CODDE, Pieter

Most of Codde’s best-known works are small-scale paintings executed in Amsterdam. They are distinctive in their silvery-gray tonalities and as is the case with the present painting, many are musically themed.

Other versions of this painting are also known.

The subject of this painting refers to the practice of art connoisseurs visiting artists in their studio. The object of such visits was not to buy a work from the artist but to discuss art with him and with like-minded devotees. This is the subject of Codde’s painting depicting three elegantly-clad gentlemen who appear to be well-acquainted with this particular studio.

Together with Dirck Hals, Hendrick Pot and Willem Buytewech, Pieter Codde played a key role in the development of high class genre painting in the first half of the seventeenth century. He concentrated on producing interiors populated with elegant, merrymaking figures, often making music as in the present example. This composition appears to have been popular as he executed a number of further versions, all of varying degrees of quality.

Pieter Codde is best known for his paintings of elegant companies in interiors. His attention to detail and meticulous technique ensured that his work stood out from that of contemporaries working in the same genre. This Gallant Company is an undisputed high point in his oeuvre.

The figures in this harmonic scene are painted with a naturalism that is typical of Codde, and the utmost care is taken in painting the sitters’ clothing. Though his palette is characteristically muted, restricted mostly to tones of green and brown, the artist instead concentrates on the representation of texture and light.

This is an autograph version of a composition repeated many times by the artist.

The figures in this conversation piece manifest two types of love: family love embodied by the couple in black at right, and the love for pleasure personified by the dancers, musicians and singers.

Pieter Codde and Willem Duyster were the two most prominent genre painters in Amsterdam during the 1620s and 1630s. Both became specialists in this field after some initial forays into portraiture. Their genre paintings, which reveal an intimate knowledge of contemporary artistic developments in Haarlem, comprise an important transitional stage, both thematically and stylistically, between Buytewech’s spirited interiors and the graceful images produced by the next generation of genre painters, epitomized by the work of Gerard Terborch and Johannes Vermeer.

This painting is an example of the genre scenes painted with a monochrome (grey) palette fashionable in this period.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: La Danza

Art historian and restorer Jan van Dijk found this militia portrait by Frans Hals and Pieter Codde so ‘barren and frail’, in 1758, ‘that they might rightfully be called the meagre company’. Since then this militia portrait has been known by that name instead of the exact title: Officers of the Company of the Amsterdam Crossbow Civic Guard under Captain Reynier Reael and Lieutenant Cornelis Michielsz Blaeuw.

Frans Hals was commissioned to paint the portrait of Captain Reynier Reael and Lieutenant Cornelis Michielsz Blaeuw of the Amsterdam crossbowmen’s guild together with their militiamen. He was to paint the piece in Amsterdam, where the members of the company lived. For Hals, who lived in Haarlem, this involved regular trips to the capital. In fact he was rarely to make the journey at all. In 1636, three years after receiving the commission, he had still only completed part of the painting. Eventually the militiamen took him to the task. In reply he responded, as the preserved documents state, that it had been agreed he would begin the portraits in Amsterdam and complete them in Haarlem. The representatives of the guild, however, claimed that they had even offered six guilders extra per portrait on the condition that Hals travel to Amsterdam to paint the men’s bodies as well as their faces. Hals was to receive 66 guilders per person upon completion of the painting, a total of 1,056 guilders for the whole work. Despite the high rate, Hals could no longer be persuaded to make the journey to Amsterdam. He suggested that the unfinished work be brought to Haarlem, where he would complete the sitters’ attire. Then he proposed to finish painting the faces, assuming that the militiamen did not object to travelling to Haarlem. By now the dispute had become so heated that the guild decided to ask another artist to complete the painting. The task fell to Pieter Codde, a strange choice since Codde’s paintings were usually small and meticulous. Codde lived in Amsterdam, though, and may even have been a member of the militia company.

Frans Hals painted the general outlines of the composition and completed some of the faces and hands, but only the ensign on the left, with the shiny satin jacket, is entirely by his hand. Pieter Codde painted the costumes and the portraits which Hals failed to complete.

In 17th-century Dutch painting there are various paintings of children drawing, for instance, mostly from plaster models. It is possible that painters of these works, an example being shown in this picture, wanted to stress the importance of drawing in an artist’s training.

Pieter Codde painted portraits, history paintings, and high-life scenes as well as military subjects. His small picture of a Young Scholar in his Study, painted in shades of silvery grey and ochres, is a kind of secularization of D�rer’s Melancholia. It is more appealing than his more ambitious genre compositions, where he gives way to his preference for rather coarse and plump types, over-glossy textures, and exaggerated highlights. The rooms Codde represents are always of less interest to him than the people he placed in them, and although he lived long enough to see the accomplishments of the great Dutch painters of interiors - he died in 1678, three years after Vermeer - he never attempted to emulate their achievements. But he made at least one attempt to make a radical shift in his style. In the half of Frans Hals’s Meagre Company he completed he made a concerted effort to emulate Hals’s touch.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Vincenzo Bellini: Malinconia, ninfa gentile