David Ryckaert III

Anonymous sale, Vienna, Leo Schidlof, 27 April 1922, lot 156;

Private collection, Germany, 2005;

Anonymous sale, Munich, Neumeister, 15 March 2006, lot 331.

B. Van Haute, David III Ryckaert: A Seventeeth-Century Flemish Painter of Peasant Scenes, Brepols 1999, p.85, cat. no. A27, reproduced plate 27.

Probably painted in the late 1630s, this charismatic scene by David Ryckaert III depicts the interior of an artist's studio where an old man, perhaps a patron, raises his spectacles to examine a landscape painting on an easel. Hunched forward and leaning against a wooden cane in his right hand, the pose of the red-cloaked connoisseur imitates that of the figure within the landscape he examines, further suggesting his identity as patron. Behind him to the left is the artist, possibly a self-portrait of Ryckaert himself, wearing a red feathered cap and holding brushes along with a paint-daubed palette. Ryckaert specialized in genre scenes, often depicting workshops, peasants, and alehouse interiors bearing the influence of Adriaen Brouwer and David Teniers the Younger. With the influx of trade and wealth in Antwerp in the early seventeenth-century came the emergence of a new source of artistic patronage- the prosperous merchant class - along with a surging demand for genre paintings in Antwerp. Emblematic of the broadening art market for which it was painted, this scene of a prospective buyer examining a painting in an artist's studio would have been a highly marketable subject to Ryckaert's clientele.