Adriaen Jansz. van Ostade Haarlem 1610 - 1685

The Marquis de Voyer, 1754;
The Prince de Conti, Gand Prieur de France;
His (deceased) sale, Paris, Remy, 8 April 1777, for 7,251 francs to Paillet (for the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin);
Duc de Choiseul-Praslin, Paris;
His (deceased) sale, Paris, Paillet, 18-25 February 1793, for 7,950 francs, to De Praslin;
Senateur de Choiseul-Praslin;
His (deceased) sale, Paris, Paillet, 9-10 May 1808 for 4,990 francs;
Monsieur de Séréville;
His sale, Paris, Paillet and Laneuville, 22-24 January 1812, for 5,020 francs;
M. Dufresne, agent de change;
His sale, Paris, Pérignon, 26 March 1816, for 12,000 francs;
Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand (1754-1838); scheduled for a sale with a significant portion of his collection in Paris on 7-8 July 1817, as lot 22, but all forty-six pictures were purchased privately beforehand for 320,000 francs by William Buchanan and all but five brought to England (see Buchanan, under Literature, pp. 305-8);
William Buchanan (1777-1864), London;
From whom purchased for 500gns by Edward Gray, Harringay Park, Hornsey, 1829;
Alexander Baring, M.P. (created Baron Ashburton in 1835) by 1842 and thence by descent at The Grange, Hampshire, to Francis, 5th Baron Ashburton, whose collection was purchased en bloc by Thomas Agnew and Sons and other London dealers in August 1907;
With F. Kleinberger, Paris;
Fritz Gans, Frankfurt-am-Main;
Baron Alfred de Rothschild (1842-1918), 1 Seamore Place, London, by whom bequeathed with most of the contents of his London residence to Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, 1 Seamore Place, London;
Her sale, London, Christie's, 22 May 1925, lot 83, for 2,100 gns., to Agnew's;
C.B.O. Clarke, Wiston Park, Steyning, Sussex;
His (deceased) sale, London, Christie's, 8 May 1936, lot 20, for 1,150 gns., to Spink;
The Rt. Hon. Sir Felix Cassel, Bt.;
Sir Robert Bird, Bt, 1947;
Mr. Robert Bell, 1962;
With Gallery Sankt Lucas, Vienna, 1992;
Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 8 July 1994, lot 82, unsold;
Acquired subsequently on behalf of the present owner.

J.B. Descamps, La Vie des Peintres Flamands, Allemands, et Hollandais, Paris 1753-63;
W. Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, London 1824, vol. II, pp. 311, 315 and 331, cat. no. 22: 'In [this picture] we find the happiest effect of clair-obscure, which makes one easily concieve the ardour with which the possession of it has been so often disputed on former occasions...The figures are of the largest size of the master, and it may be regarded as one of his works which is both rich and rare. In colourig it i s equal to Rembrant.";
J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné...,  vol. I, London 1829, p. 126, cat. no. 66;
J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné..., vol. IX, Supplement, London 1842, p. 90, no. 33;
G.F.Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, London 1854, vol. II, p. 107: "Treated in a bright, clear golden tone; particularly excellent";
C. Blanc, Le Trésor de la Curiosité, Paris 1857, vol. II, pp. 161, 243, 379-80;
C. Hofstede de Groot,  A Catalogue Raisonné..., vol. III, London 1910, p. 158, no. 56;
L.J. Slatkes, in Everyday Life in Holland's Golden Age.  The Complete Etchings of Adriaen van Ostade, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam 1998, p. 108, under no. 14.

ENGRAVED:
By Balthasar Anton Dunker (1746-1807), in the Choiseul Gallery.

This intimate picture of 1667 was painted relatively late in Ostade's career, by which time Ostade had abandoned his tonal approach to painting for strong local colours and clear daylight; characteristics of his paintings from the mid-1660s onwards.  In it he shows the typical concerns of his later style: an interest in the textures of weathered wood, brick and plaster, aged semi-opaque panes of glass and various fabrics, which he uses the daylight to illuminate, and which are meticulously rendered.  Around this time he painted quite a number of works showing domestic courtyards and dooryards with small numbers of people engaged in domestic pursuits or resting from their labours - including, in a faint echo of his former taste for the raucous, outside inns.  These works are however universally tranquil in mood, and in this picture, one of a few in which he reduces his subject matter to a single figure or a mother and child, he further refines and concentrates his subject matter.  The mother he depicts is not engaged in any form of activity; she merely holds her child up as if showing to it the outside world, protecting it with her arm, and with a demure downcast face that echoes the modest demeanour of the Virgin Mary in the religious paintings by Haarlem contemporaries such as Jan de Bray.

Ostade made a number of etchings of single figures in doorways, from the late 1640s onwards, and in the years around 1670, he concentrated on gentle domestic subjects in his etched as well as his painted oeuvre.  He may very well have had the present painting in mind when he made his etching of a Mother with Two Children sometime after 1671 (see fig. 1;  L.J. Slatkes under Literature).  As well as paintings and etchings, he also made finished watercolour drawings of such subjects.  Ostade made a number of drawings of domestic scenes with mothers and children which are generally dated to the 1660s, including one of a mother holding her child up to a window (see B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade. Isack van Ostade. Zeichnungen und Aquarelle, Hamburg 1981, vol. 1, p. 109, nos. 141-4, reproduced vol. 2, pp. 72-3).  None of these drawings have so far been connected with the present painting, but they reveal the same interests and artistic concerns.

As Bill Robinson has noted, the vine usually found above the door in Ostade's dooryard scenes, a familiar emblem of fertility and conjugal felicity in Holland in the 17th Century, inspired by Psalm 128: "Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the side of thine house...", may well have been intended by Ostade to evoke these qualities (see Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia etc., 1984, p. 289, under cat. no. 93).   

Like his townsman Philips Wouwerman, Ostade was much admired in France in the 18th Century, where his later, more colourful and less earthy pictures were widely collected.  This work, which would have particularly appeeled to French rococco taste, was in France by 1754, and stayed there until exported by William Buchanan in 1817.  A tapestry measuring 42 by 32 inches was made after the picture by Cozette at the Gobelins factory; it was sold in the Marquis de Marigny's sale in Paris, February 1782, lot 68 (1,100 francs to Prince Louis).

We are grateful to Dr. Hiltraud Doll for confirming that this picture will be included in her forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of the Ostade brothers, as no. 326.