Back to Craesbeeck...

I'm still quite fascinated by Joos Van Craesbeeck (See September Post: The one who liked pubs). I have to admit that this is mostly down to his name, but also, and more edifyingly, down to what he was about. So what can the bottomless pit tell us about Joos?

1. Joos could be pronounced 'Whose' or 'Yous'.

   As an English speaker I find both endearing. Incidentally there is a 'useful' website that breaks down Dutch pronunciation into syllables: http://woordenlijst.org/ It will only be helpful if you already speak the Dutch. I digress.

2.  Born 1605 or 1606 in Neerlinter. Died 1661, Brussels
3.  Trained as, and worked as, a baker. This seems to be throughout his early and mid-career at least.
4. Was taught and heavily influenced by Adriaen Brouwer
5. He worked as a baker in a (debtor's) prison
6. They may have met when Brouwer was in prison (for tax debts) where he was the baker.
7. Craesbeeck also got married in the chapel of the prison, to the former Antwerp prison baker's daughter. 

   This suggests to me that either things in prisons were not quite as they are today, or that the lives of Craesbeeck and his wife to be were so deeply intertwined with the business of prisons that it seemed a natural choice to make, for example, I know of someone who decided to get married in a whisky distillery because her father was a high level employee there. Where to be married is an emotional as well as a practical choice.

   Maybe I am reading too much into it, but it seems to me, that a middle class professional baker could chose to get married somewhere different, and the fact that he chose the prison indicates that he was somewhat of a type that was 'down with' the people. 

   Remember, artists, even now, operate in popular society; they need to sell work, and, until artists like Hogarth created for himself a popular middle class audience by cheaply making prints, works of art were unique and took a long, long and painstaking, time to make. Artists needed their audiences to have a lot of cash. In the 1600s, generally, that audience was the upper class.

8. The influence of his teacher Brauwer can clearly be seen in his earlier work.
9. Later in his career he turned completely to middle class scenes set in pubs, and using a somewhat limited range of characters.
10. His later work is compared unfavourably with that of his teacher: "the rolling eyes and roaring mouths never achieve the deft trenchancy of his model." http://www.sphinxfineart.com/

There may well be another post here when I've had a better look at the work of Brouwer. To me, the most interesting thing about Craesbeeck is his choice of subject and how that ties up with a change in wider society, and I'm interested to see how that differs from Brouwer.