Jan Miense Molenaer
Company Making Music
Oil on panel (parquetted). 45 x 66.5 cm.
The formal and artistic quality of the present work makes it stand out among the somewhat uniform and busy examples of this artist's later phase. A. v. Schneider (Thieme/Becker) therefore allocates it to his earlier, Haarlem period, when Jan Miense was still strongly influenced by the style of his wife Judith Leyster and the painter of merry companies Dirck Hals. Most of his large-format paintings of jolly musicians, such as the vividly coloured “Two Boys and a Girl making Music” in the National Gallery in London or “Young Musicians with a Dwarf” in the Rusche Collection, originate from this period around 1630 - 1635. After this Miense appears to have begun a relatively monotonous mass production of works. The artist generally signed his works, but the signature may have been removed in order to ascribe the piece to Gerrit van Honthorst, as it was kept for decades as a work by this master in the Oldenburger Collection.
Provenance
The Bartels Collecton. - Landes-Museum Oldenburg, no. 202 (as Honthorst). - J. & S. Goldschmidt, Frankfurt 1929. - Sotheby´s Parke Bernet, New York 9.19.1980. - Leger Gallery. London. - Private collection, Rhineland.
Literature
W. Bode: Die Griossherzogl. Gemäldegalerie zu Oldenburg, 1988, p. 43 (as Honthorst). - A. Bredius: Die Grossherzogliche Gemälde-Galerie im Augusteum zu Oldenburg, 1912, illus., no. 47. - Juliane Harms: Judith Leyster, in: Oud Holland 1927, XLIV, p. 226/7, no. 18.