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Lot Essay
‘Simon Kick’s superb skills peaked in a guardroom scene that should be considered his masterpiece.’
-Jochai Rosen, Simon Kick (1603-1652): Catalogue Raisonné (2021)
Though little-known today, Simon Kick was an artist of prodigious abilities with an equally remarkable capacity for invention. So successful were his compositions that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries his finest paintings bore erroneous attributions to a number of heralded artists of the Dutch Golden Age, including Bartholomeus van der Helst (The Robbery; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and, in the case of the present painting, Godfried Schalcken.
Kick was born in Delft in 1603 but was recorded as resident in Amsterdam before 1624. On 5 September 1631, he married Stijntje Duyster, the youngest sister of the genre painter Willem Duyster, in a double wedding ceremony that also united Kick’s elder sister, Margrieta, with Duyster. After their marriages, the two couples moved into the Duyster family house ‘De Duystere Werelt’ (‘The Dark World’) on the Koningsstraat, just up the street from the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, where Rembrandt would purchase a home in 1639. In June 1635, Kick travelled to Fort Orange (present-day Albany, New York), the first permanent Dutch settlement in New Netherland, to collect a debt on behalf of Dirck Cornelisz., Duyster’s brother. His visit to the Americas took place a year before Frans Post’s famed trip to Brazil and would suggest Kick had income from ventures other than painting.
Kick's close, familial relationship with the slightly older Duyster no doubt introduced him to the works of other guardroom painters, including Pieter Codde, and may have given rise to his own artistic interests. While Kick painted a few portraits and historical subjects, his output consisted mainly of genre paintings, half of which were military in theme. In this painting – which Jochai Rosen has described as nothing less than the artist's masterpiece – eleven figures are grouped into a tall, shadowed space. Among them can be seen two standing officers, drably dressed soldiers, two women, young boys and a pair of sappers in the right foreground who converse over a map spread out on a drum. The group is assembled within a spacious hall, the conception of which was probably influenced by Rembrandt’s Night Watch of 1642 (fig. 1; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
A frequent feature of Kick’s guardroom scenes is his preference for a relatively unusual square or upright format. As here, he typically included an elegant officer accompanied by a page or female companion in the painting’s foreground. However, what most sets Kick’s guardroom scenes apart from those of his contemporaries is what Rosen has described as ‘the introduction of civic elegance into rough military themes’ (op. cit., 2007, p. 93). Such a high-minded approach to an otherwise humble subject would no doubt have proved appealing to patriotic Dutchmen. Rosen has dated this painting to between 1647 and 1650 (op. cit., 2021, p. 108); that is to say, concurrently with the conclusion of the Eighty Years’ War following the Peace of Münster (1648), which formally recognized the Dutch Republic’s independence from Spanish rule.
Despite the Republic's military strength, many Dutchmen shied away from military service. In opposition to most European armies of the period, which largely or exclusively recruited their own citizens, the Dutch relied heavily on foreign mercenaries to fill the ranks of ordinary soldiers. Only the officer class, led by the Stadholder as commander-in-chief, was staffed in greater measure by Dutchmen, generally of noble descent. At its peak in the decade or so before Kick produced this painting, the Dutch army numbered roughly sixty thousand men, about half of whom belonged to regiments recruited from elsewhere in Europe.
This painting has tentatively been associated with the work described simply as ‘Een Corps de Garde met Soldaten en Krygsgereedschap, uitvoerig op panel, door Z. Kiek’ in the 1784 sale of the collection of Johannes van Bergen van der Grip, though the lack of dimensions or further detail preclude a definitive identification. According to Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (loc. cit.), Kick’s painted signature was altered to that of Godfried Schalcken at some point in its history, and it is no surprise that when the painting appeared in sales in Paris in 1872 and 1877 and again in London in 1892 it was sold as a work by that artist. When the painting was cleaned around the time it entered the collection of the South African gold and diamond mining magnate Sir Joseph Robinson, both signatures were removed. As evidence of its quality and importance within the artist's oeuvre, the painting was the only work by Kick to be selected for inclusion in the seminal exhibition Masters of Seventeenth Century Genre Painting staged by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and London’s Royal Academy in 1984.
A smaller copy after this painting bearing an indistinct Kick signature was sold Christie’s, London, 10 December 1993, lot 249. A second copy showing only the four figures at right given to Anthonie Palamedes is in the Lindgens collection, Cologne (see J. Rosen, op. cit., 2021, nos. 29A and 29B).
-Jochai Rosen, Simon Kick (1603-1652): Catalogue Raisonné (2021)
Though little-known today, Simon Kick was an artist of prodigious abilities with an equally remarkable capacity for invention. So successful were his compositions that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries his finest paintings bore erroneous attributions to a number of heralded artists of the Dutch Golden Age, including Bartholomeus van der Helst (The Robbery; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) and, in the case of the present painting, Godfried Schalcken.
Kick was born in Delft in 1603 but was recorded as resident in Amsterdam before 1624. On 5 September 1631, he married Stijntje Duyster, the youngest sister of the genre painter Willem Duyster, in a double wedding ceremony that also united Kick’s elder sister, Margrieta, with Duyster. After their marriages, the two couples moved into the Duyster family house ‘De Duystere Werelt’ (‘The Dark World’) on the Koningsstraat, just up the street from the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, where Rembrandt would purchase a home in 1639. In June 1635, Kick travelled to Fort Orange (present-day Albany, New York), the first permanent Dutch settlement in New Netherland, to collect a debt on behalf of Dirck Cornelisz., Duyster’s brother. His visit to the Americas took place a year before Frans Post’s famed trip to Brazil and would suggest Kick had income from ventures other than painting.
Kick's close, familial relationship with the slightly older Duyster no doubt introduced him to the works of other guardroom painters, including Pieter Codde, and may have given rise to his own artistic interests. While Kick painted a few portraits and historical subjects, his output consisted mainly of genre paintings, half of which were military in theme. In this painting – which Jochai Rosen has described as nothing less than the artist's masterpiece – eleven figures are grouped into a tall, shadowed space. Among them can be seen two standing officers, drably dressed soldiers, two women, young boys and a pair of sappers in the right foreground who converse over a map spread out on a drum. The group is assembled within a spacious hall, the conception of which was probably influenced by Rembrandt’s Night Watch of 1642 (fig. 1; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
A frequent feature of Kick’s guardroom scenes is his preference for a relatively unusual square or upright format. As here, he typically included an elegant officer accompanied by a page or female companion in the painting’s foreground. However, what most sets Kick’s guardroom scenes apart from those of his contemporaries is what Rosen has described as ‘the introduction of civic elegance into rough military themes’ (op. cit., 2007, p. 93). Such a high-minded approach to an otherwise humble subject would no doubt have proved appealing to patriotic Dutchmen. Rosen has dated this painting to between 1647 and 1650 (op. cit., 2021, p. 108); that is to say, concurrently with the conclusion of the Eighty Years’ War following the Peace of Münster (1648), which formally recognized the Dutch Republic’s independence from Spanish rule.
Despite the Republic's military strength, many Dutchmen shied away from military service. In opposition to most European armies of the period, which largely or exclusively recruited their own citizens, the Dutch relied heavily on foreign mercenaries to fill the ranks of ordinary soldiers. Only the officer class, led by the Stadholder as commander-in-chief, was staffed in greater measure by Dutchmen, generally of noble descent. At its peak in the decade or so before Kick produced this painting, the Dutch army numbered roughly sixty thousand men, about half of whom belonged to regiments recruited from elsewhere in Europe.
This painting has tentatively been associated with the work described simply as ‘Een Corps de Garde met Soldaten en Krygsgereedschap, uitvoerig op panel, door Z. Kiek’ in the 1784 sale of the collection of Johannes van Bergen van der Grip, though the lack of dimensions or further detail preclude a definitive identification. According to Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (loc. cit.), Kick’s painted signature was altered to that of Godfried Schalcken at some point in its history, and it is no surprise that when the painting appeared in sales in Paris in 1872 and 1877 and again in London in 1892 it was sold as a work by that artist. When the painting was cleaned around the time it entered the collection of the South African gold and diamond mining magnate Sir Joseph Robinson, both signatures were removed. As evidence of its quality and importance within the artist's oeuvre, the painting was the only work by Kick to be selected for inclusion in the seminal exhibition Masters of Seventeenth Century Genre Painting staged by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and London’s Royal Academy in 1984.
A smaller copy after this painting bearing an indistinct Kick signature was sold Christie’s, London, 10 December 1993, lot 249. A second copy showing only the four figures at right given to Anthonie Palamedes is in the Lindgens collection, Cologne (see J. Rosen, op. cit., 2021, nos. 29A and 29B).