Landscape with a Couple Dancing outside a Country Mansion

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower centre:P:MEVLENER·1645

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: M. van de Laar / L. Akerlund, RMA, 23 augustus 2013

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1885: worm holes repaired
W.A. Hopman, 1886: repaired

Provenance

…; collection Johannes Hendricus Balfoort (1818-83), Schoonhoven and Utrecht, from whom, fl. 175, to the museum, 1884¹NHA, ARS, IS, inv. 164, no. 252 (10 March 1884); NHA, ARS, Kop, inv. 39, p. 346, no. 21 (8 April 1884); NHA, ARS, Kop, inv. 39, p. 347, no. 22 (17 April 1884); NHA, ARS, IS, inv. 164, no. 257 (2 May 1884, no. 1078); NHA, ARS, Kop, inv. 39, p. 350, no. 28 (5 May 1884); NHA, ARS, Kop, inv. 39, p. 350, no. 29 (6 May 1884).

ObjectNumber: SK-A-803

The artist

Biography

Pieter Meulener (Antwerp 1602 - Antwerp 1654)

Born into a dynasty of Antwerp artists, Pieter (Peeter) Meulener, who specialized in small-scale figures mainly in military scenes, was baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk on 18 February 1602 and died on 27 November 1654; he was buried in the Antwerp Sint-Andrieskerk.²F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, pp. 668-69, where surname is spelt Molenaer. Meulener was not enrolled as a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke until 1632/33,³P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, ondere zinspreuk: ‘Wt Ionsten Versaemt’, 2 vols., Antwerp/The Hague 1864-76 (reprint Amsterdam 1961), II, p. 24. when he was forty; he had been taught presumably by his father, who may also have painted battle scenes,⁴Hans Meulener III became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke in 1598, see P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, ondere zinspreuk: ‘Wt Ionsten Versaemt’, 2 vols., Antwerp/The Hague 1864-76 (reprint Amsterdam 1961), I, p. 401; he may have died in 1645/46 when a mortuary debt was paid on behalf of ‘Jan de Meulennaer’, see Ibid. II, p. 174. because he is not earlier recorded as having been registered as an apprentice. The reasons for the twenty-year delay in his enrolment are not known; his marriage may be calculated as having taken place soon after his entry into the guild as he had a daughter aged twenty when he died.⁵F.J. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, 3 vols., Antwerp 1883, p. 669.

Meulener’s style owed much to that of his near contemporary Peeter Snayers (1592-1666), with whom he collaborated in depicting an event which took place in 1634.⁶Listed in an agreement of 1645 was an ‘Inkompste van den Prince Thomas geschildert bij Verhulst, Snaeijers Meulenaer and Naentkens’, see E. Duverger, Fontes historiae Artis Neerlandicae Bronnen voor de Kunstgeschiedenis van de Nederlanden: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, 13 vols., Brussels 1984-2004, V, p. 203. Prince Thomas Francis of Savoy Carignano (1596-1656) entered Brussels in 1634. His career was also overshadowed by this artist; he was not apparently patronized by either King Philip IV of Spain or by the Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and merited only a few lines in Cornelis de Bie’s Het gulden cabinet.⁷C. de Bie, Het gulden cabinet van de edel vrij schilder const, inhoudende den lof vande vermartste schilders, architecte, beldtowers ende plaetsnijders van deze eeuwe, Antwerp s.a. (1662), p. 145. His extant oeuvre consists in less than a hundred paintings – notable are his depictions of the Entry of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp⁸ICN, inv. no. NK 2822; photograph in the RKD, where is stated that seven other versions are known. of 1635 and his Siege of Magdeburg of 1650.⁹G. Cavalli-Björkman et al., Dutch and Flemish Paintings III: Flemish Paintings c. 1600-c. 1800, Stockholm (Nationalmuseum) 2010, pp. 242-44, no. 135.

REFERENCES
F.-C. Legrand, Les peintres flamands de genre au XVIIe siècle, Paris/Brussels 1963, pp. 211-12

Entry

Although chiefly known as a painter of military scenes, a number of landscapes by Pieter Meulener are recorded in seventeenth-century Antwerp inventories including a ‘stucxken op doeck … van Plaisantie …’.¹⁰Listed in the estate of Victor Wolfvoet (d. 1652), see E. Duverger, Fontes historiae Artis Neerlandicae Bronnen voor de Kunstgeschiedenis van de Nederlanden: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, 13 vols., Brussels 1984-2004, VI, p. 353, no. 340. In such a vein is a Festive Meal Outside a Country Mansion of 1650.¹¹Sale, Cologne (Lempertz), 8 May 1969, no. 66. More comparable with the present painting is the Coach Party by a Country Mansion of 1648,¹²Sale, London (Christie’s), 27 May 1983, no. 175. and the Extensive Landscape with Travellers, a Country House Beyond.¹³Sale, London (Phillips), 15 May 1984, no. 4.

None of these has the idiosyncratic proportions of the Rijksmuseum painting (which is on a conifer wood support); it was described as the cover of a clavichord in the museum’s catalogue of 1903 (and indeed it is noted as such in the museum inventory book). Properly speaking, it was in all likelihood painted as the lid of a virginal; those of this period typically measure approximately 50 by 170 cm.¹⁴Catalogus van de Muziekinstrumenten uit de verzameling van het Museum Vleeshuis, Antwerp (Vleeshuis Museum) 1981, no. 419; G. O’Brien, Ruckers: A Harpsichord and Virginal Building Tradition, Cambridge 1990, p. 237, no. 1581 HR, p. 241, no. c. 1600 HR; H. Schott, Catalogue of Musical Instruments, I: Keyboard Instruments, London (Victoria and Albert Museum) 1985, nos. 17, 18 (both English). The lids and front flaps of standard instruments made by the Ruckers family in Antwerp were decorated with woodblock printed papers painted with decorative motifs or Latin mottoes.¹⁵G. O’Brien, Ruckers: A Harpsichord and Virginal Building Tradition, Cambridge 1990, p. 165. Some, however, were painted:¹⁶G. O’Brien, Ruckers: A Harpsichord and Virginal Building Tradition, Cambridge 1990, p. 165, gives a list of the Ruckers dynasty instruments with painted lids, but this seems not reliable as the attributions are not always verifiable; see also Germann in I. Kipnis (ed.), The Harpsichord and Clavichord: An Encyclopedia, New York/London 2007, p. 127. an Annunciation to the Shepherds is painted on the inside of the front flap of the virginal in the Museo Nacional del Prado Allegory of Hearing by Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) of 1617-18¹⁷C. van Mulders, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XXVII(1): Works in Collaboration, Jan Brueghel I and II, Oostkamp 2016, no. 11 and fig. 64. and the latter was famously commissioned to paint a front flap for an instrument acquired by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (d. 1633).¹⁸P. Woods, ‘The Gerbier-Windebank Letters: Two Ruckers Harpsichords in England’, The Galpin Society Journal 54 (2001), pp. 76-89. The inventory of the collection of the artist’s sister-in-law, Susanna Fourment, and of her husband, Arnold Lunden, listed a ‘claverin par Deodat Delmonte [Deodatus Delmont (1582-1644)] (peint)’.¹⁹E. Duverger, Fontes historiae Artis Neerlandicae Bronnen voor de Kunstgeschiedenis van de Nederlanden: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, 13 vols., Brussels 1984-2004, V, p. 58, no. 32. The inventory taken probably after the death of Susanna Fourment is known by a copy by François Mols. A virginal of 1650, in the Antwerp Vleeshuis Museum, has a near contemporary lid decorated with a landscape in the style of David Teniers II (1610-1690).²⁰Catalogus van de Muziekinstrumenten uit de verzameling van het Museum Vleeshuis, Antwerp (Vleeshuis Museum) 1981, no. 419, fig. on p. 144.

The present painting seems to have been the only such commission to Meulener to have survived, as no other extant painting by him has similar dimensions. That the commission was not for a substantial sum of money is perhaps suggested by the thin application of paint.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 109, no. 914; 1903, p. 173, no. 1563; 1934, p. 185, no. 1563; 1976, p. 381, no. A 803 (incorrectly as acquired in 1883)

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'Pieter Meulener, Landscape with a Couple Dancing outside a Country Mansion, 1645', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9093

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