Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne

Private collection, Germany, from at least 1970 until circa 2000, at which point transferred to a Spanish private collection.

The single oak panel is flat, bevelled along all four edges and uncradled. There are some small retouchings to the back of Cupid and some very minor retouchings to the armour. There is a very small surface split at the centre right margin (c. 3-4cm). Overall the painting is in very good condition and is covered by a layer of dirt and dirty varnish. Sold with a gilt frame, with some losses.
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This busy interior, in which a young woman, naked but for two necklaces, two armlets and a pair of earrings, crouches beside her dressing table and gazes into a mirror, is a newly discovered work by the Delft-born painter, draughtsman and poet Adriaen van de Venne. Although the date at the lower right has been partly abraded and is now difficult to read, the painting must surely date from the 1630s when Van de Venne produced a large number of small emblematic panels often, as here, commenting on worldly vanity. It may be closely compared with his Young woman at a mirror of 1631, in which a young lady is seated at her toilet, before a mirror, placing a small flower in her hair.¹  The same powder-brush rests at the foot of a very similar mirror which leans against a suspended, broadly painted drape; on the back wall of each work, Van de Venne has hung similar damask which is littered with multiple short flicks of the brush to convey the shimmering light. Trinkets and jewels cover the floor and each panel bears the artist's idiosyncratic interlinked signature.  

Van de Venne's early development as a painter and illustrator in Middelburg, where he had moved by 1614, was strongly affected by his collaboration with J. de Brune, author of Sinne-werck, and Jacob Cats. Van de Venne himself wrote Tafereel van Sinne-mal around this time, probably inspired by Roemer Visscher's Sinnepoppen (1614) in which an engraving of a young woman gazing at herself in a mirror acts as a symbol of vanity, transitoriness and of the brevity of life on earth. But Van de Venne's allegories on this theme transcend pessimistic doctrine. His depictions of Vanity are visually appealing to the point of enchantment.²  In the present work the theme runs deep and, in hanging one of his own grisailles prominently in the centre of the back wall, Van de Venne even plays on his own vanity.

Not the least accomplished part of the present work is the execution of the plethora of still life elements. These may quite possibly be the work of Adriaen's son, Pieter (1615/24-1657) who, in his short life, painted intricate flower and shell still lifes; see, for example, the small flower still life sold London, Christie's, 6 July 1984, lot 78, or another sold Amsterdam, Christie's, 11 May 1994, lot 161.

1.  L.J. Bol, Adriaen Pietersz. Van de Venne, Doornspijk 1989, reproduced p. 74, fig. 64.
2.  Bol, op. cit., p. 73.