* Gerard ter Borch Zwolle 1617 - 1681 Deventer

Unidentified sale, Amsterdam, De Winter, 8 September 1773, lot 33;
J. de Neufville, by whom sold in 1782 for 450 Florins to;
Gerrit van der Pot, his deceased sale, Rotterdam, 6 June 1808, lot 124, for 330 Florins to Roelfsma;
P. O'Rial, Paris, by whom said to have been acquired through John Smith (though not included in Smith's catalogue raisonné);
Baron Edmond de Bussière, Paris;
Portalès, London;
With Kleinberger, Paris;
August de Ridder, Schönberg bei Cronberg-im-Taunus (according to Gudlaugsson under Literature, but not among the fine group of Ter Borchs in his sale in Paris on 2 June 1924);
Adolf Mayer, Speyer, then The Hague, then New York (by whom lent in 1938 to Rhode Island, and subsequently to Oberlin);
With Edward Speelman, London, 1955;
With Alfred Brod, London, 1956;
Herbert Girardet, Kettwig, by 1963;
Thence by descent to the present owner.

C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné..., London 1912, p. 39, no. 99;
E. Plietszch, Gerard ter Borch, Vienna 1944, p. 40, under no. 15;
W. Stechow, "The Adolf Mayer Collection", in Bulletin of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, no. 5, 1948, pp. 11-12, no. 14, reproduced;
The Burlington Magazine, December 1955, Supplement: Notable Works of Art now on the Market, reproduced fig. 17;
S.J. Gudlaugsson, Gerard ter Borch, vol. I, The Hague 1959, pp. 89-90, reproduced p. 252, no. 84 I;
S.J. Gudlaugsson, Katalog der Gemälde Gerard ter Borchs, vol. II, The Hague 1960, p. 105, no. 94 I;
E. Plietszch, review of Gudlaugsson above, in Kunstchronik, no. 14, 1961, p. 139;
H. Vey & A. Kesting, Katalog der niederländischen Gemälde von 1550 bis 1800 im Wallraf-Richartz-Museum...,
Cologne 1967, pp. 20-21, under no. 1001;
H. Vey, Sammlung Herbert Girardet.  Holländische und Flämische Meister, exhibition catalogue, Essen 1970, unpaginated, no. 9, reproduced on facing page.

Although he was much more prolific as a portrait painter, Ter Borch's fame rests on his genre paintings, which are much fewer in number.  Around 1650 he started to concentrate on upright compositions, allowing him to show small groups of figures, depicted full-length or nearly so, interacting within a small interior space.  These pictures were quite different from genre pieces painted by other artists up to that date, but were most influential on the generation that followed.  He painted this picture during this fertile period: Gudlaugsson's dating of it to circa 1652/3 (see Literature) has been generally accepted.

His chosen subject matter here: the guard room interior or cortegaertje; was by the middle of the century a well established tradition among Ter Borch's precursors, such as Pieter Codde, Willem Duyster, Simon Kick and Jacob Duck.  Soldiers were not well regarded in the 17th Century, and cortegaertjes  frequently show soldiery engaged in disreputable pursuits involving prostitutes, gaming and drinking to excess.  Ter Borch's method was to poke gentle fun at his subjects: a young soldier taunts an older colleague, whose slumber was doubtlessly alcohol induced, by blowing smoke in his face.  In stark contrast to his forebears in the tradition of genre painting, Ter Borch takes great trouble to characterize and animate his figures.  We see this most clearly here in the amused expression of the soldier to the right filling his pipe.  Neither he nor his companions are type-cast stereotypes, and by characterizing his figures, Ter Borch more effectively allows them to fulfill their comic potential.

In parallel with landscape painting of the time (although it is easy to make too much of this), Ter Borch uses very muted tones of brown and yellow and grey to draw his figures out of the background.  This monochrome approach, characteristic of his work in the early 1650s, allows light to play its part to the full, without the distractions of colour, so that its effects on different textures gives them form and depth.  Ter Borch was very much concerned with light and its effects in his genre pictures in the first half of the 1650s, and this was the period in which his genius in conveying the infinitely variable surfaces of objects is so clearly felt in his best pictures - The Stonegrinder's Family of 1653 in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, is perhaps the most famous example. 

This is Ter Borch's prime original of this composition.  Another version, also unsigned, is in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne (idem, pp. 105-6, no. 94II; reproduced Gudlaugsson 1959, p. 253), and at least three copies are known.  The differences between the compostions of the the present picture and the one in Cologne are small: the most noticeable is the absence of the clay pipe on the table in the Cologne picture, in which the right hand holding the clay pipe of the soldier blowing smoke at his companion is not visible.  There are much more noticeable differences in the lighting, especially the light reflected by the sleeping soldier's breastplate, which show that Ter Borch had different concerns in each picture.  These changes alone would suggest that the present picture is the prime version, but a further indication is given by clearly visible pentiments.  Gudlaugsson, preceeded by Wolfgang Stechow, considered the Girardet pucture to be the prime version of two autograph originals, while Plietszch initially asserted the primacy of trhe Cologne picture, but later changed his mind and dismissed the Cologne picture as a later copy by another hand of the present prime original.