Isack van Ostade

Dutch, 1621 - 1649

Isack van Ostade, the youngest of the eight children of Jan Hendricx van Eyndhoven and Janneke Hendriksdr, was born in Haarlem and baptized there on June 2, 1621. He became a member of the Haarlem painters’ guild in 1643 and died in 1649, at the age of twenty-eight.

Van Ostade’s first surviving dated painting is from 1639, a mere ten years before his early death. Despite a very short career, his output was prodigious, and his creativity and originality striking. According to Houbraken, Isack was a pupil of his more famous brother Ostade, Adriaen van, and his early paintings of low-life interiors and peasant scenes are indeed extremely close in style to the work of his brother.

It was not long, however, before Isack began to develop his own distinctive artistic personality. His paintings of outdoor peasant and village settings combine elements of genre scenes with an evocative treatment of the landscape. These compositions, which typically show travelers or peasants resting in front of inns or houses, are executed with subtle atmospheric and seasonal effects. Isack van Ostade also excelled at depicting winter scenes.

Explore Selected Works

From our place on a dirt road, a row of buildings and houses extends from the right edge of this painting, into the distance and to our left in this vertical composition. People, all with light skin, come and go through doorways and hatches, work unloading goods next to a horse, and gather under a tattered awning down the road. Most of the people wear hats and dark clothing in tones of brown, black, and golden yellow, with a few touches of brick red. A jumble of objects, including a barrel, a wooden trap, and a ceramic vessel, and some chickens are gathered in the lower right corner of the panel, closest to us. A boy holding a long-necked vessel stands at an open hatch leading to an underground level of the structure nearby. That building has a large, steeply pitched, thatched dormer on a red tile roof. Green vines grow over parts of the peanut-brown stone and brick façade. A white stork with long legs and a long beak stands at a nest built on top of the chimney. A sign hangs above an open door, through which a person leans, and a birdcage hangs below the sign. In front of the open door, two men, one wearing a golden yellow vest and one wearing teal blue, unload large wooden barrels from a horse-drawn sled. The brown horse lifts one back foot off the ground, and the side of his hide is marked, perhaps with a sore. A tall tree with dark green leaves separates the building closest to us from its neighbor. A group of people and children are gathered under an awning there. One boy in the group pets a white, long-haired dog. Nearby, a man using crutches makes his way down the road toward us. A pair of dogs, one black and one brown and white, tussle over something in the lower left corner. The row of buildings extends in a line into the distance with steeply pitched, pointed rooflines. A tower, perhaps for a church, appears in the hazy distance to our left, near the left edge of the panel. Clouds with pale peach tops and lilac-gray undersides sweep across the sky above, parting to reveal on a couple slivers of blue sky beyond. The artist signed and dated the panel with black paint in the lower right corner: “Isack van Ostade 1645.”
Isack van Ostade, Workmen before an Inn, 1645, oil on panel, Gift of Richard A. and Lee G. Kirstein, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1991.64.1

Workmen before an Inn

Isack van Ostade · 1645 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  1991.64.1

A group of pale-skinned men, women, and children along with a few horses and dogs form a loose line across a dirt road, which is flanked with rows of buildings on both sides that converge in the tree-filled distance in this horizontal painting. The scene is painted mostly with sage and moss green, peanut and caramel brown, cream white, and black. Most of the people wear hats or caps. The women wear long dresses and the men wear jackets and pants. One man wearing a black jacket with buttons down the front, and with white at the neck and cuffs, leans down from atop a black horse at the center of the group. Another man with a tall, cream-white, brimmed hat and white collar stands behind a dappled horse to our right of center. Men, women, and children, most wearing tattered and worn clothing, look on. One woman to our left holds a baby strapped to her back and others gather around the horses. A pair of men in front of a stone building to our right smoke long, white, tobacco pipes. Others peer out of the open door and windows. An illegible wooden sign hangs above the door. Leafy vines grow over parts of the building façade. To our left, a woman sits on the ground and holds a spindle as she winds wool with a spinning frame. A man leans down over her shoulder, and a child looks away from us, into a fenced enclosure in front of a building. People, horses, dogs, and chickens are scattered along the road into the distance, and a church steeple rises against the ivory-white clouds in the sky beyond. A partial inscription with the artist’s name and date appears in black paint in the lower right corner: “Isack van Os 164.”
Isack van Ostade, The Halt at the Inn, 1645, oil on panel transferred to canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.49

The Halt at the Inn

Isack van Ostade · 1645 · oil on panel transferred to canvas ·  Accession ID  1942.9.49

Isack van Ostade, Workmen before an Inn, c. 1645, pen and brown ink and wash and watercolor over black chalk on laid paper, Nell Weidenhammer Fund, 2021.30.1.a

Workmen before an Inn

Isack van Ostade · c. 1645 · pen and brown ink and wash and watercolor over black chalk on laid paper ·  Accession ID  2021.30.1.a

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Man with a Fiddle

Isack van Ostade · c. 1645 · pen and brown ink over black chalk on laid paper ·  Accession ID  2021.30.1.b

Bibliography

1753

  • Houbraken, Arnold. De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen. 3 vols. in 1. The Hague, 1753 (Reprint: Amsterdam, 1976): 1:347.

1829

  • Smith, John. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters. 9 vols. London, 1829-1842: 1(1829):179-198; 9(1842):121, 815.

1870

  • Willigen, Adriaan van der. Les Artistes de Harlem: Notices historiques avec un précis sur la Gilde de St. Luc. Revised and enlarged ed. Haarlem and The Hague, 1870: 29, 233-240.

1900

  • Rosenberg, Adolf. Adriaen und Isack van Ostade. Bielefeld, 1900.

1907

  • Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century. 8 vols. Translated by Edward G. Hawke. London, 1907-1927: 3(1910):437-556.

1971

  • Bie, Cornelis de. Het gulden cabinet van de edel vry schilderconst. Edited by Gerard Lemmens. Reprint of Antwerp, 1661/1662. Soest, 1971: 258.

1981

  • Schnackenburg, Bernhard. Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle. 2 vols. Hamburg, 1981.

  • Schnackenburg, Bernhard. Le monde paysan d'Adriaen et Isack van Ostade. Exh. cat. Institut Néerlandais, Paris, 1981.

1984

  • Sutton, Peter C. Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting. Edited by Jane Iandola Watkins. Exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; Royal Academy of Arts, London. Philadelphia, 1984: 390-394.

1987

  • Sutton, Peter C., et al. Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting. Exh. cat. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art. Boston, 1987: 390-394.

1991

  • MacLaren, Neil. The Dutch School, 1600-1900. Revised and expanded by Christopher Brown. 2 vols. National Gallery Catalogues. London, 1991: 1:303.

1995

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1995: 191.