DAVID VAN DER PLAS (Amsterdam 1647 - Amsterdam 1704)
A Musical Company
oil on canvas
28 ¼ x 23 ¼ inches (71.7 x 59 cm.)
PROVENANCE
S. Burton – Jones, London, 1936 (as Jan Verkolje)
Property of a Gentleman, Christie’s, London, May 20, 1938, lot 70, (as Jan Verkolje I)
Nystad Antiquairs, Lochem and s ’Gravenhage, 1938 – 1957
P.A. Huet, The Hague, by 1957
Anonymous sale, Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, February 8, 1988, lot 68 (as Caspar Netscher)
Private Collection, Texas
Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts, New York, 1997 (as David van der Plas)
Property of a Private Collector, Sotheby’s, London, December 16, 1999, lot 52, (as David van der Plas) where acquired by
J. E. Safra, until 2024
EXHIBITED
Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, Mens en Muziek: nederlandse meesters uit vijf eeuwen, July 13 – September 1, 1957 (as Caspar Netscher)
New York, Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts, The Affordable Face, October 13 – October 31, 1997 (as David van der Plas)
LITERATURE
Margorie E. Wieseman, Caspar Netscher and Late Seventeenth – Century Dutch Painting, Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1991, no. c 71 (as David van der Plas)
Margorie E. Wieseman, Caspar Netscher and Late Seventeenth – Century Dutch Painting, Doornspijk, 2003 p. 353, no. c 78 (as David van der Plas)
Margorie Wieseman in the course of writing her dissertation on Caspar Netscher rightly identified A Musical Company to have been painted by David van der Plas after years of the work being misidentified. Paintings by Van der Plas have often been confused with those of Caspar Netscher and Nicolaes Maes.
The artist was the son of Hans van der Plas and Sara Stevens. His brother was the painter Pieter van der Plas II, and he was the brother-in-law of the artist Govert van der Leeuw. He worked as a painter of genre and portraiture, as well as an etcher and draftsman. He was the teacher of Jacob Appel I, and probably also functioned as an art dealer.[1]
In 1684 at the age of 36 he married Cornelia van der Gon, the former housekeeper and principal heir of the wealthy architect Adriaan Dortsman, who had designed numerous canal houses in Amsterdam. Van der Plas had worked with Dortsman. Cornelia’s passion was for assembling dollhouses in which both Dortsman and Van der Plas assisted, with Dortsman designing interiors and Van der Plas creating miniature paintings.[2]
Works by Van der Plas formed part of the permanent collections of museums in Amsterdam, Brussels, Katwijk, Orléans, Oslo, Rotterdam, and Warsaw among others.
In this work an amiable group of elegant couples have gathered to drink and play music in a darkened interior. The standing gentleman and seated young lady holding a violin and songbook directly engage the viewer as if to invite them to the party. Most notable in this painting is the magnificence of the men’s hair. “Long curly hair was considered an expression of masculine beauty and dignity, and wigs were worn by men from an early age to achieve this”. From a style started by Louis XIV that spread across Europe, wigs became “the most fashionable accessory of the period”. Wigs were also very costly and could be more expensive than an entire outfit.[3] Thus it is little wonder that Van der Plas chose to showcase such splendor.