Office of the Steward, Jan Woutersz Stap, c. 1636 – (Jan Woutersz Stap) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Jan Woutersz Stap

Date: 1636

Size: 83 x 69 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

An 18th-century label on the back of the panel mistakenly records that it was executed in about ‘1545/1550’, and until the beginning of the 20th century this and other, similar works by Stap were considered to be the products of Quinten Massijs’s circle.8 The artist, Johannes Woutersz Stap, was incorrectly identified with a painter named Jan Woutersz from Oudewater who acquired Amsterdam citizenship on 11 September 1542.9 It was the discovery of the 1636 date on the document held by the notary in the present painting that led to the realization that Stap was a 17th-century artist who made pastiches of paintings executed almost a hundred years earlier.10 Notaries, money-changers and landlords in their offices were subjects frequently depicted by Stap, for which a painting from 1539 attributed to Jan Massijs apparently served as the model.11 Unlike Stap’s other painting in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-1341), The Landlord’s Steward has a vertical format. Common to both representations, as well as other works by Stap, are the 16th-century costumes, the emphasis on gestures, and the placement of the young boy in the right foreground. As in the present painting, the young boy is most often shown holding a rooster, an animal that also appears in the painting attributed to Jan Massijs. The date 1539 is recorded in the open book in front of the notary in the painting attributed to Massijs. Stap used the same trick in the document held by the landlord’s steward in the Rijksmuseum work. This document is folded in half, but enough of it is legible to determine that the man standing before the steward is a tenant farmer who has leased a piece of land (‘twee morgenlant’) from ‘my lord Jaspersen’ (‘mijnheer jaspersen’). A certain Pieter Janssen was witness to the transaction, and the signature of the notary, whose full name is given in the text as Pieter Clasen, is found at the bottom of the document.12 The document in the painting attributed to Jan Massijs also concerns the leasing of land. Like the tenant farmer in the older painting, Stap’s is clean-shaven, wears a similar costume and holds his hat to his chest. However, his serious, worrisome expression is quite different from the grimacing features of his older counterpart. Stap’s steward is a more noble variant of the one in the painting of 1539, and his child has a very earnest expression. In general, Stap has replaced the satire in the painting attributed to Jan Massijs with a sentimental seriousness. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 276.