Tátrai Vilmos szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 90-91.(Budapest, 1999)

NÉMETH, ISTVÁN: Musical Company

82. Dirck Hals: Merry Company. Budapest. Museum of Fine Arts executed in the 1630s and 40s are quite close to each other with respect to motifs and stylistic characteristics. Of course this subject was by no means a novel one by the outset of the 17

th century, for already in late medieval depictions of the «garden of love» we see young couples abandoning themselves to pleasures and to music-making. However, according to some hypotheses these scenes of "merrymakers", called geselschapjes in contemporary Holland, had their immediate iconographie precedents not in the medieval compositions, but in 16

th-century Flemish engravings and panel paintings depicting sinful mankind greedily enjoying sensual pleasures before the Flood or the Last Judgement, or else showing the Prodigal Son carousing in the company of dubious friends and women of easy virtue in a brothel.*

1 Although it is by no means certain that the Dutch genre painters of the 17

th century always had such moralizing intentions behind their scenes of gallantry, we may at least suppose that in many instances there existed such a didactic thrust. The Budapest work painted in 1621 by the Haarlem genre painter Dirck Hals (15911656) is one of the characteristic early examples of this iconographie type.

6 We see the participants of the scene by the side of a richly laid table in an idyllic spot (fig. 82). All 5 In this connection see among others: Brown, Chr., Images of a Golden Past: Dutch Genre Painting of the 17th Century, New York 1984, 160; Haak, B., Hollands schilders in de Gouden Eeuw, Amsterdam 1984, 86-90; Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, op. cit. (Note 3) XXV1I1; according to Jan Bricls, Garden of Love depictions served as the formal models for 17th-century Meny Company scenes, while representations of The Revelries of the Prodigal Son provided the moral message: Briels, J.. Vlaamse schilders in de noordelijke Nederlanden in het begin van de Gouden Eeuw 1

585-1630, Antwerp 1987, 95. 6 Oil on panel, 34 x 61.3 cm: Museum of Fine Arts. Budapest Inv. no. 51.2878. For the earlier literature about this painting sec: Pigler, A., Katalog der Galerie Alter Meister. Budapest 1967, 299.