The Fête Champêtre

The support consists of three horizontally grained oak planks and is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1609. The panel could have been ready for use by 1620, but a date in or after 1626 is more likely. The ground layer is off-white and is visible in places at the reserves, in the modelling of the drapery and through the thin paint layers. All the figures were reserved apart from one in the background on the right. The reserves were followed except for some details, such as the collars and ruffs.

Good. There are fine shrinkage cracks, and small, local areas of paint loss.

…; collection Mr Straeter, Rheine, early 19th century;¹¹Note RMA....; from Mrs P. Driessen-Hooreman, Delft, fl. 6,000, to the museum, 1899

ObjectNumber: SK-A-1796

A large group of young, fashionably dressed men and women are amusing themselves in the park of a country house on a summer’s day. The scene contains elements taken from reality, but as a whole it is not very realistic. The landscape is idealized, and the luxurious villa is a figment of the imagination.

Scenes of courting couples in a garden had been produced since the middle ages. Mostly they were allegories in which figures elegantly express their love for each other in cultivated natural surroundings.³³Amsterdam 1976, p. 125; Kolfin 2005, p. 106. However, allegories of that kind generally contain fewer realistic details than are found in this scene. One traditional element in the iconography of the Garden of Love is the chained monkey, which is generally interpreted as a warning against becoming addicted to earthly pleasures. It is possible that the monkey in Hals’s painting was also meant to urge moderation.⁴⁴Amsterdam 1976, p. 125; Kolfin 2005, p. 106.

This is one of Dirck Hals’s most ambitious pictures, if only because of its size and the number of figures. The palette is bright and varied. The composition was carefully planned and elaborated, and is of a very different standard from the routine works produced by Hals and his studio.⁵⁵Kolfin in Haarlem-Hamburg 2003, p. 96; Kolfin 2005, p. 154. The artist has rendered the costumes in a highly efficient way. It is tempting to think that in some cases he deliberately left the ground layer exposed, as can be seen in the structure of the folds in the green dresses. Perhaps he was aiming to capture the fall of light on materials of different textures.⁶⁶See Kolfin 2005, pp. 148-54, who regards the unpainted ground layer as evidence of Hals’s rapid manner of working.

There are some direct borrowings from Willem Buytewech, Hals’s fellow townsman, such as the woman with her hand on her hip on the far right.⁷⁷Cf. the woman on the right in Buytewech’s Elegant Couples on a Terrace, SK-A-3038. Harvesting motifs from the work of other artists was very common at the time. Perhaps there was some kind of artistic rivalry between Buytewech and Hals, with imitation and emulation being an important goal of Hals’s.⁸⁸Kolfin 2005, pp. 146-48, stresses that Hals borrowed parts of compositions or figures because it saved time and expense.

Everhard Korthals Altes, 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. 102.

Amsterdam 1976, pp. 124-25, no. 27; Kolfin in Haarlem-Hamburg 2003, p. 96, no. 11; Nehlsen-Marten 2003, p. 123, no. 8; Kolfin 2005, pp. 105-07, 154

1903, p. 115, no. 1082; 1934, p. 117, no. 1082; 1960, p. 120, no. 1082; 1976, p. 255, no. A 1796; 2007, no. 102

E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'Dirck Hals, The Fête Champêtre, 1627', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200109343