Artist: Pieter Meulener
Date: 1645
Size: 50 x 172 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
Although chiefly known as a painter of military scenes, a number of landscapes by Pieter Meulener are recorded in seventeenth-century Antwerp inventories including a ‘stucxken op doeck … van Plaisantie …’.10 In such a vein is a Festive Meal Outside a Country Mansion of 1650.11 More comparable with the present painting is the Coach Party by a Country Mansion of 1648,12 and the Extensive Landscape with Travellers, a Country House Beyond.13 None of these has the idiosyncratic proportions of the Rijksmuseum painting (which is on a conifer wood support); it was described as the cover of a clavichord in the museum’s catalogue of 1903 (and indeed it is noted as such in the museum inventory book). Properly speaking, it was in all likelihood painted as the lid of a virginal; those of this period typically measure approximately 50 by 170 cm.14 The lids and front flaps of standard instruments made by the Ruckers family in Antwerp were decorated with woodblock printed papers painted with decorative motifs or Latin mottoes.15 Some, however, were painted:16 an Annunciation to the Shepherds is painted on the inside of the front flap of the virginal in the Museo Nacional del Prado Allegory of Hearing by Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) of 1617-1817 and the latter was famously commissioned to paint a front flap for an instrument acquired by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (d. 1633).18 The inventory of the collection of the artist’s sister-in-law, Susanna Fourment, and of her husband, Arnold Lunden, listed a ‘claverin par Deodat Delmonte [Deodatus Delmont (1582-1644)] (peint)’.19 A virginal of 1650, in the Antwerp Vleeshuis Museum, has a near contemporary lid decorated with a landscape in the style of David Teniers II (1610-1690).20 The present painting seems to have been the only such commission to Meulener to have survived, as no other extant painting by him has similar dimensions. That the commission was not for a substantial sum of money is perhaps suggested by the thin application of paint. Gregory Martin, 2022
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