Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne (Delft 1589-1662 The Hague)
PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN GENTLEMAN
Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne (Delft 1589-1662 The Hague)

Fray en Leelijck: a blind man playing a pipe and a peasant woman playing a hurdy-gurdy

细节
Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne (Delft 1589-1662 The Hague)
Fray en Leelijck: a blind man playing a pipe and a peasant woman playing a hurdy-gurdy
indistinctly signed 'V. VNNE' (upper left); and inscribed 'Fray en Leelijk' (upper right, on the scroll)

oil on panel
14 5/8 x 11 5/8 in. (37.2 x 29.5 cm.)
inscribed 'Fray en Leelijk' (upper right, on the scroll)
来源
Jean Nicolas Joseph 'Alfred' Havenith (1838-1913), Antwerp; his sale (†), Eugène Van Herck en Zonen, Brussels, 10 November 1913, lot 5.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 4 July 1986, lot 20.
Eric Noah, New York, by 1999.
with Otto Naumann, New York, from whom acquired by the family of the following,
Martin Wunsch; (†), Sotheby's, New York, 30 January 2014, lot 276, when acquired by the present owner.
出版
M. Westermann, 'Fray en Leelijck: Adriaen van de Venne's Invention of the Ironic Grisaille', Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, L, no. 1, 1999, pp. 238 and 248-9, fig. 22.
展览
New York, National Academy of Design, Dutch and Flemish paintings from New York private collections, September 1988, no. 51.
Enschede, Rijkmuseum Twenthe, De Nieuwe Smaak: de kunst van het verzamelen in de 21ste eeuw, 17 January-21 August 2016 (not numbered).

拍品专文

This panel is typical of the distinct subgenre developed by Adriaen van de Venne within the Netherlandish tradition of depicting beggars and moralising proverbial images, characterised by their small-scale, witty depictions of low or peasant life, typically using a grisaille or brunaille palette, following his move to The Hague in 1625. These pictures served as metaphors for social dysfunction. The dispossessed and marginal in the seventeenth-century Netherlands were sometimes referred to as grauw (grey), the term also used for grisaille pictures. While the works drew attention to these peripheral groups, in the tradition of Bruegel and his followers, van de Venne’s paintings were also often witty or ironic in tone.

The small scroll in the upper right of the panel, a motif frequently employed by van de Venne, is inscribed ‘Fray en Leelijck’ which translates as ‘the beautiful and the ugly’. This references, perhaps ironically, the beautiful music played by the ugly musicians. As was often the case with the artist’s witty inscriptions, the motto may have had a double meaning, however, since ‘fray’ could also be understood to mean deceitful. This links the work with a similar painting by van de Venne, also depicting a blind old man and an old woman playing instruments, with a scroll inscribed Armoe Soeckt List, or Poverty leads to Cunning (Private collection; Sotheby’s, New York, 22 April 2015, lot 19).

As Westermann (op. cit.) emphasised, this subtly monochromatic work shows how masterfully van de Venne compensated for the lack of colour in his work through his careful attention to the distinction in texture across the small panel. Using thin, broad brushwork for the sackcloth, which is contrasted with the small dashes of translucent glazes, giving character to the figures’ faces and hands. The voluminous beard of the flute player is given texture by scratching into the wet paint, a technique which resembles that used by Rembrandt in his early works.

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