Cows in a Stable; Witches in the Four Corners, Roelant Savery, 1615 – (Roelant Savery) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Roelant Savery

Date: 1615

Size: 30 x 31 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

This work, signed and dated 1615, occupies a special place in Savery’s oeuvre, not just because of the unusual subject of the main scene, but also for the witches and fabulous animals breathing fire in the four corners. There is only one other painting of a stable interior by Savery,2 while the combination of a circular main scene with four depictions in the corners is also rare in his work.3 The Rijksmuseum stable is populated with cattle and livestock: cows, a ram, a goat and some sheep, and a sleeping dog.4 Smaller animals, such as a lizard and a frog, were added as secondary details. Raupp has given an erotic interpretation to the woman milking the cow in the foreground and the shepherd playing the wind instrument in the doorway.5 His argument is based on the only other stable interior by Savery, in which the erotic allusion is supposedly more obvious because a man and a woman are leaving the stable together while an old man remains behind to keep an eye on the cattle. However, the four corner scenes with witches in the present painting point in another direction. Müllenmeister believes that they have the apotropaic function of warding off evil. According to the superstition of the day, one of the ways witches caused trouble was by spreading disease among cattle, so Müllenmeister felt that the corner vignettes were intended to avert that.6 However, the addition of witches in order to ward them off is contradictory, and not very plausible, so as yet there is no satisfactory explanation of this puzzling scene. The stable interior originated with the Christian iconography of the Nativity.7 There are no religious elements in the Rijksmuseum painting, so it must be regarded as one of the earliest secular depictions of the interior of a stable. Savery’s innovation paved the way for later profane variants by artists like Aelbert Cuyp, Paulus Potter and Isaac and Adriaen van Ostade.8 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. 265.