Riverlandscape with Women Fortune-Telling, Arent Arentsz, c. 1625 - c. 1630 – (Arent Arentsz Cabel) ◄ Edellinen seuraava ►

Artist: Arent Arentsz Cabel

Treffi: 1630

koko: 49 x 88 cm

Tekniikka: Oil On Panel

In this painting, which is quite large by Arentsz’s standards, a group of gypsy women have pitched their tents on a riverbank outside a town. One of them is reading the palm of a fisherboy on the right, an elderly woman is paying the one in the middle, and in the tent on the left is a woman with a baby and two children. The gypsies are set apart by their long hair, dark complexion and long dresses, and in the case of the one in the centre, a blanket. There is another, but smaller version of this painting,6 in which the gypsy sitting to the right of the tent is missing and the two groups in the centre of the composition have changed places. In terms of the palette, the structuring of the composition with a broad view of a river in the background, and the draughtsman-like execution, this work fits in with the Rijksmuseum’s other paintings by Arentsz from the period c. 1625-30. The motif of the duck pen in the left middleground, in which a swimming dog is chasing the ducks, is also found in a painting by Arentsz in Paris.7 The building in the right background is the Haarlem Gate in Amsterdam, which was built by Hendrick de Keyser in 1616-17. Here it appears to have been used more as an isolated motif rather than to define a location.8 Gypsies, also known as Egyptians (after their supposed land of origin) and heathens, were regarded as antisocial because of their nomadic lifestyle, and were repeatedly getting into trouble with the authorities for begging, vagrancy, theft and swindling people out of money for reading palms and predicting the future.9 Roaming gypsies foretelling the future to ordinary citizens were a recurrent theme in Dutch and French prints, drawings and paintings from the beginning of the 17th century.10 Gypsies are also depicted a few times in the work of Hendrick Avercamp. A gypsy woman reads a peasant woman’s hand in the foreground of his Winter Scene on a Frozen Canal of c. 1620 in Los Angeles,11 and camping and fortune-telling gypsies also feature in two drawings.12 The financial accounts of Kampen record that gypsies (‘the heathens’) were expelled from the town in 1625.13 Jan Piet Filedt Kok, 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. 7.