Street scene was brought to the museum as a painting by an unknown artist. It was connected with the name of Adrian van Ostade, based on the inscription on the back of the canvas. While the painting was kept in the museum’s collection, a version arouse about it being created by Flemish artist Jan Baptist Lambrechts. It is not known who first proposed this attribution.
However, it was confirmed by comparing the paintings belonging to our museum with some famous works by this master, including Revel from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Scene at the Tavern from the State Hermitage Museum, Vegetable Market from Riga City Museum, and some others. Information about Jan Baptiste Lambrechts is quite fragmentary. He worked in the city of Lille, and was known primarily as a master of small genre scenes created in the spirit of Dutch painting of the 17th century.
He painted many revels and scenes in taverns, with street musicians and passers-by. His compositions are always straightforward and unpretentious. Street Scene is one of his typical works. In the street, three men who are apparently passing by are talking to a woman. The color scheme of the picture is subdued, expressed in shades of dark green, dark brown, dark red and gray-ocher half-tints. The spatial environment is almost tangibly filled with air, blurring the contours of indistinct architectural details and trees. The upper bar of the canvas stretcher bears the inscription From the Rostopchin Gallery.
The gallery of the Count Andrei Fedorovich Rostopchin (1813-1892) was one of the first Moscow public art galleries. His art collection included more than 280 paintings by 133 Western European and Russian artists, portraits of Russian and European public figures of the 18th and 19th centuries and family portraits, as well as sculptures, mosaics and a rich library. The collection was inherited from his father, Governor of Moscow Fedor Vasilievich Rostopchin (1763-1826), and stored in the house in Lubyanka Street and the Voronovo estate. The gallery was opened on January 8, 1850, but its owner started selling art works as early as in 1852. A.F. Rostopchin went bankrupt, closed the museum and sold 256 art works at public auctions in Saint-Petersburg, during the years of 1852 to 1868. The fate of these works is still unknown. The history of the painting from the Radishchev Museum before 1919 has not yet been established either.
