“La posada” Escuela holandesa; segunda mitad del siglo XVII

Dutch school; second half of the 17th century.
"The Inn".
Oil on canvas. Re-coloured.
It presents repainting.
Measurements: 32,5 x 38 cm; 51 x 27 cm (frame).
A rural and idealized landscape serves in this case as a scene of a social portrait of the 17th century Holland. Different characters are scattered around the scene, all of them seeming to enjoy a rest, a stop in the open air, before entering the house that shelters the travellers. The author not only tries to faithfully reflect different popular types, but also their actions, or the animals that accompany them. In fact, this verism is a resource that allows the artist to approach landscape, genre and even still life painting.
It was undoubtedly in the painting of the Dutch school that the consequences of the political emancipation of the region and the economic prosperity of the liberal bourgeoisie were most openly manifested. The combination of the discovery of nature, objective observation, the study of the concrete, the appreciation of the everyday, the taste for the real and the material, the sensitivity to the apparently insignificant, meant that the Dutch artist was at one with the reality of everyday life, without seeking any ideal that was alien to that same reality. The painter did not seek to transcend the present and the materiality of objective nature or to escape from tangible reality, but to envelop himself in it, to become intoxicated by it through the triumph of realism, a realism of pure illusory fiction, achieved thanks to a perfect, masterly technique and a conceptual subtlety in the lyrical treatment of light. As a result of the break with Rome and the iconoclastic tendency of the Reformed Church, paintings with religious themes were eventually eliminated as a decorative complement with a devotional purpose, and mythological stories lost their heroic and sensual tone in accordance with the new society. Thus portraiture, landscape and animal painting, still life and genre painting were the thematic formulas that became valuable in their own right and, as objects of domestic furniture - hence the small size of the paintings - were acquired by individuals of almost all classes and social strata.

Presenta repintes. Reentelado