Sale Dorotheum, Vienna 1964, Sale Sotheby’s Milkos Rozsa, Los Angeles, gift of his Estate, 1995, Sale Sotheby’s, New York, 29 May 2003, lot. 30, Private collection.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Annual Report, 1995/1996/1997, p. 85. Johnathan Biker, French, Dutch, and Flemish Caravaggesque Paintings from the Koelliker Collection, exhibition catalogue, Robilant+Voena, London 2005, pp. 34-35.

The inclusion of his portrait in Antony van Dyck’s Iconography and its inscription, ‘Pictor noctium, Mechliniensis’, suggests that Adam de Coster was firmly established in Antwerp around 1630 as a painter of artificially illuminated night scenes. Also on the basis of the inscription in the Iconography it has been thought that the artist hailed from Malines, an hypothesis that recently received some confirmation by the discovery of documents regarding the artist’s parents in that own town. Nothing is known about De Coster’s training and very little about his life in general. While he probably travelled to Italy as a young Italian man, the only documented trip is one to Hamburg undertaken in 1635 when he was almost fifty years old. In 1607, he registered as a master painter in the Guild of St. Luke (the painters’ guild) in Antwerp, where he appears to have spent the better part of his life.
No signed paintings by De Coster are known, his small oeuvre being reconstructed, largely by Benedict Nicolson, on the basis of a print by Lucas Vorsterman after a lost composition by the artist showing backgammon players and a female lute-player around a table. The scene in that painting was lit by two candles, one of which was concealed by the figure of a boy on the nearside table. Such lighting effects clearly show knowledge of Gerrit van Honthorst’s innovations from the 1620s, but how they would have reached the Antwerp artist remains a mystery. Although his fellow Antwerp Caravaggisti also painted such scenes, De Coster’s penchant for depicting figures making music also suggests that he drew inspiration from Honthorst and his Utrecht colleagues.
The present painting shows a bearded old man holding the hand of an attractive young woman across a table. As in all of the paintings that have been attributed to De Coster, the scene is artificially illuminated. In this case not masked, the candle produces a dazzling effect. In particular, the slivers of light gently caressing the young woman’s right arm and fingers and the old man’s coat, beard and face form a high point in the artist’s oeuvre. De Coster used the female figure with lips slightly parted baring her teeth for a number of his other works, including, quite possibly, the lute player in the lost painting engraved by Vorsterman. The old man’s furrowed brow, which reminded Nicolson of a “dried-up river-bed”, has an almost exact counterpart in De Coster’s Drinker in Stockholm (Nationalmuseum). The simplified facial constructions and intimate, poetic mood of this and other works by De Coster make his works more akin to such French Caravaggists as Georges de la Tour and Trophime Bigot than his compatriots Theodoor Rombouts, Gerard Seghers and Jacob van Oost the Elder.
When at auction in Vienna in 1964, the subject of the present painting was not identified. Nicolson was first to correctly see in it a scene of mercenary love, based primarily on the coins shown on the table before the young woman. A popular theme among Caravaggio’s northern followers, both the client and he prostitute are most often shown in the prime of their lives and often accompanied by an aged procuress. The specific subject of De Coster’s painting is unequal love, in which the ages of the two parties differ substantially. This theme was a favourite of some sixteenth-century Flemish artists.
Jonathan Bikker

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