Attrib­uted to Pieter van Laer, Dutch, 1599-c. 1642

: Figures Dancing Around a Fire, c. 1635 

He was famous not for a grandiose man­ner, but rather for the oppo­site: humor­ous, small-scale genre paint­ings of con­tem­po­rary street life that quick­ly became pop­u­lar with col­lec­tors in Rome and abroad. They also proved influ­en­tial on a num­ber of artists in his cir­cle, the so-called Bam­boc­cianti, after his nick­name, Bam­boc­cio, or ​“clum­sy pup­pet” due to his sup­pos­ed­ly awk­ward phys­i­cal appear­ance.2

Many of these artists, includ­ing Van Laer, were among the first gen­er­a­tion of mem­bers of the famous asso­ci­a­tion of transalpine painters in Rome, the Bentvueghels (“Birds of a Feath­er”), whose works are notable for their orig­i­nal­i­ty.3

We can doc­u­ment Van Laer in Rome between 1625 and 1637, the greater part of his short work­ing career, and back in the Nether­lands in 1639, where he set­tled in Haar­lem. Accord­ing to his sister’s last will drawn up in 1654, Van Laer had left the coun­try again twelve years ear­li­er (1642), and had not been heard from since.4

All trace of him after that point remains lost.

Van Laer’s small drawn oeu­vre is not well defined.5

His fol­low­ers often copied his draw­ings, and a num­ber of them bear early inscrip­tions by deal­ers or col­lec­tors attribut­ing the sheet to him (often writ­ten as Bam­boots) whether or not there is a firm basis for his author­ship. This accounts to some degree for the great dis­par­i­ty of styles of draw­ings cur­rent­ly under his name. Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters fur­ther is the story by Arnold Houbrak­en (1660 – 1719), although its verac­i­ty might be ques­tion­able, that Philips Wouw­er­man (1619– 1668) on his deathbed destroyed a large num­ber of Van Laer’s draw­ings in order to hide the fact that he had been mak­ing use of them as prepara­to­ry stud­ies for his paint­ings.6

Intrigu­ing­ly, one sur­viv­ing study of a fig­ure on blue paper with an old attri­bu­tion to Van Laer indeed recurs in a paint­ing by Wouw­er­man Fig. 13.1.7

As a black and white chalk fig­ure study, its style is obvi­ous­ly quite dif­fer­ent from the present work. Some­what more com­pa­ra­ble, given its focus on care­ful­ly back­lit fi gures around a fi re at night, is the large blue paper draw­ing in the Teylers Muse­um Fig. 13.2.8

The artis­tic chal­lenge of depict­ing fig­ures around a fi re at night was no doubt appeal­ing, and the use of blue paper for such night­time fi relit scenes seems to have also occu­pied Van Laer’s slight­ly younger Dutch col­league, Jan Asseli­jn (1610 – 1652), who would have over­lapped with him in Rome in the 1630s.9

Despite the obvi­ous­ly loos­er style and small­er scale of the the present work, the brush­work is remark­ably sub­tle in express­ing the effects of the intense, flick­er­ing illu­mi­na­tion from the bon­fire and its reflec­tions on the fi gures. Van Laer clev­er­ly indi­cat­ed one fig­ure placed on the other side of the fi re with just a few touch­es of wash and dash­es of the pen. 

The exu­ber­ant exe­cu­tion of the Peck draw­ing sug­gests the work of a mas­ter rather than a fol­low­er or copy­ist. In sup­port of the attri­bu­tion to Van Laer are some small, humor­ous water­col­or draw­ings he made in a per­son­al­ized Dutch song­book (like­ly for a woman, who has yet to be iden­ti­fied) from circa 1624 that he must have made just before he left for Italy Fig. 13.3.10

Their fluid out­lines in pen, com­bined with short, dense strokes for mod­el­ing the fig­ures, and the skill­ful lay­ered brush­work can be found in the Peck draw­ing as well. The song­book illus­tra­tions remain among the very few secure­ly attrib­uted draw­ings by Van Laer since his mono­gram or sig­na­ture appears on a num­ber of them.10

Only two other draw­ings are known that bear his sig­na­ture, both show­ing a rider dis­mount­ed from his horse, one in the col­lec­tion of Uni­ver­siteit Lei­den dated 1625, and anoth­er in Ham­burg­er Kun­sthalle dated 1628, stat­ing its loca­tion as Rome Fig. 13.4.12

All of these early draw­ings are more lin­ear in char­ac­ter, with strong out­lines in pen as opposed to the more tonal draw­ings thought to come later. The more refined char­ac­ter of the Ham­burg draw­ing sug­gests that it was pro­duced from life, while the ani­mat­ed style of the song­book draw­ings and the present sheet must cer­tain­ly reflect pure inven­tion. Pro­posed here is a date in the late 1620s, in the first years after Van Laer’s arrival in Rome when his style seems to have retained some of the same graph­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty of the song­book drawings. 

These masked and cos­tumed dancers hold­ing torch­es around a wick­er bas­ket fi re are clear­ly rev­el­ers dur­ing car­ni­val. As Katha­ri­na Weick-Joch point­ed out, the Bam­boc­cianti would have been famil­iar with the visu­al tra­di­tion of car­ni­val scenes from ear­li­er Nether­lan­dish art by Pieter Bruegel and his fol­low­ers made in the mid- to late six­teenth cen­tu­ry.13

Dutch artists could take advan­tage of breath­ing new life into that tra­di­tion once they had left their Protes­tant-dom­i­nat­ed home­land and arrived in Italy. Van Laer’s con­tem­po­rary Ital­ian biog­ra­ph­er, Gio­van­ni Bat­tista Passeri (1609/10 – 1679), noted his predilec­tion for such themes as ​“ridicu­lous pranks of the maskers in car­ni­val time,” lead­ing the art his­to­ri­an Ludovi­ca Trez­zani to won­der where they had all gone.14

Indeed, if the attri­bu­tion of this newly dis­cov­ered draw­ing to Van Laer is cor­rect, it might be the only sur­viv­ing work by him that clear­ly depicts car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions.15

Such scenes remained pop­u­lar with Van Laer’s Bam­boc­cianti fol­low­ers such as Jan Miel (c. 1599 – 1664) and Johannes Lin­gel­bach (1622 – 1674).16