Jan Stobbaerts, Slaughterhouse Barn

by Atelier Liesjes

In a dimly lit barn, two cows stand side by side on a floor of hard-packed earth. The one on the left is reddish-brown with large white patches on her flanks and withers; she stands with her head held forward and looks at us with a pale face. The one on the right is a solid dark red and has her head bowed low towards the ground, where a tuft of yellow hay lies, illuminated by the light. On the right, a cool, white beam of daylight streams in through a tall, narrow window; on the left, the barn remains almost black. Dark shadows hang in the corners; the beams of the ceiling are barely distinguishable. On the left, the wall is at its darkest; there, the wall dissolves into a brown, grainy shadow in which only an upright stake is still visible. The signature appears in the bottom right-hand corner, applied with a flourish to the wet paint. The animals’ hides are painted with broad, fleshy strokes, the hay with short, light touches. Stobbaerts uses a sober palette of burnt umber, ochre and a grubby grey-green, in which only the white hide of the cow on the left truly reflects light. The painting contains no anecdote and no figures: it is a study of posture, weight and darkness, as practised by the seventeenth-century cattle painters. In the darkest areas, the paint is almost black, with the occasional smudge of grey-green. The loose finish betrays the hand of someone who worked on site rather than polishing the painting in the studio. Jan Stobbaerts (Antwerp 1838 – Antwerp 1914) was one of the first Belgian painters to treat the slaughterhouse and the stable as subjects in their own right. He exhibited in Antwerp and Brussels and made a name for himself with paintings of cows, horses and pigs, rendered with an almost rustic directness. His work is held in Belgian museums. A subdued, sombre stable scene that comes to life in a rural interior.