The Haarlem painter Job Berckheyde was the elder brother of the well-known townscape painter Gerrit Berckheyde (1638-1698).  Although Job probably taught Gerrit to paint, he followed a somewhat different artistic path from that of his brother.  Job was less prolific than Gerrit, but his output was more varied.  Whereas Gerrit specialised in city views, Job turned his hand to a wide variety of genres, including townscapes, church interiors, still lifes, history paintings, genre scenes and even portraits.  The two brothers were evidently close to one another: they travelled together as young artists, and later shared a house in Haarlem, and possibly a studio, for much of their adult lives.  However, they apparently had rather different personalities and this is reflected in their art.  The artists’ biographer Arnold Houbraken characterised Job as ambitious and impulsive, while Gerrit was modest and meticulous[i].

Job painted relatively few scenes of everyday life, but they are among his best works.  Here, he sets his scene in a sparsely furnished tavern.  A young man in a grey coat, buff-coloured breeches, and a tatty old black hat is seated on the left, smoking a pipe.  He leans one elbow on the table and stretches a leg along the bench in a nonchalant manner, while gazing directly at the viewer.  A rosy-cheeked young woman in a white headdress sits opposite him, reading intently from a printed sheet.  Her companion, wearing a black beret, holds a violin in one hand and a bow in the other: leaning forward, he turns towards the viewer, his mouth open, singing.  Through an open door at the back of the room, we catch a glimpse of a passage beyond, lit by a shaft of sunlight.

Although depictions of people enjoying their leisure in the tavern had long been a popular theme in Dutch genre painting, Berckheyde approached the subject with fresh eyes.  The closely cropped composition and informality of the poses lend the image a compelling sense of immediacy and naturalism.  The strongly individualised figures are beautifully observed, especially the smoker on the left, who it has been suggested may be a self-portrait of the artist.  Close attention has been paid to the details of his clothing – the folds in the coarse fabric of his jacket, the broken threads in a shoulder seam, the buttonholes on the cuff, the wrinkled hose and worn leather shoes.  The young woman, with her strong working hands, is equally well characterised.  Berckheyde has rendered his scene with deft brushstrokes in thin layers of paint and in a carefully controlled palette consisting mainly of tones of grey, buff, ochre, tan and sparkling white. 

A painting described as 'Een Herbergje, daerze de Courant Leezen, door Job Berkheyde' (‘a small inn, where they read the newspaper, by Job Berckheyde’), which appeared in the 1731 posthumous sale of the Amsterdam merchant Anthony Deutz (1678-1730), seems to tally closely with the present painting.  At first glance it is easy to see why in the past the young woman was assumed to be reading a newspaper, but recent research has revealed that she is not in fact reading a newspaper at all, but almost certainly a song sheet.  According to Dr. Arthur der Weduwen, the leading expert on the history of newspapers in the Netherlands, the sheet does not conform to any known newspaper of the day,[ii] but resembles a rare form of contemporary ballad sheet, containing the words of three separate songs, printed in double columns of text, each headed by a woodcut image.  Although many such sheets must have been produced, very few examples of these ephemeral items have survived today.  Here, the musical context of Berckheyde’s scene lends weight to this interpretation.  Clearly the young woman and her violinist friend are preparing for a singalong.  A somewhat similar song sheet can be seen in an engraving of two boys singing by Cornelis Bloemaert after a painting by his father Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651). 

The fact that Berckheyde took great care to faithfully describe the song sheet is characteristic of his acute powers of observation and the matter-of-fact way in which he captured commonplace moments in the lives of ordinary people.  In another work, Job Berckheyde depicted a bespectacled old man reading a newspaper[iii]. There, the format of the broadsheet, arranged in two columns of text, with a central logo at the top of the page, is easily recognisable as a copy of the most popular newspaper of the day, the Oprechte Haerlemse Courant (‘True Newspaper for Haarlem’). 

A vibrant culture of music making permeated all levels of Dutch society in the seventeenth century and is reflected in the many genre paintings featuring musical activities.  Unlike most other European countries, where musical life centred around the church and/or the princely courts, in the Dutch Republic making music of all sorts was enjoyed by a wide spectrum of society.  Although the Dutch Reformed church disapproved of musical accompaniment to religious services, city governments employed organists and other musicians to perform regularly and on festive occasions.  Music making and singing were also popular pastimes for private citizens, both rich and poor alike.  During the course of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam became a centre for music publishing, producing printed music to suit all tastes, from luxury music and songbooks for the wealthy middle classes to inexpensive song sheets sold on street corners. 

It is hard to be certain whether or not Berckheyde portrayed himself in this painting.  It was not uncommon for an artist to insert a self-portrait in a genre scene, usually with a gaze directed at the viewer, as we see here.  Indeed, Berckheyde’s contemporary Jan Steen (1626-1679) did so often, but there are no other known examples in Berckheyde’s oeuvre.  If one compares the self-portrait of the Berckheyde in his studio[iv], painted for Cosimo III de’ Medici in 1675, with the man in our painting, which probably dates from around the same time, there are distinct similarities.  Both paintings show a man of broadly similar, thick-set build, with a short brown beard, seen in three-quarter profile.  However, in the self-portrait the artist’s nearly shoulder-length hair is visible beneath a huge beret, whereas in our painting the man’s hair is almost completely covered by the tatty old hat, and his lips are held in a pout as he draws upon his pipe, which somewhat clouds one’s judgement.  A comparison with the early self-portrait in the Frans Hals Museum[v], showing the artist looking very different as a young man, is also inconclusive.  Nevertheless, on account of the emphatic gaze and nonchalant attitude of the man in our painting, the present author is inclined to think that it does represent a likeness of the artist. 

Anthony Deutz, who owned this painting in the eighteenth-century, belonged to a wealthy family of merchants and bankers, originally from Cologne, who settled in Amsterdam in the first half of the seventeenth century.  Several members of the family, in particular, the brothers Jean (1618-73), Joseph (1624-84) and Jeronimus Deutz (1622-70), became avid collectors and patrons of the arts.  All three made the Grand Tour and enjoyed sojourns in Rome, where they developed a taste for contemporary art, especially the works of Dutch and Flemish artists working in the Eternal City.  They forged an especially close relationship with the Flemish painter Michiel Sweerts, becoming his most important patrons.  It is likely that Anthony inherited some of his paintings from his parents: his father Daniël Deutz (1678-1730) was a cousin of the brothers Jean, Joseph and Jeronimus Deutz, and his mother Maria de Bordes (1655-1686) was the daughter of Anthonij de Bordes (1615-1678), a silk merchant, who like the Deutz brothers, had business interests in Rome and patronised Sweerts[vi]. 

BIOGRAPHY

The son of the Haarlem butcher Adriaen Joppen Berckheyde and his wife Cornelia Gerritsdr. Pancier, Job Adriaensz. Berckheyde was baptised in the Reformed Church in Haarlem on 27 January 1630. The family name is derived from the polder Berckheyden near Katwijk aan de Rijn from whence Adriaen Joppen originally came.  Job was the eldest son of seven children of whom five survived, including a brother, Gerrit (1638-1698), who was eight years his junior and also became a painter.  According to the artist’s biographer Arnold Houbraken, Job was first apprenticed to a bookbinder, but soon switched to painting, becoming a pupil of the landscape and history painter Jacob de Wet (c. 1610-1691) in 1644.  He subsequently spent some time in Amsterdam, before returning to Haarlem and establishing himself as an independent painter on the Grote Markt.  In March 1654, he paid his entry fee to the Haarlem guild.  Sometime in the second half of the 1650s (before 1660 when his brother Gerrit joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke), Job and Gerrit, who he probably taught to paint, made a trip along the Rhine to Germany, stopping off to visit Emmerich, Kleve and Cologne, where they stayed for an extended period.  From Cologne the brothers travelled further up the Rhine to Bonn, Mainz, Mannheim and finally to Heidelberg, where they found employment as court painters to Karl-Ludwig, Elector of the Palatinate, and were rewarded with a variety of honours, including gold medallions, such as that worn by Job in his self-portrait in the Frans Hals Museum (Fig. 3). 

After returning to Haarlem, the two brothers shared a house with one of their unmarried sisters, possibly Aegje, in the Sint-Jansstraat, close to the Grote Markt.  According to Houbraken, neither brother ever married.  In addition to his artistic activities, Job was a member of the Haarlem chamber of rhetoric De Wijngaardranken (The Vine Branch) from 1666-1682, for which he held a variety of administrative positions, including those of chairman, dean and councillor, and factor (chief poet).  However, no literary work by him is known today.  In May 1680, Job acted as an appraiser for the sale of the Van der Meulen collection in Amsterdam.  In January 1682, he was appointed as warden of the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem, but according to the minute books he seems to have rarely attended its meetings.  Job may have left for Amsterdam around this time.  He is recorded as being briefly a member of the Amsterdam Guild of St. Luke in November 1685, and his name appears again as a member there in 1688, but it is unclear how long he stayed in Amsterdam.  Job Berckheyde was buried in St. Janskerk in Haarlem on 27 November 1693 from a house in the St. Jansstraat near the Herenstraat[vii].