Adriaen Jansz. van Ostade

As William W. Robinson so elegantly described, it was only relatively late in his career that Adriaen van Ostade turned to the making of the highly innovative, exquisitely finished works in watercolour, heightened in places with strategically applied bodycolour, of which this is such an outstanding example.¹ Although around fifty works of this type have come down to us, this highly typical, previously unrecorded drawing is only the second multi-figured Ostade watercolour to come to auction in the last four decades.² 

Ostade’s adoption, in his sixties, of this new medium coincided with a marked decrease in his production of oil paintings – a shift that the biographer Arnold Houbraken attributed to the strictures resulting from the French invasion of 1672.³ Yet whatever limitations there may have been, they were not enough to prevent Ostade from creating a remarkable corpus of watercolours, including numerous dated examples executed between 1672 and 1684, works that have very few parallels in earlier Dutch art, in which watercolour tends to be used either in a sparing way in a drawing that is primarily in another medium, or in the context of an earlier miniaturist tradition. 

Here, on the other hand, the watercolour is applied not simply to fill in or flesh out a pen drawing, but is freely applied to build, in a chromatic rather than linear way, both the structure of the entire composition and its lively lighting scheme. In some cases, Ostade made preparatory pen-and-ink studies for the compositions of his watercolours, or for individual figures within them, but in this case no preliminary drawings have so far been identified. All that we have in the way of related drawings is the fine watercolour, dating from the same year, in Berlin, in which the overall compositional layout and disposition of the figures is broadly comparable to that of the present work.⁴

Brilliantly original in its use of the medium, and both sympathetic and charming in its characterisation of the lives and personalities of the people it depicts, this extremely well preserved sheet is an important addition to the corpus of Ostade’s surviving works. 

^1.W.W. Robinson, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings. A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, and Vienna/New York/Cambridge MA, 1991-92, p. 190

^2.The other, A Peasant Couple Carousing in a Garden, now in a New York private collection, was sold, New York, Christie’s, 26 January 2011, lot 285

^3.A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en schilderessen..., 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, vol. I, p. 347

^4.Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. KdZ 5301; B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade, Zeichnungen und Aquarelle, 2 vols., Hamburg 1981, cat. 259