Karel Dujardin

Karel Dujardin (September 27, 1626 November 20, 1678) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. Although he did a few portraits and a few history paintings of religious subjects, most of his work is small Italianate landscape scenes with animals and peasants, and other genre scenes. Dujardin spent two extended periods, at the beginning and end of his career, in Italy, and most of his paintings and landscape etchings have an Italian or Italianate setting.

Biography Karel Dujardin was a Dutch painter and etcher, born in Amsterdam in 1626. Typical of his landscape paintings is Farm Animals in the Shade of a Tree (1656; National Gallery, London). He died in Venice in 1678.

After supposedly training with Nicolaes Berchem, the young Dujardin went to Italy, and joined the Bentvueghels group of painters in Rome, among whom he was known as , "goat-beard", or Bokkebaart. Here he encountered his first artistic successes.

According to Houbraken, while in Lyon in France, he contracted considerable debts, and married his (older) landlady to free himself of them. He went with her to Amsterdam, where his pictures were valued very highly.

Collections Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles. Allegory on the Transitoriness and the Brevity of Life Dujardin is represented in the following collections amongst others: Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, UK; Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Louvre Museum, Paris; Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery, The Hague; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota; National Gallery, London, UK; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Crocker Art Museum, California; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK; Harvard University Art Museums, Massachusetts; Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, Scotland; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Ringling Museum of Art, Florida; Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium; Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest; The Wallace Collection, London, UK; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid; Rhode Island School of Design, RI; Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend-on-Sea.

Work