Jan Miense Molenaer - self portrait 1640

Jan Miense Molenaer (1610 – buried 19 September 1668), was a Dutch Golden Age genre painter whose style was a precursor to Jan Steen's work during Dutch Golden Age painting. He shared a studio with his wife,

Judith Leyster Judith Jans Leyster (also Leijster; baptised July 28, 1609Molenaer, JudithNational Gallery of Art website. Accessed February 1, 2014. – February 10, 1660) was a Dutch Golden Age painter of genre works, portraits, and still lifes. Her work was h ...

, also a genre painter, as well as a portraitist and painter of still-life. Both Molenaer and Leyster may have been pupils of

Frans Hals Frans Hals the Elder (, , ; – 26 August 1666) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, chiefly of individual and group portraits and of genre works, who lived and worked in Haarlem. Hals played an important role in the evolution of 17th-century grou ...

Biography

Molenaer was born and died in

Haarlem Haarlem (; predecessor of ''Harlem'' in English) is a city and municipality in the Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of North Holland. Haarlem is situated at the northern edge of the Randstad, one of the most populated metropoli ...

. He achieved a style close to Hals' early on in his career, but later developed a style like that of Dutch genre painter, Adriaen van Ostade. His genre works often depicted players of music, such as his ''The Music Makers'' ( Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), ''The Duet'' ( Seattle Art Museum), or ''Family Making Music'' ( Frans Hals Museum). He also depicted Taverns and the activities of card games or games of the times such as ''La main chaude'', or in Dutch, ', which literally means clapping hands. Molenaer also cleverly depicted biblical stories in his own time and surroundings, such as representing a scene from Peter's Gospel set in a Dutch Tavern in '' The Denying of Peter'' (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest).

Selected works

Jan Miense Molenaer - Two Boys and a Girl Making Music - WGA16091

*1629 – ''The Dentist'', Oil on panel, (

North Carolina Museum of Art The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) is an art museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. It opened in 1956 as the first major museum collection in the country to be formed by state legislation and funding. Since the initial 1947 appropriation that ...

Raleigh Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the seat of Wake County in the United States. It is the second-most populous city in North Carolina, after Charlotte. Raleigh is the tenth-most populous city in the Southeas ...

) *1629 – ''Two Boys and a Girl Making Music'', Oil on canvas, (

National Gallery The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director ...

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

) *1630 – '' A Quack and His Assistant'', Oil on canvas, (Private Collection) *1630 – ''The Duet'', Oil on canvas, ( Seattle Art Museum,

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region o ...

) *1630/32 – ''A Young Man playing a Theorbo and a Young Woman playing a Cittern'', Oil on canvas, (

) *1631 – ''Painter in His Studio, Painting a Musical Company'', Oil on canvas, ( Staatliche Museen,

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitu ...

) *1633 – ''Allegory of Vanity'', Oil on canvas, ( Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo) *1633 – ''Allegory of Marital Fidelity'', Oil on canvas, (

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or VMFA, is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia, United States, which opened in 1936. The museum is owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia. Private donations, endowments, and funds are used for the ...

Richmond Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia, United States * Richmond, London, a part of London * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town in England * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, Californi ...

) *1633/35 – ''

Battle Between Carnival and Lent ''Battle Between Carnival and Lent'' is an oil painting by Dutch artist Jan Miense Molenaer, located in the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana. Painted ca. 1633–1634, it depicts a brawl between rowdy peasants, representing C ...

'', Oil on wood, ( Indianapolis Museum of Art,

Indianapolis Indianapolis (), colloquially known as Indy, is the state capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the seat of Marion County. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the consolidated population of Indianapolis and Marion ...

) *1635 – ''Card Players'', Oil on panel, ( Currier Museum of Art,

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The ...

) *1635 – ''Young Smoker'', Oil on panel, (

Accademia Carrara The Accademia Carrara, (), officially Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo, is an art gallery and an academy of fine arts in Bergamo, in Lombardy in northern Italy. The art gallery was established in about 1780 by , a Bergamasco collec ...

Bergamo Bergamo (; lmo, Bèrghem ; from the proto- Germanic elements *''berg +*heim'', the "mountain home") is a city in the alpine Lombardy region of northern Italy, approximately northeast of Milan, and about from Switzerland, the alpine lakes Com ...

) *1635 – ''Family Making Music'', Oil on panel, ( Frans Hals Museum,

) *1636 – ''The Denying of Peter'', Oil on canvas, ( Museum of Fine Arts,

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population o ...

) *1640s – ''Woman Holding a Jug'', Oil on panel, ( Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

)

References

External links

wga.hu
List of painters in the Web Gallery of Art
Political Iconography in a Painting by Jan Miense MolenaerWorks and literature on Jan Miense Molenaer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Molenaer, Jan Miense 1610 births 1668 deaths Dutch Golden Age painters Dutch male painters Dutch genre painters Artists from Haarlem