Jacob Duck (utrecht, 1600 - 1667) Attributable, Merry Company In An Interior

Jacob Duck (Utrecht, 1600 - 1667) attributable
Merry company in an interior

Oil painting on canvas
63 x 51 cm./ In antique box frame 80 x 70 cm.
 
On the back of the old frame label XV international art exhibition of the city of Venice, 1926 (?)

Full details below - link -

The scene depicted belongs to a pictorial subject much appreciated in Flemish painting, called the 'Merry Companies', where a group of men and women often sumptuously dressed rejoiced in a festive atmosphere intent on playing, drinking and making music, that is, the most typical pastimes of the upper middle class.

In our case it is a wonderful work attributable to Jacob Duck (Utrecht, 1600 - 1667), master in the representation of scenes of everyday life, rendered with an incredible pictorial refinement, and capable of giving life to his characters, shaped by a game of masterful lights.

His painting style, as is clearly evident when observing this scene, is striking for its high level of theatricality, and is a unique blend of humor and sexual innuendo, traits that he later managed to impart to the next generation of Dutch genre painting.

We are in front of a festive gathering of young knights with their weapons placed on the floor, found themselves in a classic tavern of the time, where it was possible to enjoy the pleasures of life, playing 'tric-trac', a typical seventeenth-century Dutch board game , drinking, smoking and entertaining obliging ladies.

On the one hand it is a Dutch representation of middle-class entertainment habits in which drinking, smoking and gambling had become simple pastimes, but on the other hand it can be seen as a moral warning against the dangers of free time.

The festive air that transpires from the painting brings with it a certain moralistic subtext: it does not seem to simply celebrate the pleasures of socializing among wealthy young people, but actually shows a more dissolute morality, linked to drunkenness, vice and lust.

In each painting we find different figures, in our case the man spying from a window or two of the party participants looking towards us with a mocking smile, whose function is probably to warn the viewer to focus his attention about the details of the scene.

To support the attribution, a comparison with the painting ''Interior with triktrak players smoking and drinking'' from around 1650 (oil on canvas, 63 x 51), published in the RDK archive, inv. 47988 (Kunsthandel Moatti Fine Arts, Paris), different from ours due to tiny details.
Link: https://research.rkd.nl/nl/detail/https%3A%2f%2fdata.rkd.nl%2fimages%2f47988


ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

The work sold is completed by a pleasant antique frame and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and guarantee.

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