Anthonie Palamedesz (Delft 1601 – 1673 Amsterdam)

‘Poor Parents, Rich Children’

Oil on panel, panel maker’s mark ‘FH’,¹ 45.8 x 74.3 cm (18 x 29.3 inch); contained in an ebonised frame of 17th-century model

Signed lower centre ‘Palamedesz’

Provenance
~ Ingo Boehringer collection, Germany
~ Private collection, Germany

***

Anthonie Palamedesz primarily painted portraits and genre works, while his brother Palamedes Palamedesz was a battle scene painter.² Anthonie was taught the art of painting in the studio of Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt, the leading portrait period of the time. He joined the Delft Guild of Saint Luke already in 1621, where one of his fellow painting colleagues was the celebrated Johannes Vermeer, who he would have known intimately. Anthonie married twice and had four children. His pupils were his younger brother Palamedes, his own son Palamedes II and Ludolf de Jongh. Anthonie died in Amsterdam in 1673.

Anthonie Palamedesz is best known for his charming genre paintings, often depicting well-dressed figures amusing themselves with song, games and drink. Such pictures were highly sought after during the Golden Age. Paintings by Anthonie Palamedesz are included in the collections of many renowned museums, including the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Boijmans-Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Our painting can for instance be compared to Palamedesz’s Guardroom Interior of 1647 in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig.).³

The present recently discovered painting is a highlight in the oeuvre of Palamedesz, and is furthermore painted on a panel with a rare maker’s mark, the as yet unidentified panelmaker ‘FH’. The chosen iconography, ‘Poor Parents, Rich Children’, is exceptionally rare. The theme was extensively discussed in an article by Pieter van Thiel of 1987,⁴ which was prompted by the Rijksmuseum’s acquisition of a painting with this subject by Pieter Pietersz (c.1540–1603).⁵ As Van Thiel outlined, only seven prints and six paintings of the theme of ‘Poor Parents, Rich Children’ are known,⁶ to which the present painting is a valuable addition. Of these paintings, the work by Pietersz in the Rijksmuseum is the best known, the others are works attributed to Dirck Hals, a work in the manner of Pieter de Hooch, by anonymous hands and, indeed, one other painting attributed to Anthonie Palamedesz.⁷

The rare subject expresses the thought that children are never released from their obligation to honour their parents, though they may long since have grown up and have achieved much more in the world than their parents ever did – in a slightly varied meaning, it encourages parents not to spoil their children too much. In the present work by Palamedesz, the contrast between the poor parents at the left, just having entered through a door and the family of the wealthy children at the right, is particularly striking. Palamedesz excelled in depicting such elegant ‘merry companies’ of Delft burghers, exuberantly dressed, and feasting from a buffet filled with silver and gilded vessels , enjoying themselves with laughter and music. That such scenes could also have a moralistic hidden meaning has long been supposed, but has only been confirmed by the emergence of this exceptional work, which casts new light on divisions of class, wealth and social status during the Golden Age – not so golden for everybody, as becomes painfully apparent by this painting…

1. We are grateful to Jørgen Wadum and Angela Jager of the RKD in The Hague for investigating this maker’s mark: to date, only six panels by the as yet unidentified maker ‘FH’ are known, dated between 1618 and 1652; email correspondence, 13 August 2024.
2. For the artist, see R.E.O. Ekkart and G. Wuestman, 'Anthonie Palamedesz' zogenaamde portretten van het echtpaar De Witte opnieuw geïdentificeerd', Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 54 (2006), p. 351-357 and Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, Munich 1992- , vol. 94 (2017), p. 165.
3. Oil on panel, 38 x 51.7 cm, signed and dated 1647, inv. no. SK-A-3024.
4. P.J.J. van Thiel, ‘“Poor Parents, Rich Children” and “Family Saying Grace”: two related aspects of the iconography of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Dutch domestic morality’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 17 (1987), no. 2, pp. 90-149.
5. Oil on panel, 61 x 163 cm, dated 1599, inv. no. SK-A-4822; W. Kloek, Pieter Aertsen en de wereld op zijn kop, Amsterdam 2010, p. 58, fig. 55.
6. Van Thiel, op. cit., p. 99.
7. Dimensions and present location unknown, formerly in the collection of Garfield A. Berlinsky in Baltimore, Van Thiel, op. cit., p. 126, fig. 21.