Interior of a Stable

Philips Wouwerman · n.d.

Medium

Pen and black ink, with brush and black and gray wash, heightened with white gouache, over graphite, on cream board

Original size

29.9 × 32.2 cm (11 13/16 × 12 11/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Interior of a Stable draws you into the quiet, dusty warmth of a working Dutch stable, rendered with the kind of intimate observation that feels more like a memory than a composition. Philips Wouwerman was one of the most prolific painters of the Dutch Golden Age, producing over a thousand works during his career in Haarlem, the majority of them centred on horses, riders, and the everyday life that surrounded them. This piece, a drawing in pen and black ink with gray wash and white gouache over graphite, shows his draftsmanship at its most considered — the layered washes building depth and shadow while the white highlights pull light through the scene with restraint. Where many of his contemporaries painted the drama of battle or the pageantry of the hunt, Wouwerman was equally at home in the unheroic corners of stable life. Wouwerman's work became enormously fashionable among European collectors in the eighteenth century, when his paintings commanded prices that rivalled Rembrandt's and decorated the grandest private galleries on the continent. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the tonal subtlety of the original into the warmth and texture of oil on canvas, preserving the atmosphere of the piece in a medium built to last.