Artist: Jan Woutersz Stap
Date: 1629
Size: 76 x 107 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
As is the case with Stap’s other painting in the Rijksmuseum, the present painting is based on the 1539 Landlord’s Steward attributed to Jan Massijs (fig. a). Significantly, Van Mander recorded the presence of a painting, presumably the one of 1539, showing moneychangers by Jan Massijs in Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam in his 1604 Schilder-boeck.7 The costumes worn by Stap’s figures are very similar to those in the 1539 painting. Stap’s figures also resemble those in the earlier painting, although his interest is solely in the naturalistic rendering of the grooved and wrinkled faces. Unlike the 16th-century artist, Stap’s approach to his figures is sympathetic, as he avoids making caricatures of them. The exaggeration of other elements in the present painting taken over from the prototype makes Stap’s restraint in this respect all the more remarkable. Even more than in the 16th-century painting, the figures are crammed together in his composition – to such an extent, in fact, that the table appears to intersect in a most uncomfortable way with the woman on the right, whose anatomy in general is hopelessly mangled. Unlike the interior in the 1539 work, Stap’s does not have windows, increasing the sense of claustrophobia. The tilted perspective of his table is also greater than in the prototype, and the gesturing hands, another feature in the 1539 painting, have been given greater prominence as well. From a contemporary document it appears that Stap actually painted these leathery, arthritic hands from life.8 It is difficult, therefore, to decide to what extent the exaggerated, clumsy features of the present painting reflect Stap’s artistic intent or his artistic short-comings. As in Stap’s painting of c. 1636 in the Rijksmuseum and the 1539 prototype attributed to Jan Massijs, an indication of the painting’s date is recorded in a document within the painting – in this case an open book on the table. The document in the Rijksmuseum painting concerns a debt of Pieter Pietersen, of which 29 guilders and 7 stuivers has been paid, and 8 guilders and 10 stuivers is still outstanding. Jonathan Bikker, 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. 275.
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