Jan Anton Garemyn and Constantin van Eecke

Private collection, Sint-Pieters, Bruges, by 1955;

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 12 December 1990, lot 99, for £49,500;

Where acquired by the present owner.

A. Janssens de Bisthoven, 'Interieur: Achttiend'eeuwse salonkunst te Brugge', in West-Vlaanderen, vol. IV, Tielt 1955, pp. 72–73;

Drie Vlaamse meesters van de XVIII ^e eeuw; J. Garemijn, H. Pulinx, P. Pepers, exh. cat., Bruges 1955, p. 36, no. 1772–73 (1), reproduced p. 37, pl. VII.

This work is a collaboration between Jan Anton Garemyn and Constantin van Eecke, as demonstrated by both painters' signatures lower left. Once part of a series of six landscapes depicting merry festival scenes in Dudzele, near Bruges, this impressively large canvas is the only one to have been signed. Adults and children are depicted enjoying a feast; some wash the meal down with wine, while others dance and make music.

Van Eecke appears to be an unrecorded artist, whose degree of participation in the execution of the present picture is therefore difficult to determine, though it is safe to assume that he worked under the direction of Garemyn, who is much better known today. Garemyn, who was local to Bruges, studied under Hendrik Pulinx (1698–1781) and, later on, Lodewijk Roose. He painted several altarpieces for churches in Bruges and Courtrai and was also a skilled draughtsman, as attested to by the presence of his drawings in a number of museum collections, including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge;¹ the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa;² and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.³

Garemyn was likewise known as a fine décorateur, who painted salon wallpapers and wall coverings. The present painting, along with the five other canvases with which it was created, were executed for exactly this purpose. In 1955, they still hung together in a dining room in Sint-Pieters, Bruges, though we cannot know for certain if this was the home for which they were originally commissioned. When analysing such decorative works within Garemyn's œuvre, Dr. Aquilin Janssens de Bisthoven has compared him to François Boucher (1703–1770): while Boucher was designing chinoiseries and mythological scenes for the residences of Madame de Pompadour in Paris and beyond, Garemyn was producing decoration for patrician houses in Bruges.⁴

¹ Inv. no. 2592; red chalk on paper, 354 x 225 mm.; https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/4654.

² Acc. no. 36140; red chalk and stump on laid paper, 315 x 225 mm.; https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/the-hurdy-gurdy-player.

³ Object no. RP-T-1984-128; red and white chalk on paper, 297 x 198 mm.; https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-T-1984-128.

⁴ Janssens de Bisthoven 1955, p. 71.