Description of The Fiddler.—One of the gems of The Hague Gallery is The Fiddler by Adriaen van Ostade (1610-85). The old dilapidated inn with its broken casement window is picturesque because of the graceful festoons of vine-leaves that grow above the roof and penthouse. A wandering fiddler is playing to the innkeeper and his wife, who lean over the door, while five children and a dog are variously grouped. A young man with a large tankard in his hand also enjoys the music in his lazy position.
A. VAN OSTADE
The Fiddler
Description of Peasants in an Inn.—"Peasants in an Inn was painted in 1662; but it exhibits all the qualities of Ostade's best work. The figures are drawn true to life. Very charming is the poodle gazing with great interest at the child, who is eating his bread and butter. By allowing the full daylight to fall from the left through the door while the background is lighted by a high window, Ostade gives himself every opportunity to express his chiaroscuro as beautifully as he desires. The little pot on the tree-trunk and all the other still life of this picture forcibly remind us that Ostade was an unusually great master in this field. His small pictures of still life, principally representing pots and other kitchen stuff, are pearls of the first water; but they are somewhat rare. The coloring of this picture is warm, but it melts into cool tones, which we find still more strongly in The Organ Grinder of the same gallery, which was painted eleven years later."[13]
The Demand in Marriage, painted between 1650 and 1655, also hangs in the Mauritshuis. This picture is owned by Dr. A. Bredius.
Ostade's Pictures Generally taken from Low Life.—The number of Ostade's pictures as given by Smith is 385; but it is thought that he painted even more. About 220 pictures have been traced in public and private collections.
Adriaen Ostade was the contemporary of David Teniers and Adriaen Brouwer, and, like them, chiefly devoted himself to painting rustic and village life, tavern and gambling scenes, brawls and open-air games. Smokers, drinkers, fish-wives, quacks, strolling musicians, itinerant players, wood-cutters, children at play, alehouse-keepers and their wives, all find sympathetic treatment. Like Brouwer, Ostade wandered about the towns and country, finding his models in the taverns and cottages.
Increase in the Value of his Pictures.—He painted with equal vigor at all times; and so highly appreciated is he that pictures worth little in his day now bring large sums. For instance, in 1876 Earl Dudley paid £4,120 for a cottage interior. According to Houbraken, Ostade was a pupil of Frans Hals, while he was also teaching Brouwer.
Crowe's Opinion of Ostade's Style.—"There is less of the style of Hals in Adriaen Ostade than in Brouwer, but a great likeness to Brouwer in Ostade's early works. During the first years of his career, Ostade displayed the same tendency to exaggeration and frolic as his comrade. He had humor and boisterous spirits, but he is to be distinguished from his rival by a more general use of the principles of light and shade, and especially by a greater concentration of light on a small surface in contrast with a broad expanse of gloom. The key of his harmonies remains for a time in the scale of grays. But his treatment is dry and careful, and in this style he shuns no difficulties of detail, representing cottages inside and out, with the vine leaves covering the poorness of the outer side, and nothing inside to deck the patch-work of rafters and thatch, or tumble-down chimneys and ladder staircases, that make up the sordid interior of the Dutch rustic of those days. His men and women, attuned to these needy surroundings, are invariably dressed in the poorest clothes. The hard life and privations of the race are impressed on their shapes and faces, their shoes and hats, worn at heel and battered to softness, as if they had descended from generation to generation, so that the boy of ten seems to wear the cast-off things of his sire and grandsire. It was not easy to get poetry out of such materials. But the greatness of Ostade lies in the fact that he often caught the poetic side of the life of the peasant class, in spite of its ugliness and stunted form and misshapen features. He did so by giving their vulgar sports, their quarrels, even their quieter moods of enjoyment, the magic light of the sungleam, and by clothing the wreck of cottages with gay vegetation."[14]
Ostade the Greatest Dutch Painter of Peasant Life in his Day.—Adriaen van Ostade is rightly regarded as the greatest of the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century who represented the peasant life of that day. In song and dance, weddings and kermesses, at bowling, love-making, and drinking, Ostade always was an observer of country folk, although he himself was a townsman, and held a rather exalted position in the world. His second wife seems to have raised him into a very high social class of Amsterdam families, as numerous records of executions of wills, which the painter must have signed in Amsterdam, inform us. To some extent, his peasants involuntarily progress parallel with the force of his own life. In his earliest pictures, when Ostade was still a modest artist, his peasants are also still quite peasant-like; in his tavern-scenes things are still very lively. Later, when the painter became closely related to refined and well-to-do patricians, his peasants also became more prosperous and polite; in a word, more decorous. Unfortunately, his painting also became somewhat more polished and smooth, so that the early pictures, and particularly those of the middle period, more strongly delight the heart of an artist than the cool, smooth works of the later period. Ostade is eminent in his coloring, chiaroscuro, and composition: he knows how to arrange his groups in the most spontaneous and natural manner; and truly artistic is his method of illumination, for which, knowingly or unknowingly, he has to thank Rembrandt. In his earliest pictures, which have a somewhat cold tone grading into gray, reminding us of his teacher Hals (from 1631 to 1640), there still remains some local color. The subjects, mostly peasants in poor homes or in the tavern, are energetically conceived. Bode rightly says: