An Elegant Company (1632): Artwork and History

An Elegant Company (1632) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Pieter Codde (Dutch, 1599-1678).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

A master of scenes of finely dressed revelers known as “merry companies,” Amsterdam painter Pieter Codde here demonstrated his sharp sense of composition. He animated a gathering of 18 guests and attendants through a complex network of gestures, glances, and poses, with a young woman dressed in luxurious silver satin at center. Such images of joyful gatherings, with participants acting in accordance with their privileged social station, would have functioned as models of polite behavior to cosmopolitan art collectors.

Object facts

• Title: An Elegant Company
• Date: 1632
• Artist attribution: Pieter Codde (Dutch, 1599-1678)
• Place of origin: Holland
• Medium: Oil on panel
• Dimensions: 58.8 × 92.7 cm (23 1/8 × 36 1/2 in.); Framed: 84.8 × 118.1 × 6.4 cm (33 3/8 × 46 1/2 × 2 1/2 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1933.1069

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.