The head of a piper: Study for As the old sang, so the young pipe

A preparatory study for one of Jordaens’s most enduringly popular compositions, As the old sang, so the young pipe, which survives in several versions: this drawing relates to the great picture in Antwerp (1638; Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; Fig. 1). With the bagpipes indicated only with the faintest strokes of black chalk, this drawing focuses on the character of the young piper himself, with the humanity and humour typical of Jordaens’s genre drawings. The face is so individualised that, when I.Q. van Regteren Altena bought the drawing, it was thought to be a self portrait of the artist. However, there can be no doubt about its connection with the celebrated picture, and the link with the composition had been known from an early date. It had formerly been part of two of the greatest Dutch collections formed in the 18th Century: those of the painters Isaac Walraven (1686-1765) and Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726-1798), and in Walraven's 1765 sale catalogue it had already been described as a study for 'zo de oude Zongen, zo piepen de Jonge', albeit referring to a print of the subject.

The proverb was included by Jacob Cats (1577-1660) in his Spiegel van den Ouden en de Nieuwen Tijdt (The Hague, 1932, II, p. 13), and was one of many moralistic themes popular in 17th-Century Antwerp. It warned parents that their children would naturally grow up to emulate their own behaviour, whether for good or ill. Jordaens would go on to make several autograph versions of the painting, which testifies to its success among his contemporaries. The composition of the Antwerp painting was repeated in one of a series of moralistic tapestries, which were commissioned from Jordaens in 1644, and for which a coloured modello survives in the National Gallery of Scotland (K. Andrews, Catalogue of Netherlandish Drawings in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1985, I, no. D1192). Two other closely-related studies of bagpipers are known, though neither of them was used for the Antwerp picture. One is in the Fondation Custodia, Paris (d'Hulst, op. cit., no. A129) and the second is in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam (d'Hulst, op. cit., no. A127).