BUYTEWECH, Willem Pietersz.

The Dutch genre painting emerged in Haarlem in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In Buytewech’s Banquet in the Open Air all the typical elements of genre are already manifest, even though the painting clearly reflects a transitional style. Transitional it is, not only in the general setting, which is curiously theatrical, but also in its stiff composition. The presentation of the different motives which together constitute the scene is painfully precise and orthodox.

On a stage-like floor, marked off from a garden by theatrical architecture, are two groups of people, both consisting of richly dressed ladies and flashy men. On the middle of the floor a table is set. One group is still seated next to the table; the other is standing on the right, displaying themselves and also, one has the impression, the table. Within this setting, two types of symbol have been introduced: symbols of Luxury (among others: the golden vases and decanters, the peacock on the table, the not quite contemporary fancy dress) and symbols of Vanity (the musical instruments on the floor).

All paintings currently attributed to Buytewech were regarded until the beginning of the 20th century as works by Frans or Dirck Hals. The similarities to Buytewech’s surviving drawings and prints led to their reattribution.

This painting depicts four fashionably dressed figures in a courtyard. Their sumptuous attire is depicted with virtuosity.

The artist’s dashing brushstrokes capture the figures’s poses perfectly, and their sumptuous attire is depicted with equal virtuosity.

Buytewech was not very active as a painter. Only about ten pictures can be attributed to him, and these were all made during the last seven or eight years of his short life. He had close contact with Frans Hals: according to an old inventory reference, both artists worked on the same picture; they used the same models; and Buytewech even copied some of Hals’s works. But he never acquired Hals’s fluency or boldness in the use of fat oil paint and he never worked life-size. Compared with Hals, the efforts of Buytewech are tight and his touch is minute. Nevertheless, he painted enough to justify the claim that he established the important category of the ‘merry company’ in an interior. An excellent example of the type is this painting in Rotterdam.

The fat Falstaff type who wears a garland of sausages is the same model who appears in one of Hals’s early paintings. Buytewech’s work already shows the early Baroque phase of Dutch painting. The figures are depicted close to the spectator, with a detailed realism. The colours have become bright and show a bit of a plein-air effect, although there is too much local colour - particularly pinks, yellows, and blues - to produce complete unity and harmony.

Buytewech was not yet the type of narrow specialist who developed in the following generation. His subject matter included religious themes, allegorical motifs disguised as scenes from everyday life, book illustrations, and charming landscapes as well as genre scenes, all this largely in graphic art.

This is one of the earliest of the middle-class conversation pieces. It is typical of the early phase of Dutch genre painting, as can be seen from the limited amount of background, the figures made to turn so that they can be shown full face, the bright, emphatic and varied colours. A map and musical instruments hang on the wall behind the figures, on the floor are weapons, a metal jug and a goblet, while a tiny monkey balances on the chair. Together these objects create an atmosphere of physical and intellectual pleasure, and suggest the thrill of foreign travel and the conquest of distant lands.

In the late 1610s Willem Buytewech began to paint scenes of fancily attired youth drinking, making music, and courting. In this characteristic work a brightly coloured group of four men and two women fully occupies a shallow interior, pressing on us their enjoyment of music, wine, and those notorious aphrodisiacs, oysters. But rather than communicating an obvious narrative, the figures are posed in attitudes of merriment, swagger, and romance.

This company originally alluded more blatantly to illicit pleasure, as the man at left held a chamber pot, a fixture of brothel scenes. The offensive item was painted out early in the twentieth century, when the man’s hand was repainted as resting on the chair.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 9 minutes):

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto in C major RV 180 (Il Piacere, The Pleasure)