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
Shoulder Operation, in which, alongside the protagonist suffering the intervention, we likewise find the figure of the lamenting wife and child, as well as the motif of the little table laden with the implements of the provincial doctor. 49 Preserved for a long time in a Hungarian private collection, and reemerging a few years ago on the art market is the small-size panel painting which depicts a peasant figure carrying a broken broom under his arm (fig. 10). 50 The man wearing a ragged, red cap, and with missing teeth, is turned toward the right edge of the picture, so that we see him from the side, his clothing threadbare and stained, his footwear torn. He carries the long and slightly crooked broomstick on his shoulder and a besom under his arm, and looking heavenwards, he curses his misfortune. The depiction quotes an old Netherlandish proverb: "Die eerst een bezem was, wordt daarna een schrobber." ("That which was first a broom will later be a scrubbrush.") 51 In the background, the outlines of simple hovels are visible, and before the structures a few peasants. The palette of the painting that can be ranked within Quast's œuvre on the basis of the PQ monogram builds upon warm brown tones, enriched with bright, local colours on the protaganist. We encounter the characteristic physiognomy of the vulgar, large-nosed figure again in one of Quast's drawings, and similarly grotesque figures making comic gestures also appear in other of his drawings. >: The choice of subject matter in the Budapest work is by no means unique in seventeenthcentury Dutch genre painting. The figure of the peasant with broom also appears in the panel painting held in the gallery of the Pommersfelden Palace, formerly attributed likewise to Quast, but more recently to Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne (1589-1662) (fig. 11). S3 The grisaille painting that received the title Chimney-Sweeper cannot exactly be referred to as reassuring: the gangly male figure is advancing toward the left-hand side of the picture while he looks behind him with his head turned. As to its naming, it is presumedly based on a misunderstanding, as the desperate broom under the arm of our hero can scarcely be suited to any sort of chimney cleaning. This work can most certainly be correlated with an engraving attributed to Jan Matham in the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam, which portrays a very similar figure.4 As another compositional analogy to the Budapest picture, we might mention another painting attributed to Quast, which was put on auction in 1939 in Hamburg. ss The male figure in the work entitled Dutch Peasant in a Landscape appears with a long stick on his shoulder, in the background the same structures and figures visible as in the Hungarian picture. Likewise a close parallel that might be mentioned is an engraving of Quast's 'Tis al verwaert-gaeren, representing a beggar with a long stick and busket on his shoulder, in which the posture of the figure, its positioning and scale is very similar.6 Quast's method of representing an image that could be called typical
