Dutch school; second third of the 17th century.

Dutch school; second third of the 17th century.
"Banquet".
Oil on panel. Cradled.
It has frame of the twentieth century.
Measurements: 48 x 64 cm; 60 x 76 cm (frame).
In this work a costumbrista scene is represented, starring a great multitude of characters, whose majority seem to belong to the high society, judging by the situation and their elegant clothes, eating in a sumptuous interior, accompanied by servants. The scene is clearly described, within the naturalistic and narrative language of the Dutch Baroque, and in fact there are anecdotal elements in the first terms, which seek to create an illusionism and confusion between real and pretended space. At the compositional level, the rigor and classicism of the structure stands out, closed in the center and open to the landscape.
This type of hedonistic scenes, which reflect with an almost documentary spirit (although without neglecting the decorative aspect) the daily life of the time, are themselves a genre born in the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, which enjoyed a great development thanks to the good reception it had by the bourgeois public, who liked to see themselves portrayed. Beyond this representation, the scene also invites allegorical reflection, since the author proposes in the same scene different actions that allude directly to the senses, such as sight, taste and touch. This interest in this representation is very much reminiscent of the works of the five senses by the painter Rubens and Brueghel, which today are in the Prado Museum and which, as in this particular case, show a composition that stands out for the abundance and precise detail of all the elements that make up the scene.
This type of representations closely linked to the genre gabinet d'amateur, which originated in Flanders, may have developed for two reasons. Firstly, the development of the devotio moderna and the influence of Holland with regard to the political emancipation of religion, as well as the economic prosperity of the liberal bourgeoisie. The combination of the discovery of nature, objective observation, the study of the concrete, the appreciation of the everyday, the taste for the real and material, the sensitivity to the seemingly insignificant, made the Flemish artist commune with the reality of everyday life, without seeking any ideal alien to that same reality. The painter did not seek to transcend the present and the materiality of objective nature or to escape from tangible reality, but to envelop himself in it, to become intoxicated by it through the triumph of realism, a realism of pure illusory fiction, achieved thanks to a perfect and masterful technique and a conceptual subtlety in the lyrical treatment of light.