Artist: Jan Van Bijlert
Date: 1640
Size: 18 x 18 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
This very economically painted representation of a half-length man playing a lute by the light of an oil lamp is the smallest work in Van Bijlert’s extant oeuvre. The painting can be related to the small-scale merry company scenes, several including figures making music, which Van Bijlert executed in the 1630s. These works differ greatly from the artist’s larger, often single-figure, Caravaggesque paintings, and betray the influence of Van Bijlert’s fellow townsman Jacob Duck.4 Not only is the present painting the smallest in Van Bijlert’s known oeuvre, it is the only one to include artificial illumination. Small-scale paintings in which the figures are illuminated by oil lamps by Judith Leyster, such as Man Offering Money to a Seamstress from 1631,5 may have been influential for this aspect of Van Bijlert’s painting,6 although it is not certain whether the Utrecht artist would have known such works produced in Haarlem. Another possibility is that Van Bijlert was inspired by Gerard van Honthorst’s use of artificial illumination in a number of his large-scale Caravaggesque works, and simply adapted it to a work of very modest dimensions. 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. 20.
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