Entry by
Susan Anderson,
completed November 01, 2017:
Many drawings of unpopulated peasant cottages—both interior and exterior views—survive from the orbit of Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), the premier practitioner of peasant genre in the northern Netherlands in the 17th century. Those of the highest quality have been convincingly given to Adriaen’s short-lived younger brother, Isaac van Ostade (1621–1649). Another group, including this sheet, belongs to Adriaen’s last student, Cornelis Dusart. Still more belong to the hands of his other students and followers, both known and unidentified. The proliferation of such sheets suggests that Adriaen kept them as studio material, sometimes consulted them for use in a painting, and allowed others to copy them. Some copies postdate Adriaen’s death, which indicates that Dusart used these materials in the same way, after he presumably inherited the artist’s studio contents.
Of Dusart’s roughly two dozen known drawings of unpopulated dwellings, five are close copies after sheets by Isaac. Here, Dusart selected as his model Isaac’s exterior of a rustic dwelling with a thatched roof and awning with grain underneath, alongside a partially foliated tree. As with Dusart’s other four sheets, the Harvard drawing can be recognized as a copy by its simplification of details, especially in the foliage, grass, and wall surfaces: he rendered his tree leaves as a cluster of small circles, whereas Isaac’s remain an energetic mass of often scribbly lines; his thatched roofs offer less detail until terminating at the eaves with a tufty hatching; his bricks and window panes are less haphazardly drawn in favor of a series of self-contained ovals and confidently drawn diagonals; and the slightly wavering contours and slanted elements of Isaac’s architecture are straightened and delineated with thin, precise strokes. These stylistic developments coincide with compositional sketches that Dusart drew around 1685–86, suggesting that he did these copies after Adriaen’s death, at which point Dusart had presumably possessed the contents of his master’s workshop.
Another related object is Adriaen van Ostade’s painting of peasants outside a cottage that last appeared in the New York trade in 1989. The cottage from Isaac’s drawing and from Harvard’s Dusart copy provides the setting. An oil on canvas adhered to parchment, the work is signed and dated to the 1660s (the last digit of the date is illegible). Despite the signature and date, Bernhard Schnackenburg, in his 1981 monograph on Adriaen’s and Isaac’s drawings, suggested that the work might instead be an early piece by Dusart. Whether the painting is by Adriaen or Dusart, Isaac’s original watercolor from the late 1640s served as the ultimate source, and its use here stands as further evidence that Isaac’s group of unpopulated peasant dwellings remained an important studio resource.
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