OCHTERVELT, Jacob

This painting depicts a child and nurse in the foyer of an elegant townhouse, the parents beyond. The subject matter and composition are related to a group of nine other ‘entrance hall paintings’ that Ochtervelt made over the course of about twenty years and which are universally considered to be among his most innovative and interesting pictures. All are set in the entrance hall of an elegant contemporary house and portray an encounter between the residents of the house and members of the outside world. Of the nine pictures, three depict street musicians at the doorway, three show fish sellers and there are three individual pictures of poultry, cherry and grape sellers. In the present work, which is the earliest dated painting of the group, the visitors are beggars.

Ochtervelt’s paintings are almost all elegant upper-class interiors, in which he showed off a skill in painting silks and satins. The picture shown here is a typical example of his interior scenes.

A middle-class family is shown stiffly posed for a group portrait in a rather bare but impressive hall. The glossy white and yellow satin frocks of the two girls and the combination of brown, grey and black herald the colour fashions which later dominated the ‘Feinmalerei’ period of genre. The forms are clean-cut and as smooth and polished as if they had been turned on a lathe.

Objects or certain motifs in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings were often endowed with a dual function. They serve as perceptible material things, while simultaneously doing something entirely different, namely giving expression to and idea, an intention, a moral, or a condition. In the present painting the little dog standing on its hind legs is, on a deeper level, an image denoting the raising and educating of children.

This domestic tableau by Ochtervelt contrasts the security of a wealthy home with the hazards of itinerant musicians who stand outside its opened door. Firmly placed within the extended space of the residence, the viewer is aware of the poverty of those without.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 21 minutes):

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Musical Joke (Village Musicians) K 522

This well-preserved painting betrays the influences of Frans van Mieris (and other Leiden ‘fijnschielders’) and Gerard Terborch in the costumes of the foreground protagonists as well as their postures. Moreover, the elongated figures are placed within an evenly lit room whose spatial disposition is reminiscent of Pieter de Hooch’s interiors.

This portrait represents an unidentified gentleman bust-length, in a white silk chemise, holding a trumpet, standing at an arched window. The influence of Leiden artists Frans van Mieris and Gerrit Dou is unmistakable in the composition and style of the present work. The framing device of the niche, popularised by Dou, provides a focused composition as well as visual interest through the layering of space.

Terborch’s influence on Jacob Ochtervelt is unmistakable, as seen in this picture.

Ochtervelt is best known for his genre pictures which received a strong impetus from the works of Frans van Mieris the Elder done in the late 1650s and early 1660s. He adopts and often refines Mieris’s motifs. Mieris’s sexual allusions are not missing, but they are less explicit. He gains distinction as a remarkable stuff painter and develops a personal palette of lovely salmon pinks, light blues, silvery greys, violets, and orange browns.

After 1660 he concentrates on the high life of the wealthier classes and the domestic life of affluent women, their children, servants. His highly original contribution in his domestic scenes is the perfection of the entrance hall motif. In them he focuses on the open door of a well-to-do home at which food vendors or begging musicians appear. In Ochtervelt’s hands the threshold device creates three prominent distinctions: the differences between indoor and outdoor light and space; the separation of private and public spheres of life; the differentiation of social classes. His vendors and beggars are well-kempt and jolly; they seem to live in a world where the misery of poverty has never been experienced. They hardly could differ more from the wretched ones Rembrandt depicted in his etchings earlier in the century.

As seen in this picture, in the sixties Ochtervelt’s figures become slender and attenuated reflecting a new ideal of beauty. About the same time Jan Steen begins to use a similar canon of proportion for the fine women in his genre pieces. What soon became recognized as an elegant thinness, an earlier generation would have called skinny.

In this scene the painter depicts a young woman from a prosperous home taking drawing lesson. She shows her latest effort to a painter behind his easel.

The subject of this painting is a woman at her toilet, reading a letter that must be from a suitor. A maid threads a string of pearls through her mistress’s hair. Both a seated woman reading a letter and a maid dressing a young woman’s hair are motifs found in paintings of the early 1660s by Gerard Terborch.