Die Burger-Buurt Adriaan (Rue Hollandoise Adrien) | Amsterdam street (Dutch street Adriaan)

A genre scene, set in an elegant district of Amsterdam, depicts two courting couples and their companions near a notary's office. One of the couples is a young woman courting with an older man, the other is a young man courting an older woman. Below the picture, which is an illustration of the thirteenth scene of the theatre play De wanhébbelyke liefde (Love ill-chosen) by CJ van der Lijn, there is a phrase predicting misfortune if one of these relationships develops into marriage. The first edition of this play was published in Amsterdam in 1678 by Albert Magnus (1642-1689). The presented engraving comes from a later edition from the Amsterdam publishing house Joannes Smit en Zoon. The topic of relationships between young and old suitors has been discussed since antiquity, including by Ovid in his work Amores. In the Middle Ages and modern times, it often appeared in the art of Dutch and German artists, such as Israel van Meckenem, Hans Baldung Grien, the artistic Cranach family, and Jacob Matham, sometimes conveying a moral, as in the case of the compositions of Crispijn de Passe I or Hendrik Goltzius. The author of the scenography for the play presented here was Jan Gerard Waldorp (1740-1808), a Dutch interior painter and decorator. Reinier Vinkeles (1741-1816) invented and drew the actors' characters, and created the engraving together with his brother Herman (1745-after 1817). Reinier Vinkeles was a draftsman, watercolorist and engraver-etcher. He studied in Amsterdam with Jan Punt, in Brabant (1765) and from 1770 in the Parisian workshop of Jacques Philippe Lebas. From 1771, he worked in Amsterdam then left to stay in St. Petersburg, where, at the invitation of Catherine II, he became the director of the Academy of Arts. He specialized in vignettes and book illustrations on portrait, biblical and genre themes. Ewa Gwiazdowska