Halt at an Italian Winehouse Door (1675)
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Photograph © The University of Edinburgh
Artist | Karel Du Jardin (b.1622, d.1678) |
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Title | Halt at an Italian Winehouse Door |
Date | 1675 |
Period | 17th century; 1670s |
Description | Italianate landscape with two men on horseback, one with a red cape. Several standing and seated figures, both male and female, welcome them to the village, seen in the middle ground, while the background displays the surrounding mountains. The orange and blue sky suggests this is an evening scene, thus these travellers might be searching for a place to stay over night. The depiction of inns and travellers was a common theme in Dujardin’s Italianate landscape paintings. This landscape is build up with horizontal patches, identifying the foreground with the figures and house, the lake at the middle ground, bind that ruins, houses and trees build up a next line, after that there is a depiction of a plain and then mountains block the horizon. This division in the width of the composition is the traditional Italian manner of painting a landscape, which Dujardin learned from his stay in Rome, therefore it is likely that this work is one of a group of late landscapes painted in italy around 1675-78. the picture can be related to another work of the master, Travellers halted for refreshment at an Inn which hangs in Turin. This painting is also in the style of the Bamboccianti, genre painters active in Rome from about 1625 until the end of the seventeenth century. Most were Dutch and Flemish artists who brought existing traditions of depicting peasant subjects from sixteenth-century Netherlandish art with them to Italy, and generally created small cabinet paintings or etchings of the everyday life of the lower classes in Rome and its countryside. Their paintings have been traditionally interpreted as a realist, true portrait of Rome and its popular life without variation or alteration of what the artist sees. Typical subjects include food and beverage sellers, farmers and milkmaids at work, soldiers at rest and play, and beggars,or pickpockets, bands of drunks and gluttons, scubby tobacconists, barbers, and other 'sordid' subjects. In contrast to their painted topics, the works themselves sold for high prices to esteemed collectors. |
Material | canvas (textile material)/textile materials/materials (substances); oil paint (paint)/paint (coating) |
Dimensions | 81 x 89.6 cm |
Subject | Landscapes |
Collection | Art Collection; Torrie Collection |
Accession Number | EU0719 |