Garden Party

Three elegant and fashionably dressed couples sit in a garden and enjoy themselves with music, wine and one another. On the left a servant comes out of a house, bearing more drink. On the right by a fountain – in scenes like this often an allusion to fertility – there is an etagère on which valuable vases and dishes are displayed.
The garden party is a type of painting that seems to have been confined to Haarlem, from 1612 onwards. Esaias van de Velde, Willem Buytenwech and, rather later, Dirck Hals (see p. 57) were all practitioners of this genre. It was an entirely new sort of painting, very different from the art of Cornelis van Haarlem and Hendrick Goltzius (see pp. 24, 32) that dominated the scene at this time.
These paintings, with people rolling in wealth, free of care, enjoying themselves with music and idle card games, were intended to remind the seventeenth-century viewer of the relativeness of earthly pleasure. Although death is not depicted here, he nonetheless looks over our shoulder. This is tellingly expressed on a print with a similar subject by Jan van de Velde: ‘although we have often enjoyed great luxury, death is much closer than we know’.