page_title: Pieter van Laer
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Pieter van Laer / Work
context_page_description: Pieter Bodding van Laer was a Dutch painter and printmaker. He was active in Rome for over a decade and was known for genre scenes, animal paintings and landscapes placed in the environs of Rome.
  Pieter van Laer was an active member of the association of Flemish and Dutch artists in Rome known as the Bentvueghels. His nickname in this group was Il Bamboccio. The style of genre painting he introduced was followed by other Northern and Italian painters. These followers became known as the Bamboccianti and a painting in this style as a Bambocciata.
context_section_description: Pieter van Laer is mainly known for his genre scenes set in Italianate landscapes as well as for his landscapes and animal scenes.  He also painted some battle scenes.  He further engraved a number of plates of animals.  He was one of the first artists to develop the painting of cattle as a specialist genre.  He left one painting with a religious theme, the Annunciation to the shepherds (Museum Bredius, The Hague).  This composition is also van Laer's earliest surviving cattle painting.   His paintings were typically of a small format.
  The influence of a long stay in Rome is seen in his treatment of landscape and backgrounds. One of his important contributions is the introduction to Roman painting of new subjects derived from Flemish and Dutch genre paintings including according to a contemporary source, "rogues, cheats, pickpockets, bands of drunks and gluttons, scabby tobacconists, barbers, and other 'sordid' subjects." His subjects also included blacksmiths shoeing horses in grottoes, travelers in front of inns, brigands attacking travelers, military actions, idlers around Roman lime-kilns, markets, feasts and scenes with hunters.  He further depicted people playing popular games of chance such as morra as well as excretory functions. Several of his compositions deal with lively scenes from peasant life.  His pictures are marked by skillful composition and good drawing. He was especially careful in perspective. Despite their lowly subject matter, van Laer's works themselves sold for high prices and were held in some of the most prestigious collections of his time. 
  The traditional art historical view was that the Bamboccianti style practised by Pieter van Laer offered a realist "true portrait of Rome and its popular life without variation or alteration" of what the artist sees. However, their contemporaries did not generally regard the Bamboccianti as realists.  An alternative view of the art of the Bamboccianti is that their works constitute complex allegories that provide a commentary on classical art with a view to bringing the observer to contemplate elevated ideas. They thus stand in a long tradition of paradox in which low or vulgar subjects were the vehicle for conveying important philosophical meanings.
  While his style of painting was openly disdained by pre-eminent Italian painters in Rome and Bologna, such as Sacchi, Albani, and Reni, this did not translate into a poverty of commissions. In fact, van Laer paintings over time became highly sought after. Initially, the painter must have depended on an open market and dealers, rather than commissions for sales. However, within a decade of work in Rome, he could ask a very respectable price for his paintings. Among those owning his work were Pietro Testa, Cassiano dal Pozzo, the marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, and later, the Flemish merchant in Naples Gaspar Roomer.
  Pieter van Laer was an accomplished printmaker and he produced two series of prints of animals. One series of 8 plates of domestic animals published in 1636 in Rome under the title Various animals was dedicated to Don Ferdinando Afan de Ribera, the Spanish Viceroy in Naples. This series of engravings had an important influence on the Dutch animal painter Paulus Potter, in particular the way in which van Laer was able to place figures, animals, buildings and trees in a coherent pictorial space.  A second set of 6 plates was entitled Horses and depicts the bleak lot of horses belonging to poor peasants.
caption: Urinating horse
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