Jana&JS
This work by Jana&JS is a street art interpretation of the seventeenth-century painting Village street with hurdy-gurdy player by the Dutch Baroque painter Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685), part of the Kaiserschild Foundation’s art collection; the painting is on permanent loan to the Alte Galerie of the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz.
Influenced by Rembrandt
The original work by van Ostade features a hurdy-gurdy player in front of a farmhouse shown in an oblique perspective; he is hoping for alms from the small audience standing around him and listening intently. The group is composed of young and old together; several children are gathered in front of a house with a typical Dutch split door, a chicken ladder, and a pigeon coop, joining the adults to listen to the music. A musical performance was always an out-of-the-ordinary event in seventeenth-century everyday life.
The period shown in the painting is the time after the Thirty Years' War. Great tracts of land in Europe are ravaged and destroyed. Roving vagabonds and demobilized mercenaries are frequent sights in the villages. The hurdy-gurdy is the instrument played by beggars and vagrants; and yet those who make music have an advantage, as people give alms more readily to them than to those who only bemoan their fate. This work shows the influence on Adriaen van Ostade of the chiaroscuro style favored by Rembrandt, whose younger contemporary he was.
A ukulele player takes center stage
Jana&JS, a duo of street artists, have based their reinterpretation on van Ostade’s motif, giving the scene a contemporary twist and rendering it in their inimitable style. The resulting work, titled Village square with ukulele player, draws structurally on van Ostade’s painting, showing the same number of people in almost the same positions, but features women rather than the three men that appear in the original.
Rooted in everyday life
As long as he lived, van Ostade never left his hometown of Haarlem, and the motifs he chose were drawn from his immediate surroundings. Village square with ukulele player similarly bears witness to the artists’ locality; the square depicted in the scene is located in the small town where Jana&JS live, and some of the people who appear in the work live there too.
