Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 104. (Budapest, 2006)
ZOLTÁN KOVÁCS: "The Witty Pieter Quast": The Works of an Amsterdam Master in Hungary Then and Now
Traces of satirical humour characteristic of Quast's depictions of peasants can also be found in his genre paintings representing illustrious companies. He attains this effect with the exaggeration of the features of the figures, and sometimes caricature-like portrayals. One of his popular figures is the military officer standing on the right of the Budapest picture, with a slight paunch and a blotchy nose. 2s The erotic symbol of the figure of a satyr holding the ledge of a fireplace as an atlas could refer to that actually, it is a bordello scene that we see. Supporting this is the fact that seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings often depicted the courtesans of brothels —also called "musical houses" —with a lute in their hands. 29 Compositionally related to the Budapest Musk-Making Company is a Quast painting at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. 30 In the Card-Players with a Pipe-Smoking Woman, the foursome appears around a precarious table in a similar arrangement. Here, too, a male figure stands facing the woman smoking a pipe on the right-hand side, and we even find the figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat sitting behind the table. While we see a more distinguished, and better-dressed company in the Budapest painting, on the other hand, the Amsterdam painting is a composition depicting more simply dressed peasants. The woman smoking a pipe is the mirror-image of the woman singing from the score in Music-Making Company. The woman playing the lute, appearing behind the table in the Budapest painting, is a type that recurs in other works of Quast, as well. The painting entitled Musical Couple, likewise formerly in the Budapest collection of Hugó Kilényi, employs exactly the same female figure (fig. 6). 31 This painting made in 1636 portrays a young woman in a yellow silk dress, as she strums a lute and sings. A refined cavalier sits to the right of the woman, turned toward the right, a feathered hat on his head. His face is flushed from the wine he has consumed, and his eyelids have growm heavy. A piece in the collection of the National Museum in Wroclaw presents a close analogy to this duet, in which we see practically the same female figure playing the lute, only with the difference that there, the cavalier stands to the left of the woman, singing. 32 The couple visible in the Budapest painting appear, with the addition of a third figure —a woman smoking a pipe, in a work Quast produced in 1635, which has appeared on several occasions over the last decades on European auctions. 33 Music-Making Company at the Museum of Fine Arts, and the former Kilényi's Musical Couple are superb examples of Quast's satirical humour, which he sometimes smuggled into these scenes displaying elegant groups merely as an allusion. Doubtlessly, in this subject, Anthonie Palamedesz was his role model, but Quast associated his mocking wittiness to his meticulous, detailed method of painting, imitating the style of Palamedesz to perfection, which stood contrary to the raw, and occasionally pronouncedly crude humour characteristic of his peasant genre paintings.
