JAN MIENSE MOLENAER | A group of young musicians with a dancing dwarf

Jan Miense Molenaer and his wife Judith Leyster were the two most talented pupils of Frans Hals in Haarlem. Some of their caricatural studies of single figures are very Hals-like, and both husband and wife painted small-format genre subjects of gentle comedy. Molenaer alone however developed larger scale works such as this one, in which unruly boys and a dwarf grasping a flagon make raucous music and dance, absorbed in their own amusement, but put on display by the artist for ours. Dating from around 1630, as Dennis Weller suggests, it is one of Molenaer’s first large-scale representations of merrymakers out-of-doors, and he continued to paint similar pictures until the later 1640s. Molenaer’s style of painting has already diverged from his teacher, particularly in the way he builds up paint layers to convey form, but Hals’ ideas are never far away – one thinks for example of his own depictions of boys playing the rommel-pot which date from around 1620 onwards, and are the direct forerunners of the lad looking out at us here. Judith Leyster’s treatments of this theme on the other hand remain more Hals-like well into the 1630s.