Merry company is the term in art history for a painting, usually from the 17th century, showing a small group of people enjoying themselves, usually seated with drinks, and often music-making. These scenes are a very common type of genre painting of the Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque; it is estimated that nearly two thirds of Dutch genre scenes show people drinking.[1]
The term is the usual translation of the Dutchgeselschapje,[2] or vrolijk gezelschap, and is capitalized when used as a title for a work, and sometimes as a term for the type. The scenes may be set in the home, a garden, or a tavern, and the gatherings range from decorous groups in wealthy interiors to groups of drunk men with prostitutes. Gatherings that are relatively decorous and expensively dressed, with similar numbers of men and women, often standing, may be called Elegant Company or Gallant Company, while those showing people who are clearly peasants are more likely to use that word in their title. Such subjects in painting are most common in Dutch art between about 1620 and 1670.
Scope of the term
Prostitution is clearly indicated in this scene by Gerard van Honthorst of 1623, complete with aged procuress, low cleavage, and a feathered headdress on the second girl.Abraham van den Hecken, A Merry Company in a Tavern, 1640s
The definition of a "merry company" is far from rigid, and overlaps with several other types of painting. Portraits of family groups or bodies such as militia companies may borrow an informal style of composition from them, but works where the figures were intended to represent specific individuals are excluded. There are normally between four and about a dozen figures shown, which typically includes both men and women, but may just consist of men, perhaps with female servants, as in the Buytewech illustrated. Contemporary Dutch descriptions of paintings from inventories, auction catalogues and the like, use (no doubt somewhat arbitrarily) other terms for similar compositions including "a buitenpartij (an outdoor party or picnic), a cortegaarddje (a barrack-room or guardroom scene), a borddeeltjen (a bordello scene), and a beeldeken or moderne beelden (a picture with little figures or modern figures)".[4]
"Musical party" or "concert" is often used when some of the main figures are playing instruments. More generally such works may be referred to as "company paintings" or "company subjects" (but this is not to be confused with Indian Company painting, a style patronized by the British East India Company). Few if any titles used for 17th century genre paintings can be traced to the artist; those used by museums and art historians today may derive from a record in the provenance or be made up in modern times.
Paintings showing specific celebrations such as weddings or the festivities for Twelfth Night, the main mid-winter celebration in the Netherlands, or the playing of specific games, are likely to have titles relating to these where the subject is still clear. For example, a painting by Godfried Schalcken (1665–1670, Royal Collection) is known from his biography by his pupil Arnold Houbraken to represent The game of 'Lady, Come into the Garden', and is so titled, although the rules of this are now unknown but "clearly involved the removal of clothes", at least by some male participants.[5] In La Main Chaud ("the hot hand") male participants just got smacked.[6] Paintings showing the parable of the Prodigal Son in his prodigal phase are conceived as merry company scenes of the brothel type, though they are often larger, as was expected of a history painting.
Interpretation
As with other types of Netherlandish genre painting, the body of merry company paintings include some with a clear moralistic intention, carrying a message to avoid excess in drink, lavish spending, low company and fornication. Others seem merely to celebrate the pleasures of sociability, often with a socially aspirational element. Many fall somewhere in between, are hard to interpret, and "contain within them an obvious contradiction between their goal of condemning certain types of excessive behaviour and the amusing and attractive aspect of this very behaviour and its representation".[7]
Jacob Ochtervelt, Musical Company in an Interior, c. 1670. A row of portraits hang at the top of the back wall.
Often the art historian wishing to interpret them has first to decide such questions as whether the scene is placed in a home, a tavern or a brothel, and if a tavern whether the women present are respectable or prostitutes, or whether the artist had a intention to convey definite meaning to his contemporary viewers on these questions at all.[8] The titles given later to paintings often distinguish between "taverns" or "inns" and "brothels", but in practice these were very often the same establishments, as many taverns had rooms above or behind set aside for sexual purposes: "Inn in front; brothel behind" was a Dutch proverb.[9]
Scenes with prostitutes do not reflect the realities of 17th century prostitution in many ways, but offer a conventionalized visual code.[10] The madam or (as art historians like to call them) "procuress" is always an aged crone, whereas court records for Amsterdam (the national centre for Dutch prostitution) show that most were still fairly young, and 40% in their twenties.[11] The presence of a procuress figure is by itself sufficient to justify interpreting a painting as a brothel scene.[12]
Fine clothes (rented from the madam) and in particular feathers in headdresses are said to be signifiers of prostitutes,[13] as well as the more obvious loosened clothes, low cleavages, and a provocative frontal stance. But in the later part of the century demure downcast looks by the woman feature in many scenes thought to represent prostitution;[14] in the famously ambiguous threesome The Gallant Conversation by Gerard ter Borch, the young woman is seen only from behind.[15] Of one painting by Jacob Ochtervelt, (c. 1670, now Cleveland, illustrated at left) Wayne Franits says:
At first glance, the Musical Company in an Interior appears to be an elegant gathering of well-heeled youths [and women and a servant]... The picture exudes an aura of calmness and finesse. Nevertheless, the series of female portraits on the wall behind the figures discloses the true nature of its subject. There is strong evidence that actual brothels displayed portraits like these to assist clients in selecting their partners.[16]
Simon de Vos, 1630s; according to the owning museum "Well-bred young ladies did not join parties in public inns; these smiling women are prostitutes".
...when we are unsure whether we are looking at a picture of a home or a tavern, or whether what seems to be a tavern is actually a brothel, it may not be because we lack hard-and-fast clues to the artist's unambiguous intention, but because he meant us to be unsure. ... It would be futile to attempt to distinguish between scenes of good homely fun and public-house dissipation, because the figurative and actual territories were themselves deliberately mixed up. Where goings-on take place in a household or, conversely, children run around with gleeful worldliness in a tavern, there is a good chance that the picture is about the conmingling of innocence and corruption.[18]
Jan Steen owned a tavern for a period, living on the premises, and often included portraits of himself and members of his family in "genre" works.[19]Gerrit van Honthorst, who painted several scenes that, like the one illustrated here, clearly do show prostitution, married the daughter of the proprietress of a tavern and a wine merchant, who was a distant cousin and something of an heiress. The traditional interpretation and title of his Prodigal Son in Munich has been challenged, with the assertion that it merely shows a "festive" tavern scene, despite the presence of an older woman and feathers in the girls' hair, often taken as diagnostic of a brothel scene.[20]
Elmer Kolfin, in "the first comprehensive study to date on the merry company in Dutch art during the first half of the seventeenth century" divides the pictures "into three iconographic categories: "idealistic", which present mainly positive views of the festive activities depicted; "moralistic", in which such activities are condemned from a moral point of view; and "satirical", in which they are held up for ridicule, but chiefly for comic rather than moralizing effect" seeing a movement away from moralistic to idealistic treatments from the 16th to the 17th century.[21]
Other scholars see a large group of paintings as deliberately ambiguous or open in their meaning; the limited evidence we have suggests they were often displayed in the main rooms of their owners' houses.[22]
The exceptional freedom allowed to Dutch women amazed and usually horrified foreign visitors; according to the visiting Englishman Fynes Moryson:
... mothers of good fame permit their daughters at home after they themselves go to bed, to sit up with young men all or most part of the night, banqueting and talking, yea with leave and without leave to walk abroad with young men in the streets by night. And this they do out of a customed liberty without prejudice to their fame whereas the Italian women, strictly kept, think it folly to omit every opportunity they can get to do ill.[23]
Many paintings have lightly worn allegorical schemes; a plate of food, tobacco pipe, musical instrument and a squeeze, kiss or slap will be enough to make any group into an Allegory of the Five Senses.[24] Many may illustrate the endless supply of moralistic Dutch proverbs.
Courtly party scenes, typically of couples of young lovers in a "garden of love", were popular in the late Middle Ages, mostly in illuminated manuscripts and prints rather than panel paintings, and often as part of calendar series showing the months, or book illustrations.[25] In the Renaissance such scenes tended to be given specific settings from religion or classical mythology, such as the Feast of the Gods which, unlike merry company scenes, was an excuse for copious amounts of nudity. In 16th century Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting traditions of genre painting of festivities or parties began to develop, most famously in the peasant scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which were the first large paintings to have peasant life as their sole subject.
The "courtly company scene" with anonymous genre figures developed in the first years of the 17th century in both the Northern and Southern Netherlands, now separated by the Eighty Years War. As the subject type developed, so did differences between the two regions: Flemish painting covered a wider range of settings in terms of class, with peasant scenes remaining strongly represented, and many scenes showing court milieus. Dutch painting concentrated on a class spectrum that might all be called middle-class, though ranging from elegant patrician companies to scruffy and rowdy groups. Flemish scenes tend to have far more characters, and the tranquil middle class group of four or five people sitting round a table at home is not seen.[28] Whereas most Dutch paintings, except for those by the Utrecht Caravaggisti, had small figures, the "monumental company scene" remained part of Flemish painting, with Jacob Jordaens producing several examples, especially of Twelfth Night festivities.[29] By the 1630s artists in both regions, but especially the north, tended to specialize in particular genres, and the merry company was no exception.[30]
The first generation of Dutch painters included Willem Pieterszoon Buytewech (1591/1592–1624), who can claim to have invented the small interior merry company,[31] Other early artists were David Vinckboons (1576–1629),[32] and Esaias van de Velde (1587–1630), who was an even more significant pioneer of realistic landscape painting, in a completely different style to his elegant garden parties.[33] The famous portraitist Frans Hals was attributed with a single very early merry company, a gallant picnic of about 1610, which was destroyed in Berlin in World War II;[34] he also painted a "close-up" genre depiction of three revellers.[35] His younger brother Dirck Hals (1591–1656) was a prolific specialist in small merry company groups.[36]
By about 1630 active painters included Hendrik Gerritsz. Pot (1587–1657), also a portraitist, Anthonie Palamedesz. (1601–1673), Pieter Codde (1599–1678), and Jacob Duck (1600–1667). Codde and Duck, with Willem Duyster, were also painters of "guardroom scenes", which showed soldiers specifically, and became popular in the 1630s; as Lucy van de Pol notes, the sailors who made up a great part of the clientele of taverns and brothels, at least in Amsterdam, are very rarely represented.[37]
After about the mid-century many "company paintings" showed smaller and more quiet groups more firmly located in homes, often with more narrative elements and a greater concentration on effects of lighting and texture. Pictures showing many of the same interests as "company" works, but just using couples or individuals become very common. The paintings of Vermeer, none of which quite fall into the category of "merry company" works, exemplify this trend, which is also seen in those of Gerard ter Borch, Gabriel Metsu, Gerrit Dou, and Pieter de Hooch.[38] The works of Jan Steen (c. 1626–1679) maintained the tradition of rowdy drinking groups, but usually with a setting showing a specific occasion, or illustrating a proverb. Many show family groups, and often a self-portrait is included.[39]
The Bruegel tradition of peasant scenes was continued by his sons Jan Brueghel I and Peter Brueghel the Younger, mostly painting kermesse-type festivities with large numbers of figures, most often outdoors. Smaller groups in interiors were pioneered by the intensely naturalistic Adriaen Brouwer, who was Flemish but also worked and sold in Haarlem in the north, where he greatly influenced Adriaen van Ostade, the leading Dutch painter of peasants. Brouwer's sordid scenes are short on merriment, but van Ostade softened and sentimentalized his style.[41]
David Teniers the Elder, his son David Teniers the Younger as well as other members of the family included many peasant scenes in their large and varied output.[42] Most of the works of all these painters lie outside the typical boundaries of the "merry company", in terms of the number of figures or their class, but many fall within; there was also a later generation of Flemish painters of peasant scenes.[43]Rubens, who owned 17 paintings by Adriaen Brouwer, painted a few kermesse and other peasant scenes that are highly successful, despite their very heroic style. He also painted a few large courtly company scenes, including his Garden of Love, (Prado, 1634-5),[44] looking forward to the French Fête galante type of the next century.
Apart from Jordaens and Rubens, Flemish painters of monumental company scenes included Theodoor Rombouts (1597–1637), who made several large paintings of card-players, Cornelis de Vos, and Jan Cossiers.[45]
↑ Alejandro Vergara, "The Subject Matter of Paintings of Domestic Interiors" in Vermeer and the Dutch Interior, 2003, (orig. Vermeer y El Interior Holandes), excerpted at www.essentialvermeer.com
↑ Franits, 20, 68–69, 78–82, 106–107, 124, 201; van de Pol; Schama, 462–464; Webster
Adriaen Brouwer was a Flemish painter active in Flanders and the Dutch Republic in the first half of the 17th century. Brouwer was an important innovator of genre painting through his vivid depictions of peasants, soldiers and other "lower class" individuals engaged in drinking, smoking, card or dice playing, fighting, music making etc. in taverns or rural settings. Brouwer contributed to the development of the genre of tronies, i.e. head or facial studies, which investigate varieties of expression. In his final year he produced a few landscapes of a tragic intensity. Brouwer's work had an important influence on the next generation of Flemish and Dutch genre painters. Although Brouwer produced only a small body of work, Dutch masters Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt collected it.
David Teniers the Younger or David Teniers II was a Flemish Baroque painter, printmaker, draughtsman, miniaturist painter, staffage painter, copyist and art curator. He was an extremely versatile artist known for his prolific output. He was an innovator in a wide range of genres such as history painting, genre painting, landscape painting, portrait and still life. He is now best remembered as the leading Flemish genre painter of his day. Teniers is particularly known for developing the peasant genre, the tavern scene, pictures of collections and scenes with alchemists and physicians.
Dutch Golden Age painting is the painting of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history roughly spanning the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) for Dutch independence.
Genre painting, a form of genre art, depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attached either individually or collectively, thus distinguishing it from history paintings and portraits. A work would often be considered as a genre work even if it could be shown that the artist had used a known person—a member of his family, say—as a model. In this case it would depend on whether the work was likely to have been intended by the artist to be perceived as a portrait—sometimes a subjective question. The depictions can be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Because of their familiar and frequently sentimental subject matter, genre paintings have often proven popular with the bourgeoisie, or middle class.
Flemish Baroque painting was a style of painting in the Southern Netherlands during Spanish control in the 16th and 17th centuries. The period roughly begins when the Dutch Republic was split from the Habsburg Spain regions to the south with the Spanish recapturing of Antwerp in 1585 and goes until about 1700, when Spanish Habsburg authority ended with the death of King Charles II. Antwerp, home to the prominent artists Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacob Jordaens, was the artistic nexus, while other notable cities include Brussels and Ghent.
Gillis van Tilborgh or Gillis van Tilborch (c. 1625 – c. 1678) was a Flemish painter who worked in various genres including portraits, 'low-life' and elegant genre paintings and paintings of picture galleries. He became the keeper of the picture collection of the governor of the Habsburg Netherlands and travelled in England where he painted group portraits.
Joos van Craesbeeck (c. 1605/06 – c. 1660) was a Flemish baker and a painter who played an important role in the development of Flemish genre painting in the mid-17th century through his tavern scenes and dissolute portraits. His genre scenes depict low-life figures as well as scenes of middle-class people. He created a few religiously themed compositions.
Balthasar van den Bossche (1681–1715) was a Flemish painter who is mainly known for his wide range of genre subjects and occasional portraits.
Cornelis Mahu was a Flemish painter of still lifes, genre paintings and seascapes who showed a very high level of craftsmanship in his compositions.
Willem Cornelisz Duyster (1599–1635) was a Dutch Golden Age painter from Amsterdam, best known for his "guardroom scenes" (cortegaarddje), genre paintings showing the military life.
The art of the Low Countries consists of painting, sculpture, architecture, printmaking, pottery, and other forms of visual art produced in the Low Countries, and since the 19th century in Belgium in the southern Netherlands and the Netherlands in the north.
Ludolf de Jongh or Ludolf Leendertsz. de Jongh was a Dutch painter, known for his genre scenes, hunting scenes, history paintings, landscapes, cityscapes and portraits. He was further a merchant, an officer in the civil guard of Rotterdam and a schout (sheriff) of Hillegersberg. He was in the 1650s the leading genre painter in Rotterdam whose work influenced artists such as Pieter de Hooch. He was active as a staffage painter and added the figures in the works of artists such as the church interior painter Anthonie de Lorme and the landscape painter Joris van der Haagen.
Thomas van Apshoven was a Flemish painter known for his landscapes with peasant scenes and genre scenes in interiors. His genre scenes depict village festivals, the interiors of taverns, village scenes or landscapes with peasants engaged in various activities, singeries, guardroom scenes and laboratories of alchemists. Some still lifes have also been attributed to him. His themes and style are close to that of David Teniers the Younger.
Anthonie Palamedesz., also Antonie Palamedesz, birth name Antonius Stevens, was a Dutch portrait and genre painter. He is in particular known for his merry company paintings depicting elegant figures engaged in play, music and conversation as well as guardroom scenes showing soldiers in guardrooms. Like many Dutch painters of his time, he painted portraits and still lifes, including vanitas still lifes. He further painted the staffage in a few views of the interior of churches. He played a major role in the development of genre painting in Delft in the mid 17th century.
Christoffel Jacobsz van der Laemen or Christoffel van der Laemen was a Flemish painter who specialized in merry company scenes with elegant figures. His favorite themes were card and backgammon players, brothel scenes, the prodigal son, dancing, music making and scenes of food and drink set in elegant rooms, inns and gardens.
Anton Goubau or Anton Goebouw was a Flemish Baroque painter. He spent time in Rome where he moved in the circle of the Bamboccianti, Dutch and Flemish genre painters who created small cabinet paintings of the everyday life of the lower classes in Rome and its countryside. He is known for his Italianate landscapes and genre paintings in the style of the Bamboccianti and his history paintings with mythological and religious themes.
François Duchatel or du Chastel (1616/1625–1679/1694) was a Flemish painter who worked in Brussels and possibly also in Paris. He is known for his portraits, including of children and groups and genre paintings, including of peasant subjects, tavern interiors and guardroom scenes. He also painted a few large views of historical events and religious scenes.
The world landscape, a translation of the German Weltlandschaft, is a type of composition in Western painting showing an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. The subject of each painting is usually a Biblical or historical narrative, but the figures comprising this narrative element are dwarfed by their surroundings.
The Feast of the Gods or Banquet of the Gods as a subject in art showing a group of deities at table has a long history going back into antiquity. Showing Greco-Roman deities, it enjoyed a revival in popularity in the Italian Renaissance, and then in the Low Countries during the 16th century, when it was popular with Northern Mannerist painters, at least partly as an opportunity to show copious amounts of nudity.
Abraham Teniers was a Flemish painter and engraver who specialized in genre paintings of villages, inns and monkey scenes. He was a member of artist family Teniers which came to prominence in the 17th century. He was also active as a publisher.
Pol, Lotte C. van de, "The Whore, the Bawd, and the Artist: The Reality and Imagery of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prostitution", online version, 2010, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Volume 2: Issue 1–2 (2010), DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2010.2.1.3
Rosen, Jochai, "The Dutch Guardroom Scene of the Golden Age: A Definition", Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 27, No. 53 (2006), pp.151–174, JSTOR
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, 1987, Random House, ISBN000217801X
Vlieghe, H. (1998), Flemish art and architecture, 1585–1700, Yale University Press Pelican history of art, New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN0300070381
Webster, Erin L., review of Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth Century Holland by H. Rodney Nevitt, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp.550–552, JSTOR
Further reading
Arbitman, Karen Jones, Gardens of Earthly Delight: Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Netherlandish Gardens, catalogue of exhibition at the Frick Art Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 3, 1986 - May 18, 1986, 1986, Indiana University Press, ISBN0253212529, 9780253212528, google books
Kolfin, Elmer, The Young Gentry at Play; Northern Netherlandish Scenes of Merry Companies 1610–1645, 2005, Leiden (trans. of Een geselschap jonge luyden. Productie, functie en betekenis von Noord-Nederlandse voorstellingen van vrolijke gezelschappen 1610–1645, Leiden, 2002), review by Nevitt
Nevitt, H. Rodney, Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth Century Holland (see Webster for review)
Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips, Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective, 2003, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, chapter 6: "Erotic Images in the Domestic Interior: Cultural Ideals and Social Practices"
Pol, Lotte C. van de, The Burger and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam, 2011, Oxford University Press, also Het Amsterdams Hoerdom: Prostitutie in de Zeventiende en Achttiende Eeuw, Amsterdam, Wereldbibliotheek, 1996.
Merry Company at the Walters Art Museum, interpreted moralistically
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