Currently not on view
A Courting Couple and Woman with a Songbook,
ca. 1594
In this early genre painting, Cornelis presents three figures whose relationship to one another is unclear. The alert woman looking out at the viewer holds a songbook; her bodice is buttoned to the top. The woman in pink, whose décolletage is pronounced and whose expression is unfocused, holds a glass of red wine. With her gesture, is she rebuffing or encouraging the man who embraces her? The painting evokes the saying, “wine, women, and song.” It might also refer to the theme of the Prodigal Son who squanders his inheritance on fast living. Or it might more generally allude to the temptations of the senses. As a contrast to the drinker, does the woman in yellow represent more upright and morally acceptable behavior? Intentional ambiguity encouraged contemporaries to puzzle out the meanings of such images.
More Context
Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem portrays a simple yet delicate temptation scene. The gentleman is poised to embrace the drunken woman on the left. We, too, are offered the lure of wine, women, and song, as his companion’s glass tips precariously forward. The woman on the right turns to us, a songbook in her lap. Despite the moral dubiousness of the scene, Cornelisz. renders the balanced half-length figures in elegant curves silhouetted against a mysteriously dark interior. The painting bears witness to a change in the artist’s style following the return of his fellow Haarlem painter Hendrik Goltzius from Italy. Cornelisz. eschews the complexities of his earlier works in favor of a few large-scale figures set in a dark, shallow space reminiscent of Caravaggio’s innovations. This painting’s pastel tones and the figures’ egg-shaped heads, however, are far from the realism of the Dutch followers of Caravaggio. Cornelisz.’s simple, elegant composition dignifies and refines a moralizing subject based on the wasted youth of the Prodigal Son.
Information
ca. 1594
Aleksandr Ivanovich Nelidov [Russian, 1835–1910, served as an ambassador in Rome, Paris, Constantinople] (ca. 19th century; to private collection); private collection, Mexico (ca. 19th century–; sold to La Granja); La Granja, Calle Bolivar, Mexico City (–1967; sold to Rollings); Mr. and Mrs. H. Kelley Rollings (1967–1997; gift to Princeton University Art Museum).
- Jill Guthrie, ed., In celebration: works of art from the Collections of Princeton Alumni and Friends of The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 1997)., cat. no. 311 (illus.)
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1997," in "A Window into Collecting American Folk Art: The Edward Duff Balken Collection at Princeton," special issue, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 57, no. 1/2 (1998): p. 164-208., p. 205
- P.J.J. van Thiel, Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, 1562-1638: a monograph and catalogue raisonné, (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1999).
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 288 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 340
