Artist: Nikolaus Knüpfer
Date: 1650
Size: 60 x 74 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
Kuznetzow states that this picture used to have the false signature ‘B. We….x’,11 and was thus attributed to Jan Baptist Weenix when it was in the collection of the Duc d’Orléans in the eighteenth century. This led to it being wrongly identified at an auction in 1830 as a work described by Houbraken in his biography of Weenix as ‘a merry company, the Prodigal Son according to some’.12 Until recently it was thought that the subject was indeed the Prodigal Son, but then in 2004 Schoemaker came up with the interesting hypothesis that it is an episode from the secret marriage described by Tacitus of the nymphomaniac Messalina, wife of Emperor Claudius, and the consul designatus Gaius Silius.13 When the emperor’s counsellors told him about this extramarital deception it was feared that a coup was imminent, so Claudius travelled to Rome to sort things out. His wife and Gaius Silius were indulging in a bacchanal at which drink flowed in abundance, people gave themselves over to ecstatic dancing and similar debauchery. They fled (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to escape the emperor’s wrath when they heard that he was approaching. According to Schoemaker, Nicolaes Knupfer depicted the moment when the people on the table in the background saw a violent storm lashing distant Ostia, which was a harbinger of Claudius’s arrival. Knupfer was often very familiar with the written sources for his classical subjects, some of which were rather obscure.14 The identification of the scene with the story in Tacitus explains the odd group on the table and the man drawing his sword in the foreground. Although this identification provides an attractive explanation of this unusual work, several caveats are in order. One also finds a figure on a table in a painting of the Prodigal Son attributed to Johannes Baeck in which a standing man holding a glass is pointing at something outside the picture.15 The debauchery in a drawing of a group of people in a brothel in the Rijksmuseum,16 which is traditionally attributed to Knupfer, is emphasized by a man on a table.17 In addition, Knupfer omitted several other elements associated with Tacitus’s subject, which is unique in art history. Messalina has not let her hair down, for instance, she is not holding a thyrsus, there are no overflowing wine casks, Gaius Silius does not have an ivy wreath, the women are not wearing animal skins, and Vettius Valens has not climbed a tree to observe the metaphorical storm approaching. Schoemaker suggested, not very convincingly, that these details are missing because the artist based the scene on a play about Messalina and Gaius Silius by Joost van den Vondel that was never published.18 Knupfer borrowed many elements from the countless depictions of the Prodigal Son in the brothel, such as the wine cooler, the plumed bonnet, the man raising his glass in a toast, the woman playing the lute, the prostitutes and the playing cards on the floor. The biblical story was treated in a similarly light-hearted way by artists from Knupfer’s circle like Jan van Bijlert, Maerten Stoop, Gabriel Metsu and Jan Steen.19 There are three other paintings of merry companies or brothels in Knupfer’s oeuvre which are in the same licentious vein as the Rijksmuseum picture but whose subjects cannot be determined precisely.20 The present panel has been variously dated to around 1638/39, the 1640s and around 1650.21 On the evidence of the dendrochronology it can be assigned to the second half of the 1640s.22 In the eighteenth century the work belonged to Louis Philippe Joseph, Duc d’Orléans (1747-1793), a cousin of King Louis XVI. He had inherited the bulk of his paintings from his great-grandfather, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans (1674-1723), but he very probably bought this one himself, after 1788 and before his collection was sold in 1792/93.23 It is clear from the old inscription ‘St. CLOUD TABLEAU RECLAMÉ’ in large black letters on the reverse that the picture hung near Paris in the Château de Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine) at the time. In order to raise money for his political ambitions, the almost bankrupt duke sold all his Dutch and Flemish paintings in 1792/93 for 350,000 francs to the English collector and art speculator Thomas Moore Slade.24 The description in the 1830 auction catalogue of the English architect and archaeologist William Wilkins states that the present panel was ‘surreptitiously abstracted’ from Saint-Cloud,25 which probably accounts for the term ‘reclamé’ inscribed on the back. This could have something to do with the stealthy way in which Slade shipped the works from France to England at night in 1793 in order to prevent French art lovers from trying to keep them in the country.26 Slade offered his Orléans collection for sale in the rooms of the Royal Academy in Pall Mall in London from March to June 1793,27 but it is not known who bought the Rijksmuseum painting. Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledg../..
Artist |
|
|---|---|
Download |
