# Young Scholar in His Study: Melancholy [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [CODDE, Pieter]() - Date: 1601-1650 - Technique: Oil on panel, 46 x 34 cm ## Commentary Young Scholar in His Study: Melancholy c. 1630 Oil on panel, 46 x 34 cm Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille Pieter Codde painted portraits, history paintings, and high-life scenes as well as military subjects. His small picture of a Young Scholar in his Study, painted in shades of silvery grey and ochres, is a kind of secularization of Dürer's Melancholia. It is more appealing than his more ambitious genre compositions, where he gives way to his preference for rather coarse and plump types, over-glossy textures, and exaggerated highlights. The rooms Codde represents are always of less interest to him than the people he placed in them, and although he lived long enough to see the accomplishments of the great Dutch painters of interiors - he died in 1678, three years after Vermeer - he never attempted to emulate their achievements. But he made at least one attempt to make a radical shift in his style. In the half of Frans Hals's Meagre Company he completed he made a concerted effort to emulate Hals's touch. <P> <TABLE ALIGN=LEFT CELLPADDING=5 BORDER=1 WIDTH=320 BGCOLOR="\#99CCCC"> <TR VALIGN=MIDDLE><TD><IMG SRC="/support/gif/listen.gif" BORDER=0 VALIGN=MIDDLE> Suggested listening \(streaming mp3, 2 minutes\):<BR><A HREF="\#" onClick="w=window.open \('/music1/19\_cent/bellini\_malinconia.html', 'newWin', 'scrollbars=yes,status=no,dependent=yes,screenX=0,screenY=0,width=350,height=350'\);w.opener=this;w.focus\(\);return true"><B>Vincenzo Bellini: Malinconia, ninfa gentile</B></A> </TD></TR></TABLE> ## Related artworks - [A Merry Company in an Interior]() - [Actors' Changing Room]() - [Art-lovers in a Painter's Studio]() - [Elegant Company Making Music]() - [Gallant Company]() - [Interior with Musicians Seated around a Table \(detail\)]() - [Interior with Musicians Seated around a Table]() - [Lady Seated at Virginals]() - [Merry Company]() - [Musical Company]() - [Portrait of a Child]() - [The Dancing Lesson]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()