Isaack Koedijck

Jonkheer A. van Panhuis, Slot Nienoort, near Leek, Groningen, The Netherlands, until circa 1927;
Dr. Eduard Beith, London, 1938;
Private collector, England, by whom offered London, Sotheby's, March 24, 1966, lot 66 (unsold);
By inheritance to his wife;
Sale, London, Sotheby's, April 22, 2004, lot 37, where purchased for £84,000 by the present owner.

C. Hofstede de Groot, "Die Koedijck-Rästel und ihre Lösung," Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, vol. XXIV, 1903, p. 46, illus. p. 45;
C. Hofstede de Groot, in Festshrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstag, 1927, p. 189;
E. Plietzsche, Höllandische und Flämische Maler des XVII. Jahr, Leipzig 1960, p. 79, pl. 130;
P.C. Sutton, in Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, exhibition catalogue, London and Philadelphia 1984, p. 230, under no. 59 ("three extant versions");
Great Masters of Western Art:  Jan Vermeer, Tokyo 2006, p. 66, illus. in color.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has been recently restored and should be hung as is. The panel has been cradled on the reverse. The surface is flat and the paint layer is stable. A visual appraisal of the picture suggests that there is no abrasion of the paint layer, even in the fine details of the still life and architecture. There are no restorations visible under ultraviolet light because of the type of varnish that has been applied to the paint layer. There may be a restoration in the upper left, addressing what appears to be an old crack in the panel and there may well also be a few dots of restoration around the edges. Overall however, the bulk of the picture seems to be in beautiful, fresh and unrestored condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Isaack Koedijck was influenced by the Leiden fijnchilder Gerrit Dou (1613 - 1675), and his interest in perspective and light in the depiction of bourgeois interiors anticipates the work of Delft School artists such as Pieter de Hooch (1629 - 1684) and Johannes Vermeer (1632 - 1675).  Koedijck's finest paintings were made from the late 1640s to circa 1650, shortly before he spent a decade in the Dutch East Indies.  His surviving oeuvre is small, partly because of his activities as a merchant in the East, but also because two major works from the 1771 Gerrit Braamcamp sale were lost at sea en route to Catherine the Great's collection.

This painting is traditionally entitled Het leege wijnglas (The Empty Wineglass).  In it, a cavalier sits at a table in an inn ruefully holding his upturned glass, while an empty pewter jug rolls on the floor.  On the carpet-covered table are a gaming board and chips, a clay pipe and a twist of tobacco.  A goat's foot hangs from the ceiling over the table, while a map of the Netherlands, dated 1648 and oriented with the west coast towards the top, is displayed on the back wall.  The cavalier has clearly been enjoying the sensual pleasures of gaming, drinking and smoking but now his luck has run out:  glass and jug are empty and the hostess in the passageway in the background yields to the embrace of another man.  There is a sense of pleasure spent and a warning against overindulgence.

Koedijck enjoyed exploring the perspectival complexity of interior spaces, often incorporating rooms glimpsed through narrow hallways or scenes pictured through open or partially open windows into his compositions.  Here, the lobby with the embracing couple leads the eye deep into the righthand side of the picture, while the open window at the left offers the viewer a glimpse of a figure on a bridge.  The vanishing point of this complex system is, unexpectedly, the dangling goat's foot.  Subdued tones of brown, black, red, cream and gray unify the composition and emphasize the play of light, which rounds the solid form of the cavalier and moves delicately over the pewter jug in the foreground.

The composition must have had popular appeal, as Koedijck made at least two versions of it.  One, signed and dated 1648, is illustrated in Walter Bernt's The Netherlandish Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. II, London 1970, pl. 633.  It was sold at Frederick Muller, Amsterdam on April 26, 1927, lot 60.  The same work came up for sale at Sotheby's, London on July 6, 1994, lot 1.  In it, the face of the cavalier is slightly thinner and younger; the lid of the pewter jug protrudes slightly less far over the foreground seam of the floor and the loop of cord hung from the rafter to the wall is almost invisible.

The date of 1648 on both compositions may be significant, as it was in that year that the Peace of Westphalia finally put an end to the Thirty Years' War and granted independence to the Protestant Northern Netherlands.  The cavalier's glass is empty, perhaps signifying exhaustion after eighty years of struggle against the Spanish for the right of self-government.