Anthonie Palamedesz

ANTHONIE PALAMEDESZ (Delft, 1601 - Amsterdam, 1673).
"Interior."
Oil on panel.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 33 x 42 cm; 45 x 53 cm (frame).

The work shows a very humble and dark interior, barely determined, which makes us focus the viewer's attention on the figures and how the composition is resolved based on characters. The figures are grouped in various registers, which create different atmospheres within the same interior, composing the scene in three planes. It is also reminiscent of the tradition of tavern painting, a genre created in early Baroque Flanders by the masters Adriaen Brouwer (1605 - 1638) and David Teniers (1610 - 1690). Especially demanded by the bourgeois class, the scenes set in taverns reflected joy and bustle, always under a point of view focused on the anecdote, narrative and characterization of the characters.Antonie Palamedes or Palamedesz was a painter of the Dutch Golden Age known and appreciated, above all, for his portraits, although he also made genre scenes and other works of interiors, etc.. He would train in the workshops of other important figures such as Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt and Hans Jordaens, and would have joined the "Guild of St. Luke" in Delft, which he entered in 1621 or 1636. His younger brother Palamedes Palamedesz I was a painter specializing in battle scenes, and he himself served as his teacher, as well as his son Palamedes II, Ludolf de Jongh, etc.His work is preserved in important private collections and institutions such as the Stockholms Universitet Konstsamling in Stockholm, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Wallraf-Richarts Museum in Cologne, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (USA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA), etc.Dutch Baroque painting from around the time of the Eighty Years' War (1568 - 1648) is known as Dutch Golden Age painting. It shows many characteristics of European Baroque, except, usually, the love of Roman Christian splendor and themes. The large production of the time is striking, whose recipients were the increasingly wealthy urban bourgeoisie, something that goes hand in hand with the proliferation of pictorial genres.