Boy with a Fish by Candlelight

Schalken’s Boy with a Fish by Candlelight was likely painted in the early 1680’s, a period in the artist’s career marked by great innovation in terms of subjects and style. To begin with style, this picture constitutes a quintessential example of our painter’s exceptional nocturnal scenes illuminated solely by the light of a candle. In this instance, the candle is obscured by the large fish in the foreground (see further below); only its flickering flame is evident just above this sea creature’s toothy mouth. The incandescent effects here are masterfully captured. Schalcken deftly delineates the lambent effects of candlelight, which bathe the lad’s face and hands in its soft reddish glow while dancing upon the silken material of his burnt sienna-colored doublet¹.

The portrayal of night-time settings illuminated by candlelight in Dutch (and Flemish) art have a long history and were often equated in a moralistic sense with voluptuousness and profligacy². The Utrecht Caravaggists, Dutch painters who were working earlier in the century under the impetus of Caravaggio (1571-1610), helped to popularize this subject matter. As the seventeenth century progressed, other genre-painting specialists, such as Willem Duyster (1599-1635), occasionally painted nocturnal imagery, as did Gerrit Dou, Schalcken’s teacher. It was under the latter’s impetus that Schalcken began to paint night scenes and did so very early in his career, namely, by roughly 1665. Thereafter, he produced large numbers of them.

Unlike his artistic predecessors, Schalcken seems to have understood precisely how candlelight diminishes the coloristic intensities of surrounding stuffs and objects. Accordingly, he replicated this visual phenomenon with great sensitivity. Thus, the shadows in Boy with a Fish by Candlelight dilute color, as they migrate and gradually diminish into inky blackness at its peripheries. What makes this even more remarkable in is that this sophisticated play of light and shadow occurs within such a small picture, which measures a mere 24.5 x 18.5 centimeters. Schalcken’s nocturnal paintings were quite popular, particularly in England, where, as we have seen, he resided between 1692 and 1696. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the master’s paintings continued to be highly valued and enthusiastically collected. Their influence can be traced throughout eighteenth-century English art and were especially relevant for the work of Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797)³.

Schalcken’s small panels of this sort, representing both day and night scenes of daily life, were an outgrowth of his training in Dou’s studio (who focused upon comparable subjects) and hence, reflect his thorough knowledge of his erstwhile teacher’s fijnschilder [fine painter] works in general (Fig. 1)⁴. But this is not simply a case of his imitating the art of the esteemed older painter; concepts of emulation were also at play here. For example, Schlacken’s painterly touch in this charming little panel is more fluid and varied than that of Dou⁵. Particular sections of its surface, especially the highlights on boy’s silken doublet, are painted somewhat more broadly than one encounters in Dou paintings. In Schalcken’s hands, the disposition of light is more refined as well. In essence, he adjusted his style to accentuate further its signature qualities. These changes can be considered both aesthetic and strategic and are fully consonant with contemporary ideas concerning how successful painters should practice their profession. Most assuredly, painters were advised to imitate the styles and subjects of their teachers, their illustrious forebears, and even those of rival artists but the goal was not simply to imitate but rather to emulate visual precedents and in doing so, transcend the achievements of others to secure their own esteemed place within the art market.

It should be noted, however, that there is nothing at all unusual about our artist’s strategy in this regard: rivalry and competition were endemic to art production among Schalcken, Dou, and other genre painters who served the high end of the art market with pictures of great beauty, sophistication, and cost, intended for a comparatively limited network of elite connoisseurs and collectors⁶. This network of well-to-do buyers and art afficionados– called liefhebbers at the time–were critical in this regard⁷. For an artist’s appropriation of various features from the work of his competitors, which were thereafter ‘improved upon’, was only reputationally and financially consequential if his audiences recognized these enhancements vis-à-vis their sources. As Angela Ho has observed, the selective adaptation of another artist’s subject and/or style potentially served as foil against which aesthetes could assess a particular painter’s achievement and, in the process, impute distinction to that painter and his creations⁸. The resultant art works that arose from this creative amalgam of the borrowed and the new might even be thought of as a marketing strategy to ensure the ready recognition and hence the acclamation of their maker. As such, Schalken’s Boy with a Fish by Candlelight was just one example among several of his creative if not unique depictions of boys in diurnal settings; his near contemporary portrayals of a Boy Holding up a Pancake (Fig. 2) and A Young Boy Sticking His Finger in the Mouth of a Stone Mask come to mind in this context⁹.

As remarkable as the pictorial effects are in our picture, they are perhaps trumped by the eerie silhouette of the large toothy fish dominating its lower-right foreground. While there a few earlier seventeenth-century paintings of destitute boys with fish, Schalcken’s work is virtually unique¹⁰. In those aforesaid pictures, the young boys are working either as fishermen or market vendors as their attire confirms (Fig. 3). Here, by contrast, we see a smiling youth sporting an elegant Van Dyckian doublet and linen shirt. He is no worker and the fish before him is no ordinary species of the type routinely caught, sold, and consumed in the Dutch Republic¹¹. It’s flat, disk-like shape, pronounced foreheard, and gaping maw filled with pointy teeth enable us to associate it tentatively with such fish as the sickle pomfret (Taractichthys steindachneri) or the Mahi-Mahi (Coryphaena hippurus), both inhabiting tropical and subtropical waters in, among others, the Pacific and Indian Oceans (Fig. 4)¹².

How did this extraordinary specimen end up in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting? Animals of all sorts, particularly exotic aquatic ones, made their way to the Dutch Republic (and to Europe at large) courtesy of two interconnected factors: the far-flung commercial exploits of the Dutch East India Company and the avid pursuits of educated and cultured collectors¹³. As to the former, commercial trade within a global context, as conducted by the Dutch and their rivals, exerted a profound impact on European visual culture in that large quantities exotic objects and creatures were imported to the continent, many of which were hitherto unknown¹⁴. This phenomenon can be linked to the aforementioned collectors of this era. Their ranks included government officials, scientists, affluent merchants, and even artists. They collected engravings and books illustrating animals and inanimate objects, and some even created collector’s cabinets (commonly termed cabinets of curiosities or Kunst- und Wunderkammern) teeming with natural and man-made items, which testified to their owners’ knowledge, wealth, status and sophistication (Fig. 5)¹⁵. Given the taste for the exotic and rare, specimens from the non-native animal kingdom were in great demand, particularly fish, which, following contemporary rubrics, encompassed a much larger category of species (crabs, turtles etc…) than it does today¹⁶. Regardless, popular collectable specimens had to be preserved, so that they could be placed on display in a collector’s cabinet. This involved drying them–either as a whole or simply their skin– and in the case of fish, such as we see in Schalcken’s painting, this unfortunately meant that their original coloring was lost¹⁷. It is very interesting that several seventeenth-century paintings of these collector’s cabinets feature dried fish whose physical features in some instances resemble those of the one portrayed in Schalcken’s panel (Fig. 6)¹⁸.

Many of Schalcken’s genre paintings from this period make rather bold claims about his artistic supremacy, from the standpoints of both style and subject matter. With its spectacular light effects, compelling brushwork, and unusual if not unique subject, his Boy with a Fish by Candlelight fully demonstrates those claims. For Schalken’s brush rivals the artfulness of nature because he has portrayed a fearsome fish whose painted existence is just as potentially frightening as the actual creature itself. No doubt, it was intended for an audience of affluent connoisseurs and other liefhebbers (as defined above) whose love and knowledge of painting overlapped with their interest in collector’s cabinets since the parameters between fine art and scientific endeavor were not distinctly separated as they are in modernity.