.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This single-figure scene featuring a young man in a darkened interior once looked very different. Infrared reflectography has revealed a table or chair at the lower left of the composition that has been painted out at some point in the panel's history, rendering the young man's pose somewhat awkward. He holds a cup in one hand and a pipe in the other as he leans in the direction of the jug of wine sitting on the floor. The existence of what appears to be an undergarment draped over the chair at the right suggests an evening of drinking and flirtation that may well have ended in another frame of the scene. The figure is not old enough to be one of Duyster's carousing soldiers and his glance up and to one side is not one of confidence but has a tentative, even furtive feel. While he appears to reach for the jug of wine, the presence of a table or chair may have shifted the emphasis somewhat. Rather than trying to take part in the debauchery, could he be removing evidence of it? Further scientific study and, perhaps, restoration of the painting may help to determine Duyster's intended iconography. Both the subject and the application of paint are typical of Duyster's works. He painted both genre scenes and portraits and played an important role in popularising the guardroom scene comprised of soldiers looting, skirmishing, drinking, and smoking. The thin, loose application of paint is typical of Duyster's style as is the fine brushwork describing the cuffs of the boy's jacket and the white cotton of the garment on the chair.
Aspects of Duyster's biography offer an interesting glimpse of life in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. His name, for example, is not that of his father, Cornelis Dircksz., but comes from the house in the Koningstraat called 'De Duystere Werelt' (The Dark World) in which the family lived. A document of 1625 records a violent quarrel between Duyster and his fellow Amsterdam painter Pieter Codde at Meerhuysen, a country house rented by Barent van Someren. Van Someren was a painter, dealer, and innkeeper who patronised Brouwer and was a friend of Hals and the document suggests not only that he used the country house to entertain his fellow artists but that such gatherings were festive enough to, at times, get out of control. Indeed, artists seemed to form their own communities to a certain degree in this period, as evidenced by the double marriage in 1631 of Duyster to Margrieta Kick, a cousin of the Haarlem painters Jan and Solomon de Bray and of Duyster's sister Styntge to Margrieta's brother, the genre painter Simon Kick. Both couples eventually lived together in De Duystere Werelt.
Aspects of Duyster's biography offer an interesting glimpse of life in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. His name, for example, is not that of his father, Cornelis Dircksz., but comes from the house in the Koningstraat called 'De Duystere Werelt' (The Dark World) in which the family lived. A document of 1625 records a violent quarrel between Duyster and his fellow Amsterdam painter Pieter Codde at Meerhuysen, a country house rented by Barent van Someren. Van Someren was a painter, dealer, and innkeeper who patronised Brouwer and was a friend of Hals and the document suggests not only that he used the country house to entertain his fellow artists but that such gatherings were festive enough to, at times, get out of control. Indeed, artists seemed to form their own communities to a certain degree in this period, as evidenced by the double marriage in 1631 of Duyster to Margrieta Kick, a cousin of the Haarlem painters Jan and Solomon de Bray and of Duyster's sister Styntge to Margrieta's brother, the genre painter Simon Kick. Both couples eventually lived together in De Duystere Werelt.