(Antwerp 1540–1584)
A soldier and a peasant woman,
oil on panel, 23 x 31 cm, framed

Another version of this composition, but of weaker quality, was sold at Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 6 May 1998, lot 86 (as Circle of Pieter Balten).

The present close-up depiction of a weeping peasant woman and a coarse-faced soldier is characteristic of the oeuvre of Pieter Balten, who specialised in painting tronies – unidentified sitters with exaggerated facial expressions. Along with Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who is recorded to have worked with the master and may have been Balten’s assistant, the Antwerp painter with his expressive style and rich colours may be seen as one of the originators of the Low Countries’ celebrated art of genre painting. The present pair of heads, are in effect personnages who could be re-used in the farcical depictions of everyday life, religious paintings set in typically Flemish contemporary settings, and the raucous Kermesse scenes for which Balten and Brueghel are so renowned.

Balten is recorded by Karel van Mander to have been a member of the Chamber of Rhetoric Violoren and to have travelled widely, suggesting that like Brueghel, his clientele and milieu would have been made up of humanists and erudite collectors. Balten’s key work, the Vlaamse kermis in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, shows one such popular dramatic work penned by one of Flanders’s Chambers of Rhetoric and immortalised in paint by Balten: the humorous tale of the seduction of an artisan’s wife by a philandering clergyman, with the husband observing the affair whilst being concealed carried in a giant basket. However, despite Balten’s evident success, and gift for narrative invention, few of his works were signed and only about a dozen confirmed paintings by the master are known today.