David Vinckboons

(Mechelen 1576 – circa 1632)
Saint George’s Kermesse,
oil on panel, 41.5 x 77 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Paris;
Private collection, Belgium;
with Galerie de Jonckheere, Paris;
Private collection (1997);
sale, Sotheby’s, London, 4 December 2014, lot 107;
Private collection, Belgium

Literature:
K. Goossens, David Vinckboons, Soest 1977, p. 140, cat. no. 34, illustrated p. 71;
K. Ertz, David Vinckboons, Lingen 2016, p. 365, cat. no. 101, illustrated p. 363

Kornel Goossens and Klaus Ertz date the present painting to the years around 1604.

Typical of Vinckboons’s early work is the construction of the scene in the present painting as a bird’s-eye panorama showing a lively village kermis, a popular fair celebrated every year in the Netherlands. The subject originated with Pieter Bruegel the Elder and constituted a major part of Vinckboons’s oeuvre (see K. Ertz, op. cit, pp. 361–367). The artist, who had great success with his kermis paintings, portrays here the wide variety of festivities taking place, with religious processions, stand-up performances, drinking, dancing and duelling. These highly animated scenes are entwined with more intimate passages, mostly numerous personal encounters like the one of a couple sitting in a shady corner. The artist describes the tiny figures, their colourful clothing, and expressive movements in great detail. All these attentively recorded details make this painting a particular delight to explore visually.

Technical analysis:
St. George’s kermesse is painted over a thin cradled panel, with quite a thin white ground, in fact the texture due to the horizontal wood fibres can be seen in some places. This ground is mainly painted with vertical or quite vertical strokes.

As typical of this artist, the painting is extremely detailed. The underdrawing that we can visualize by means of IR reflectography is extremely simple, no more than a free sketch that summarily describes the buildings, some other structure or large objects, made with a black chalk. About the multitude of figures, occasionally an oval shape suggests the idea of placing something or someone. But a second, more accurate underdrawing, was used for the figures or at least for some of them. It is scarcely opaque to IR radiation, so barely visible, probably made with a pen or small brush. And we cannot exclude that it was traced using an iron-gall ink (largely transparent to IR radiation) and a thin brush, as Vinckboons used in his drawings on paper. Some features of the first sketch are highly significant, as such as the zigzag lines on the ground, the spiral line defining the tree trunk, or the elongated oval shapes of the boats.

On pigments, used in various ways in many Netherlandish masters of the period, the artificial glass pigment smalt blue is not included in the palette, substituted by the most precious and expensive blue, natural ultramarine deriving from lapis lazuli stone. This pigment is used in the sky and in the water, together with some azurite. Azurite, a copper carbonate, less bright, is preferred for all the blue clothes and it also constitutes all the gamut of the green hues, varying from the bluish tops of the trees in the background to the deep and light green of the foliage and grass, varying the quantity of lead tin yellow in the mixture. This yellow increases in the pale green or yellowish leaves, and is used in some garments modulated with yellow ochre. Red lake and vermillion are used in pink and red colours, brown earths in brown shades. The afore mentioned pigments, together with black, are used in different combinations, mixed or juxtaposed in order to achieve the richness of tones of the figures.

We are grateful to Gianluca Poldi for the technical examination.