Lot 77: Philips Koninck Amsterdam 1619 - 1688 , The laughing peasant oil on canvas

signed in monogram lower left: PK oil on canvas

measurements note 15.3 by 13.5 cm.

Leiden, Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, Rondom Rembrandt , 11 April-16 June 1968, p. 15, no. 21, reproduced (on loan from Daan Cevat).

W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schuler, Landau/Pfalz 1983 and later, vol. II, no. 1025, reproduced p. 1575.

Sir Michael Seymour G.C.B.;
His sale, London, Sotheby's, 7 June 1967, lot 101 (as 'Mieris') where acquired by Daan Cevat.

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
When discovered by Daan Cevat at a Sotheby's sale in 1967, much less was known than today about Koninck's career beyond his famed activities as a painter of sweeping Dutch panoramas. Other than in his portraits, the figures in his paintings show a marked angularity, and, in a many reminiscent of Jan Steen, a taste for theatrical caricature. This can be seen in his Feast of Bacchus in the Museum Bredius in the Hague, in which the classical theme is clearly being represented by inebriated Rhetoricians.υ1 This laughing fellow, making a theatrical gesture holding his ear for the benefit of the painter, is painted with the same marked angularity. Such characters - inmates of taverns, for example - are rarely found in Koninck's paintings, but are much more often seen in his drawings, in which the yet more pronounced angularity revealed by his swift strokes of the reed pen betrays the influence of Adriaen Brouwer.

There would seem to be little evidence for Sumowski's late dating on the basis of a comparison with the rather different Young Woman in Koninck's 1671 painting in St. Petersburg, whereas the Merry Peasant of 1656 formerly in the L.D. van Hengel collection in Arnhem, seems to provide a more convincing comparison, although it may well date from earlier still, to the 1640s.υ.2

1. See Sumowski under Literature, p. 1540, no. 1018, reproduced p. 1568.
2. Idem, p. 1541, no. 1026, reproduced p. 1576, & p. 1540, no. 1019, reproduced p. 1569.