Lot 27: Joachim Beuckelaer (Antwerp c. 1534 - c. 1574 Antwerp?)

A kitchen scene
signed with monogram and dated 'JB 1569' (upper right)
oil on panel
44 x 62 3/4 in. (111.8 x 159.4 cm.)

Private collection, West Hartford, CT.
Private collection, Wellesley, MA, and by descent.

In this previously unknown painting by Joachim Beuckelaer, a woman has paused from her lute playing while a kitchen maid refills her companions' glasses. Books of music to her right and left suggest that the concert has been going on for some time and the intimacy of her companion's gesture, together with the direction of his gaze, alludes to the erotic overtones of music making between the sexes. The discrepancy between the clothes and jewels of the couple at the right and the two women at the left suggest a difference in their status, perhaps master and mistress of the house together with a kitchen maid and child minder. The silk garment worn by the baby aligns him with the couple and it may be that the young mistress's gesture is one of invitation to the seated woman. A meal has been laid on the table and more than two plates appear on the sideboard at the left. The monumentality of the figures and the freedom of the brushwork in passages such as the sleeves of the standing maid and the black velvet of the mistress's dress show Beuckelaer at his absolute best.

Beuckelaer's narratives are never explicit and usually revolve around the eroticism of food and questions of morality. He is best known for large-scale market scenes in which voluptuous young women appear to proffer themselves along with their produce. In The Market Stall of 1564 (Staatliche Museum, Kassel), for example, more than three-fourths of the composition is given over to a towering display of fruit and vegetables and the young woman skinning a duck at the left flirtatiously encourages the viewer to look. In other market scenes, the young woman rather than her produce is being tested with arms wrapped around waists and hands plunged into bodices. Paintings such as these remained popular through the end of the seventeenth-century and were hung specifically in kitchen and dining room settings. The kitchen interior, peopled with both servants and an elegant couple, can be compared to the series of Four elements by Beuckelaer sold at Christie's London, 13 December 2000, lot 25 (£2,973,750=$4,305,990), now in the National Gallery, London, two of which were similarly dated 1569 (see fig. 1, An Allegory of Fire). Beuckelaer included specific references to moral choices in works such as The Well Stocked Kitchen with Christ in the House of Mary and Martha of 1566 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). In this painting it is Mary, who sits at Christ's feet in the background, rather than Martha, who busies herself with the preparation of food, who has made the right choice-seeing the relative importance of the two activities, she has eschewed decorum in favor of enlightenment. Other of Beuckelaer's works also contain this kind of foreground-background relationship and, in this painting, where an old bearded man sitting in a melancholic pose appears next to the fireplace in the background, the juxtaposition could relate to the theme of the ages of man. Life has its seasons and the springtime of youth inevitably becomes the winter of old age.

The scale of Kitchen Scene with Wine and a Lute reflects Beuckelaer's increasing interest in the work of history painters such as Frans Floris. His figures became progressively more monumental, elegant, and idealized throughout the 1560s and his painting technique loosened over time. He experimented with Italian oil sketch techniques in the early 1560's and by the end of the decade was using canvas in addition to panel supports. His vigorous underdrawing can be seen through the paint surface in certain passages such as the back of the seated maid's jacket, the tablecloth, and the front of the lute. Infrared reflectography has revealed considerable underdrawing in the head of the infant, who was originally looking up at its mother, and who is now characteristically distracted by the glass held above his head (see figs. 2 and 3).

Joachim Beuckelaer was born around 1534 to a little known family of Antwerp painters and studied with his uncle by marriage, Pieter Aertsen. He became a master in the St. Luke's Guild in 1560, the year in which he also got married, and his earliest works are densely populated landscapes and religious subjects such as the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, seen in bird's eye view. Beuckelaer also received commissions from the Church - one of which, as recorded by van Mander, was destroyed in the Iconoclastic riots of 1581 - and made designs for stained glass windows. His latest dated work is from 1574 and he died that year or shortly thereafter. He seems to have had a studio, as evidenced by a group of works associated with him and signed with the monogram HB but does not seem to have had any immediate followers in Antwerp. His work was popular in northern Italy, and by around 1580, Vincenzo Campi in Cremona and Bartolomeo Passarotti and Annibale Carracci in Bologna were painting large-scale market and kitchen scenes.