(Haarlem 1610–1685)
A barn interior, with peasants smoking and drinking, a dog in the foreground,
signed and dated lower right: Av. (ligated) Ostade 1640,
oil on panel, 24 x 28 cm, framed

Provenance:
Charles T.D. Crews (1839–1915), Billingbear Park, Berkshire;
his deceased sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 2 July 1915, lot 214 (acquired by ‘Holland’);
sale, Sotheby’s, London, 17 October 1951, lot 75 (signed and dated 1642;
acquired by ‘Richter’);
sale, Rasmussen, Copenhagen, 25 October 1967, lot 279;
sale, Christie’s, London, 10 July 1992, lot 167;
sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 4 November 1992, lot 127;
Private collection, Vienna;
sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 5 October 2005, lot 151;
Private collection, Vienna

Literature:
C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten Holländischen Mahler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, vol. III, Esslingen/Paris 1910, p. 343, no. 648 (erroneously titled as ‘Vier Bauern in einer Scheune‘)

The present painting is listed in the RKD database under no. 186005 (as Adriaen van Ostade).

We are grateful to Bernhard Schnackenburg for confirming the attribution of the present painting to Adriaen van Ostade on the basis of a photograph.

This well-preserved panel of a sparsely furnished barn interior with peasants smoking and drinking is a characteristic example of the first period of van Ostade’s artistic development, from about 1630 to 1640. The meagre peasant interiors that were so often the setting for Adriaen van Ostade’s genre paintings with their sombre, and subdued colour palettes, were eventually superseded by the more affluent ones with their bright, warm colours that arose over the course of the 1640s. Indeed, the figures in the present painting, with their slender and naturalistic physiognomy, and their somewhat softer facial expressions propound to a conscious shift away from the more caricatured personalities that featured so prominently in the preceding decade, and instead become truer to life.

Van Ostade began his career studying with Frans Hals (1582–1666) at the same time as Adriaen Brouwer (1605–1638), the latter of whom would have an especially decisive influence on the evolution of van Ostade’s popular scenes of smoking, gambling, drinking, and enjoyment among the peasant classes. By 1634 at the latest, van Ostade had become a member of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke. In an active career that spanned more than half a century, Adriaen van Ostade became one of the most prolific and accomplished Dutch artists of the seventeenth century.