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Lot Essay
By the second half of the 1530s, Jan Sanders van Hemessen had become one of the most exciting and revolutionary painters working in Antwerp. Drawing inspiration from the diverse, everchanging population of merchants, sailors, tavern workers and entertainers who passed through this port city, which had established itself as one of Europe’s leading economic capitals, the artist produced a series of paintings showing scenes of daily life. Brimming with humor and sexual innuendo, these compositions feature flamboyantly dressed men and women with often exaggerated facial expressions and gestures, who gather in taverns and domestic interiors, as in the earliest work from this series, the Prodigal Son at the Inn from 1536 (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels). The present painting belongs to this fundamental moment in Hemessen’s career. It depicts a Bagpiper and Merry Wife, seen bust-length against a dark, monochromatic background. The man appears to be singing, his face contorted and mouth open, as he clutches his pipes, the folds of which echo those of his chaperon. The woman gazes at him intently, toting a piece of buttered bread and a flagon in her raised hands, revealing that she is indulging both her sense of hearing and taste. While this remarkable painting has been known to scholars since at least the early twentieth century, it has only recently been made available for in-depth study.
Burr Wallen discusses the composition of the Bagpiper and Merry Wife, specifically the version in the Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, in relation to Hemessen’s celebrated Tearful Bride (fig. 1; National Gallery Prague), citing this as evidence of the artist’s investigation into ‘the realm of moralized genre’ (B. Wallen, Jan van Hemessen: An Antwerp Painter between Reform and Counter-Reform, Michigan, 1983, p. 64). The scholar proposes that the paintings were intended as pendants, with the latter capturing the moment when the reluctant bride was being led to her nuptial bed, and the Bagpiper and Merry Wife reflecting the bawdy merrymaking typical of wedding celebrations at the time. Hemessen’s Tearful Bride is the earliest surviving painting of this subject, though precedents clearly existed, since Francis I of France is documented as having purchased a painting of that subject for the royal collection in 1529 from the Antwerp art dealer Jehan Duboys (K. Renger, ‘Tränen in der Hochzeitsnacht,’ in Festschrift für Otto von Simson zum 65. Geburtstag, Berlin, 1977, p. 311).
Numerous painted and printed representations of this theme were produced in the Netherlands in the latter half of the sixteenth century, all of which essentially follow the same scheme, although with younger participants, in which the new bride is guided by her mother and bridegroom with a bagpiper typically accompanying the party. These later images tend to assign two attributes to the bride – a candle to light her way, and an earthenware jug for her nuptial ablutions. Hemessen’s contemporaries would have immediately recognized in these everyday objects the sexual symbolism of male and female genitalia. Both items appear in Pieter Balten’s engraving of 1598 (fig. 2), which unites in a single composition Hemessen’s imagery of the Tearful Bride and the Bagpiper and Merry Wife and bears the inscription: ‘Maintenant plorer icy voyez l’Espousée, / Qui de rire au lict se tient bien assure’ (‘Now weeps the bride, and yet I wager, / She shall laugh again, once she is in bed’; quoted in B. Wallen, op. cit., p. 65).
Hemessen’s version of the Tearful Bride is more nuanced than most. The bride and groom are both advanced in age and relatively unattractive. The balding man is gaunt-cheeked with a head that resembles a skull. He grasps and caresses the arm of his bride, not without coincidence tucking a finger beneath her torn dress. The bride’s wrinkled face is contorted with grief, her tears echoed by the stream of snot that runs from her nose. The elderly couple is contrasted by the young man who hands the bride her nuptial pot. The candle is absent. Rather than a crown, she wears a garland of cherries, a mocking reflection of her lack of fecundity. As Wallen observes, in addition to their connections with weddings, cherries also were emblems of luxuria. Indeed, there is nothing virginal about this bride, who appears to lament her fate, unwilling to tear herself away from the much younger man who holds her pot, tapping into the longstanding tradition of unequal lovers imagery.
The version of the Bagpiper and Merry Wife now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium was taken as spoils from the imperial collection of Rudolf II in Prague by Queen Christina of Sweden before entering the museum at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Brussels panel measures 45 x 65.5 cm., but notably was cut down somewhat along the top and bottom edges. The Tearful Bride measures 51.8 x 63 cm. and was also cut down a few centimeters along the right edge. Accordingly, the Brussels and Prague panels would appear to have originally been of equal size, lending support to the theory that they were conceived of and painted as pendants. It is worth noting, however, that the earliest history of the Prague painting is uncharted. Our first notice of the panel is when it was sold in the Mallet sale at Sotheby’s, London, on 19 June 1935, as Pieter Aertsen. Its potential link with Rudolf II was surely the impetus for its acquisition by a Prague private collector and eventually the National Gallery Prague, but there is no concrete evidence to explicitly link them together, particularly when one takes into account the existence of the present autograph version of the Bagpiper and Merry Wife.
The possibility that the present panel, rather than the Brussels version, is the pendant to the Prague Tearful Bride therefore merits consideration, though ultimately this seems unlikely. The earliest history of the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife is similarly unclear at this point. By the eighteenth century, it was in the collection of Sir Henry Ibbetson, Bt., of Denton Park, Yorkshire. The Ibbetson’s art collection passed into the possession of the Wyvill family of Constable Burton, Yorkshire, following the marriage of Laura, the daughter and heiress of Sir Charles Ibbetson, Bt., in 1845 to Marmaduke Wyvill, the celebrated chess master and politician. Today, the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife measures 45.9 x 60.1 cm., following the recent removal of a later 6.2 cm. addition along its upper edge. Assuming that its current state properly reflects the painting’s original dimensions, it would accordingly be both too short and too narrow to serve as a pair to the Tearful Bride in Prague.
What then are we to make of the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife? Dendrochronological analysis performed by Ian Tyers in December 2021 on the two Baltic oak boards that comprise the panel suggests that it was made from trees that were felled after circa 1530 and indicates a usage date of the late 1530s or 1540s. Analysis of the infra-red reflectography mosaic (IRR) reveals that the artist developed his underdrawing using a dry medium (fig. 3). According to his typical practice, Hemessen defined the contours of his composition with thin, precise lines. Only a few minor pentimenti may be observed, and these mostly relate to minute adjustments to the positions of the fingers. Wallen dates the Brussels and Prague panels to around 1540 based on the existence of an inferior copy of the Tearful Bride which sold at Christie’s, London, in 1935 and 1936 and more recently at Sotheby’s, London (7 April 1982, lot 76), bearing the inscription, `JOHANNES/DE HEM/ESSEN/PINGEB/AT/1540’ (op. cit., pp. 298-299, 353 note 79, no. 22a). The scholar further suggests that the existence of this mediocre copy, which he considers to be a studio production, indicates that there may have been an earlier, autograph version of the composition by Hemessen himself. Given the highly refined execution of the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife, which is arguably superior to the poorly-preserved version in Brussels, and bearing in mind that the ex-Sotheby’s copy measures 48 x 60 cm. and is practically the same size as the painting under consideration here, it therefore seems likely that Hemessen’s original Tearful Bride is not the Prague picture – which may well be the Brussels pendant – but another, now lost, prototype of the same size of the 1982 auctioned copy. Presumably, this original signed and dated 1540 version of the Tearful Bride was painted as the companion to the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife, which may accordingly now be recognized as a welcome addition to the small group of autograph works by Hemessen.
Peter van den Brink
Burr Wallen discusses the composition of the Bagpiper and Merry Wife, specifically the version in the Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, in relation to Hemessen’s celebrated Tearful Bride (fig. 1; National Gallery Prague), citing this as evidence of the artist’s investigation into ‘the realm of moralized genre’ (B. Wallen, Jan van Hemessen: An Antwerp Painter between Reform and Counter-Reform, Michigan, 1983, p. 64). The scholar proposes that the paintings were intended as pendants, with the latter capturing the moment when the reluctant bride was being led to her nuptial bed, and the Bagpiper and Merry Wife reflecting the bawdy merrymaking typical of wedding celebrations at the time. Hemessen’s Tearful Bride is the earliest surviving painting of this subject, though precedents clearly existed, since Francis I of France is documented as having purchased a painting of that subject for the royal collection in 1529 from the Antwerp art dealer Jehan Duboys (K. Renger, ‘Tränen in der Hochzeitsnacht,’ in Festschrift für Otto von Simson zum 65. Geburtstag, Berlin, 1977, p. 311).
Numerous painted and printed representations of this theme were produced in the Netherlands in the latter half of the sixteenth century, all of which essentially follow the same scheme, although with younger participants, in which the new bride is guided by her mother and bridegroom with a bagpiper typically accompanying the party. These later images tend to assign two attributes to the bride – a candle to light her way, and an earthenware jug for her nuptial ablutions. Hemessen’s contemporaries would have immediately recognized in these everyday objects the sexual symbolism of male and female genitalia. Both items appear in Pieter Balten’s engraving of 1598 (fig. 2), which unites in a single composition Hemessen’s imagery of the Tearful Bride and the Bagpiper and Merry Wife and bears the inscription: ‘Maintenant plorer icy voyez l’Espousée, / Qui de rire au lict se tient bien assure’ (‘Now weeps the bride, and yet I wager, / She shall laugh again, once she is in bed’; quoted in B. Wallen, op. cit., p. 65).
Hemessen’s version of the Tearful Bride is more nuanced than most. The bride and groom are both advanced in age and relatively unattractive. The balding man is gaunt-cheeked with a head that resembles a skull. He grasps and caresses the arm of his bride, not without coincidence tucking a finger beneath her torn dress. The bride’s wrinkled face is contorted with grief, her tears echoed by the stream of snot that runs from her nose. The elderly couple is contrasted by the young man who hands the bride her nuptial pot. The candle is absent. Rather than a crown, she wears a garland of cherries, a mocking reflection of her lack of fecundity. As Wallen observes, in addition to their connections with weddings, cherries also were emblems of luxuria. Indeed, there is nothing virginal about this bride, who appears to lament her fate, unwilling to tear herself away from the much younger man who holds her pot, tapping into the longstanding tradition of unequal lovers imagery.
The version of the Bagpiper and Merry Wife now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium was taken as spoils from the imperial collection of Rudolf II in Prague by Queen Christina of Sweden before entering the museum at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Brussels panel measures 45 x 65.5 cm., but notably was cut down somewhat along the top and bottom edges. The Tearful Bride measures 51.8 x 63 cm. and was also cut down a few centimeters along the right edge. Accordingly, the Brussels and Prague panels would appear to have originally been of equal size, lending support to the theory that they were conceived of and painted as pendants. It is worth noting, however, that the earliest history of the Prague painting is uncharted. Our first notice of the panel is when it was sold in the Mallet sale at Sotheby’s, London, on 19 June 1935, as Pieter Aertsen. Its potential link with Rudolf II was surely the impetus for its acquisition by a Prague private collector and eventually the National Gallery Prague, but there is no concrete evidence to explicitly link them together, particularly when one takes into account the existence of the present autograph version of the Bagpiper and Merry Wife.
The possibility that the present panel, rather than the Brussels version, is the pendant to the Prague Tearful Bride therefore merits consideration, though ultimately this seems unlikely. The earliest history of the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife is similarly unclear at this point. By the eighteenth century, it was in the collection of Sir Henry Ibbetson, Bt., of Denton Park, Yorkshire. The Ibbetson’s art collection passed into the possession of the Wyvill family of Constable Burton, Yorkshire, following the marriage of Laura, the daughter and heiress of Sir Charles Ibbetson, Bt., in 1845 to Marmaduke Wyvill, the celebrated chess master and politician. Today, the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife measures 45.9 x 60.1 cm., following the recent removal of a later 6.2 cm. addition along its upper edge. Assuming that its current state properly reflects the painting’s original dimensions, it would accordingly be both too short and too narrow to serve as a pair to the Tearful Bride in Prague.
What then are we to make of the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife? Dendrochronological analysis performed by Ian Tyers in December 2021 on the two Baltic oak boards that comprise the panel suggests that it was made from trees that were felled after circa 1530 and indicates a usage date of the late 1530s or 1540s. Analysis of the infra-red reflectography mosaic (IRR) reveals that the artist developed his underdrawing using a dry medium (fig. 3). According to his typical practice, Hemessen defined the contours of his composition with thin, precise lines. Only a few minor pentimenti may be observed, and these mostly relate to minute adjustments to the positions of the fingers. Wallen dates the Brussels and Prague panels to around 1540 based on the existence of an inferior copy of the Tearful Bride which sold at Christie’s, London, in 1935 and 1936 and more recently at Sotheby’s, London (7 April 1982, lot 76), bearing the inscription, `JOHANNES/DE HEM/ESSEN/PINGEB/AT/1540’ (op. cit., pp. 298-299, 353 note 79, no. 22a). The scholar further suggests that the existence of this mediocre copy, which he considers to be a studio production, indicates that there may have been an earlier, autograph version of the composition by Hemessen himself. Given the highly refined execution of the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife, which is arguably superior to the poorly-preserved version in Brussels, and bearing in mind that the ex-Sotheby’s copy measures 48 x 60 cm. and is practically the same size as the painting under consideration here, it therefore seems likely that Hemessen’s original Tearful Bride is not the Prague picture – which may well be the Brussels pendant – but another, now lost, prototype of the same size of the 1982 auctioned copy. Presumably, this original signed and dated 1540 version of the Tearful Bride was painted as the companion to the present Bagpiper and Merry Wife, which may accordingly now be recognized as a welcome addition to the small group of autograph works by Hemessen.
Peter van den Brink