Ostade. The Reader's Biographical Encyclopaedia. 1922

Ostade. The Reader's Biographical Encyclopaedia. 1922 Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record Hugh Chisholm, et al., eds.  The Reader’s Biographical Encyclopædia.  1922.
17,000 Articles from the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th & 12th eds. Ostade By Sir Joseph Archer Crowe (1825–1896) and Paul George Konody (1872–1933) Name of two Dutch painters whose ancestors were settled at Eyndhoven, near the village of Ostaden. Early in the 17th century Jan Hendricx, a weaver, moved from Eyndhoven to Haarlem, where he married and founded a large family. The eldest and youngest of his sons became celebrated artists.

1   I.  Adrian Ostade (1610–1685), the eldest of Jan Hendricx’s sons, was born and died at Haarlem. According to Houbraken he was taught by Frans Hals, at that time master of Adrian Brouwer. At twenty-six he joined a company of the civic guard at Haarlem, and at twenty-eight he married. His wife died in 1640 and he speedily re-married, but again became a widower in 1666. He took the highest honours of his profession, the presidency of the painters’ gild at Haarlem, in 1662. Among the treasures of the Louvre collection, a striking picture represents the father of a large family sitting in state with his wife at his side in a handsomely furnished room, surrounded by his son and five daughters, and a young married couple. It is an old tradition that Ostade here painted himself and his children in holiday attire; yet the style is much too refined for the painter of boors, and Ostade had but one daughter. The number of Ostade’s pictures is given by Smith at 385, but by Hofstede de Groot (1910) at over 900. At his death the stock of his unsold pieces was over 200. His engraved plates were put up to auction, with the pictures, and fifty etched plates—most of them dated 1647–1648—were disposed of in 1686. Two hundred twenty of his pictures are in public and private collections, of which 104 are signed and dated, while 17 are signed with the name but not with the date.

2   Adrian Ostade was the contemporary of David Teniers and Adrian Brouwer. Like them he spent his life in the delineation of the homeliest subjects—tavern scenes, village fairs and country quarters. Between Teniers and Ostade the contrast lies in the different condition of the agricultural classes of Brabant and Holland, and the atmosphere and dwellings that were peculiar to each region. Brabant has more sun, more comfort and a higher type of humanity; Teniers, in consequence, is silvery and sparkling; the people he paints are fair specimens of a well-built race. Holland, in the vicinity of Haarlem, seems to have suffered much from war; the air is moist and hazy, and the people, as depicted by Ostade, are short, ill-favoured and marked with the stamp of adversity on their features and dress. Brouwer, who painted the Dutch boor in his frolics and passion, imported more of the spirit of Frans Hals into his delineations than his colleague; but the type is the same as Ostade’s. During the first years of his career Ostade displayed the same tendency to exaggeration and frolic as his comrade, but he is to be distinguished from his rival by a more general use of the principles of light and shade, and especially by a greater concentration of light on a small surface in contrast with a broad expanse of gloom. The key of his harmonies remains for a time in the scale of greys. But his treatment is dry and careful, and in this style he shuns no difficulties of detail, representing cottages inside and out, with the vine leaves covering the poorness of the outer walls, and nothing inside to deck the patchwork of rafters and thatch, or tumble-down chimneys and ladder staircases, that make up the sordid interior of the Dutch rustic of those days. The greatness of Ostade lies in the fact that he often caught the poetic side of the life of the peasant class, in spite of its ugliness, and stunted form and misshapen features. He did so by giving their vulgar sports, their quarrels, even their quieter moods of enjoyment, the magic light of the sungleam, and by clothing the wreck of cottages with gay vegetation.

3   It was natural that, with the tendency to effect which marked Ostade from the first, he should have been fired by emulation to rival the masterpieces of Rembrandt. His early pictures are not so rare but that we can trace how he glided out of one period into the other. Before the dispersion of the Gsell collection at Vienna in 1872, it was easy to study the steel-grey harmonies and exaggerated caricature of his early works in the period intervening between 1632 and 1638. There is a picture of a “Countryman having his Tooth Drawn,” in the Vienna Gallery, unsigned, and painted about 1632; a “Bagpiper” of 1635 in the Liechtenstein Gallery at Vienna; cottage scenes of 1635 and 1636, in the museums of Karlsruhe, Darmstadt and Dresden; and “Card Players” of 1637 in the Liechtenstein palace at Vienna, which make up for the loss of the Gsell collection. The same style marks most of those pieces. About 1638 or 1640 the influence of Rembrandt suddenly changed his style, and he painted the “Annunciation” of the Brunswick museum, where the angels appearing in the sky to Dutch boors half asleep amidst their cattle, sheep and dogs, in front of a cottage, at once recall the similar subject by Rembrandt and his effective mode of lighting the principal groups by rays propelled to the earth out of a murky sky. But Ostade was not successful in this effort to vulgarize Scripture. He might have been pardoned had he given dramatic force and expression to his picture; but his shepherds were only boors without much emotion, passion or surprise. His picture was an effect of light, as such masterly, in its sketchy rubbings, of dark brown tone relieved by strongly impasted lights, but without the very qualities which made his usual subjects attractive. When, in 1642, he painted the beautiful interior at the Louvre, in which a mother tends her child in a cradle at the side of a great chimney near which her husband is sitting, the darkness of a country loft is dimly illumined by a beam from the sun that shines on the casement; and one might think the painter intended to depict the Nativity, but that there is nothing holy in all the surroundings, nothing attractive indeed except the wonderful Rembrandtesque transparency, the brown tone, and the admirable keeping of the minutest parts. Ostade was more at home in a similar effect applied to the commonplace incident of the “Slaughtering of a Pig,” one of the masterpieces of 1643, once in the Gsell collection. In this and similar subjects of previous and succeeding years, he returned to the homely subjects in which his power and wonderful observation made him a master. He does not seem to have gone back to gospel illustrations till 1667, when he produced an admirable “Nativity,” which is only surpassed as regards arrangement and colour by Rembrandt’s “Carpenter’s Family” at the Louvre, or the “Woodcutter and Children” in the gallery of Cassel. Innumerable almost are the more familiar themes to which he devoted his brush during this interval, from small single figures, representing smokers or drinkers, to vulgarized allegories of the five senses (Hermitage and Brunswick galleries), half-lengths of fishmongers and bakers and cottage brawls, or scenes of gambling, or itinerant players and quacks, and nine-pin players in the open air. The humour in some of these pieces is contagious, as in the “Tavern Scene” of the Lacaze collection (Louvre, 1653). His art may be studied in the large series of dated pieces which adorn every European capital, from St. Petersburg to London. Buckingham Palace has a large number, and many a good specimen lies hidden in the private collections of England. But if we should select a few as peculiarly worthy of attention, we might point to the “Rustics in a Tavern” of 1662 at The Hague, the “Village School” of the same year at the Louvre, the “Tavern Court-yard” of 1670 at Cassel, the “Sportsmen’s Rest” of 1671 at Amsterdam and the “Fiddler and his Audience” of 1673 at The Hague. At Amsterdam we have the likeness of a painter, sitting with his back to the spectator, at his easel. The colour-grinder is at work in a corner, a pupil prepares a palette and a black dog sleeps on the ground. A replica of this picture, with the date of 1666, is in the Dresden gallery. Both specimens are supposed to represent Ostade himself. But unfortunately we see the artist’s back and not his face. In his etching (Bartsch, 32) the painter shows himself in profile, at work on a canvas. Two of his latest dated works, the “Village Street” and “Skittle Players,” which were noteworthy items in the Ashburton and Ellesmere collections, were executed in 1676 without any sign of declining powers. The prices which Ostade received are not known, but pictures which were worth £40 in 1750 were worth £1,000 a century later, and Earl Dudley gave £4,120 for a cottage interior in 1876. The signatures of Ostade vary at different periods. But the first two letters are generally interlaced. Up to 1635 Ostade writes himself Ostaden, e.g., in the “Bagpiper” of 1635 in the Liechtenstein collection at Vienna. Later on he uses the long s (ſ), and occasionally he signs in capital letters. His pupils are his own brother Isaac, Cornelis Bega, Cornelis Dusart and Richard Brakenburg.

4   2.  Isaac Ostade (1621–1649) was born in Haarlem, and began his studies under Adrian, with whom he remained till 1641, when he started on his own account. At an early period he felt the influence of Rembrandt, and this is apparent in a “Slaughtered Pig” of 1639, in the gallery of Augsburg. But he soon reverted to a style more suited to his brush. He produced pictures in 1641–1642 on the lines of his brother—amongst these, the “Five Senses,” which Adrian afterwards represented by a “Man reading a Paper,” a “Peasant tasting Beer,” a “Rustic smearing his Sores with Ointment” and a “Countryman sniffing at a Snuff-box.” A specimen of Isaac’s work at this period may be seen in the “Laughing Boor with a Pot of Beer,” in the museum of Amsterdam; the cottage interior, with two peasants and three children near a fire, in the Berlin museum; a “Concert,” with people listening to singers accompanied by a piper and flute player, and a “Boor stealing a Kiss from a Woman,” in the Lacaze collection at the Louvre. The interior at Berlin is lighted from a casement in the same Rembrandtesque style as Adrian’s interior of 1643 at the Louvre. The low price he received for his pictures of this character—in which he could only hope to remain a satellite of Adrian—induced him gradually to abandon the cottage subjects of his brother for landscapes in the fashion of Esaias van de Velde and Salomon Ruisdael. Once only, in 1645, he seems to have fallen into the old groove, when he produced the “Slaughtered Pig,” with the boy puffing out a bladder, in the museum of Lille. But this was an exception. Isaac’s progress in his new path was greatly facilitated by his previous experience as a figure painter; and, although he now selected his subjects either from village high streets or frozen canals, he gave fresh life to the scenes he depicted by groups of people full of movement and animation, which he relieved in their coarse humours and sordid appearance by a refined and searching study of picturesque contrasts. He did not live long enough to bring his art to the highest perfection. He died on the 16th of October 1649 having painted about 400 pictures (see H. de Groot, 1910).

5   The first manifestation of Isaac’s surrender of Adrian’s style is apparent in 1644 when the skating and sledging scenes were executed which we see in the Lacaze collection and the galleries of the Hermitage, Antwerp and Lille. Three of these examples bear the artist’s name, spelt Isack van Ostade, and the dates of 1644 and 1645. The roadside inns, with halts of travellers, form a compact series from 1646 to 1649. In this, the last form of his art, Isaac has very distinct peculiarities. The air which pervades his composition is warm and sunny, yet mellow and hazy, as if the sky were veiled with a vapour coloured by moor smoke. The trees are rubbings of umber, in which the prominent foliage is tipped with touches hardened in a liquid state by amber varnish mediums. The same principle applied to details such as glazed bricks or rents in the mud lining of cottages gives an unreal and conventional stamp to those particular parts. But these blemishes are forgotten when one looks at the broad contrasts of light and shade and the masterly figures of horses and riders, and travellers and rustics, or quarrelling children and dogs, poultry and cattle, amongst which a favourite place is always given to the white horse, which seems as invariable an accompaniment as the grey in the skirmishes and fairs of Wouverman. But it is in winter scenes that Isaac displays the best qualities. The absence of foliage, the crisp atmosphere, the calm air of cold January days, unsullied by smoke or vapour, preclude the use of the brown tinge, and leave the painter no choice but to ring the changes on opal tints of great variety, upon which the figures emerge with masterly effect on the light background upon which they are thrown. Amongst the roadside inns which will best repay attention we should notice those of Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery, the Wallace and Holford collections in England, and those of the Louvre, Berlin, Hermitage and Rotterdam museums and the Rothschild collection at Vienna on the Continent. The finest of the ice scenes is the famous one at the Louvre.

6   For paintings and etchings see Les Frères Ostade, by Marguerite van de Wiele (Paris, 1893). For his etchings see L’Œuvre d’Ostade, ou description des eaux-fortes de ce maître, &c., by Auguste d’Orange (1860); and Catalogue raisonné de toutes les estampes qui forwent l’œuvre gravé d’Adrian van Ostade, by L. E. Faucheux (Paris, 1862).

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