Cheerful Society

Through movements, looks and the absence of distance in the foreground, the viewer is drawn directly into this merry company, animated by sensual pleasures. A corpulent elderly man with a violin generates an exuberance that is almost audible. The remains of a meal, shells scattered on the floor, wine jugs on the wall and above all the dandyish clothing of the young men and their provocative postures point to the dissipated life of the wealthy class in Holland that was often castigated in the moralising literature of the time. The subject of the “merry company”, as propagated in Dutch painting of the early 17th century, always included an element of moral instruction. Buytewech’s composition is notable for its positively mathematical symmetry. A wide-format landscape painting – a picture in the picture – hangs at the exact centre of the back wall of the room. Corresponding to three groups of trees that rise on the banks of a body of water, six persons are grouped in pairs in front of the painting around a table, which in turn stands precisely in the middle. The couple behind this decorative, octagonal-topped piece of furniture, which emphasises the axis of the scene and on which stands a fine glass bowl with snacks, frontally faces the viewer. Moreover, the man directs a challenging gaze through round eyes straight at the beholder, while drawing towards him with a tender gesture a coquettishly smiling girl who holds a wine glass. Through their posture and looks, the two pairs of figures at the side turn to the centre of the picture, but the outstretched leg of the cavalier on the right, who is lolling almost diagonally on the chair, ostentatiously re-emphasises the axis of the painting with a shoe that reaches to the lower edge of the scene. At the same time, the persons on the outside – a young maid with a pewter bowl on the right, a cavalier with a large feathered hat on the left – are making to leave the room. In the original version, the maid’s pewter bowl on the right had a counterpart, an earthenware vessel into which the man on the left was urinating, while discreetly shielding this action with his right hand.
A previous owner of the painting must have found this detail embarrassing and had it painted over so that the curved hand of the man rested on the back of a chair, with which the unknown restorer simply overpainted the offending vessel. A surviving photograph belonging to the previous owner shows the original version, which was re-instituted in a later restoration. It also shows a further over-painting, probably dating from the 19th century that disfigured the composition. The landscape painting hanging on the back wall of the room clearly seemed too dominant to the owner at that time, who had it reduced in size by one third on the right. This owner also “cleaned up” the wooden floor, making the oyster shells scattered across the boards invisible through overpainting. This arbitrary way of restoring old paintings was a common occurrence. In this case, the supposed corrections had already been reversed when the work was purchased by the Berlin Gemäldegalerie.
In 1912, Wilhelm von Bode was not yet able to provide evidence for his intuitive attribution to Buytewech, as panel paintings by this artist were almost unknown. This late work in Berlin was therefore long attributed to Dirk Hals. Buytewech, called “de gheestige Willem” (witty Willem) by contemporaries, was indeed primarily a master of graphic arts. To this day no more than eight paintings by his hand have been identified. Although Buytewech lived in Haarlem only from 1612 to 1617, the manifold artistic impulses of this city, which was provincial in comparison to Amsterdam, had a lasting influence on him. This work was not painted until later, after the artist returned to his home town of Rotterdam. Irene Geismeier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019