Young Scholar in His Study: Melancholy

genre

Pieter Codde painted portraits, history paintings, and high-life scenes as well as military subjects. His small picture of a Young Scholar in his Study, painted in shades of silvery grey and ochres, is a kind of secularization of Dürer's Melancholia. It is more appealing than his more ambitious genre compositions, where he gives way to his preference for rather coarse and plump types, over-glossy textures, and exaggerated highlights.

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About the Artist

Pieter Codde

1599 – 1678

Dutch genre and portrait painter of the fashionable world and barrack-room life, active in Amsterdam. His best works are usually on a small scale, marked by subtle silvery-gray tonalities, but he achieved one memorable feat on a much larger scale. In 1637 he was called upon to finish the group portrait of the Amsterdam Civic Guards known as the Meagre Company (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) that Frans Hals began in 1633 and refused to finish because he would not come to Amsterdam for sittings, and Codde succeeded so well in capturing Hals's spirit and the touch of his brush that experts still disagree where the work of the one ends and the other begins. Codde also wrote poetry.

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