Pen and ink in bister, washed with a brush in grey,
on laid paper: 11,1 x 5,4 cm
"*" indicates required fields
Notes
Adriaen van Ostade was an important Dutch Golden Age painter of genre works, showing everyday life of ordinary men and women. According to Arnold Houbraken, he and his brother Isaac van Ostade were pupils of Frans Hals and like him, spent most of their lives in Haarlem. In 1632, he is registered in Utrecht (where he was probably influenced by the village scenes of Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot, which were popular in his day), but in 1634 he was back in Haarlem where he joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. Aged 26, he joined a company of the civic guard at Haarlem.
Ostade was the contemporary of the Flemish painters David Teniers the Younger and Adriaen Brouwer. Like them, he spent his life in delineation of ordinary life, depicting tavern scenes, village fairs and country quarters. Between Teniers and Ostade the contrast lies in the different condition of the agricultural classes of Brabant and Holland and in the atmosphere and dwellings peculiar to each region. Brabant has more sun and more comfort; Teniers, in consequence, is silvery and sparkling, and the people he paints are fair specimens of their culture. Holland, in the vicinity of Haarlem, seems to have suffered much from war; the air is moist and hazy, and the people depicted by Ostade are short and ill-favoured, marked with adversity’s stamp in feature and dress.
He opened a workshop and took on pupils. His notable pupils were Cornelis Pietersz Bega, Cornelis Dusart, Richard Brakenburgh, Michiel van Musscher, his brother Isaac van Ostade and Jan Steen.
In 1662 and again in 1663, he is registered as deacon of the St. Luke guild in Haarlem. In 1672 he packed up his goods with the intention of fleeing to Lübeck, Germany. He got as far as Amsterdam, however, when he was convinced to stay by the art collector Konstantyn Sennepart, in whose house he stayed, and where he made a series of coloured drawings, that were later bought for 1300 florins by Jonas Witsen, where the famous art historian Arnold Houbraken saw them and fell in love with his portrayals of village life.
Provenance
Literature