The Fête Champêtre, David Vinckboons, c. 1610 – (David Vinckboons) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: David Vinckboons

Date: 1610

Size: 29 x 44 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

Young, elegantly clad couples have sought out an idyllic spot in the woods to give themselves over to the pleasures of music-making, drinking, eating and courtship. The fête champêtre is a theme that recurs frequently in Vinckboons’s oeuvre. In 1608 he included a merry company out of doors in a drawing of the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son as a design for a print series.1 His earliest painted Fête champêtre is from 1610,2 and it is also his first treatment of the theme that does not include a specific reference to the biblical story of the Prodigal Son. The Rijksmuseum’s Fête champêtre is usually dated around the same year.3 The theme of the fête champêtre is rooted in the southern Netherlandish visual tradition of 15th- and 16th-century calendar miniatures for the months of April and May, all showing well-to-do couples playing music and courting out of doors. Those motifs were further developed by artists like Hans Bol in moralistic scenes of the parable of the Prodigal Son and other works. It was from this background that Vinckboons introduced a new theme in the northern Netherlands with his fêtes champêtres. His depiction of the landscape was inspired by the work of another Flemish immigrant, Gillis van Coninxloo. There are several elements indicating that this Fête champêtre should be regarded as a moralistic scene.4 They are the peacock pie, the playing cards and the gnawed bones lying on the ground, which are traditional symbols respectively of pride and lechery, a passion for gambling and the decay of the flesh. It has been suggested that The fête champêtre was a companion piece to Vinckboons’s Preaching of St John the Baptist in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-1782) with the latter symbolizing that even the sinful people in The fête champêtre can repent.5 This, though, is very unlikely, as is explained in the entry on The Preaching. Vinckboons’s Fêtes champêtres were a major source of inspiration for paintings of similar subjects by Dutch contemporaries like Esaias van de Velde (SK-A-1765), Willem Buytewech (SK-A-3038) and Dirck Hals (SK-A-1796; SK-A-1722). Yvette Bruijnen, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 313.