An Allegory of the Twelve Year Truce,
oil on panel, 48 x 117 cm, framed

The present panel is an unfinished version by an unknown hand of Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne’s (1589–1662) prototype entitled The Allegory of the Twelve Years Truce, conserved in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 1924).

Rather than depicting the compromises and confessional differences that characterise the Twelve Years Truce which was concluded between the nascent Dutch Republic and the Habsburg Empire, the original and the present work appears to be a guarded celebration, if only of the act of truce itself, rather than in setting up a treaty with the autocratic Southern Netherlands. Indeed, on the left of the composition, the regents of the Southern Netherlands, Isabella and Archduke Albert VII seem, even to today’s eyes, slightly villainous, while beside them stand their grim-faced general, Spinola, and their personal agent of papal tyranny, their confessor Father Neyen. In contrast to this Counter-Reformation cabal, the freedom-fighting heroes of the Dutch, Princes Maurits and Frederick-Hendrick, stand erect and proud, their regal, but restrained, costumes a rare splash of colour beyond the serried ranks of black-doubletted Calvinists behind.

Van de Venne played an important role in the art scene of the Northern Low Countries in the early seventeenth Century. Van de Venne was particularly noteworthy for further developing the rich tradition of the humanistic interest in folk customs which dates back to Erasmus of Rotterdam in his 1511 work, Lof der Zotheid, illustrated by Hans Holbein, and most notably as depicted in the works of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and his followers. The present work, with its witty reflection on contemporary political realities, is also redolent of Van de Venne’s 1614 masterpiece Fishing for Souls, conserved in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The black-clad figure second from the right in the original and present picture is, according to Laurens Bol, a self-portrait of the artist (see L. Bol, Adriaen Pietersz Van De Venne. Painter And Draughtsman, The Hague 1989, pp. 38–39 and 41–43).