Pieter Codde

Pieter Jacobsz. Codde (December 11, 1599 – October 12, 1678) was a Dutch painter of genre works, guardroom scenes and portraits.

Codde was a technically skilled painter. He is said to have studied with Frans Hals, but it is more likely that his training was with the portrait painter, inn-keeper, actor and art-dealer Barent van Someren (1572–1632) or possibly with Cornelis van der Voort (1576–1624). In 1623 he married the 18-year-old Marritje Arents. In the summer of 1625, on a party, organized by Van Someren on his estate, Codde got into a fight with his friend, the artist Cornelis Duyster. It ended with bloodshed as the two hit each other in the face with jars. By 1628 Codde was living in the Sint Antoniesbreestraat, then a fashionable street in Amsterdam with many painters. In 1636 the couple divorced after he was accused of raping the maid; because nothing could be proved he was only locked up for one night. His wife went to live with Pieter Potter, their neighbor and the father of the painter Paulus Potter. In 1657 he purchased a house on the Keizersgracht for 5,000 guilders, where he lived until he died. When Pieter Codde died his maid, Barendje Willems, inherited most of his property.

His earliest known work is a piece from 1626, Portrait of a Young Man, now in the Ashmolean. Most of his best-remembered works were executed in Amsterdam and are small-scale paintings. They are distinctive in their silvery-gray tonalities, and many are musically themed, such as his first known genre work, Dancing Lesson (Louvre) from 1627, Musical Company of 1639, The Lute Player (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and, Concert, a piece now in the Uffizi Gallery. The other piece by Codde in the Uffizi is a genre work, Conversation. Codde also painted historical religious works, such as his Adoration of the Shepherds, from 1645, in the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam.

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