A Merry Company
Framed: 16 1/4 x 21 3/4 x 1 inches (41.28 x 55.25 x 2.54 cm)
Dutch and Flemish Drawings: 16th and 17th Centuries, R.M. Light and Company, Boston, November-December 1960, no. 16.
Jacob Jordaens 1593-1678, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, November 29, 1968-January 5, 1969, no. 217, as The King Drinks.
Master Drawings from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, MO, September 12-December 3, 1989, as The King Drinks.
Master European Drawings from Polish Collections, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 17-June 6, 1993. NAMA Addition.
Dürer to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, June 23-August 18, 1996; The Cummer Museum and Gardens, Jacksonville, FL, September 20-November 29, 1996; The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, December 21, 1996-March 2, 1997, no. 23, as Merry Company.
Dürer to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Permanent Collection, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, July 12-September 6, 1998, no cat., as Merry Company.
The Human Body, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, November 30, 2010-June 5, 2011, no cat., as A Merry Company.
Revelers gather around a table for an evening of merriment in this preparatory study for Jordaens’ earliest version of the painting The King Drinks. Ranging in age and gender, members of the merry company turn their attention to a stout man on the right side who holds a pitcher of drink. In the final painting, this man wears a crown, identifying him as the “king” presiding over the feast of Epiphany. The moment depicted here must be when the group salutes the newly appointed “king” with cries of “the king drinks!”
Private collection, Amsterdam;
Martinus Joseph Antonius Maria Schretlen (1890-1972), Amsterdam, 1958-60;
R.M Light and Company, Boston, 1960-61;
Purchased from R.M. Light and Company by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1961.
Roger-Adolf d’Hulst, Gentse Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeschiedenis en de Oudheidkunde, vol. 17 (Ghent, The Netherlands: Hoger Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis en Oudheidkunde van de Universiteit te Gent, 1957-1958) 138-39, 141, (repro.), as De Koning drinkt [?].
Dutch and Flemish Drawings: 16th and 17th Centuries, exh. cat. (Boston: R.M. Light and Company, 1960).
Michael Jaffé, Jacob Jordaens 1593-1678, exh. cat. (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1968), 198, 363, (repro.), as The King Drinks.
Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 182, (repro.), as The King Drinks (Epiphany Feast).
Roger-Adolf d’Hulst, Jordaens Drawings (Brussels: Arcade, 1974), 1: no. A136, p. 226; 3: unpaginated, (repro.), as Merry Company.
Bernhard Schnackenburg, Flämische Meister in der Kasseler Gemäldegalerie (1985, repr., Kassel, Germany; Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Kassel, 1985), 40, 42, (repro.), as Fröliche Gesellschaft.
Roger Ward and Mark S. Weil, Master Drawings from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, exh. cat. (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1989), 10, 22, (repro.), as The King Drinks.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 166, (repro.), as Study for “The King Drinks.”
Roger Ward, Dürer to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1996), 91-93, (repro.), as Merry Company.
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 74, (repro.), as Merry Company.
Babette Bohn, Shelley Perlove, and George Keyes, eds., Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections: The Age of Bernini, Rembrandt, and Poussin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).
