I. ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE (1610-1685), the eldest of Jan Hen dricx's sons, was born and died at Haarlem. According to Hou braken he was taught by Frans Hals, at that time master of Adrian Brouwer. He was president of the painters' gild at Haar lem, in 1662. A striking picture in the Louvre represents the father of a large family sitting in state with his wife at his side in a handsomely furnished room, surrounded by his son and five daughters, and a young married couple. The number of Ostade's pictures is given by Smith at three hundred and eighty-five, but by Hofstede de Groot (I 910) at over goo. At his death the stock of his unsold pieces was over two hundred. His engraved plates were put up to auction, with the pictures, and fifty etched plates—most of them dated 1647-1648—were disposed of in 1686. Two hundred and twenty of his pictures are in public and private collections, of which one hundred and four are signed and dated, while seventeen, though signed, are undated.
Adrian Ostade was the contemporary of David Teniers and Adrian Brouwer. Like them he spent his life in the delineation of the homeliest subjects—tavern scenes, village fairs and country quarters. Between Teniers and Ostade the contrast lies in the different condition of the agricultural classes of Brabant and Hol land, and the atmosphere and dwellings that were peculiar to each region. Brabant has more sun, more comfort and a higher type of humanity; Teniers, in consequence, is silvery and sparkling; the people he paints are fair specimens of a well-built race. Holland seems to have suffered much from war ; the air is moist and hazy, and the people, as depicted by Ostade, are short, ill-favoured and marked with the stamp of adversity on their features and dress. The key of his harmonies remains for a time in the scale of greys. But his treatment is dry and careful, and he shuns no difficulties of detail, representing cottages inside and out, with the vine leaves covering the poorness of the outer walls, and noth ing inside to deck the patchwork of rafters and thatch, or tumble down chimneys and ladder staircases, that made up the sordid interior of the Dutch rustic of those days.
Before the dispersion of the Gsell collection at Vienna in 1872, it was easy to study the steel-grey harmonies and exaggerated caricature of his early works in the period intervening between 1632 and 1638. There is a picture of a "Countryman having his
Tooth Drawn," in the Vienna Gallery, unsigned, and painted about 1632; a "Bagpiper" of 1635 in the Liechtenstein Gallery at Vienna; cottage scenes of 1635 and 1636, in the museums of Karls ruhe, Darmstadt and Dresden; and "Card Players" of 1637 in the Liechtenstein palace at Vienna, which make up for the loss of the Gsell collection. The same style marks most of those pieces. About 1638 or 164o the influence of Rembrandt changed his style. "The Angels appearing to the Shepherds" in the Brunswick gal lery is very much in the style of Rembrandt. In 1642, he painted the beautiful interior at the Louvre, in which a mother tends her child in a cradle at the side of an immense chimney. In 1667, he produced an admirable "Nativity" (collection of Otto Beit, London) which is only surpassed as regards arrangement and colour by Rembrandt's "Carpenter's Family" at the Louvre. He devoted himself to familiar themes, from small single figures, representing smokers or drinkers, to vulgarized allegories of the five senses (Hermitage and Brunswick galleries), half-lengths of fishmongers and bakers and cottage brawls, or scenes of gambling, or itinerant players and quacks, and nine-pin players in the open air. His art is seen in the large series of dated pieces which adorn every European capital, from St. Petersburg to London. Buck ingham Palace has a large number. At Amsterdam we have the likeness of a painter, sitting with his back to the spectator, at his easel. The colour-grinder is at work in a corner, a pupil pre pares a palette and a black dog sleeps on the ground. A replica of this picture, with the date of 1663, is in the Dresden gallery. The same subject is represented on a picture in the Johnson collection at Philadelphia. In his etching (Bartsch, 32) the painter shows himself in profile, at work on a canvas. In the signatures of Ostade, the first two letters are generally interlaced. Up to 1635 Ostade writes himself Ostaden, e.g., in the "Bagpiper" of 1635 in the Liechtenstein collection at Vienna. Later on he uses the long s (f), and occasionally he signs in capital letters. His pupils are his own brother Isaac, Cornelis Bega and Cornelis Dusart.