Entry by
Susan Anderson,
completed November 01, 2017:
Like many of Dusart’s earliest drawings, this sheet was long believed to be by his teacher Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), until Bernhard Schnackenburg correctly recognized its hand. In correspondence, Schnackenburg compared it to the drawing Pig Market, in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, which he also recognized as by Dusart, and dated the Harvard sheet to around 1680.
Dusart’s drawings from 1679 (the date of his first signed painting) to about 1685 (the year of Van Ostade’s death) do indeed owe a tremendous debt to his master, and the present drawing fits within this broader timeframe. Dusart fully absorbed Van Ostade’s approach to subject, style, and execution: scenes of peasants merrymaking either inside or outside a tavern appear as frequent subjects and are often rendered first with a rapid and schematic graphite or black chalk sketch and finished with pen and brown ink, sometimes applied only to the central group of figures. Although the approach to figural poses, groupings, and costumes remains strikingly similar, unlike Van Ostade’s scruffier brown ink line, Dusart’s remains thinner, finer, and more precise.
Here, Dusart shows us a tavern interior with peasants gathered near a hearth. His graphite sketch schematically delineates the entire interior, including the full hood of the fireplace, ceiling joists, and figures near a window or door at the rear. In his second pass with the pen, however, Dusart focused only on the foreground elements, such as the hood of the fireplace with a woman tending to the hearth, a small group of three men conversing in front of it, and a group of peasants, including a woman and child, enjoying their meal around a table. The meat sits on a platter on a small bench in the immediate foreground, inviting the viewer to imagine that the jowly dog lying in front of it is wolfing down a stolen slice.
Notes
