Vienna, Österreichisches Museum fur Kunst und Industrie, Gemälde alter Meister aus dem Wiener Privatbesitze, August - September 1873, no. 17 (as Pieter de Grebber).

The Amsterdam painter Pieter Codde specialised in guardroom and merry company scenes, the latter featuring modishly attired young men and women, enjoying music-making, drinking, gaming and sometimes even dancing.  As well as scenes of contemporary life, he painted portraits and a small number of history paintings.  With the exception of his contributions to Frans Hals’s large unfinished, life-size group portrait of one of Amsterdam’s civic guard companies, known as The Meagre Company, Codde produced cabinet-sized paintings with small-scale figures. 

Merry company scenes (geselschapjes), as they were known, emerged as a new subject in painting in the early seventeenth century.  The genre had its origins in the outdoor scenes of young people enjoying themselves in gardens and on terraces (buitenpartijs) painted by Esaias van de Velde (c. 1590-1630) and David Vinckboons (1576-c. 1632) in the second decade of the century.  Around 1620, the Rotterdam artist Willem Buytewech (1591/2-1624), who also worked in Haarlem for a while, broke new ground when he started painting  intimate parties making merry indoors.  Although he only painted a handful of pictures of this type, he set a trend that became enormously popular with genre painters throughout the 1620s and 1630s.  Among the most accomplished exponents of this new genre were Dirck Hals (1591-1656) in Haarlem, Anthonie Palamedesz. (1601-1673) in Delft, and Pieter Codde and Willem Duyster (1598/99-1635) in Amsterdam. 

Owing to the loss of Amsterdam guild records, we know nothing about Codde’s training, but he must have launched his career in the early 1620s, around the time that scenes of the jeunesse dorée entertaining themselves were becoming fashionable.  Codde was evidently quick to appreciate the potential of the new subject-matter and went on to paint countless variations on the merry company theme.  This well-preserved panel, painted when the artist was at the height of his powers, is a typical work from the first half of the 1630s.  In an unadorned interior, six expensively dressed young people are depicted socialising and making music. The focal point of the picture is the couple seated in the foreground, fondly holding hands: the young woman sings from an open songbook, while her beloved gazes dreamily into space.  Behind them, two more couples are gathered round the table: one of the young women is singing along too, while a young man accompanies the women on the lute.  A third woman, standing with her back to us, inclines towards the lutenist.  Several songbooks are heaped on chairs, and a viola da gamba leans against the table.

In the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, making music was a popular pastime among the well-to-do and had strong associations with love and courtship.  The representation of people singing or playing stringed instruments was an established metaphor for harmony between men and women both in genre scenes and in portraits of families and married couples.  The Haarlem painter Jan Miense Moelenaer (1610-1668), for example, portrayed his own family as an ensemble of musicians gathered before a gallery of family portraits.  This image clearly serves as an allusion to the harmonious bond that united several generations of the family[i].  Similarly, the use of musical imagery to suggest harmony between lovers is expressed in a popular emblem from Jacob Cats’s Sinne- en Minnebeelden (Images of Allegory and Love, 1618), entitled “Quid non sentit amor?” (Who does not feel love?), which shows a man with two lutes: as he tunes one, the strings of the other begin spontaneously to vibrate in unison, suggesting the heartbeats of lovers beating in tandem.  Here, the prominence of the hand-holding couple leaves no doubt as to the intended symbolism of Codde’s painting.

According to the inventory of Codde’s possessions drawn up in 1636, he kept an “old lute” and a violin in his studio[ii].  We do not know whether he played these instruments himself, or whether he simply kept them as studio props for inclusion in his paintings.  Whatever the case, his genre scenes frequently feature musical instruments of various kinds and young people making music. 

Although Codde did not date the present work, the style of the costumes provides a good guide to dating.  Codde has lavished a great deal of attention on the meticulous details of the young people’s apparel, and on the description of the various fabrics and trimmings. Clearly a significant part of the appeal of paintings of this type was the contemporary nature of the subject-matter.  The young people depicted here are all dressed in the height of fashion for the early to mid-1630s.  The young women wear voluminous, high-waisted dresses with exaggerately wide sleeves and broad lace-collars.  The foreground gentleman is clad in  black satin breeches and doublet, with ribbons and gold points at the waist, and a flat white collar trimmed with bobbin lace.  He sports a broad-brimmed hat and gold rosettes on his shoes: his garters are tied at the knee with an extravagant bow.  His partner wears a long black overgown (known as a vlieger) – a garment worn only by married women – over a shimmering green dress embellished with silver thread. 

It was Codde’s practice often to recycle compositions and motifs in more than one painting.  He must have considered this composition particularly satisfying and successful, since he painted a number of closely related versions, including a version in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich[iii] and another in the National Museum, Warsaw[iv]. 

BIOGRAPHY

Pieter Jacobsz. Codde was baptised in Amsterdam on 11 December 1599.  He was the fourth of nine children born to Maria Jansdr. and Jacob Pietersz. Codde, a minor government official.  Nothing is known of Codde’s early life or training, but he is first described as a painter, aged twenty-three, in a deed of 27 October 1623 announcing his intended marriage to the eighteen-year-old Marritge Aerents.  The couple were married on 24 April 1624 : a daughter, Clara, was baptised in the Oude Kerk six months later, but she died in August 1635.  Codde lived in the Anthoniebreestraat (now the Jodenbreestraat) from around 1628 until at least 1650-53.  During the late 1620s and early 1630s, the artist also moved in literary circles in Amsterdam: in 1627, the playwright Elias Herckmans dedicated his tragedy Tyrus to “Pieter Codde, artist-painter in Amsterdam”, and, in 1633, the artist’s own pastoral love poem was published in the Hollands Nachtegaelken.

The artist got himself into trouble on more than one occasion.  In 1625 he attacked the genre painter Willem Cornelisz. Duyster (1598/99-1635) during a quarrel, and, in 1636, he was accused of raping his 22-year-old maidservant, for which he and the maid were locked up in Amsterdam Town Hall.  In the same year, he separated from his wife, who had had an affair with the painter Pieter Potter (1597/1600-1652) that led to the drawing up of an inventory of their possessions on 5 February 1636, which included paintings by Frans Hals, Jan van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael, Jan de Heem and Adriaen Brouwer. 

Codde had apparently gained a reputation as a portraitist by 1637 when he was commissioned to complete the large civic guard painting, commonly known as the Meagre Company[v], begun four years earlier by Frans Hals but left unfinished.  Although Codde rarely dated his works after 1645, he continued to paint and remained active in artistic circles in Amsterdam throughout the 1650s. He apparently prospered, for on 7 January 1657 he was able to buy a house at 385 Keizersgracht together with the two buildings behind it for a total of 5000 guilders, where he lived until his death.  In 1672, he was one of the artists consulted by the art dealer Gerrit Uylenburgh to value a group of Italian paintings.  Codde made his Will on 12 October 1669, and died nine years later, aged around seventy-eight.  He was buried beside his sister Elizabeth in the Oude Kerk on 12 October 1678.