Kitchen Interior with Christ in the House of Mary and Martha
Cornelis Engelszen (1574/5 - 1650)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1595 - 1642
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
1016 x 1549 mm (40 x 61 in)
Order this imageCollection
Uppark House and Garden, West Sussex
NT 138287
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, Kitchen Interior with Christ in the House of Mary and Martha by Cornelis Engelszen (1575-1642/3), signed bottom left in mongram: CE f (?indistinctly dated). Three figures round a kitchen table, piled with vegetables, in the foreground. A man at the left holding a basket of eggs and a flagon. Behind the table a servant girl about to carve a chicken and at her shoulder a young man with a brace of partridges. In the background in another room Christ is seated with Mary and Martha. Modern still-life painting began in the Low Countries with artists like Beuckelaer and Aertsen, who often coupled kitchen scenes with this episode in Luke (10;38-42), in which Martha, the archetype of the busy cook, chides her sister Mary Magdalen for sitting in apparent idleness listening to Christ. The practice of subordinating a religious scene in favour of a still life and this providing a title derives from Tintoretto and was practised widely in the Low Countries in the 17th century as well as by Velasquez in his early 'bodegones'
Provenance
Early 19th century hanging-plans, in the Dining Room: '5. Martha and Mary Two Bassans' [overmantel] [not in H. R. Bolton's list of pictures cleaned in 1849]; and thence by inheritance and descent, until accepted in lieu of tax on the death of Admiral the Hon. Sir Herbert Meade-Fetherstonhaugh (1875-1964) in 1965 and transferred to the National Trust by the Treasury, September 1990
Marks and inscriptions
signed at bottom ; CE (monogram) f (indistinctly dated)
Makers and roles
Cornelis Engelszen (1574/5 - 1650), artist