Egbert van Heemskerck the Elder

Egbert van Heemskerck, a pupil of Pieter de Grebber in Haarlem, lived and worked in England for much of his later career, painting genre scenes and also making something of a speciality of depictions of Quaker meetings. 

This oil on paper, painted en grisaille, depicts, however, a rather rowdier scene, though still with some religious connotations. The subject is a traditional Twelfth Night or Epiphany celebration, when according to Dutch and Flemish custom, someone would be chosen as king for the night, in honour of the visit of the Three Kings to Bethlehem. These festivities generally involved much drinking, and so the subject is also frequently known as ‘The King Drinks.’ Jacob Jordaens made a number of paintings and drawings with this theme, which also became popular in the Northern Netherlands.

Though the technique of making monochrome oil sketches on paper was perhaps more prevalent in Heemskerck’s time in Flanders than in the Northern Netherlands, it had always enjoyed a certain local popularity in his native Haarlem, in the hands of earlier artists like Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem and also his own contemporaries such as Cornelis Bega. Robust and somewhat bawdy, yet also technically refined, this accomplished and appealing work fits very well into Haarlem’s distinguished artistic tradition.