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

Cavalry Skirmish display entirely outstanding artistic quality. In his genre scenes exhibiting aristocratic companies, the motifs borrowed from his contemporary genre painters function as visual quotations, and simply provide a framework for Quast here, too, to allow his characteristic humour to shine. His unmistakable personal style, that forgoes presenting the descriptive details, concentrates first and foremost on the physiognomy of the figures. His figures

— similarly to Brouwer

—manifest mainly caricatural features; however, he doesn't exhibit even a trace of the aloofness that is always perceptible with Brouwer.

6- The highly characterised heads, facial expression and exaggerated gestures, as well as the often unnatural posture of the figures lends the depiction a somewhat unreal nature. It is as if the figures were presented to the viewer as clowns. All these traits are especially palpable in his peasant genre paintings and portrayals of beggars. Quast was obviously very familiar with the visual tradition that distinguished peasant depictions in the Netherlands. His works, with their raw, vulgar, mocking means of depiction, lacking any sort of restraint and discretion, enrich the century-old negative and in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bipolar image of people living on the periphery of society with the means of humor.

66 It is precisely this raw immediacy and mocking humour that is the feature that provided Quast's art with its original flavour, within the colourful palette of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. Zoltán Kovács is Deputy-Head of Research and Documentation Department of Cultural Heritage, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.