Pieter Codde

With Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell, London.

E.J. Sluijter, De 'heydensche fabulen' in de schilderkunst van de Gouden Eeuw, Leiden 2000, p. 43, reproduced p. 405, fig. 118.

The actual painting is slightly softer in tone than the catalogue illustration suggests. The single panel has cracked through the centre in the lower half of the painting, because of which the panel has been cradled. Two smaller thin horizontal repaired and retouched splits are visible along the left edge. The paint surface is generally sound, if a little abraded in the some of the brown tones. Retouchings can be observed along the splits and tiny scattered ones in the sky. Inspection under UV light reveals additional tiny scattered retouchings in the figures, which has been well done. The paint surface is under a slightly dirty layer of varnish. Offered in a black ebonised wood frame in good condition. (MW)
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Codde was mainly known as a portrait painter, and his interior scenes with elegant companies, his brothel scenes and musical themes enjoyed enormous popularity. Nonetheless, his fewer historical and mythological works, such as this, are of equal quality.

The subject is taken from Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI: 146-193. The musical contest between Apollo and Pan was judged by the mountain god Tmolus, here seated in the centre. Tmolus declared Apollo the victor, but King Midas, who was also present, objected, proclaiming that Pan should have won. In this painting, Midas has already received his punishment for favouring the wrong contestant: the vengeful Apollo has given him the ears of an ass. Another representation of the subject by Codde is in the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig (inv. no. 999).

In the present work the date reads 1603, but as Sluijter points out, must have been mistakenly altered during a previous restoration, and should in fact read either 1633 or 1643.¹

1. See Sluijter under Literature, p. 224, nt. 58.