Isaack Koedijck

Probably Arthur Kay, Edinburgh;
Probably with Julius Böhler, Munich, 1910;
Baron Léon Janssen, Brussels, by 1923;
His sale, Amsterdam, Frederick Muller & Cie., 26 April 1927, lot 60;
C.J.K. van Aalst, Hoevelaken, by 1935;
With the Brod Gallery, London;
With Cramer, The Hague, 1966;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 11 July 1979, lot 121;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 6 July 1994, lot 1;
There purchased by the present collector.

Rotterdam, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Vermeer-Tentoonstelling, 1935, no. 63a, reproduced in the catalogue, fig. 138.

C. Hofstede de Groot, "Die Koedijck-Rätsel und ihre Lösung", in Jahrbuch der Preussichen Kunstammlungen, vol. XXIV, 1903, p. 46, reproduced p. 45;
W. Martin, Catalogue Collection Baron L. Janssen, Brussels, 1923, no. 60, reproduced;
C. Hofstede de Groot, “Isack Koedijck”, in Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstag, 1929, p. 189;
W. Bernt, Die Niederländischen Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts, 1948, vol. II, no. 456;
W. Bernt, The Netherlandish Painters of the 17^th Century, 1970, vol. II, cat. no. 633;
P.C. Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting (under two separate entries), exhibition catalogue, 1984, pp. 218, 230, reproduced, p. 213, fig. 3.

The painting is in fact crisper than it appears in the catalogue illustration. For a high resolution digital image, please refer to the online catalogue at Sothebys.com or contact a member of the Old Master Paintings department. 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 is in beautiful condition. It is on an oak panel which is unbroken and unreinforced. It is made of two sections of wood joined vertically through the center of the composition. The details throughout are extremely well preserved. Under ultraviolet light, there are remnants of an old varnish, but actual retouches are conspicuously lacking. It is of course possible that there are a few small retouches in the picture, but from a visual appraisal, this is a work in lovely condition. It will respond to cleaning, which will add more brightness and depth to the image.
"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 Jan 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 right hand 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 grey 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, also dated 1648, was sold in London, Sotheby's, 22 April 2004, lot 37 and differs in only very minor respects, of which the most obvious is the extension of the cord holding the goat's foot from the rafter to the wall above the door. This other version was reproduced in E. Plietzsch, Holländische und Flämische Maler des XVII. Jahrh., 1960, plate 130, where wrongly given as the present picture (when in the van Aalst collection). Given the similarity between the two versions it is possible that parts of the provenance for this picture may be confused with the other one; however, the reproductions in both the Baron Janssen catalogue and the Rotterdam exhibition catalogue (see Literature) confirm that the present version was the one in the Janssen and van Aalst collections.

The date of 1648 on both the present composition and the ex-Sotheby's 2004 version 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.