METSU, Gabriel

This painting represents the front rooms of a fine town house with several figures which recall earlier paintings by Frans van Mieris the Elder, for example, the figure of the seated man is derived from the one in the foreground of Van Mieris’s Brothel Scene, the arrangement of objects in the foreground recalls motifs in The Painter’s Studio. The subject of elegant musical gatherings flourished during the 1650s, for example in the work of the Amsterdam painters Gerbrand van den Eeckhout and Jacob van Loo.

The painter follows the example of Jan Vermeer van Delft.

The emphasis on gentility and opulence intensified in Metsu’s works during the final years of his career as did his painstaking technique which became harder and drier. Such works as the Young Woman Composing Music present a rarefied view of the leisure life of moneyed urbanites. In this panel, a woman gazes serenely as if lost in thought as she composes music, poised to record the notes played by her lute-strumming confidant behind the table. A man, perhaps an admirer, peers over her shoulder as she works. The room is extravagantly decorated from its wooden table bedecked with an expensive Turkish carpet to the eye-catching mantelpiece that mimics a real one in the Amsterdam Town Hall. The painting above the mantelpiece is a seascape with a storm-stossed boat.

The painting is also known by the title “Oyster Eaters”. It is a painting from the best period of the artist.

Despite Leiden being his birthplace, Gabriel Metsu is not regarded as one of the city’s ‘Feinmaler’, as a result of the great variations in the style and quality of his work. It was not until the late 1650s that his work became close to that of the Feinmalers; Metsu’s paintings from the early 1660s constitute a high point in his dialogue with the School and simultaneously of his creative output as a whole.

This woman is encompassed by motifs connoting, like her very persona, virtue. She is about to peel an apple, an activity associated with food preparation, a quintessential task of women. Note as well the book on the ledge, a tome indicating piety, and also the grapevine and birdcage hanging in the space behind her symbolizing love and fidelity.

The companion-piece of the painting (in the Mauritshuis, The Hague) represents a hunter surrounded by motifs apposite to the male realm.

Metsu’s indisputable masterpieces are Man Writing a Letter and Woman Reading a Letter which were painted as companion pieces. In both paintings, the way the silvery daylight flows over the figures set against light walls is not surpassed by Vermeer. The pendants offer a small drama: the handsome man writes a letter, and its patient recipient attentively reads it by the light of a window. Here letter writing and reading are most likely associated with love.

The Man Writing a Letter offers a view of the love of comfort and beautiful materials in the home of a well-to-do burgher about 1660, and the heavily carved gilt Baroque frame around the landscape painting on the wall behind the handsome young man makes clear that not all seventeenth-century Dutch pictures were enclosed in rectilinear black ebony mouldings.

Most of Metsu’s paintings are domestic scenes. In some the influence of Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch can be detected.

Celebrating the reciprocity between affluence and fertility, the painter here presents a prosperous family in a suitably wealthy domestic interior. The walls are covered in tooled and gilded Spanish leather, but for all their small scale, these figures are not eclipsed by so daunting a setting. The eldest son, in festive dress, plays the part of falconer, possibly emblematic of the family’s name.

Jan Jacobsz. Hinlopen (1626-1666) was a rich Dutch cloth merchant, an officer in the civic guard, a real estate developer in the Jordaan, alderman in the city council and a keen art collector. It is likely that he had good connections with Gabriel Metsu.

Formerly the painting was thought, erroneously, to portrays Burgomaster Gillis Valckenier and his family, or the merchant Geelvink and his family.

Dressed in their finery the couple sit side by side in a room, which is revealed by numerous items and the woman at the blackboard to be in a tavern. The man and his wife are illuminated by an unseen light source from the front left. The man is laughing and puts his left arm around the young woman’s shoulders, a gesture echoed by her arm as she hands him some berries. He raises a flute glass in his right hand to her health, while she looks straight ahead rather stiffly. Beside the couple a table is laid with a silver pot, some dried fish and a small loaf of bread, but the way it has been truncated at one end gives it the look of a stage prop. The rear of the tavern is in shadow, so that all that may be distinguished is the incidental figure chalking up orders in front of the fireplace, a narrow shelf, and an empty birdcage hanging above. The room opens up to the rear at the right, giving a view of a sunny courtyard in which a market stall has been erected.

Although the painting was for many years known simply as The Lovers at Breakfast, the two protagonists, quite different in type, have been identified as the artist and Isabella de Wolff, whom he married in 1658 and who was a niece of the painter Pieter de Grebber.

The iconography of the painting distinguishes it as part of a painting tradition well-known to the educated contemporary viewer: the carousing, feasting couple, the ambience of the tavern with the landlady at the blackboard, the highly significant bread and fish still-life on the table. All of these elements point to the subject of the ‘prodigal son regaling with the harlots in the inn’. This Biblical parable, much loved and widespread in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, was understood as an admonition against a life of sin and vice. A link between the Biblical story and an artist’s self-portrait was not, however, completely unusual. Rembrandt, for instance, had depicted himself in a similar pose some twenty years earlier, in his Self-portrait with Saskia in the Scene from the Prodigal Son, which is also in the Dresden collection.

This painting is a good copy after a lost painting by Gabriel Metsu.

The cittern, the pear-shaped, plucked string instrument the young woman is tuning here, was common in the 17th century, only later losing its place to the guitar and the mandolin, to be forgotten today. In Renaissance and Baroque painting, the subject of music is often linked to erotic themes and it is in this sense that one reads the figure of the elegant young man with the wine glass who stands behind the young woman, gazing at her yearningly as she concentrates on her task. Sitting at her side is a dog, a symbol of fidelity. On the table with its cover of oriental carpet, and emphasised by the light, is a still-life-like arrangement of violin and drinking horn.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 12 minutes):

Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto in G major for two mandolins and orchestra, RV 532

Metsu was a specialist in market and kitchen scenes which provided the possibility to depict game, fish, fruit and vegetables, and kitchen utensils.

Hagar, the Egyptian hand maiden of Sarah was the mother of Ishmael, Abraham’s first son. When Isaac, Sarah’s son, was born Ishmael mocked his younger brother so that Sarah asked Abraham to banish him, together with his mother. Abraham provided them with bread and a bottle of water and sent them off into the desert of Beersheba.

Gabriel Metsu’s painting of the subject is highly indebted to the work of the Italianate painter Jan Weenix from Utrecht. The Italianate landscape in the background with its stone bridge and ruinous tower set against mountains, possibly refers to the wilderness mentioned in the biblical text Hagar’s dress and white body linen, her straw hat and sandles identify her as a shepherdess common in Italianate paintings of the time.

The subject of this painting, a young woman sewing who entertains a hunter proffering a dead partridge, constitutes a male—female confrontation that lies at the heart of much of Metsu’s imagery throughout his career. Cleverly, the artist has even introduced a contrast between the protagonists’ dogs: the lady’s lapdog poised on the table stares at the stocky spaniel standing faithfully by its masters side.

Clearly, the little statue of Cupid perched on the linen chest behind the hunter and seamstress emphasizes the amorous nature of his offer, but the lustful underpinnings of the hunter’s gesture would have been readily apparent to seventeenth-century viewers. In contemporary Dutch prints and texts birds refer to lasciviousness and the Dutch verb ‘vogelen’ (to bird) to sexual intercourse. Thus by offering the bird to the young woman, Metsu’s hunter is actually propositioning her.

Market and kitchen scenes originally came from Flemish painting and above all are linked in the sixteenth century with Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer. In sharp contrast to Dutch still-life specialists, the Leiden Feinmalers around Gerard Dou reactivated these subjects for their small-format genre paintings, in which market goods were showed off to their best advantage in small, select groups. Metsu’s Poultry Seller depicts just such a group of varied items, arranged along the painting’s lower and left-hand margins; the precision with which they have been painted testifies to a supreme virtuosity in the Feinmaler style, and is accentuated in part by the use of light and dark contrasts. But importantly, each surface receives the same amount of attention: from different woods - a bamboo rod, basketwork, a barrel and a bare tree — to the fluffy fur of the rabbit beside the pale flesh of the plucked hen in the basket, or from the bird’s skeletal head, a strong contrast with the luminous red head of the turkey, to the trader’s thick wool stockings that differ so from his young customer’s delicate, filmy gauze apron. Metsu is not simply content, however, to use the Feinmalers’ technique of applying flat, narrow brush strokes one beside the next. The tree and the row of houses in the background reveal his command of a far more relaxed and expansive style. Furthermore, his colours are richer than those of the Leiden Feinmaler, and reveal a love of clear reds, blues and greens demonstrated, for instance, in the young woman’s clothes.

This painting is the pendant of the Poultry Seller (also in Dresden). The two works are identical in size, bear the same date, show the same motif using variously a male or a female protagonist, are set in the one case in a town and in the other in a village, and reveal a number of elements in common: in both cases an old man with one exposed knee sits beneath a bare tree with long branches that extend from the painting’s edge to its centre; and both paintings depict an inquisitive little spaniel, as well as plants painted with botanical precision in their respective lower inside corners.

Gabriel Metsu was born in Leiden, the son of a Flemish painter who had emigrated to the north. He was a pupil of Gerrit Dou, a painter of genre scenes and the founder of the so-called ‘fijnschilder’ school of painting, whose work is characterized by its very high finish. Metsu was one of the founder members of the Leiden guild in 1648 but by 1657 was living in Amsterdam. Like so many artists from smaller towns (including Rembrandt, who also came from Leiden) he was drawn to the metropolis by its thriving art market and the hope of lucrative commissions. Metsu is a fascinating and eclectic artist whose work at different times shows the influences of Jan Steen, Nicolaes Kn�pfer, Gerard ter Borch, and his master Gerrit Dou.

Most of Metsu’s paintings are genre scenes but he also painted religious subjects (including a notable Noli Me Tangere of 1667, now in Vienna) as well as a few portraits, still lifes and game pieces. This particular painting is a genre scene and yet the pose of the child on her mother’s knee is reminiscent of that used to depict the Infant Christ in Mary’s lap. These religious resonances are deepened by the small black-framed painting of the Crucifixion which hangs on the wall above the figures. Metsu’s technique is quite different from that of his master: the mother and child are broadly painted with a rich, almost succulent application of paint. His palette too is bolder and more varied than Dou’s. In all, there is a similarity with contemporary Flemish painting and even echoes of pictures of the Virgin and Child by Anthony van Dyck.

Metsu’s painting depicts a sad situation: food being brought to a woman who seems terminally ill.

Gabriel Metsu was born at Leiden and is said tro have been a pupil of gerrit Dou. He was active in Leiden during most of his brief career, but like other artists from provincial centres, he was finally attracted by the opportunities Amsterdam offered. He had settled in the city by 1657 and spent the rest of his life there. His early Leiden works, which include rather broadly brushed religious and allegorical pictures, as well as genre paintings, do not show signs of Dou’s influence or the high finish and polished manner assiciated with the Leiden School. It was onnly after Metsu had settled in Amsterdam that he adopted more of the Leiden ‘fijnschilder’ technique and became a prolific painter of the well-to-do bourgeoisie.

The pendant of the painting, Woman Peeling an Apple, is also in the Louvre.

This scene, set in an imaginary reception room, depicts a visit to a woman in confinement shortly after giving birth. The extraordinary size of the room, which is suggested by the marble fireplace and the seascape above it, exceeds what would have been found in almost any private house in a Dutch city during the period. The model for the main features of the room: the fireplace and the black-and-white marble floor are derived from the burgomasters’ council chamber in the new Town Hall (now the Royal Palace ) of Amsterdam, designed by Jacob van Campen. Pieter de Hooch depicts the same room in a painting now in Madrid. However, it is unlikely that Metsu was influenced by De Hooch’s painting, considering that it is usually dated somewhat later than Metsu’s The Visit to the Nursery.

Horticulture was as potent a source of pride and livelihood in the Dutch Republic as livestock. The vegetable market painted by Gabriel Metsu displays an impressive variety of cabbages and root vegetables against a backdrop of the Prinsengracht, one of Amsterdam’s finest canals. Metsu gave pride of place to the Horn carrot (the orange root in the cane basket) and the cauliflower, both of them expensive vegetables that Dutch growers had recently developed; they are contrasted with turnips and other staples of Dutch cooking. The canal calls attention to an enabling factor of Amsterdam’s economy: its ready access to Holland’s network of waterways.

In setting and motifs, the painting is about Amsterdam’s flourishing vegetal and economic cultures, both the subject of numerous laudatory descriptions. While such specific market pictures had some general precedents, their combination of actual sites with the best of locally grown produce constitutes their novelty, and even their seventeenth-century Dutchness.

A doctor visiting a sick young woman was a widely used subject bin Dutch genre painting. The tendency to allegory is displayed here, too: the illness is often lovesickness and its undesirable consequences, for which medicine is powerless. The doctor here is more of a disciplinarian than a healer.

The pendant of the painting, The Tippler, is also in the Louvre.

Metsu’s indisputable masterpieces are Man Writing a Letter and Woman Reading a Letter which were painted as companion pieces. In both paintings, the way the silvery daylight flows over the figures set against light walls is not surpassed by Vermeer. The pendants offer a small drama: the handsome man writes a letter, and its patient recipient attentively reads it by the light of a window. Here letter writing and reading are most likely associated with love. The discreet waiting maid pulls aside a curtain hanging from a rod to reveal a choppy seascape, possibly but not demonstrably a reference to the popular adage that love is as hazardous as a sea voyage. The maid’s momentary movement contrasts with the concentration of the young woman who, one senses, will not move until she has finished reading the letter.

The curtain over the painting is not an unusual detail. The Dutch often protected paintings with curtains, either to keep off the light and dust, or to look at them only occasionally, as is the traditional way of the Chinese and, Japanese - a practice that comes from the fine feeling that a work of art cannot be looked at continually. Trompe l’oeil curtains on rods painted to give the illusion that they have been drawn aside to reveal a framed picture are not uncommon either; best known is the one Rembrandt included in his intimate Holy Family at Kassel.

A proper, prosperous Dutch lady daydreams as she tunes a mandolin; the viewer is invited to complete the story. The child is likely her son, and the making of music is a traditional reference to sexual love.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 12 minutes):

Vivaldi: Concerto in G major for two mandolins and orchestra RV 532