolina Museum of Art)/Indianapolis (Indianapolis Museum of Art)/Manchester (Currier Museum of Art) 2002-03, pp. 81-82. Although peasants remained his main subject throughout his career, Van Ostade abandoned the base figure types of his early works for more sympathetic ones later on, and moved them out of barns and into more respectable inns and houses.

Jonathan Bikker, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, III, Esslingen/Paris 1910, p. 318, no. 557; M. Bouffard-Veilleux and H. Roodenburg, ‘Voetenwerk: Hoe de zeventiende-eeuwse schilders hun feestvierders lieten dansen’, in A. Tummers (ed.), De Gouden Eeuw viert feest, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum) 2011-12, pp. 28-39, esp. p. 31; Hillegers in A. Tummers (ed.), De Gouden Eeuw viert feest, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum) 2011-12, p. 56, no. 2

1912, p. 383, no. 1821b; 1934, p. 216, no. 1821b; 1960, p. 235, no. 1820 A3; 1976, p. 429, no. A 2568

Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, Dancing Couple, c. 1635', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4896