Painter and engraver, born in Haarlem, The Netherlands. He was a pupil of Frans Hals, and his use of chiaroscuro shows the influence of Rembrandt. His subjects are taken mostly from everyday life, for example tavern scenes, farmyards, markets, and village greens. His Alchemist is in the National Gallery. His brother Isaak (162149) treated similar subjects, but excelled at winter scenes and landscapes.
Adriaen van Ostade (bapt.
He was the eldest son of Jan Hendricx Ostade, who was from the town of Ostade near Eindhoven. Although Adriaen and his brother Isaack were born in Haarlem, they adopted the name "van Ostade" as painters.
According to Jacobus Houbraken, he was taught from 1627 by Frans Hals, at that time the master of Adriaen Brouwer and Jan Miense Molenaer. Among the treasures of the Louvre is a striking picture of a father sitting in state, his wife at his side, surrounded by his son, five daughters, and a young married couple in a handsomely furnished room. By an old tradition, Ostade here painted himself and his children in holiday attire; but the style is much too refined for the painter of boors, and Ostade had but one daughter.
The number of Ostade's pictures is given by Smith at three hundred and eighty-five, but by Hofstede de Groot (1910) at over 900. Two hundred and twenty of his pictures are in public and private collections, of which one hundred and four are signed and dated, while seventeen are signed with the name but not with the date.
Ostade was the contemporary of David Teniers the Younger and Adrian Brouwer. Between Teniers and Ostade the contrast lies in the different condition of the agricultural classes of Brabant and Holland and in the atmosphere and dwellings peculiar to each region. the people, depicted by Ostade, are short and ill-favoured, marked with adversity's stamp in feature and dress.
Brouwer, who painted the Dutch peasant in his frolics and passions, brought more of the spirit of Frans Hals into his depictions than did his colleague; but the type is the same as Ostade's. During the first years of his career, Ostade tended toward the same exaggeration and frolic as his comrade, though he is distinguished from his rival by a more general use of light and shade, especially a greater concentration of light on a small surface in contrast with a broad expanse of gloom. The greatness of Ostade lies in how often he caught the poetic side of the peasant class in spite of its coarseness.
It was natural, given the tendency to effect which marked Ostade from the first, that he should have been fired by emulation to rival the masterpieces of Rembrandt. His early pictures are not so rare but that we can trace how he glided from one period to the other. Before the dispersal of the Gsell collection at Vienna in 1872, it was easy to study the steel-grey harmonies, the exaggerated caricature of his early works between 1632 and 1638. There is a picture in the Vienna Gallery of a Countryman Having his Tooth Drawn, unsigned, and painted about 1632; and the Card Players of 1637 in the Liechtenstein palace at Vienna, making up for the loss of the Gsell collection.
About 1638 or 1640, the influence of Rembrandt suddenly changed his style. He painted the Annunciation of the Brunswick Museum: angels, appearing in the sky to Dutch boors half-asleep amidst their cattle, sheep and dogs in front of a cottage, recall at once the similar subject by Rembrandt, who effectively lighted the principal groups by rays propelled to earth from a murky sky. Ostade, however, did not succeed here in giving dramatic force and expression; His picture was an effect of light, and masterly as such, in its sketchy rubbings of dark brown tone relieved by strongly impasted lights, but without the very qualities which made his usual subjects attractive.
In 1642 he painted the beautiful interior at the Louvre: a mother tending her cradled child, her husband sitting nearby, beside a great chimney; Ostade was more at home in a similar effect applied to the commonplace incident of the Slaughtering of a Pig, one of the masterpieces of 1643, and once in the Gsell collection.
In this and similar subjects of the previous and succeeding years, he returned to the homely themes in which his power and wonderful observation had made him a master. Almost innumerable are the more familiar themes to which he devoted his brush during this interval: from small single figures, representing smokers or drinkers, to allegories of the five senses (Hermitage and Brunswick galleries), half-lengths of fishmongers and bakers, cottage brawls, scenes of gambling, itinerant players and quacks, and ninepins players in the open air.
The humour in some of these pieces is contagious, as in the Tavern Scene of the Lacaze collection (Louvre, 1653).
At Amsterdam we have the likeness of a painter, sitting with his back to the spectator, at his easel. A replica of this picture, with the date 1666, is in the Dresden gallery. Both specimens are supposed to represent Ostade himself, but unfortunately we see the artist's back and not his face.
The prices which Ostade received are not known; but pictures which were worth £40 in 1750 were worth £1000 a century later, and Earl Dudley gave £4120 for a cottage interior in 1876. The signatures of Ostade vary at different periods, but the first two letters are generally interlaced. Up to 1635, Ostade writes himself Ostaden, e.g.
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