Pieter Codde

Pieter Codde is easy to place among painters of elegant Dutch interiors, but one commission pulled him onto a much larger stage. In 1637 he was asked to finish the enormous Amsterdam civic guard portrait now known as the Meagre Company. Frans Hals had begun it four years earlier and left it unfinished, so Codde had to enter another famous painter’s composition and bring it to completion. His own usual scale was much smaller: merry companies, portraits and history scenes. Codde also moved in literary circles. A tragedy was dedicated to him in 1627, and one of his own pastoral love poems was published in 1633. The Rijksmuseum records few dated paintings by him after 1645, although he lived until 1678 and later served as an expert asked to assess Italian paintings for an Amsterdam art dealer.