VINCKBOONS, David

This composition was engraved by Claes Jansz. Visscher with a text referring to an avaricious peasant, called Jorden, who is being pick-pocketed by a child, named, Gauwert while listening to the hurdy-gurdy player.

The painting depicts a blind hurdy-gurdy player, led by a dog. He travels through a village followed by a large group of children. On the left a begging old woman, on the right pancakes are baked.

A leading figure in the transition from Mannerist tradition to the new realism in genre painting was David Vinckboons, one of the most popular and prolific painters and print designers of his time. Good proof of Vinckboons’ debt to Bruegel is the debate which scholars still hold about whether some pictures should be attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Younger, whose art was a shadow of his great father’s, or to Vinckboons.

Vinckboon’s family had settled in Amsterdam by the time he was fifteen years old, and he apparently spent the rest of his life in Holland. His work indicate that he had contact with Gillis van Coninxloo, the gifted Flemish landscape painter, who also emigrated to Amsterdam. Vinckboons was one of the artists who helped to forge the new landscape style, but toward the end of his career his interest in the activities of men and women increased. His genre pictures range from early multicoloured ones of large crowds strolling through gardens and Bruegel-like kermis scenes, to those made in the last years of his life which show a close view of a single couple in a landscape.

In Dutch literature, fishing conveyed a variety of conflicting sexual associations ranging from impotence to coitus. In the visual arts, the pastime (which is mostly depicted in book illustrations) likewise connotes carnality. Such is the case with this drawing, in which an elderly yokel and his much younger companion both reach for worms conspicuously located in a box between his legs; clearly their interests extends well beyond angling.

In the magnificent gardens of a country palace a group of young and fashionable figures have assembled for a banquet beneath the trees. It is an early example of fête galantes painted in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century that would prove hugely influential on Dutch painting, especially in Haarlem, for a generation or more. Esias van de Velde, Willem Buytewech and Dirck Hals, were, for example, all directly influenced by Vinckboons’s examples.

The painting is attributed to the artist on stylistic ground.

This is a fine example of a forest landscape by Vinckboons. He produced similar compositions in other forest landscapes in the first decade of the seventeenth century. These landscapes respond strongly to forest scenes by Gillis van Coninxloo, who worked in Amsterdam from 1595 until his death.

In the present painting the story of Jairus’s daughter and the woman who touches Jesus’s garment is illustrated. Christ and the Apostles have crossed over the Sea of Galilee, enduring a great storm, to the land of the Gadarenes. Christ sets off to Jairus’s house. Among the crowd following him is a woman who has had an “issue of blood twelve years.” She touches Christ’s garment and is immediately healed. This miracle is shown on the of the canvas. Two distant sailboats in the central background indicate the crossing over the Sea of Galilee.

Formerly, this panel was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It was sold for the Acquisitions Fund in 2013.

In the present painting the story of Jairus’s daughter and the woman who touches Jesus’s garment is illustrated. Christ and the Apostles have crossed over the Sea of Galilee, enduring a great storm, to the land of the Gadarenes. Christ sets off to Jairus’s house. Among the crowd following him is a woman who has had an “issue of blood twelve years.” She touches Christ’s garment and is immediately healed. This miracle is shown on the of the canvas.

David Vinckboons together with Roelandt Savery introduced landscape painting in Amsterdam and Utrecht.

This painting was executed in collaboration with Sebastian Vranckx.

Vinckboons was responsive to Pieter Bruegel’s peasant imagery, especially his depictions of peasant fairs and related festivities. This theme was enormously popular during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and was (and still is) generally known by its Dutch title, Kermis.

Vinckboons’s Kermis of around 1605 is an outstanding representation of this theme, one of many he produced during his three-decade career. The picture shows peasant merrymaking in connection with the feast day of St George, who is portrayed on the banner hanging from the ramshackle building at the right. The peasant figures of the painting urinate, drink, and vomit with wild abandon.

The Flemish Vinckboons, who emigrated from Antwerp to Amsterdam, introduced a Flemish subject, the conversation piece, into Dutch painting. The present painting is an example of this genre.

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The painter portrays the wide variety of festivities taking place in this revelrous Peasant Feast. As is typical with Dutch and Flemish feast scenes, this highly animated composition is interspersed with more grotesque passages, including a man becoming sick at the table in back.

The painting is signed in monogram and dated upper right: DvB 1606.

This painting depicts a tavern interior with men and women eating and drinking whilst children and animals play and a man begs alms. It belongs to a series of small panels of similar subjects painted by Vinckboons around 1606-10, which are generally interpreted as depicting Spanish soldiers feasting and oppressing Dutch peasants.

Like Vinckboons’s other early works, the scene is constructed as a birds-eye panorama showing a lively village kermesse, the traditional church festival celebrated in the Low Countries. Such peasant subjects originated with Pieter Bruegel the Elder and constituted a major part of Vinckboons’ oeuvre.