Pictures from Dresden at the Royal Academy

Contemporary Review, June, 2003 by Donald Bruce

Of the two pupils of Adam van Noort, Rubens often assumed the role of the warrior aristocrat, whilst Jacob Jordaens usually played that of the quiet peasant who rejoices in peace and fecundity:

How blest are shepherd, how happy their lasses,

When drums and trumpets are sounding alarms!

To Jordaens fecundity meant the grain and fruit harvests gathered in by broad-hipped maidens clumsily helped by satyrs: agrarian demi-gods whom Jordaens's peasants, gross, primitive and intemperate, often resemble. An example is his Allegory of Fecundity in the Wallace Collection, London. Fecundity to Rubens means opulence, as in his Allegory of War and Peace, an autograph work in the London National Gallery; or a display of his own prosperity, as in his several pictures of his estate at the Chateau de Steen. A tragedian, Rubens loved to depict battles, atrocities, martyrdoms and slaughters. Jordaens, a farceur, was attracted to the rudimentary life and coarse humour of those bound to the soil. Because of their affinity with the toilers of the fields, he took an odd liking to satyrs. Apart from Christmas carousels, satyrs were his favourite subjects. He had greater powers of invention than the Elder Pieter Brueghel, but was otherwise 'of the earth, earthly'. He lacked Brueghel's acute observation and Brueghel 's love of landscape. It is no surprise that in Jordaens's Diana and Actaeon his corpulent bumpkin Actaeon struts at leisure past the globular pop-eyed nymphs, taking in what he would call an eyeful of them. His mild dogs do not look capable, for all Diana's magic, of more than a playful nip or two. So it will end, to Jordaens's satisfaction, in nothing worse than a romp, with no harm done.

There are three classes in David Teniers's Kermis in an Innyard: people of fashion who have come to stare at boorish antics; farmers who stand at the porch to discuss their crops, and are still too close to the soil to forego the country fair; and the peasants, who enjoy themselves. As in the pictures of Adriaen van Ostade, the peasants are childishly apt to mirth, and childishly inquisitive. One group crowds around a tippling grandam, closely attentive to her stories. At a table across the innyard an older peasant, in the full heyday of an anecdote, pauses while carving a ham, his knife still aloft. He is raptly heard by a girl in a hood, whose middle-aged admirer, perhaps jealous, urges her to drink up her ale. At the end of the table a greybeard makes heavy overtures, mirthfully spied upon from a window above, to a half-protesting matron. Nearby a drunkard, almost nose-to-nose with a pig, sprawls on the ground. Another toper, incapable of standing, is solicitously helped by his friends through the gate of the innyard.

Bent on their revels, other peasants dance stoutly in a ring to the music of a fiddle and a bagpipe: the women with dogged concentration, the men with carefree high-kicks. One old reprobate has detached his companion, not in her first youth, and dances her away down the road to a tete tete in their delectably neat village: in the environs of Antwerp, since the spire of its cathedral rises among distant trees. An egalitarian peasant, exhilarated and probably drunk, grabs the hand of a girl from the visiting gentry, to drag her into the round dance. She resists so vehemently that she falls to the ground on her hip. The impudent fellow has also angered his wife who sits nearby suckling their child. This village upstart is likely to have a day of trouble on the morrow. Like a series of engravings by Hogarth, the detailed interactions of Teniers's Kermis would provide the material for a whole novel, perhaps a seventeenth-century version of Zola's La Terre. In its own right it certainly deserves the designation of a masterpiece.