Celebrating farmers in a barn, 1778

About the Work

Here Jacobus Buys copied a painting by Adriaen van Ostade, a seventeenth-century artist who had specialized in scenes of rural life. An inscription on the back informs us that the original was in a collection in Amsterdam at the time. It may have been Cornelis Ploos van Amstel who commissioned the drawing from Buys. The latter faithfully reproduced the painting but scaled it down by one third. The effect of the watercolours is gentler and less vibrant than that of the oil paints used for the original.