Fijnschilder(Fine painter)

The Old Master collections of the National Gallery of Victoria have recently been enriched by a remarkable bequest of more than two dozen paintings from the Estate of Robert Victor Jones. A friend and supporter of the NGV for decades, Robert operated the Woollahra Trading Company art dealership in both Sydney and London, working under the professional name Robert Compton Jones. He was also a distinguished and scholarly collector of European art.

The Robert Victor Jones bequest encompasses sixteenth and seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch paintings, seventeenth and eighteenth-century French paintings, and selected masterworks from the English, Italian and Swiss schools. Landscape, portraiture, mythology, religion and allegory are all topics touched upon by the works in this remarkable gift. Four Dutch genre paintings are examined here.

In the mid-nineteenth century Godfried Schalcken’s finely painted depiction of a boy buying sweet cherries in a shop once graced the thirtymetre- long Great Flemish and Dutch Gallery in the San Donato Palace in Florence, which housed the vast collections assembled by the Russian industrialist Demidoff family. In A young lady weighing cherries in a shop, c. 1680, Schalcken shows us an upmarket premises where the saleswoman is dressed in blue silk trimmed with ermine. Her facial features are exquisitely rendered, as are the details of her intricate lace bonnet, the scales with which she weighs her produce, and the earthenware cherry container.

‘At the age of thirteen, in 1656, Schalcken trained in his hometown of Dordrecht with Rembrandt’s former pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten, a master trompe-l’oeil artist; and subsequently in Leiden
with Gerrit Dou, who was renowned for his fijnschilder (fine painter) style’
Dr Ted Gott

In 1665 Schalcken returned to Dordrecht, where he became internationally acclaimed for his own meticulous and realistic paintings, in particular for his mastery of candlelit compositions. While not a nocturnal subject, this scene of a sweet transaction is imbued with equally dramatic lighting effects, its saleswoman strongly illuminated from the right by multi-panelled windows whose shutters have been opened to admit the daylight. To her left, Schalcken offers a marvellous portrait of a wealthy young boy, his neck bibbed with fine lace, who proffers a coin in exchange for his purchase of the tasty cherries. His brightly expectant eyes and half-open mouth convey the sense that he can already taste the lush flesh of the fruit he is about to procure. Behind him a worker in a red jacket pounds away at something in a copper mortar. In the background rows of shelves hold bottles and containers of all shapes and sizes.

Schalcken’s early biographer Arnold Houbraken wrote around 1720 that the artist was ‘one of the happiest of Dutch painters, seeing that the art of his brush was amply paid from the beginning to the end of his life, so that he reaped the rewards of his labours while alive, which occurs but very rarely’.

Schalcken’s reputation as both a portraitist and genre painter extended well beyond Dordrecht, and his paintings were avidly sought after by collectors in Germany, Spain and France, as well as in the Netherlands. Mezzotints after his paintings were also widely circulated, adding to his international reputation. He travelled regularly to The Hague to undertake portraits of notables in the circle of William of Orange, the Stadtholder of Holland, who was to become King William III of England in 1689. In 1692 Schalcken and his family moved to London for five years. During this period, he executed a celebrated portrait of King William III by Candlelight (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

On a different scale of painterly finesse are two earthy scenes of peasant life that contrast with the ‘gilded’ elegance of Schalcken’s shopping tableau: The village surgeon by Jan Steen and Interior with three figures by Adriaen van Ostade. When van Ostade painted this intimate scene of a peasant couple relaxing in 1661, he was hoofdman, or leader, of the Guild of Saint Luke, the painters’ guild in Haarlem where he spent most of his life. Van Ostade had first joined this guild as a young man in 1634, and in subsequent decades he delighted in depicting vigorous slices of everyday life among the lower strata of society.

Interior with three figures, which is signed and dated 1661, is a mature work painted when van Ostade was fifty-one. Haarlem was a major centre for brewing beer at this time, which is reflected in the painting’s portrayal of a woman pouring a glass of beer for an elderly man with whom she is about to share a pipe of tobacco. We are a far cry here from the refined elegance of Schalcken’s cherry saleswoman, with van Ostade’s subjects being shown with fleshy and robust coarseness. This was very much the artist’s point, van Ostade being intent on making the viewer aware that happiness lies within the soul rather than in the vanity of external appearances.

Writing perceptively about this Haarlem master’s work in 1894, the American wood engraver Timothy Cole observed:

To judge the faces of Van Ostade’s men and women ugly … is to regard their features merely, and to fail to perceive their air, which is their essence. Often the good nature of a countenance gives it a certain air which is more amiable than beauty. The beauty of a Van Ostade face is that it is warm with expression. It is a beauty that speaks to the imagination and conducts us from the surface to regard the soul within. Van Ostade’s power of seizing character is certainly equal to Rembrandt’s in its subtlety and depth of insight. ¹Tomothy Cole, ‘Old Dutch Masters. Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685)’, The Century Magazine, vol. 48. no. 2, June 1894, p. 217.

Cornelis Dusart, van Ostade’s pupil from around 1675 to 1679, executed a close copy after Interior with three figures around 1680.

Another pupil of van Ostade, Jan Steen, was born into a family of brewers in Leiden, Southern Holland, around 1626. Steen probably became an assistant to the landscape and marine painter Jan van Goyen, whose daughter he married in 1649. It is the influence of van Ostade, however, which can be clearly felt in The village surgeon, c. 1653, Steen’s animated depiction of a rural villager being held down while a surgeon appears to be peeling skin from his leg. In the background a transaction of another kind seems to be taking place, where a young woman flirtatiously strokes the beard of a leering man who clutches a large bag of money. This early work, made before Steen developed a more fijnschilder style, is close in manner to Steen’s Country doctor, c. 1653, in The Leiden Collection in New York, which features the same taxidermied crocodile hanging from the ceiling. The NGV holds two more meticulously painted genre works by Jan Steen, Interior, c. 1661-65, Felton Bequest, 1922, and The wedding party, c. 1667–68, presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mr James Fairfax, Honorary Life Benefactor, 1992. The village surgeon makes a fine addition to these, revealing an artist in his late twenties finding his way through study of van Ostade’s down to earth narratives of peasant life.

Painted in 1635, Interior with soldiers is one of only a handful of works that Jacob Duck marked with a date. Born around 1600 and trained initially in Utrecht as a goldsmith, in 1621 Duck was listed as an apprentice portrait painter in that city’s Guild of Saint Luke. He developed into a master painter of the kortegaard, or guardroom scene, derived from the French term corps de garde for the military post where the changing of the guard took place, a genre popular at a time when the Dutch Republic was actively involved in the Eighty Years’ War of rebellion against its colonial Spanish government, as well as the devastating Thirty Years War that saw millions die between 1618 and 1638.

As Joachi Rosen has defined the kortegaard:

A guardroom scene is a genre painting depicting an interior of a temporary nature hosting officers, soldiers and their camp followers. These would be depicted passing their leisure time surrounded by military items and booty.²Jochai Rosen, Jacob Duck c.1600–1667. Catalogue raisonné, Amsterdam, 2017, p. 19.

Duck’s paintings were highly prized during his lifetime, especially by collectors in Utrecht and they fetched comparatively high prices for their time. The gallery has one kortegaard scene by Cornelis Saftleven, Interior with soldiers, 1620s, which focuses on a favoured motif of exhausted soldiers sleeping. Interior with soldiers, 1635, from the Robert Victor Jones Estate brings a sprightly new kortegaard painting, showing soldiers playing cards in a stable, into the Collection.

Reflecting the influence of Caravaggio, Duck loved to paint darkish interiors against which figures stand out as if spotlit. His Interior with soldiers is a classic example of this, with its principal actors all illuminated by strong light coming from the open door at the left. The painting is remarkable for Duck’s minute attention to detail, from specifics of clothing and armour to the upturned drum upon which the scene’s card game is being played, and the raw hewn legs of the stool upon which the central soldier rests his booted and spurred left foot.

Scenes of card playing at this time often had erotic overtones, signalling loose morals. Duck adds a further twist to this. The moustachioed man half hidden behind the door here holds a mirror up so that the seated woman can ‘read’ the cards of the gullible soldier being duped by this game of deceit. As the viewer delights in the myriad details that command attention in this engaging
composition, this is one detail the artist didn’t want anyone to miss.

Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art.

The NGV warmly thanks the Estate of Robert Victor Jones for enabling these works to join the NGV Collection.

Explore the works discussed in the Dutch and Flemish galleries, Level 2, NGV International.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 58 May–June 2026.

Notes