Adriaen van Ostade

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Adriaen van Ostade
(Dutch, 1610-1685)

Old Woman Seated in Profile to the Left (Detail)

Black Chalk and Grey Wash on Paper
19 x 17 in (48 x 43 cm)

	Provenance: Mathias Polakovits (bears his collector's mark); acquired ca. 1948 by a private Paris collector, where it remained until 2001. Museums and Collections: J. Paul Getty Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., National Gallery, London, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, and countless other museums and collections throughout Europe and North America.

	Neither moralist nor social critic, Adriaen Jansz. van Ostade was the leading painter of peasant and low-life genre painting of 17th-century Holland. His subjects included the village fair or kermis, village inn scenes, family life, domestic and agricultural work and trades. Van Ostade trained in the workshop of Frans Hals, where his primary influence was the subject matter of fellow student, Adriaen Brouwer (whose work is also represented in our current inventory.). In his early work, van Ostade depicted scenes of peasants engaged in debauchery, using Rembrandt's forceful chiaroscuro. Later, van Ostade portrayed calmer, more respectable people in more comfortable interiors, with carefully structured spaces and picturesque clutter. By then, both he and Holland had become more prosperous. An extremely prolific artist, van Ostade produced hundreds of paintings (over eight hundred are known to this date.) Van Ostade also painted portraits, still lifes, and added figures to paintings by Pieter Saenredam, Jacob van Ruisdael, and others. After Rembrandt, he was the preeminent Dutch etcher of his day. Van Ostade's watercolors, about half of which were made after 1670, were attempts to duplicate the effect of his oil paintings through watercolor and were in much demand. His students included his brother, Isaack, and Jan Steen. After van Ostade's death, Johannes Vermeer directed the sale of the vast contents of van Ostade's studio. Our fine drawing was formerly in the reknowned collection of Matthias Polakovits.