home>learning resources>work of the month

SEARCH THE COLLECTION

EXHIBITIONS THE COLLECTION EDUCATION CALENDAR OF EVENTS PLANNING A VISIT GETTING INVOLVED PRIVATE EVENTS NEWS & INFORMATION MUSEUM SHOP

work of the month

(click on image to enlarge)

A Wedding Party, 1673

Anthonie Palamedesz (Dutch, 1601-1673)
Oil on canvas, 29-1/2 x 42 inches
Museum membership purchase

---

What's Going On In This Picture?

Is this wedding party in a home or in a public space? What has the artist included that provides a clue? Are these people wealthy, poor, or middle class? What answers can you find in their dress, furnishings, or decorative objects? What symbols or allusions in the room would tell you this may be a newly married couple's wedding party if the artist had not provided this title for the work?

The guests at this wedding feast have assembled in the high-ceilinged reception hall of the newlywed couple, who are portrayed in the lower left foreground. The room displays that blend of opulence and simplicity so typical of upper middle-class Dutch interiors in the age of Vermeer. Thus, while the floor is bare and the furniture stark in its design, the walls are covered in richly brocaded leather. As did most contemporary reception rooms, this one also served as a sleeping chamber; a heavily curtained bed sits at the right. The painting of Venus and Amor above the fireplace lends an appropriately amorous note to this wedding feast, as does the bed curtain drawn back to receive the newlyweds. In a sense the composition may be viewed as a seventeenth-century revival, in visual form, of the Roman tradition of the epithalamium (bawdy verse) which accompanied the bridal procession into the nuptial chamber. In antiquity, epithalamiums were written by bards such as Pindar, Sappho, and Catullus. Song of Solomon is a classic of the genre from the Bible, and Edmund Spenser's Epithalamium of 1595 is, perhaps, the greatest example of the genre in the sixteenth century.

The Golden Age of Dutch Painting

As you look at the people, the d³cor, the costumes, or the decorative objects in Anthonie Palamedesz's, A Wedding Party, 1672-3, what guesses would you make about why the seventeenth century is viewed as a Golden Age for the nation of Holland and her artists?

The Nation: The northern provinces of the Netherlands proclaimed their independence from the Spanish Hapsburgs in 1588. Only in 1648, however--after decades of continued conflict--did Spain finally acknowledge their freedom. By the mid-17th century, they had emerged not only as a separate nation--a new distinctly Dutch nation whose religion and social fabric were no longer like those of the Flemish provinces to the south--but as one of the most formidable powers in Europe, a vigorous sea trading nation with a far-flung overseas empire and a mighty navy to protect it.

The Artists: Paralleling Holland's economic and political rise was a splendid blossoming of the arts. The Dutch now experienced a veritable Golden Age of painting. Within the relatively brief span of eighty years (c. 1600-1680), the United Provinces produced thousands of extraordinarily gifted artists, including three of the most brilliant painters in the history of western art--Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Genre: Unlike their early Netherlandish predecessors, seventeenth-century Dutch painters could no longer rely upon the church for employment. Indeed, with the Protestant suppression of Catholic worship in the previous century, the church had all but vanished as a patron of the arts in Holland. With neither the church nor the Hapsburgs nobles to sustain them, Dutch painters now turned to the middle classes for support--to the shopkeepers and wealthy merchants in the cities and to the farmers and other prosperous rural folk who visited the towns on market and fair days and bought the pictures that were hawked in the public squares. When it came to paintings, these bourgeois buyers preferred secular subjects and a realistic style. Above all, they demanded pictures which accurately reflected the lives they led and the land they inhabited.

About The Artist

Genre painting, which flourished in the Netherlands in the opening years of the seventeenth century, found a proponent in the Delft painter Anthonie Palamedesz, who studied with Van Mirevelt. Palamedesz, specialized in the production of interiors with merry making figures and guardroom scenes similar to the works of Amsterdam painters Pieter Codde and William Duyster. His younger brother, Palamedes Palamedesz, was his student and specialized in calvary battles related to the work of the Haarlem painter Esaias van de Velde.

Space And Light In Dutch Art

As you look at the space, light, tones, or position of objects and people in this picture, what contemporary or modern medium comes to mind?

It is generally acknowledged that in the years around 1650, Delft emerged as a more innovative presence within Dutch art. At about this time painters active in Delft began to display a radically new conception of pictorial space and light, grounded in an underlying interest in perspective and optics. The motivating force behind this new development is thought to have been Carel Fabritius, a Rembrandt pupil who was active in Delft starting in 1650. His career was tragically cut short by his death in 1654. The optical and spatial distortions evident in Fabritius' famed View of Delft with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall (1652, NG, London), have suggested the use of the camera obscura, a mechanical recording device and early forerunner to the modern-day camera.

Who Were Some of the Best-Known Painters of the Golden Age of Dutch Painting?

No single Dutch artist-not even Rembrandt-can be said to have dominated the whole of the seventeenth century. Amsterdam was by far the most important artistic center of the Dutch Golden Age, but many other smaller cities could point with pride to their own resident painters. In Haarlem, Frans Hals inspired a brilliant school of portrait and genre painters in the years after 1630; Rembrandt prospered in Amsterdam until the 1640s, the Caravaggists (followers of Caravaggio) presided in Utrecht, and Vermeer worked on in Delft until his death in 1675.

-- John Welch

RESOURCES

Jakob Rosenberg, Seymour Slive, and E.H. ter Kuile. Dutch Art and Architecture, 1600-1800. New York: Penguin Books, 1966.

Sheila D. Muller, ed., Dutch Art: An Encyclopedia, London: Garland Publishing, 1997.

Chrysler Museum of Art Object File, Anthonie Palamedesz, A Wedding Party.

Map source: Schneider, Cynthia P. Rembrandt's Landscapes: Drawings and Prints. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990. p.34