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The Fish Market
The Fish Market. Unknown author · Public domain · source

Adriaen van Ostade

Public domain1610-1685·Dutch·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Baptised in Haarlem on 10 December 1610, the son of a weaver; the RKD records him as a pupil of Frans Hals from 1627. He joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1634, served as its deacon in 1662 and 1663, and painted, drew and etched the peasants of the Dutch countryside in their inns, cottages and village streets for half a century. He was buried in Haarlem on 2 May 1685.

Why they matter

He gave the Dutch peasant a long career. His early peasants brawl; the later ones sit calmly by the fire, and the Rijksmuseum notes how much milder his country folk are than Adriaen Brouwer's drunkards. He was also one of the great painter-etchers of the Golden Age, and his pupils and followers, among them Cornelis Bega, Cornelis Dusart and his brother Isaac van Ostade, carried his kind of picture on.

What to buy

Prints: his paintings are small and full of brown half-light, and the honest reproduction is the Rijksmuseum's own photography, published free as public-domain downloads of pictures such as 'The Skaters': Peasants in an Interior, printed by a good shop. Books: Louis Godefroy's L'oeuvre gravé de Adriaen van Ostade (Paris, 1930) is still the catalogue that dealers and museums cite for his etchings, by Godefroy number and state, often alongside Hollstein's. Originals: this is where he is buyable. He made about fifty etchings, most dated 1647-48, and they were printed for more than a century after his death, so the questions are always which state (some plates went through seven) and which printing. Impressions made in his lifetime are the top tier. Below them come the posthumous printings from his own copper plates: by his son-in-law until about 1694, Bernard Picart's edition of the complete works after 1710, and Pierre François Basan's album of about 1764 and later Paris editions. Those are genuine Ostade etchings, not copies, and the cheapest honest way in; ask the seller for the Godefroy state and the edition, and compare the sheet with an early impression in a museum's online collection before buying. Two subjects Basan added, A Woman Catching Fleas and The Pissing Peasant, are not Ostade's.

Notes

The Rijksmuseum's The Painter's Studio is not his own workshop; in the museum's words he was poking gentle fun at his own speciality by inventing an ordinary painter's workshop. Travellers at Rest, painted at sixty-one, impressed the critic Théophile Thoré, and Hofstede de Groot thought it one of the best paintings of his last period. He married twice: his first wife died in 1640, and his second, Anna Ingels, whom he married in 1657, died in 1666.

Story

Adriaen van Ostade died in the spring of 1685, but his etchings kept being printed for well over a century, and each owner of the copper plates left a mark.

After his death his plates were sold, and his son-in-law bought them and went on pulling impressions until about 1694. Then they surface in Amsterdam in the hands of Bernard Picart, an engraver who arrived there in 1710 and was the first to issue Ostade's complete etched work after his death. Around 1760 the plates went to Paris, to the publisher Pierre François Basan, who printed them as an album, 't Werck complet, with an engraved title in English and French and a mezzotint portrait of the artist.

Basan's complete works were more than complete. He was the first to slip in two prints Ostade never made: A Woman Catching Fleas and The Pissing Peasant. Album buyers got them along with the real thing, bound in among his own plates.

Basan died in 1798, and the coppers moved on again, to the widow of the Paris publisher Auguste Jean, who printed further editions with the sheets in a different order. That is why a genuine Ostade etching can be an impression from his own lifetime or a much later Paris pull from the very same copper.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Rijksmuseum (The Painter's Studio) ↗Rijksmuseum (Travellers at Rest) ↗Rijksmuseum ('The Skaters': Peasants in an Interior) ↗The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗National Gallery, London ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

AbeBooks (Godefroy, L'oeuvre grave de Adriaen van Ostade) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

Originals

Invaluable (auction results) ↗eBay (etchings) ↗

See also

Frans Hals 1582-1666Jan Steen 1626-1679Jacob van Ruisdael 1628-1682Judith Leyster 1609-1660Rachel Ruysch 1664-1750Gerard van Honthorst 1592-1656Pieter de Hooch 1629-1683Jan van Goyen 1596-1656

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