The stable.

The city of Haarlem prospered in the 1600s and fostered an important and diverse artistic community. Cornelis Visscher was one of the city's most celebrated and prolific portrait draftsmen and printmakers. His portraits were ambitious: Visscher frequently worked on a large scale and created highly finished likenesses in black chalk on luxurious vellum. This distinctive, polished approach to portraiture influenced many of Visscher's Haarlem colleagues including Dirk Helmbreker and Cornelis Bega, the latter also represented in Te Papa's collection.

Visscher was only active as an artist for about a decade. He probably studied with Pieter Soutman, a pupil of Rubens, and in 1649 he made numerous portrait engravings, which Soutman supervised. A year later, Visscher is believed to have set up on his own and several years later, he joined Haarlem's Guild of St. Luke. Although he died in his early thirties, Visscher created nearly two hundred prints and a large number of drawings. Many of these works are portraits, but Visscher did not limit himself to a single genre and produced accomplished animal studies - as here - landscapes, and allegorical scenes based on his own designs or inspired by the work of other artists.

The stable is a high quality reproductive engraving - with added etching - by Visscher after a now lost painting by Pieter de Laer (1592-1642), a Dutch Golden Age artist of genre scenes, active for over a decade in Rome. It was almost certainly made a few years after De Laer's death. De Laer travelled to Rome in 1625 where he became a member of the Bentvueghels, a society of mostly Dutch-speaking artists in Rome known for their anti-academic stance and initiation rituals), where his nickname was Il Bamboccio. Artists working in his style became known as the Bamboccianti. Robust realism and anti-academicism certainly characterise this print. The three horses in the stable enact episodes in their daily lifestyle - eating hay from a feeder attached to the wall, vigorously peeing and being saddled for the ride ahead. This is not the only De Laer to depict a urinating horse, a fascinating art historical sub-genre that will repay further exploration!

This print was part of a much larger collection, mostly of Old Masters, presented to the Colonial Museum in 1869 by Bishop Ditlev Monrad. It forms the nucleus of Te Papa's art collection. Although he was a 'man of the cloth', cleaerly Monrad was robust enough to enjoy a print such as this, no doubt partly because of its high quality execution.

Sources:

Getty Museum, 'Cornelis Visscher', http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/19002/cornelis-visscher-dutch-about-1629-1658/

Wikipedia, 'Pieter de Laer', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_van_Laer

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   March 2019