Seated Lady with a Flax Winder
Formerly in the Rothschild collection, Adriaen van Ostade’s Seated Lady with a Flax Winder was sold to a private collector by Nicholas Hall.
Signature
Signed and dated ‘AV Ostade/1666’ (AV linked, lower right)
PROVENANCE
Pieter Locquet; Van der Schley, Amsterdam, 22-24 September 1783, lot 273 (with its pendant The Smoker, 300 florins to Yver)
(Probably) with Jan Yver
Paris, Le Brun, Anonymous sale, May 1803 (precise date unknown), lot 10, ‘Ce précieux tableau est d’une vérité &d’une autorité de couler familiére aux plus parfaits ouvrages de ce maître’
D. van der Schriek, Louvain, by 1842
(Possibly) Jules-Paul-Benjamin, Baron Delessert (1773-1847), Hôtel d’Uzés, 176 rue Montmartre, Paris, by whom bequeathed to his brother Fraçois-Benjamin-Marie Delessert (1780-1868), Hôtel Delessert, 176 rue Montmartre, Paris; Papet/Pillet, Paris, 15 March 1869, lot 67, ‘Ce portrait est d’une qualité merveilleuse et d’un grand caractére dans sa petite proportion’ (FF 22,000)
B. Narischkine [Naryshkin]; sale, Chevallier/Pillet, Paris, 5 April 1883, lot 23
Baron Alphonse de Rothschild (1827-1905), Paris, by descent to
Baron Edouard de Rothschild (1868-1949), Paris
Confiscated by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg following the Nazi occupation of Paris after May 1940 (No. R 94)
Transferred to the ‘Sonderauftrag Linz’ (Linz no. 1460)
Recovered from Alt Aussee (No. 2538) by the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Division and transferred to the Munich Central Collecting Point on 10 June, 1945 (MCCP no. 3800)
Repatriated to France, 20 September 1945 and restituted thereafter to the Rothschild Family
By descent to Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild (1914-1999), Tel Aviv
London, Christie’s, Anonymous sale, 13 December 2000, lot 41
with Richard Green, London
Private collection, Europe
New York, Christie’s, Old Master Paintings Part I, 29 January 2014, lot 9
Private collection, New York
with Nicholas Hall, by 2020
Private collection, acquired from the above
Bibliography
John Smith, Supplement to the Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, IX, London, 1842, no. 31.
Paul Eudel, L’Hôtel Drouot et la Curiosité en 1883, Paris, 1883, III, p. 186.
Inventory of pictures, Rothschild Archive, London, no. 75: ‘Vieille Femme songeuse, par Van Ostade (de la collection Narischkine)’, unpublished.
‘Le Baron Alphonse’ in L’Art, Paris, 1905, p. 270: ‘Un Adriaen van Ostade comme il ne s’en voit qu’en un palais, et en effet, il provient d’une des premières galeries particulières de la famille impériale de Russie’; etching by E. Bocourt illustrated on p. 265.
Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol.III, London, 1910, p. 414, no. 895.
Essay
One of the foremost genre painters of seventeenth century Holland, Adriaen van Ostade is recorded by his biographer Arnold Houbraken as having trained with Frans Hals. Studying with Frans Hals at the same time was Adriaen Brouwer, the Flemish painter of low-life and tavern scenes who lived in Haarlem until 1631. These two artists, and Brouwer in particular, inspired Van Ostade to develop his lively, sometimes raucous, scenes of smoking drinking and carousing peasants in their village surroundings. From about 1640 onwards, Ostade began to endow his low-life figures with greater restraint and dignity, his palette becoming richer and his chiaroscuro stronger—perhaps closer to Rembrandt. Ostade worked, and was incredibly productive, in Haarlem his entire life and played an active part in the administration of the Saint Luke’s Guild.
The present painting, Portrait of an elderly lady in a red coat, is among the finest of Ostade’s single-figure pictures, painted in his maturity at a time when tranquil domestic interiors had become a favorite subject in his work. Despite Ostade being neither a moralist nor a social critic, he highlights the theme of domestic virtue. The elderly lady is presented in fine clothing with a distaff by her side and spun flax ready for the next stage of production. Recorded in the Bible as one of the activities of the good wife (Proverbs 31:19), spinning and weaving had long been associated with domesticity, which was especially valued in 17th-century Dutch society. Ostade himself was the son of a weaver, and the rhythm of spinning and weaving would have been deeply familiar—and also surely personally significant—to him.
Adriaen van Ostade was celebrated in his lifetime and afterwards. After his death, Johannes Vermeer organized the sale of many of Ostade’s paintings. The present painting was owned by both the Delesserts and the Rothschilds. The Delessert collection was one of the most notable in Paris in the nineteenth century. The son of a Lyons silk-merchant, Etienne Delessert moved to Paris where he began lending money to the sellers of luxury goods. His eldest son Jules-Paul-Benjmanin was appointed Régent of the Banque de France and in 1812 was ennobled as Baron Delessert. He created a fine collection of paintings including Raphael’s Orléans Madonna for which he paid 27,250 francs. Additionally, Baron Delessert owned a significant group of Dutch cabinet pictures including Pieter de Hooch’s Merry Company (Brussels, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium) and eighteenth-century French paintings, including Greuze’s Portrait of the engraver Jean-Georges Wille (1763; Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André). His paintings hung in his home at 176 rue Montmartre, Paris where he died in 1847. Upon his death his house and collection were transfer to his younger brother Fraçois-Benjamin-Marie Delessert. Their belongings were sold in 1869 when this painting subsequently entered the collection of the Russian aristocrat B. Narischkine. B. Narischkine had important Dutch pictures including Pieter de Hooch’s The Visit (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Portrait of an elderly lady in a red coat was acquired, in 1883, by Baron Alphonse de Rothschild who assembled a legendary collection of Old Master paintings. Baron Alphonse collected an astonishing range of masterpieces, including works by Hobbema, Frans Hals, Wouvermans and Rembrandt. He also supported contemporary artists and his largesse extended to some 200 artistic institutions with the Académie des Beaux-Arts receiving FF 2,000 to use as a biennial prize. He was eventually elected to the Académie Française.
This painting was displayed in Château de Ferrières, Paris until being confiscated by Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg following the Nazi occupation of Paris. In 1945 it was repatriated to France and restituted thereafter to the Rothschild Family. It is no surprise that this physically small, yet quietly expressive picture was described as among the ‘plus parfaits ouvrages de ce maître’ in the Lebrun sale of 1803.❖