The Lawyer"s Office, Pieter de Bloot, 1628 – (Pieter De Bloot) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Pieter De Bloot

Date: 1628

Size: 57 x 83 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

This scene is identified as a lawyer’s office by the bags hanging around the edge of the ceiling, in which completed case files were kept. The inscription on the piece of paper on the side of the lectern on the right is an attack on the greediness of the profession. It translates loosely as ‘He who sues for a cow will lose another one’. Legal costs were evidently so high, certainly for a simple man, that they generally bore no relation to the value of the object in contention. The origin of the proverb is not known, but the earliest record is from 1726, stating that it was already old by then.3 Its meaning is given there as ‘a miserly verdict’ is better than a ‘lavish judgement’, and ‘it leaves the money box bare and empty’. The saying is being taken so literally by Pieter de Bloot that a peasant is leading a cow through the door in the left background. The figures are much stiffer than they are in De Bloot’s Festive Peasants of 1625 and his Village Scene with Peasants of the same year as the present work.4 The explanation for this must be sought in the fact that he based his painting on one of the versions of The Village Lawyer by Pieter Brueghel II, of which no fewer than 91 are known, 19 of them autograph.5 It was evidently one of the latter’s most successful creations. Whereas Brueghel depicted only peasants and simple folk, De Bloot included people from other classes as well. The lawyer is holding his hand out to a dandy clad in white, while a well-dressed gentleman on the right is examining his purse, which is probably now empty. The artist evidently wanted to show that everyone, regardless of social standing, could become the victim of lawyers’ rapacity. His moneygrubber is wearing spectacles, which had been a bad sign since the late Middle Ages.6 Here they reinforce the message about the man’s guile. De Bloot also repeated much of Brueghel’s setting, with the lawyer behind his lectern on the right and the clerks’ counter against the rear wall. The vanishing point is also more or less the same, and allows quite a lot of the floor to be seen.7 All that is missing compared to the prototype is the left side wall with the door, around which a peasant is peeking shyly. De Bloot extended the back of the office and installed an entrance on the far left through which the man brings in the cow. There are documents lying about everywhere in Brueghel’s work, and the figures are far larger relative to the size of the interior which, together with their poses and physiognomies, gives the scene more the air of a caricature. De Bloot’s room looks much bigger, there are fewer papers and the figures are far more static in both execution and composition, which is in marked contrast to what he had done up to now. Since Cornelis Saftleven also depicted a lawyer’s office with the same inscription the following year, it must have been a topical subject.8 He replaced the people with animals, and his painting is far livelier for that reason alone. It seems from an account of a work auctioned in Cologne that De Bloot produced a similar interior later on, in 1630.9 Unfortunately there are no extant images of it, but the title identified it as a bailiff’s office. According to the description, he was in the same position as the present lawyer, peasants were standing around waiting, and there were papers everywhere. The Rijksmuseum acquired this panel in 1877 from the collection of Gerhard Nilant Bannier, a lawyer and later president of the court in Deventer. His profession gave him an affinity with the subject, and he was also a creditable amateur painter himself.10 Richard Harmanni, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements