Mythology: 24 Paintings and Prints portraying The Satyr and the Traveller (or Peasant), one of Aesop's Fables

The Satyr and the Traveller (or Peasant) is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 35 in the Perry Index. The popular idiom 'to blow hot and cold' is associated with it.

Ioannis Patousas

Collection of Aesop's Fables in Greek, Venice

The Satyr and the Peasant, c. 1644

There are Greek versions and a late Latin version of the fable by Avianus. In its usual form, a satyr or faun comes across a traveller wandering in the forest in deep winter. Taking pity on him, the satyr invites him home. When the man blows on his fingers, the satyr asks him what he is doing and is impressed when told that he can warm them that way. But when the man blows on his soup and tells the satyr that this is to cool it, the honest woodland creature is appalled at such double dealing and drives the traveller from his cave. There is an alternative version in which a friendship between the two is ended by this behaviour.

Walter Crane

The Satyr and the Peasant, c. 1887

Walter Crane (15 August 1845 – 14 March 1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the latter 19th century.

Crane's work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles and other decorative arts. Crane is also remembered for his creation of a number of iconic images associated with the international Socialist movement. More

CRE NEEFS, Jacques; ( Flemish; 1610-1660)

The Satyr Visiting The Peasant Family

Engraving, printed in black ink

38.9 x 40

CRE NEEFS, Jacques; ( Flemish; 1610-1660) AFTER JORDAENS, Jacob; (Flemish; 1593-1678)

The idiom 'to blow hot and cold (with the same breath)', was defined by the emblem books of the Renaissance, particularly those that focused on fables as providing lessons for moral conduct. While Hieronymus Osius tells the tale of the traveller and draws the moral that one should avoid those who are inconstant, Gabriele Faerno puts it in the context of friendship and counsels that this should be avoided with the 'double-tongued' (bilingues). In this he is followed by Giovanni Maria Verdizotti, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and Geoffrey Whitney. However, in Francis Barlow's edition of the fables (1687), the Latin text warns against those whose heart and tongue do not accord

Jan van der Venne (fl. 1616–1651)

De satyr bij de boer, first half of 17th century

Oil on panel

38 × 54 cm (15 × 21.3 in)

Brukenthal National Museum, Romania

Jan van de Venne (active by 1616 – died before 1651), was a Flemish painter of genre, religious scenes, and cabinets who was court painter to the governors of the Southern Netherlands. Many of his works depict "low-life" genre scenes of tooth-pullers, card-players and hurdy-gurdy players, tronies and expressive religious scenes. More

The fable was included as Le satyre et le passant among the fables of Jean de la Fontaine (V.7) but with no alteration of moral. However, this version too was to be reinterpreted in a political sense in the 19th century. In the course of his very free version, John Matthews expanded the text to comment on the 1819 election in Westminster and advise the voters to adopt the satyr's view of blowing hot and cold. In France the satirical cartoonist J.J. Grandville also updated the meaning by showing a group of loungers reading and commenting on the newspapers in a public park next to a statue illustrating the fable.

Sebastiano Ricci

The Satyr and the Traveller, Early 18th century

The Louvre

Sebastiano Ricci (1 August 1659 – 15 May 1734) was an Italian painter of the late Baroque school of Venice. About the same age as Piazzetta, and an elder contemporary of Tiepolo, he represents a late version of the vigorous and luminous Cortonesque style of grand manner fresco painting. More

The Age of Enlightenment had intervened and prominent thinkers had then attacked the logic of this fable in particular. In the article on "Fable" in his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), Voltaire remarked that the man was quite right in his method of warming his fingers and cooling his soup, and the satyr was a fool to take exception.[ The German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing asserts in one of his essays on fables that its fault 'lies not in the inaccuracy of the allegory, but that it is an allegory only', perhaps reaching towards the conclusion that the fable had been badly framed around an already existing proverb. 'The man ought really to have acted contradictorily; but in this fable he is only supposed to have done so.' By using the fable to focus on political behaviour, therefore, the writers and artists give it a justification not inherent within its narrative.

Constantijn à Renesse (1626 – 1680)

Satyr at the peasant's house, c. 1653

Oil on canvas

168 × 203 cm (66.1 × 79.9 in)

National Museum in Warsaw, Poland

Constantijn à Renesse (1626 – 1680), was a Dutch Golden Age painter and pupil of Rembrandt. He was born in Maarssen to the son of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange's military chaplain. He moved with his family to Breda and was sent to Leiden to the University, where besides literature studies he also took drawing lessons from Rembrandt in 1649. He moved to Eindhoven in 1653 where he later died. He is known for religious prints and drawings and is documented working with Rembrandt on paintings of religious subjects. More

Hippolyte Lecomte

Le satyre et le passant

1818 edition of La Fontaine's Fables

Hippolyte Lecomte (28 December 1781, Puiseaux – 25 July 1857, Paris) was a French painter best known for large scale historical paintings and ballet designs. His wife, born Camille Vernet, was the sister of the painter Émile Jean-Horace Vernet; the caricaturist Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, better known as "J.J. Grandville", worked in Lecomte's studio (See Below). His son, Charles Emile Hippolyte Lecomte-Vernet, was also a noted painter. More

File:Le-satyre-et-le-passant Grandville.jpg

Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (1803–1847)

J.J. Grandville's reinterpretation of La Fontaine's Fable of "Le Satyr et le Passant", c. 1838

Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (13 September 1803, Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle – 17 March 1847, Vanves), generally known by the pseudonym of Jean-Jacques or J. J. Grandville, was a French caricaturist. He was born at Nancy, in northeastern France, to an artistic and theatrical family. The name "Grandville" was his grandparents' professional stage name. Grandville received his first instruction in drawing from his father, a painter of miniatures. At the age of twenty-one he moved to Paris, and soon afterwards published a collection of lithographs entitled Les Tribulations de la petite proprieté. He followed this with Les Plaisirs de tout âge and La Sibylle des salons (1827); but the work which first established his fame was Les Métamorphoses du jour (1828–29), a series of seventy scenes in which individuals with the bodies of men and faces of animals are made to play a human comedy. These drawings are remarkable for the extraordinary skill with which human characteristics are represented in animal facial features.

The success of this work led to his being engaged as artistic contributor to various periodicals, such as La Silhouette, L'Artiste, La Caricature, Le Charivari; and his political caricatures which were characterized by marvelous fertility of satirical humour, soon came to enjoy a general popularity.

After the reinstitution of prior censorship of caricature in 1835, Grandville turned almost exclusively to book illustration, supplying illustrations for various standard works, such as the songs of Béranger, the fables of La Fontaine, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe. He also continued to issue various lithographic collections, among which may be mentioned La Vie privée et publique des animaux, Les Cent Proverbes, Un Autre Monde and Les Fleurs animées.

Though the designs of Grandville are occasionally unnatural and absurd, they usually display keen analysis of character and marvellous inventive ingenuity, and his humour is always tempered and refined by delicacy of sentiment and a vein of sober thoughtfulness. He died on 17 March 1847 and is buried in the Cimetière Nord of Saint-Mandé just outside Paris. More

ricci, sebastiano a scene from aeso | allegory | sotheby's n09515lot7y564en:

Attributed to Sebastiano Ricci, BELLUNO 1659 - 1734 VENICE

A SCENE FROM AESOP'S FABLE: THE SATYR AND THE PEASANT

oil on canvas

24 1/8 by 27 7/8 in.; 61.2 by 71 cm

Sebastiano Ricci, see above

For a variety of reasons the fable of "The Satyr and the Peasant" in particular became one of the most popular genre subjects in Europe and by some artists was painted in many versions. It was particularly popular in the Netherlands, where it brought together the contemporary taste for Classical mythology and a local liking for peasant subjects. At the start of the 17th century the poet Joost van den Vondel published his popular collection based on Marcus Gheeraerts' prints, Vorstelijke Warande der Dieren (Princely pleasure-ground of beasts, 1617), in which the poem Satyr en Boer appears.[12] This seems to have appealed to the imagination of the young Jacob Jordaens, who went on to produce some dozen versions of the subject and did more than any other painter to popularise it.[13] He was followed in his native Antwerp by others such as Willem van Herp and Jan Cossiers, while in the Northern Netherlands it was taken up by the group of Rembrandt's pupils and followers, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Barent Fabritius and Claes Corneliszoon Moeyaert, as well as by genre painters like Benjamin Gerritsz Cuyp, Jan Steen and David Ryckaert the younger.

Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)

The Satyr and the Peasant, c. mid 17th century

Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (19 August 1621 – 29 September 1674), was a Dutch Golden Age painter and a favourite student of Rembrandt. He was also an etcher, an amateur poet, a collector and an adviser on art. More

A peasant family sits around a wooden table in a Dutch kitchen. The room's exposed rafters, assorted domestic objects on shelves, and cobbled floor are all rendered in careful detail. A woman serves a man who blows on his soup to cool it. A young child faces her, holding a spoon in his upraised hand and begging for food. A lively young woman wearing a large straw hat and an old woman fill the space between the eating man and the standing woman. A crude fellow in the background spoons soup in...:

Jan Steen

Satyr and the Peasant Family, c.1660-62

Jan Havickszoon Steen (c. 1626 – buried 3 February 1679) was a Dutch genre painter of the 17th century (also known as the Dutch Golden Age). His works are known for their psychological insight, sense of humour and abundance of colour. Steen was born in Leiden, where his well-to-do, Catholic family. He was the eldest of eight or more children. Like his even more famous contemporary Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Steen attended the Latin school and became a student in Leiden. He received his painterly education from Nicolaes Knupfer (1603–1660), a German painter of historical and figurative scenes in Utrecht. Influences of Knupfer can be found in Steen's use of composition and colour. Other sources of inspiration were Adriaen van Ostade and Isaac van Ostade, painters of rural scenes, who lived in Haarlem. Whether Steen actually studied with Ostade is not known.

In 1648 Jan Steen and Gabriël Metsu founded the painters' Guild of Saint Luke at Leiden. Soon after he became an assistant to the renowned landscape painter Jan van Goyen and moved into his house on the Bierkade in The Hague. On Oct 3, 1649 he married van Goyen's daughter Margriet, with whom he would have eight children. Steen worked with his father-in-law until 1654, when he moved to Delft, where he ran the brewery De Slang for three years without much success.

Steen lived in Warmond, just north of Leiden, from 1656 till 1660 and in Haarlem from 1660 till 1670 and in both periods he was especially productive. In 1670, after the death of his wife in 1669 and his father in 1670, Steen moved back to Leiden, where he stayed the rest of his life. When the art market collapsed in 1672, called the Year of Disaster, Steen opened a tavern. In April 1673 he married Maria van Egmont, who gave him another child. In 1674 he became president of the Saint Lucas Guild. Frans van Mieris became one of his drinking companions. He died in Leiden in 1679 and was interred in a family grave in the Pieterskerk. More

Johann Liss, German (c. 1597-1631)

The Satyr and the Peasant, c. 1623/1626

Oil on canvas

133.3 x 167.4 cm (52 1/2 x 65 7/8 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Johann Liss (c. 1590 or 1597 - 1629 or 1630) was a leading German Baroque painter of the 17th century, active mainly in Venice. Liss was born in Oldenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. After an initial education in his home state, he continued his studies with Hendrick Goltzius in Haarlem and Amsterdam. Around 1620 he travelled through Paris to Venice. He moved to Rome around 1620–1622, and his first works there were influenced by the style of Caravaggio.

Although his earlier work was concerned with the contrasts of light and shadow, his final move to Venice in the early 1620s modified his style and gave impetus to brilliant color and a spirited treatment of the painted surface. In 1627, he was created an admired large altarpiece, the Inspiration of Saint Jerome in San Nicolò da Tolentino. His loose brushstrokes seem precursor to rococo styles of the Guardi brothers.This final style, along with that of other "foreign" painters residing in Venice, Domenico Fetti and Bernardo Strozzi, represent the first inroads of Baroque style into the republic.

His legacy is as a painter of both sensuous mythological and pious biblical subjects, a master of colors and Baroque painting. He was most influential to Venetian 18th-century painters like Sebastiano Ricci, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Giovanni Piazzetta. More

Jacob Jordaens, 1593 - 1678

Satyr and Peasant

c. 1615

67 x 51 cm

Oil on canvas

Glasgow Life, Glasgow Museums

Aesop’s ancient fable warns against the double minded, and Jordaens’ earliest known version seeks to visualize this lesson in several ways at once. The figure of the satyr – half man, half beast – literally embodies the idea of man’s conflicting spiritual and animal urges. This theme is echoed by the two women: one is modestly dressed, her head covered; the other wears a low-cut blouse and flowers in her hair. They could almost be seen as homespun personifications of spiritual and earthly love, respectively. More

Jacob Jordaens (19 May 1593 – 18 October 1678) was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and tapestry designer known for his history paintings, genre scenes and portraits. After Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, he was the leading Flemish Baroque painter of his day. Unlike those contemporaries he never travelled abroad to study Italian painting, and his career is marked by an indifference to their intellectual and courtly aspirations. In fact, except for a few short trips to locations in the Low Countries, he remained in Antwerp his entire life. As well as being a successful painter, he was a prominent designer of tapestries. Like Rubens, Jordaens painted altarpieces, mythological, and allegorical scenes, and after 1640—the year Rubens died—he was the most important painter in Antwerp for large-scale commissions and the status of his patrons increased in general. However, he is best known today for his numerous large genre scenes based on proverbs in the manner of his contemporary Jan Brueghel the Elder, depicting The King Drinks and As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young. Jordaens' main artistic influences, besides Rubens and the Brueghel family, were northern Italian painters such as Jacopo Bassano, Paolo Veronese, and Caravaggio. More

Jacob Jordaens, 1593 - 1678

THE SATYR AND THE PEASANT FAMILY

oil on canvas

46 1/2 by 59 1/4 in.; 118.2 by 150.5 cm