Rustic Concert
1638.Not on display
This work belongs to the so-called peasant interiors, one of the new genres of painting that emerged and developed in Flanders and Holland in the early seventeenth century. In Houbraken and in early inventories they are described as een boertje, (a little peasant), or as toeback rookerchen, (tobacco smokers). The consolidation and appreciation of this genre was fostered by the satirical and moralising literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which was in turn rooted in the Kerelslied or fourteenthcentury peasant ballads composed by the knights during the struggles with the peasants. However, the term kerel, which originally denoted the freeman peasant or villager, came to be used to describe the churl, an uncouth, boorish and coarse peasant whose behaviour, dominated by instincts and passions, contrasted with the rules of conduct of the new bourgeois class. This is the type of villager depicted in the peasant interiors that were acquired by the bourgeoisie as a source of entertainment or learning.
Van Ostade`s original -and essential- contribution to the peasant genre consisted in replacing the grotesque and violent scenes of Adriaen Brouwer with pleasant compositions infused with humour, thereby transforming the satirical depiction into a positive portrayal of the peasant class at moments of leisure and amusement. The genre thus acquired a new significance which, in Schnackenburg`s opinion (1981), has its literary parallel in a series of texts that emerged in mid-seventeenth-century Holland in defence of country life.
Rustic Concert appears in the 1828 catalogue as an original by Adriaen van Ostade. However, in 1873 it is recatalogued as a copy of Isaak van Ostade. The 1885 edition states that Bredius considers it an original by Adriaen, an attribution that is confirmed in 1920, when cleaning revealed the date and signature. The monogram TAYPM with vertically linked letters, appears on the back. This is the mark of a collector, who cannot be identified today. The scene takes place inside a peasant`s hut, where a man and a woman are singing the lyrics of a song on a paper the man is holding.
They are accompanied by two musicians. One is standing on a stool playing the violin with his right leg resting on another, three-legged stool. The other is seated with his back to the viewer, playing a panpipe. Behind them, another man is seated with what appears to be a tankard in his hands. In the background, on the right, a man is seated in front of the fireplace while another, standing, pours him a beer. This kind of rustic kitchen, with a still life featuring household utensils on the one side and figures on the other, was first produced in Rotterdam by the Saftleven brothers, Cornelis (1607-1681) and Herman (1609-1685) in the early 1630s. It was also cultivated by the Van Ostade brothers in Haarlem, and by Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606-ca. 1683) and Pieter Potter (1597-1652) in Leiden, although in the latter case without figures.
The difference in scale between the dog and the pitcher of beer to the left of the violinist suggests that these elements were added at a later stage (Posada Kubissa, T.: Pintura holandesa en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Catálogo razonado, 2009, pp. 308-309).
