loading page

Loading the page ...

Cornelis Dusart

1660–1704, Haarlem

Cornelis Dusart, who worked his whole life in Haarlem, was apprenticed to Adriaen van Ostade in 1675 and admitted, as a free master, to the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem in January 1679. His extensive oeuvre of paintings and drawings marks the final high point of the peasant genre in Dutch art. He also produced a high-quality corpus of some 15 etchings and a fairly large number of mezzotint prints, some of which were produced in collaboration with his friend and fellow-artist Jacob Gole. The artist’s style was greatly influenced by his master Ostade; after his death Dusart acquired the contents of his studio, includ­ing a substantial stock of partly unfinished paintings, drawings and prints. Another major source of creative inspiration was Jan Steen’s genre painting with its moralistic and satirical undertones. Right from his childhood days Dusart suffered from poor health and, having remained a bachelor all his life, died in Haarlem in 1704.