Youth Making a Face
Adriaen Brouwer·c. 1632/1635
Historical Context
Adriaen Brouwer was a Flemish-born painter who spent much of his career in the Dutch Republic, and his specialty was low-life genre — the taverns, smokers, and grimacing characters of the Flemish and Dutch peasant world. Youth Making a Face, painted around 1632 to 1635, exemplifies the extreme close-up grotesque that is Brouwer's most original contribution to European painting: a face distorted by laughter, pain, disgust, or in this case a deliberate comic contortion, magnified to fill the picture plane. Such images had a clear lineage in Flemish art going back to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's studies of peasant physiognomy, but Brouwer pushes them toward an almost visceral intensity. Rubens was among the most passionate collectors of Brouwer's work, owning seventeen paintings, which speaks to the respect Brouwer's radical vision commanded even among the most elevated patrons.
Technical Analysis
The face fills nearly the entire canvas in a dramatic close-up unprecedented in scale for genre painting. Brouwer paints with liquid, rapidly applied strokes, capturing the animation of a mobile expression rather than the fixed decorum of conventional portraiture. The palette is limited to warm flesh tones against a dark ground, concentrating all attention on the distorted features.
Provenance
Everhard Jabach [1610-1695], Paris.[1] Possibly Nicolaus Hudtwalcker [1791-1863], Hamburg, by 1863.[2] (Nathan Katz, The Hague and Dieren); (his sale, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 12 July 1950, no. 9). (Kunsthandel P. de Boer, Amsterdam). W. Reineke, Amersfoort, by 1962. Private collection, The Netherlands, by 1982; (Noortman Ltd., London and Maastricht); purchased 9 June 1994 by NGA. [1] Jabach died 9 March 1695, and an inventory of his collection was drawn up by his eldest son, also named Everhard, who had come to Paris from Cologne for that purpose. Dated 17 July 1696, the inventory was published by Vicomte de Grouchy ("Éverhard Jabach, collectionneur parisien [1695], _Mémoires de la Société de l'Histoire de Paris et de l'Ile-de-France_ XXI [1894]: 217-292); no. 661 is "Petit tableau, sur bois, d'un paisan qui s'ouvre la bouche avec les doigts, demie-figure, de Brauwer. 75 liv." [2] NGA 1994.46.1 is possibly the one mentioned in G. Parthey, _Deutscher Bildersaal_, 2 vols., Berlin, 1863: 1: 208, no. 88. However, according to Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, _A catalogue raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch painters of the seventeenth century based on the work of John Smith..._, 10 vols., London, 1907-1927: 3(1910): 657, no. 222j, it is not in the 1889 catalogue of the Hudtwalcker-Wesselhoeft Collection. .
