Merry Company with Masked Dancers

Two years after his portrait of a newly married couple, Codde was back at the kind of party he was known for, and this time some of the guests hide their faces. In the middle of the room a woman in a fashionable black dress dances with a man in a Venetian mask and a fool's costume, and his two companions on the left wear masks too. Around them the others go on eating, drinking and making music. Scenes of elegant young revellers like this, called merry companies, were popular in the early 17th century, and Codde was one of the Amsterdam painters who specialised in them. He signed and dated the panel on a book at lower right, 1636. It belonged to the Viennese collector Alexander Scharf, and the Mauritshuis bought it at his sale in Paris in 1876 for 2,000 francs.