Elegant Party in an Ornate Palace Garden

1610 · Private collection

genre

In the magnificent gardens of a country palace a group of young and fashionable figures have assembled for a banquet beneath the trees. It is an early example of fte galantes painted in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century that would prove hugely influential on Dutch painting, especially in Haarlem, for a generation or more. Esias van de Velde, Willem Buytewech and Dirck Hals, were, for example, all directly influenced by Vinckboons's examples.

Elegant Party in an Ornate Palace Garden

About the Artist

David Vinckboons

1576 – 1633

Flemish-born painter, active in Amsterdam. He painted landscapes and genre scenes and is a transitional figure between the decorative and imaginative Mannerist tradition and the more naturalistic style associated with 17th-century Dutch painting. His early genre pictures depicting village festivals reveal the influence of Pieter Bruegel, and Vinckboons is credited with introducing some of his motifs into Holland. It has been asserted that Vinckboons's works can always be identified by the presence of a finch ('vinck') in a tree ('boom'), but the painstaking student usually finds that the bird has flown.

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