Dulle Griet (Dull Gret)
oil on panel, 32.5 x 47 cm, framed

The present painting shows an elderly woman who, with her left hand and left knee, weighs down a demon tied to a pillow. In her right hand she holds a pair of fire tongs, raising her arm as if to strike a blow; this threatening gesture obviously seems to be directed at the monstrous creatures in the left half of the picture as well, who are intimidated by it and draw back.

The scene is undoubtedly based on the legend of ‘Dull Gret’: a figure of Flemish folklore. She is the opposite of a good housewife – angry, quarrelling, disobedient and not behaving as would befit her sex. The proverbial phrase ‘She would even tie the devil to her pillow’, referring to overly resolute women, was also associated with the figure of “Dull Gret”, as is illustrated by the subsidiary scenes depicted right next to the protagonist looting at the gates of hell in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of Dulle Griet (Antwerp, Museum Mayer van den Bergh). Bruegel also integrated the motif in his Netherlandish Proverbs (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie). Flemish artists revisited the subject towards the mid-17th century. For instance, David Teniers the Younger, in a signed painting, depicted an old woman kneeling on the ground opposite a host of demons and tying a devil to a pillow (Munich, Alte Pinakothek). David III Ryckaert, Teniers’s contemporary, painted two pictures, both of which are signed, of the looting figure of ‘Dull Gret’ at the entrance to hell (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and private collection, sold at Sotheby’s, London, on 9 April 1986).

On the reverse, the present painting bears the same brand of the Antwerp painters’ guild that also appears on the verso of Ryckaert’s Dulle Griet in Vienna. There are also similarities between the two paintings in terms of the painting style: in both works, the demons have been executed with a loose brush, with shadows, outlines, and white highlights applied to the translucent priming. Even if there can be no doubt that the female figure in the present painting lacks expression, several passages are extremely close to Ryckaert’s art with regard to both motifs and technique.