| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Story of Dutch Painting
Author: Caffin, Charles H.
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Story of Dutch Painting" ***
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
THE STORY
OF DUTCH PAINTING
[Illustration: MAN WITH A FUR CAP REMBRANDT
THE MUSEUM OF THE HERMITAGE, ST. PETERSBURG]
THE STORY OF
DUTCH PAINTING
BY
CHARLES H. CAFFIN
AUTHOR OF
“HOW TO STUDY PICTURES,” ETC.
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1911
Copyright, 1909, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published November, 1909_
THE DE VINNE PRESS
TO THE PRESENT AND FUTURE ART
OF THE NEW REPUBLIC OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THIS STORY OF THE ART OF THE OLD DUTCH REPUBLIC
IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER, 1909
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE END OF THE OLD 3
II THE OLD ORDER CHANGES 19
III BEGINNING OF THE NEW 35
IV FRANS HALS 49
V REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN 71
VI THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT 96
VII DUTCH GENRE 107
VIII GERARD TERBORCH, JAN VERMEER, AND JAN STEEN 127
IX BIBLICAL SUBJECTS AND PORTRAITURE 150
X LANDSCAPE 169
XI VAN GOYEN AND HOBBEMA 187
XII JACOB VAN RUISDAEL 193
INDEX 201
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MAN WITH A FUR CAP _Rembrandt_ _Frontispiece_
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Cie.
FACING PAGE
COUPLE DRINKING _Jan Steen_ 21
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST _Gerard Terborch_ 28
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
LANDSCAPE WITH FENCE _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 37
LANDSCAPE WITH OAK _Jan van Goyen_ 44
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
THE JOLLY TOPER _Frans Hals_ 54
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF NICOLAES VAN DER MEER _Frans Hals_ 59
REUNION OF THE OFFICERS OF ST.
ANDREW _Frans Hals_ 67
THE SYNDICS OF THE CLOTH GUILD _Rembrandt_ 78
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
SORTIE OF THE BANNING COCK COMPANY _Rembrandt_ 81
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH BAS _Rembrandt_ 87
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF HENDRICKJE STOFFELS _Rembrandt_ 90
THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS _Rembrandt_ 96
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Cie.
PEASANTS ROUND A HEARTH _Adriaen van Ostade_ 110
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
OLD WOMAN SPINNING _Nicolaes Maes_ 114
OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATION _Gabriel Metsu_ 116
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
LADY AT THE CLAVICHORD _Caspar Netscher_ 125
THE DESPATCH _Gerard Terborch_ 127
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
OFFICER WRITING A LETTER _Gerard Terborch_ 129
GIRL AT THE WINDOW _Johannes (Jan) Vermeer_ 132
HEAD OF A GIRL _Johannes (Jan) Vermeer_ 135
THE COOK _Johannes (Jan) Vermeer_ 138
THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO _Johannes (Jan) Vermeer_ 141
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
THE INN _Jan Steen_ 144
PORTRAIT OF PAUL POTTER _Bartholomeus van der Helst_ 163
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
FAMILY OF ADMIRAL PIETER PIETERSZ _Thomas de Keyser_ 166
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
THE YOUNG BULL _Paul Potter_ 179
THE AVENUE, MIDDELHARNIS, HOLLAND _Meindert Hobbema_ 190
VIEW OF HAARLEM _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 193
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
OAK-WOOD _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 194
THE MILL NEAR WYK-BY-DUURSTEDE _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 199
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
THE JEWISH CEMETERY _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 200
THE STORY OF DUTCH PAINTING
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE OLD
On the 25th of October, 1555, Charles V abdicated the imperial crown,
ceding Spain and the Netherlands to his favorite son, Philip II. The
event proved to be the prologue of a drama, which in its immediate
aspects involved the decay of Spain and the growth of Holland, but in
its wider significance was to be the beginning of a new era.
For the modern world dates from the seventeenth century, and its
pioneers were the Hollanders of that period. Practically everything that
we recognize to-day as characteristic of the modern spirit in politics,
religion, science, society, industry, commerce, and art has its
prototype amid that sturdy people; being either the cause or the product
of their struggle for independence and their self-development. Nor, in
paying honor to the Dutch, need we attempt to suggest that they were the
inventors of these characteristics. Most of the latter were, so to say,
in the air. In the progress of things they had been evolved. But our
debt to the Hollanders is that they attracted them and gave them
practical application, and thus set the world upon a definite path of
new progress. It is particularly with the newness of their art that we
are here concerned, but we will try to study it in its relation to the
material and mental environment of the nation itself, of whose newness
it was so immediate a product and so manifest an expression.
For it is in this way that the art of every country may be studied with
most interest and profit. Although there will appear from time to time
certain individual artists, whose genius cannot be satisfactorily
correlated to its environment, but will indeed, as in the case of
Rembrandt’s, seem to be actually contradictory to it, yet even they can
be more fully comprehended through the very contrast that they offer to
the mass of their contemporaries, whose relation to their environment is
readily discernible. Apropos of this customary connection between the
artist and the spirit of his time, may be quoted that phrase of Richard
Wagner’s, that all great art is produced in response to a common and
collective need on the part of the community. It may serve as an
excellent touchstone for testing the quality of this new Dutch art which
we are to study, so let us for a moment examine its face value, leaving
the fuller application of its meaning to all the subsequent pages of
this book.
In Wagner’s mind great art, as he conceived it, stood out in clear
contrast against a background of less art, of art which is produced in
response to some more restricted impulse than that of a common and
collective need of the people; for example, in catering to the whims of
fashion. Such was the major part of the art of France produced in the
last days before the Revolution. The great mass of the people were too
abased by ill rule and exactions to have any consciousness but that of
hunger, any common collective need but to fill their bellies. The only
articulate demand to reach the artists was from the ephemeral swarm of
courtiers, sycophants, and, as we should say to-day, “grafters,” who
buzzed in splendor and profligacy at court. For a moment the glamour of
this life inspired a great artist, Watteau, who, however, it is to be
noted, was a foreigner. What he himself was he owed to Flanders. To him
the glamour of the French court was but a pageant, a spectacle passing
before his eyes, leaving his heart and conscience untouched. When,
however, artists of French birth, reared in the home environment,
followed in his steps, they revealed nothing of Watteau’s idealistic
detachment from the grossness of the theme, but became purveyors to the
shallow profligacy of their patrons. And to this day Van Loo, Boucher,
and Fragonard have no place with other old masters in the hearts of the
people; they are still the favorites of fashion. Nor was it until the
upheaval of the Revolution had precipitated the gathering consciousness
of a common and collective need on the part of the people, that French
art in the nineteenth century began to develop a vital response.
Moreover, what was characteristic of French art during the eighteenth
century was generally symptomatic of the art of the whole of Europe. The
latter had little or no creative force, was essentially an art of more
or less feeble and perfunctory imitation. For the age itself was
non-creative; a period of exhaustion after the strenuousness of the
seventeenth century, or of the slow forming of new alinements after the
shattering of the old ones; of speculation and doubts rather than of
convictions.
So the artists, feeling no spur in the needs of the moment, fell to
imitating the Renaissance artists of Italy. Among them, if we may
anticipate the end of our present story, were the Dutch. They, too, had
exhausted the immediate impulse of their own environment. War had made
them a world-power, and peace brought them the foreign entanglements
that maintenance of such a position entailed. They were no longer under
the compulsion of an immense centripetal energy, a nation concentrated
upon its own self-reliance. They began to spread themselves as
cosmopolitans, aping the fashions of the rest of the world; and, as the
fashion of the period was to be Italianate, so the artists of Holland,
lacking at home the momentum of a common and collective need, ceased to
be a school of great original painters, and became instead clumsy
imitators of the splendors and elevation of the Italian masters of the
Renaissance.
After this glance at the nature and cause of decline of Dutch art in the
eighteenth century, we may return with a better appreciation of what is
ahead of us in our study--the establishment in Holland in the
seventeenth century of a new art, the product of a new nation; of a
group of original and distinguished painters who formed, as Fromentin
says, “the last of the great schools, perhaps the most original,
certainly the most local.”
The course of our story, therefore, spreads before us. It is to discover
in what respect the Dutch School of the seventeenth century was great,
how it was original, and in what way its genius grew out of and
responded to the common and collective need of the Dutch people of the
period. Meanwhile there are the previous fifty years of the sixteenth
century to be accounted for, which brings us back to the prologue of the
drama, the abdication of Charles V.
That monarch, born in Ghent and educated in Flanders, had a special
feeling of regard for his “dear Netherlanders.” Incidentally, they were
the richest jewel in the imperial crown, and he had drawn from them
annually two fifths of the enormous revenue that he squandered in wars
of ambition elsewhere. He had, moreover, proved his love for them by
systematic slaughtering of dissenters, that the remnant might be
preserved within the fold of the Catholic Church. It was Brussels,
therefore, that he selected as the scene of his abdication. Formerly the
capital of the Dukes of Burgundy, it had been under imperial rule the
seat of government of the vice-regents of the Netherlands; a city of
royal and princely palaces, immediately surrounded by parks and
game-forests, and fields and gardens, teeming with opulence; the royal
center of a group of cities. Of these Antwerp was the commercial chief,
the greatest emporium of trade in Europe, with an exchange in which five
thousand merchants daily congregated, and a port where five hundred
vessels daily made their entrance or departure. It was the
distributing-point for the imports from the East and for the products of
the Netherlands: textiles of most sumptuous fabrics as well as of plain
cloths and linens, works of gold and silver craftsmanship, agricultural
and dairy produce from the rich polders of the northern provinces, and
fish from a hundred thriving towns and villages along the coast.
So when the emperor, enfeebled by excesses of action and appetite, felt
his grip of power slackening, and determined to transfer this people of
three million souls, the most industrious, versatile, and liberty-loving
in the world, from his own pocket to that of his son, he saw to it that
the proceeding should be conducted with a pageantry of ceremonial worthy
of the occasion.
It was enacted in the hall of the renowned Order of the Knights of the
Golden Fleece, the walls of which were hung with superb tapestries from
the looms of Arras, representing the Biblical story of Gideon. The floor
was occupied by official representatives of the provinces, clad in the
sumptuous bravery of costume that distinguished this country and the
times. Upon the dais at one end, beneath a splendid canopy, three chairs
awaited the principals in the drama. Precisely at the stroke of three,
the emperor entered from the adjoining chapel. Strange whim of Fate, he
supported his gout-ridden body by leaning on the arm of the man who was
eventually to be chief in undoing the policy that this day
inaugurated--William, Count of Orange. Behind the emperor came Philip,
and the regent, Queen Mary of Hungary, the “Christian widow” admired by
Erasmus, who on one occasion had written to her brother, the emperor,
that “in her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be
prosecuted with such severity as that error might be at once
extinguished, care being only taken that the provinces were not entirely
depopulated.” Following the principals, appeared the Knights of the
Fleece in full regalia, and a retinue of nobles, many of them, Egmont,
Brederode, Berlaymont, Aerschot, and others, destined to figure in the
subsequent drama of the Netherlands.
After a long oration by a member of the Privy Council, depicting the
bodily infirmities of the emperor, his great zeal for his people’s
welfare, and the particulars of the cession he was about to make,
Charles himself read a long recapitulation of his wars and triumphs,
dwelt upon his failing strength, and commended his successor to the good
will and allegiance of his “dear Netherlanders.” At the conclusion of
the speech the whole audience was melted to tears and the emperor
himself wept like a child. Philip knelt in reverence, as his father made
the sign of the cross above his head and blessed him in the name of the
Holy Trinity. Then, while the assembled host applauded he rose to his
feet, ruler by the grace of God, vice the emperor, of the Netherlands,
Spain, and her American possessions. But he could not speak the language
of the Netherlands; his acceptance of their allegiance and his own
promises of regard for their interests had to be made through an
interpreter.
Philip, as he assumed possession of the lives of millions, is
characterized by Motley[A] as “a small meager man, much below middle
height, with thin legs, a narrow chest, and the shrinking, timid air of
an habitual invalid. In face, he was the living image of his father,
having the same broad forehead and blue eye, with the same aquiline,
but better-proportioned, nose. He had the same heavy hanging lip, with a
vast mouth and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was
fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He
had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His
demeanor in public was still, silent, almost sepulchral. He looked
habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech,
embarrassed and even suffering in manner. This was ascribed partly to a
natural haughtiness which he had occasionally endeavored to overcome,
and partly to habitual pains in the stomach, occasioned by his
inordinate fondness for pastry. Such,” adds Motley, “was the personal
appearance of the man who was to receive into his single hand the
destinies of half the world; whose single will was, for the future, to
shape the fortunes of every individual then present, of many more in
Europe, America, and at the ends of the earth, and of countless millions
yet unborn.”
Yet it may be doubted whether in the assembly present on that memorable
occasion there was a single person who even dimly perceived the enormity
of this idea. That a nation, without being consulted, should be
transferred like a herd of cattle from one owner to another, for his own
use and emolument and even to be slaughtered at his will, probably
seemed a natural and right proceeding. The fact emphasizes the immense
and profound change that during the ensuing fifty years was to take
possession of men’s imagination. The seventeenth century was to see a
new idea of the rights of nations and of the relations that should
govern a people and its rulers; the commencement, in fact, of a new era
of thought in its bearing on life. But as yet the minds of all engaged
in the ceremony were possessed with the old thought, the brute survival
of Roman imperialism and of the medieval conflict of rival autocrats;
the claim of a pope to exercise supreme sway over the consciences of
innumerable millions, and the contention of temporal potentates for
absolute control over the souls and bodies of their subjects. Thought
and life had been, and still were, based upon the supremacy of the
favored individual.
Let us note the effect which this idea had had upon the art of painting,
that we may better appreciate the change which is to come over the
latter, as the new idea begins to penetrate life and thought. How did
painting, notably the fullest expression of it in Italian art, respond
to the common and collective need of men’s lives and thoughts? In what
way did it embody the idea of the propriety and desirableness of the
subordination of all to the will of one individual?
In the first place, the idea was fostered by the Church. This is no
place to attempt to discuss, on the one hand, how far the Church in
upholding this doctrine was actuated by the desire of saving souls or,
on the other hand, to what degree it benefited the world. It is
sufficient to recall what an immense hold the Church had over the lives
and thoughts of men, and that to establish and maintain it she employed
painting as a handmaiden. Thus, in response to the common and collective
need of the people, the favored subjects of painting were the doctrines
and story of the Christian faith. The interiors of churches were
converted into vast picture-books for the edification of the people, as
well as into sumptuous shrines for the celebration of the mystic drama
of the Mass. And, corresponding to the stately ceremonial of the latter,
its superb accompaniments of lights and vestments, and its imposing
spectacle of ordered ritual, the altarpieces grew to be miracles of
stately composition; arrangements of form and color, light and shade,
built up with an artifice as imposing and moving in its effects as that
which had elaborated the Mass itself. So closely is the genius of these
paintings a product of the Catholic Church’s particular mode of
emphasizing its faith that it is evident, when men shall separate
themselves from such exposition of the faith, their common and
collective need will not demand pictures of this character. This will be
exemplified in the case of the Dutch. They will need religious pictures,
but neither of a ceremonial character, nor, in view of their idea of
worshiping in spirit and in temples not made with hands, for the
purposes of decorating their houses of God. Their religious pictures
will be of a kind to affect the thoughts and lives of the people in a
simpler and more unpretentious way, perhaps more intimately and
personally.
But, while the splendor and dignity of the Italian religious pictures
were inspired by the religious fervor that had continued from medieval
times, they also reflected the new impulse which had made possible the
Renaissance: the New Learning, the study of the classics, particularly
of Hellenic culture, preëminently of Plato. From the latter, scholars
and artists alike had learned to think in terms of the abstract. To the
artists had been revealed the abstract idea of beauty--of beauty as at
once the symbol and the expression of the highest good in life and
thought. They were no longer satisfied simply to represent the sacred
story and doctrines; they would have their pictures beautiful,
independently of the subject; they would give the subject itself a
higher significance through the abstract beauty of the compositions in
which it was embodied. Hence the principles of technical distinction
that began to sublimate their pictures, until they reached a degree of
abstract as well as material elevation that has never been, and, one
imagines, will never be surpassed. For it was the offspring of two
motives that may never again be found in wedlock--the religious need and
the need of expressing the enthusiasm for the cult of the classics. The
former may still be operative, but the latter has been dissipated in the
spread of the democratic idea.
And what was the principle upon which was based the classic ideal of
abstract beauty, as it expressed itself in Italian painting? It was the
supreme motive of the human form, as being, in its harmony of
proportions and its rhythm of movement, the symbol and expression of
abstract beauty. Again it happened that the teaching of the Church
conjoined with the speculations of scholars. This world was thought to
be the center of the universe; man was the axis of the world. Even God
was interpreted as concerned chiefly in the rewarding or punishment of
man, while to man all other created things were subordinate. To the
imagination of the Renaissance, as of the Middle Ages, man towered up
supreme against the mere background of the universe. Small wonder if
some men, seizing the logic of this, aspired to be the owners of the
bodies and souls of their fellows, and scarcely less that the others
acquiesced! It was a rôle not only for popes, emperors, and kings to
play upon the stage of the world, but for every princeling and duke to
strut through on some smaller platform of a municipality. It justified
the Medici in their own eyes, and made them almost of necessity the
patrons of artists who had accepted the supremacy of such as they for
the leading motive of their art. The painters, in fact, accepting the
exclusive aristocracy of the human figure, adopting as their prime
motive its ideal perfection, and building up compositions in which the
figures were arranged in conformity with the rhythms and proportions
derived from such ideal perfection, necessarily achieved an art that was
essentially aristocratic, fitted for the temples of an aristocratic
church and the palaces of the lay aristocracy. Yet, to repeat, it was
also inspired by a great religious need, so that it was fitted for the
masses as well as for their rulers.
Such was the great art of the world at the period when Charles V
abdicated. Yet even by 1555 the tide has begun to ebb. Of all the great
Florentines Michelangelo alone remains, and he has ceased from painting
and sculpture. The giant brood survives only in the persons of Titian,
Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto. The last named will live out nearly the
remainder of the century, after which the art of Italy will be in the
hands of “mannerists” and “eclectics,” groups whose very names suggest
that they are but fanning a flame already dead. Only the “naturalists”
will have something in them of the modern spirit.
Meanwhile among the painters of the Netherlands there is as yet little
or nothing of the distinction that will grow between Hollander and
Flemish. The principal seat of painting is Antwerp, and its school has
already been Italianized. Even Lucas van Leyden, the personal friend of
Dürer, and at first an original genius inclined toward Gothic feeling,
had before his death in 1533 gone over to Italian influence. Admirably
representative of this influence is the large triptych by Barend van
Orley, now in the Antwerp Museum. Its central panel shows _The Day of
Judgment_. In the vault of the sky Christ appears, enthroned upon a
rainbow, his feet resting on a globe. He is encircled by clouds, below
which a ring of angels supports a cross, while to the right and left are
seraphs sounding their trumps, and all the distant air is aquiver with
angelic forms. Hovering midway between earth and sky is St. Michael, the
archangel. Down on the earth are the myriads of the risen: the good on
one side, in orderly bands, lifting hands and heads toward heaven, and
on the other the lost souls in a tumult of flames and smoke. In the side
panels the works of mercy are represented; grave personages ministering
to the sick and the halt and the blind and the dying, in a spot
dignified by monumental architecture, above which, seated on clouds, are
ranged the Madonna and the saints. The superb composition,
unquestionably suggested by that of the _Disputá_, is one which Raphael
himself need not have been ashamed to design. But the figures that
appear large in the foreground exhibit a realism of nudity and an
individuality of separate characterization that bespeak the artist’s
Flemish origin. Notwithstanding his Italian training he had still
retained his racial instincts for naturalism. But this fine work was
finished in 1525, and the artist died in 1542.
At the date we have selected as our starting-point, the leading artists
were Jan van Scovel, Antonio Moro, and Pieter Pourbus; the last of
Flemish birth, the others born in the northern provinces. Though Pourbus
essayed religious subjects, the finest examples of which are in Bruges,
he is best known as a portrait-painter, in which branch Moro also
excelled. The latter, after studying under Scovel, visited Italy, and
upon his return was recommended to Charles V, who despatched him to
Madrid and Portugal, and later to England to make a portrait of Queen
Mary, the wife of Philip II. Subsequently he was in the latter’s service
in Spain, but returned to Brussels, where he found a patron in the Duke
of Alva. His portraits are distinguished by evidence of truth to life as
well as by their masterly, if somewhat careful, handling. But it was
Scovel himself whose life best illustrated the tendencies of the time.
Born in Alkmaar in 1495, he studied in Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht;
then in Cologne, Speyer, Strasburg, Carinthia, and Venice, from which
last he went to Jerusalem. Returning to Europe, he lived for a while in
Rome, where he was appointed superintendent of the Vatican Gallery by
his countryman, Pope Adrian IV. On the latter’s death he returned to the
Netherlands, living by turns in Utrecht and Haarlem, in one of which
cities he died in 1562. Greatly influenced by his sojourn in Rome, he
was the first of the strictly Dutch painters to absorb the Italian
influence. Among several examples of his style in the Municipal Museum
of Haarlem the most remarkable is a portrait group of twelve Knights
Templars, with palm branches in their hands, indicating that they have
made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It is noteworthy both for its
characterization and as an early instance of what was to be a special
feature of Dutch art--the portrait group. His subject pictures, mostly
on religious themes, have the elegant, non-committal character of work
that was inspired by outside impulse, though possibly in the landscape
backgrounds one may find a foretaste of the Dutch regard for truth of
natural surroundings. His work, indeed, like his life, exemplifies the
lack of originality and conviction in the temper of the times. It was a
period of suspense, succeeding to the vigorous realities of old ideals,
scarcely ready for the development of the new. It was a prologue to a
new era.
The new art, when it arrives, will be in response to a new common and
collective need of a people, the product, in fact, of a new attitude of
thought toward life. In place of the aristocratic it will be democratic,
concerned with the rights of all instead of the privileges of the few.
It will no longer set man in a pose of artificial supremacy against the
background of the universe, but will begin to take account of his
environment and to discover his true relation to it. It will be an era,
not of magnificent mendacity and superb hypotheses, but of patient
inquiry into the facts of life and of resolute adjustment of life to the
facts. It will, indeed, be the dawning of the scientific era. And so
firmly will it have taken hold of the thought and life of the then
separated provinces of the north, that, even as they have parted
absolutely from the old religion and politics, still adhered to by the
southern states, so they will be impervious to the influence of the art
by which the latter continue to be represented. When, fifty years from
our opening date, Rubens shall return from Italy to give a brief lease
of lustier life to the Italian motive by the vigor of his Flemish
genius, the Hollanders of the seventeenth century will be absolutely
unaffected by his influence. Their art will be as closed to the invasion
of his masterful genius as their country is to the inroads of the German
Ocean. Theirs will be an art not only new and original, but certainly
most local.
CHAPTER II
THE OLD ORDER CHANGES
The forty-five years, following the abdication of Charles V, yielded no
indication of the harvest of painting that was to signalize the
succeeding century. The earlier half of the period embraces the work of
Pieter Aertz, first of the distinctively Dutch genre painters, and the
latter half sees the growth to manhood of the portrait-painters Michiel
Jansz van Mierevelt and Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn, while the whole
period covers the active life of Jan de Bray. He, like the other two,
was an honest but entirely uninspired portrait-painter; and it was not
until nearly the end of the century that three men were born who were
subsequently to become notable. These are Frans Hals, Jan van Goyen, and
another landscape-painter, less well known, Hercules Seghers.
It was a period, indeed, solely of upheaval and preparation, during
which the ground was plowed, harrowed, and fertilized, while its old
landmarks were being removed, new boundaries established, and a new
proprietorship asserted and exercised. It covered, moreover, the whole
of Philip the Second’s miserable reign.
This monarch, tiring of the atmosphere of the Netherlands, soon withdrew
to Spain, whence for the remainder of his life he attempted to govern
the distant provinces as a satrapy, through vice-regents, military
commanders, and bishops. His aim, as became his father’s son, was
autocracy over the lives, fortunes, and consciences of his subjects.
But, to do him justice, it was their own good, as he saw it, that he
labored and intrigued for: to purge them of heresy and retain them
within the fold of the Roman communion. For nothing is to be gained in
the way of understanding the temper and conditions of that day by
regarding Philip as an inhuman monster. Judged by the manner of our own
time, he may seem to have been; but, judged by the tenacity and
unscrupulousness with which men still cling to what they believe to be
their rightful privileges and pursue what they are convinced is the
dictate of their conscience, he is seen to be but a natural product of
the mental and social conditions of his day. He was a recognizable and
for a time even tolerated part of a system that men as yet had not
thought of disturbing.
It was so, at first, that the citizens of the Netherlands, even William,
Prince of Orange, regarded him. They held his overlordship sacred, even
while they opposed the acts of his official representatives. They
expected to be roundly taxed, but at the same time to have the machinery
of their local government of free cities and Estates-General unimpeded;
and it was against the interference with this on the part of Philip’s
mercenaries that they first remonstrated. For, in the pursuance of his
policy of riveting Roman Catholicism upon the Netherlands, Philip had
induced the Pope to create more bishops and archbishops, to uphold whose
hands in the extirpating of heresy four thousand Spanish troops were
to
[Illustration: COUPLE DRINKING JAN STEEN
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
be retained in the country at the expense of the Estates. The latter and
the cities remonstrated, and the troops were withdrawn, though the
Inquisition continued its fell work. So matters drifted until 1566, a
memorable year in the story of the rise and growth of Holland.
The Flemish nobles, though Roman Catholic to a man, drew up a
“Compromise” and pledged themselves to resist the Inquisition. William
of Orange, also a Catholic, though he had married a Protestant princess,
Anna of Saxony, and would later change his profession of faith,
instituted a secret system of espionage in Madrid over the acts and
counsels of Philip. Then the League of Nobles, Orange assisting in the
wording of the document, presented a “Request” to the vice-regent,
praying that the edicts against heresy and the Inquisition might be
withdrawn and the management of affairs restored to the Estates-General.
Its presentation drew from one of the vice-regent’s counselors,
Berlaymont, the expression: “Is it possible that your Highness can be
afraid of these beggars?”
Three days later the dissentient nobles were entertained at a feast by
Brederode. When the enthusiasm was at its height, and the guests were
debating on a name and a watchword, the host let drop among them
Berlaymont’s contemptuous phrase. At the same moment he produced a
beggar’s wallet and bowl; and, slinging the one over his shoulder and
filling the other with wine, called upon all present to drink to the
Beggars. The word was caught up, and from man to man the wallet and bowl
were passed round, until all had enrolled themselves in the Beggars’
ranks. Then, at the height of the excitement, the counts Orange, Horn,
and Egmont entered the room. They were compelled to drink to the pledge
and, although they immediately retired, were henceforth marked for
Philip’s special revenge.
Later in the same year the “Image-breaking” occurred in Antwerp. It was
unpremeditated and in its occurrence unguided: the spontaneous explosion
of latent passions smoldering in the mob; the spark that kindled it, the
annual procession and parade of the image of the Virgin. Scoffs and
ribaldry were succeeded by horse-play, which involved a rough-and-tumble
fight among some of the mob that filled the cathedral. The excitement
grew. The mob, surging in and out of the building, began to mock an old
woman who sold images of the Virgin at the cathedral door. She
retaliated in kind, and from the bandying of words the mob and their
victim proceeded to the hurling of missiles. A riot was averted for the
moment by the arrival of the margrave and senators; but, when evening
came, the cathedral was still occupied by a mob, now bent on mischief.
The image of the Virgin was the first object of its fury, which,
however, soon spread to a wholesale wrecking and desecration. The sacred
vessels, the glory of stained glass, and the intricate beauty of carved
work--every object of beauty that had made this one of the richest
shrines of religious art in Christendom--were irretrievably destroyed.
The blind, unreasoning fury, thus aroused, spread to other cities.
Philip retaliated with another fury, coldly and calculatingly horrible.
Alva was despatched with ten thousand troops, and the so-called Spanish
Fury was inaugurated.
Its first victims were the counts Horn and Egmont, William of Orange
escaping into exile. A Council of Troubles, or, as the Netherlanders
called it, of Blood, was established, and in the six years of Alva’s
stay eighteen thousand six hundred persons were put to death. These were
irrespective of those who fell in armed resistance. For in 1572 the
Beggars of the sea took Brill, and a little later drove the Spanish
garrison out of Flushing. It was the signal for revolt. Nearly all the
cities of Holland and Zeeland declared for William of Orange, and, in an
assembly of the Estates at Dort, voted funds for a war, directed,
however, even then, not against the sovereignty of Philip, but to the
expulsion of his soldiery. The fortunes of the patriots were checkered
with more defeats than victories, but meanwhile the Spanish operations
were impeded by lack of money; the troops depending upon the pillage of
an impoverished country and the occasional sack of a city, while the
treasure-ships of Spain were being intercepted and her commerce
continually harassed by the Beggars of the sea. So Philip sparred for
breath, and through his vice-regent agreed to the withdrawal of his
troops, a treaty to this effect being signed at Brussels in 1577.
William, however, was too convinced of the duplicity of Philip to be a
party to the treaty, and persuaded the northern provinces to refuse
their assent. The struggle was continued, punctuated by the Union of
Utrecht, in which the Estates agreed upon a Dutch republic; by Philip’s
rejoinder in the shape of a ban declared against the life of Orange,
with a price of twenty-five thousand golden crowns upon his head; and by
the counter-movement of the patriots. This was the declaration of Dutch
independence, formally issued at The Hague on the 26th of July, 1581.
To ideas that had been slowly but steadily accumulating under the
pressure of dire facts a formulation had at last been discovered and a
name given. A new word had been uttered in the world, that was, as the
centuries advanced, to be echoed and reëchoed and to be fruitful in
newly advancing ideas. Comparable only to it, in modern history, was the
word spoken sixty years before by Luther at the Diet of Worms. And now
the doctrine of the responsibility to itself of the conscience, with its
allied doctrine of religious freedom, had been completed by the
political doctrine of the responsibility of government to the governed,
and its allied doctrine of a nation’s right to the choice of its own
form of government. But, just as the idea must be in labor until the
word for it is delivered, so the word itself is but a battle-cry, the
fruits of which are painfully and slowly won. The labor of Holland’s
actual independence, begun fifteen years before, had yet to be
protracted sixty-seven years.
Hitherto all the hope of the patriots had centered in William of Orange.
In declaring their independence, they offered him the crown. Partly to
prove the disinterestedness of his motives, still more perhaps because
he believed that the final release from Spain could be effected only by
putting the new state under the protection of France or England, he
refused the dignity. Fortunately, however, France continued to be a reed
on which no dependence could be placed, and the English help, when it
did come, was indirect. Meanwhile, Philip’s ban was still out against
the Stadtholder, and an attempt was made upon his life. He was shot in
the face, but recovered from the wound, to fall a victim, however, two
years later, to the pistol of one Balthasar Gerard. The tragedy occurred
on July 10, 1584.
It had removed the chief obstacle to Philip’s success. Maurice would
worthily succeed his father in the generalship of the war; but the brain
and conscience, the unswerving patience and unselfishness, that had
given some reality of union to the rival elements of the United
Provinces, were buried with William the Silent. The exaggerated
individualism of the several provinces and cities would have put them at
the mercy of Philip, had he not himself been distracted from any
singleness of purpose by the same cause. His own exaggerated egoism,
inflated with the ambition to be a world-power, prevented him from
concentrating his efforts upon the subjugation of the republic. He still
strove to force his influence upon the affairs of France, and meanwhile
made preparations to subdue England.
Thus Elizabeth, much as her Tudor instinct may have shrunk from the idea
of encouraging rebellion against kingship, was induced by her advisers
to make common cause with the Dutch against Spain. She refused their
offer of the crown, but lent them money and some troops under the
command of Leicester. He proved inefficient as a general, and, while a
few names, such as that of Sir Philip Sidney, stand out heroically,
England’s real contribution to Dutch independence was indirect. It was
Drake’s incessant harrying of Spanish ships and ports and the
destruction of the two Armadas that distracted Spain, broke her power
of offense, and hastened the exhaustion of her waning resources. Thus
the struggle with the provinces continued on land, but became more
desultory, while of the sea the Dutch had practically undisputed
mastery. The result was an accession of adventurous spirit that, while
it failed in the attempt to discover a Northwest Passage, established
settlements in the East Indies, wore down the competition of the
Spaniards in the trade of those regions, and inaugurated a condition of
extraordinary commercial prosperity.
Meanwhile Philip’s long reign of forty-three years was drawing to a
close. In May, 1598, he handed over the Netherlands to his daughter and
son-in-law, the Archduke Albert, and a few weeks later died. It is
sufficient for our present purpose to recall that the prolongation of
the war on behalf of the archduke by various generals, including
Spinola, was stopped by the bankruptcy of the attacking parties. A truce
of twelve years was agreed to in 1609.
Such was the background of events that preceded the birth of a new art
in Holland. A new nation had been formed, and the circumstances which
attended its formation had a direct influence in shaping the character
of the new art. That it involved a departure from the decorative
grandeur and the religious motive of Italian art was an incident of the
Dutch having repudiated alike the Roman Catholic form of worship and the
ceremonies of a regal court. Almost equally incidental was the fact that
the artists were limited to subjects drawn from the personages and
conditions of life within their own borders; were influenced, in fact,
to become realists. This, I repeat, was incidental and not unexampled,
for realism was at the same time revived in Italy and continued in
Spain. The fundamental thing was to be the character of Holland’s
realism; and this was a direct product of the national events we have
been describing. For it was a symptom of the general character that the
people had been forming in itself during more than half a century of
nation-building. It was essentially a moral character.
I need hardly say that I do not use the word “moral” in its narrower
sense, but to the full extent of its suggestion of a stout fiber of
conviction and purpose that habitually promotes integrity of conscience
and determines the conduct of a nation or an individual. It is nearer to
our borrowed word, “morale.” It is the product, I take it, primarily of
a great and worthy pride in self, and then of loyalty to the best in
one’s self that such pride engenders and makes necessary. It is what an
artist, least of all men, can afford to be without; for his work is
necessarily an expression of himself, and, if he has not morality in the
sense we have been describing, his work will inevitably betray the fact
and prove the weaker for it. No artist in any medium can maintain a
bluff. Even if it hoodwinks his contemporaries, posterity will “call
it.”
Now, in the case of Holland, the struggle for a great principle,
persevered in against all discouragements, had gradually established in
the nation just such a morality, which during the years of the truce and
for some thirty years later was to demonstrate its value in practically
every department of human activity. To higher learning and research, to
the practical affairs of life, such as manufactures, commerce, banking,
engineering, agriculture, and dairy-farming, to questions of disease and
hygiene, and to the systematizing of the legal relations as well of
nations as of individuals, the Dutch brought the application of a new
principle, substituting for empiricism and _laissez-faire_ the method of
approach and treatment that we now call scientific.
It is a term, by the way, that from time to time has been assumed to be
antagonistic to morality; whereas, if properly considered, it should and
does surely represent a morality of the most exacting and, frequently,
the most disinterested kind. One after another, then, the Dutch in those
days of newly realized nationality confronted the problems of
intellectual, material, and social progress, bringing to their study a
keen analysis, and handling their solution with integrity and
thoroughness. With morality such as this conspicuously abroad in the
community, it would have been strange if her artists had not reproduced
it in their own special field; if to directness and sanity of vision
they had not brought a scrupulous artistic conscience, that resulted in
integrity and thoroughness of craftsmanship. That certain of them at
some period of their careers deviated, as we shall see, from this high
standard does but emphasize the existence of the latter, which, too, was
reached, not by a few individuals, but by the artists as a body; so that
in no other school of painting can you find such wide-spread excellence
of technique. This, indeed, if we may anticipate the sequel, proved to
be one of the causes of the school’s subsequent decline. Technique came
to be pursued as a
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST GERARD TERBORCH
HAGUE MUSEUM]
motive. But this was itself a symptom of a deeper cause--the freshness
of the original motive had been outworn, its vigor slackened. The nation
itself had by that time lost the simple directness of its early ideal
and become enamoured of the sophistries of a world-wide ambition.
But to resume the thread of the story. At the commencement of the new
century Hals was sixteen years old; Daniel Seghers, eleven; Van Goyen
and the portrait-painter Thomas de Keyser, four. The train, in fact, was
already laid for a new kind of portraiture and for a new motive in
painting--that of naturalistic landscape. Otherwise the men destined to
be the most representative of the new school were as yet unborn. With
the opening of the century, however, their names appear thick and fast,
and continue to arrive for forty years; after which the list of those
conspicuous in the annals of the Dutch seventeenth-century school
ceases. Dating, therefore, from Hals’s birth in 1584, the period covered
is fifty-six years.
It is perhaps convenient for the purpose of assisting the memory to
divide the first forty years of the new century into two parts: the
first ending in 1621, with the conclusion of the twelve years’ truce;
and the second with the marriage, in 1641, of the Prince of Orange’s
son, William, to the eldest daughter of Charles I of England. The
historical aspect of these two periods in relation to the story of art
may be considered after we have reviewed the names of the principal
artists whose births they contain.
The earlier division, then, includes the greatest name in the art of
Holland, one of the greatest in all art, that of Rembrandt, who was
born in 1606. The latter is the birth-year also of the flower-painter
Jan van Heem, while the preceding years of the century disclose the
names of the marine-painter Simon de Vlieger and the landscape-painters
Salomon Ruisdael and Aert van der Neer, and Palamedesz, painter of
genre. The year 1610 gives us Van Ostade and the landscape-painter
Johannes Both; 1611, Ferdinand Bol and Willem van de Velde the Elder;
1613, Wouwerman and Gerard Dou; and 1615, Govert Flinck and Jan Wynants.
Here we may check the routine of enumeration to note another great name,
one of the most distinguished of the Holland School. It is that of
Gerard Terborch, born in 1617. He is followed, in 1619, by the
landscape-painter Philips Koninck and the portrait-painter Bartholomeus
van der Helst. To them succeed in 1620 Aelbert Cuyp and Nicolaes
Berchem, followed in 1621 by Eeckhout and Allart van Everdingen.
This enumeration does not pretend to be exhaustive. The aim has been
rather to include as few names as possible, so as to simplify the study
by concentrating attention from the start on those which are most
representative and most often met with. After familiarizing one’s self
with these, it is comparatively easy to add to their number and to place
the newly acquired ones in their chronological relation to this
preliminary list. The same motive determines the selection for the
second period.
It begins in 1624 with Carel Fabritius; but the following year discloses
a name that in the Holland School stands very close to Rembrandt, Jacob
Ruisdael, and another name of great reputation, Paul Potter. To 1626
belongs Jan Steen. After the birth of this artist there is a pause of
four years, when Gabriel Metsu and the still-life painter Kalf appear,
to be followed two years later, in 1632, by a notable trio, Nicolaes
Maes, Pieter de Hooch, and the most distinguished, Jan Vermeer of Delft.
With 1633 comes the marine-painter Willem van de Velde the Younger, and
with 1635 Frans van Mieris; while 1636 yields Adriaen van de Velde,
landscape-and figure-painter, and the painter of birds and poultry,
Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Finally, the painter of architecture, Jan van
der Heyden, is born in 1637; Hobbema in 1638, and in 1640 the painter of
animals and dead game, Jan Weenix.
If one glances back over the names of these two periods, it is to note
some interesting suggestions. In the first place, one of the earliest
names, Van Heem, and the last of the list, Weenix, represent painters of
still-life. The fact emphasizes the hold which this branch of painting
had upon the interest alike of the painters and their public, and the
part it plays in the general work of the school. In our own day there is
perhaps a tendency to underestimate the interest of still-life. “Only a
picture of flowers or fruit or game,” represents the feeling of many
people on the subject. It is an attitude of mind, resulting from the
habit of relying on the mind to appreciate a picture. Thus, as a subject
for mental study, a bunch of flowers, a mass of vegetables, pots and
pans and the like, may not be interesting. On the other hand, I think it
would be a mistake to assume that the Holland public of the seventeenth
century were free from this tendency; or to suppose that they regarded
a picture as a thing to be viewed and to be appreciated solely through
the abstract pleasure that is communicated by the joy of sight. As a
matter of fact, they were actually interested in the objects represented
in the still-life pictures. They were enthusiastic cultivators of
flowers and vegetables, keen sportsmen, and shared with the women of
their families a pride in all the objects of decoration and utility in
their homes, so that even utensils of ordinary use were made and kept in
a state of being ornamental. Accordingly, with that simple directness,
characteristic of the race, they took a positive interest in the
representation of such things. The latter were subjects of importance in
life; accordingly, since their art was so intimate an expression of
their life, they were welcomed as subjects for pictures.
The public also applauded the skill with which such subjects were
rendered by the artists, and the latter, since still-life presented
excellent opportunities for the display of craftsmanship, were glad
enough to reciprocate the popular taste. Thus resulted what one notes as
a second point in the consideration of Holland still-life painting:
namely, that the artists freely introduced objects of still-life into
their portraits. I cannot cite a more typical instance than the earliest
military group-picture by Frans Hals in the Haarlem Museum. Here the
viands and furnishings of the banquet are rendered with at least as much
gusto as the heads, and for the present with more assurance. Thirdly, it
is easy to trace the influence that this joy in the representation of
still-life had upon the evolution of genre painting in the Holland
School and upon the particular character that it assumes. In fact, the
interest in still-life subjects, with the influence it had upon the
methods of the artists, was a most important factor in the development
of the Holland School. Closely allied to it is the interest in
portraiture.
How radically this interest affected the art of Holland may be gathered
from another glance at the foregoing list of names. It is in the
beginning of the new era, in the earlier division of names, that all the
famous portrait-painters appear. Not to mention Rembrandt, whose genius
was of the universal kind, embracing in its single scope the separated
motives of other artists, we find the names of Hals, Mierevelt,
Ravesteyn, Van der Helst, Terborch, De Keyser, Cuyp, Bol, and Flinck. On
the other hand, among the names in the second list, selected without any
_parti pris_, there is not one of first or even second rank as a
portrait-painter; only men like Maes and Netscher, who were primarily
and far more worthily genre painters.
For it is the genre painters who form one of the chief distinctions of
the later generation. It is true that Dou belongs with the earlier, and
he was and still remains popular. But he is not in the same class as
Vermeer and Steen, nor as Maes, Metsu, and De Hooch, scarcely as a
painter even to be reckoned with Ostade. Indeed, he is nearer to Van
Mieris and Netscher, the men in whose hands genre sank to a distinctly
lower level. The only example in the earlier generation of a great genre
painter is Terborch, who presents the exception, and a brilliant one, to
the generalization I have suggested.
Another point of interest to be derived from this summary is the place
that landscape takes among the motives of the Holland School. We see, in
fact, that it figures at the beginning of the new era and continues to
the end. Seghers and Van Goyen precede the century, which immediately
opens with Salomon Ruisdael and Aert van der Neer, followed in the
earlier division by Both, Wouwerman, Koninck, Cuyp, Berchem, and Van
Everdingen. Then the second period opens with the birth of Jacob
Ruisdael, and, including Potter, Adriaen van de Velde, and Vermeer (the
last named with one known example), ends with Hobbema. Similarly, in the
allied department of marine-painting, the century opens with Simon de
Vlieger; Willem van de Velde the Elder follows, and in the later period
the art is represented by Bakhuysen and Willem van de Velde the Younger.
As a matter of fact, in each field of motive the seed was laid in the
beginning of the period under examination. What followed was a rotation
of crops and an enriched development of each variety.
CHAPTER III
BEGINNING OF THE NEW
The breathing-time given by the truce allowed play for dissensions among
parties and for the ambitions that had crept into the house of Orange.
Meanwhile it favored the development that during the next hundred years
made Holland the richest and most advanced country in Europe.
To commemorate the raising of the siege of Leyden, the patriots in 1574
had founded a university in that city; to inaugurate the truce, they
pumped dry the Beemster Lake and added eighteen thousand acres to their
territory. The two acts, and even the order in which they came, were
characteristic of this extraordinary people. They were the most
enlightened of their day and brought their intelligence to bear upon all
the practical concerns of life. The renown of their university excelled
that of Paris, Oxford, or Cambridge; their scholars laid the foundations
of international law and modern medicine, and their printing-presses
produced more books than those of the rest of Europe combined. Their
development in painting is our present subject, but they also carried
their love of the beautiful into the design and craftsmanship of the
ornaments and utensils of the home, and into the laying out of gardens
and the cultivation of flowers. Meanwhile their looms, manned by
weavers who had fled from Flanders to avoid religious persecution,
produced the finest fabrics in Europe; their workshops exported the best
mathematical, astronomical, and nautical instruments; and their
discovery of the art of cutting and polishing diamonds gave them a
monopoly of this business. The Bank of Amsterdam was founded in the
first year of the truce and soon became famous for the amount of its
deposits and the volume of its transactions, while the city itself
became the chief distributing center for the commerce of the Old and the
New World.
Meanwhile in agriculture the Hollanders displayed a similar combination
of scientific resourcefulness and indomitable energy. They discovered
the value as fodder of certain “artificial” grasses and clovers, and
experimented with these to the immense improvement of their cattle and
dairy produce; and by the application of intensive methods to the
cultivation of the land so increased its productivity, that it became
capable of supporting three times the population which had before
subsisted on it. Further, by promoting the cultivation of the potato and
other root-vegetables they wrought a signal improvement in the public
health, since the variety of diet, thus made possible in winter, stamped
out the scurvy and leprosy which had been the scourge of Holland as of
other countries. At the same time they developed their fisheries and
introduced improved methods of drying and treating fish; enlarged their
merchant marine, so that they became the chief carriers of the world;
and pushed their commerce with the Indies, until they
[Illustration: LANDSCAPE WITH FENCE JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
IMPERIAL ACADEMY, VIENNA]
possessed a practical monopoly of the most lucrative trade of those
times, namely, that of spices.
Meanwhile, as a reverse to this story of national progress, were the
religious and political dissensions that crept into the commonwealth.
Protestantism, after presenting a solid front to Romanism, now found
itself cleft by the sect-rivalries of Arminians and Gomarists; and these
in time gave color and opportunity to the ambition of Maurice. No
disinterested patriot like his father, William the Silent, the second
Stadtholder intrigued for his personal aggrandizement, and stained his
memory by the judicial murder of the old patriot-statesman Barneveldt.
On the other hand, of better memory was his service to art. In 1611 he
commissioned Ravesteyn to paint a series of portraits of officers. These
and other pictures that he gathered adorned his palace, and, added to by
his successor, the Stadtholder Frederick Henry, became the nucleus of
the collection that, accumulating through various vicissitudes, now
occupies the Mauritshuis, as the Royal Museum of The Hague.
The lack of cohesion, of which these dissensions were a symptom, and
that had always been close to the surface of unity owing to the
excessive individualism of the cities, was reflected in the new art.
Small as was the total area of the country, it supplied a number of
artistic centers, each with its group of artists, who had sufficient in
common to constitute a school. Under the influence of tradition, or more
often of some conspicuous member of the group, they presented
similarities of motive that distinguished their choice of subjects and
even their method of painting. Thus we may note a school of Haarlem, of
Leyden, of Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Dordrecht, and Utrecht. There
was a certain rivalry between the schools of these various cities, but,
on the other hand, a centripetal force that tended also to draw them
together. Communication was easy in so small a country, and, moreover,
the growing importance of Amsterdam as the commercial capital made it
gradually a center also of art. The result was a happy combination of
homogeneousness and individualism. The paintings of the period possess a
common excellence, of a kind so distinctive that you may recognize at
once a picture as belonging to the School of Holland, and yet they
reveal so many individual traits that the homogeneousness is not
characterized by monotony.
Accordingly, if we do not make the mistake of trying to surround the
school of each city with an arbitrary wall, separating it conclusively
from other cities, we may get many suggestions that help to classify our
comprehension of the Holland School as a whole. I propose, therefore, to
distribute the artists, whose names we have already reviewed, according
to their individual schools; to the cities in which they worked, and, in
most cases, were born and educated.
Under the head of Utrecht, then, we find the names of Heem, Hondecoeter,
and Weenix, all three of them still-life painters. But, while this
points to the fact that the distinguishing characteristic of the Utrecht
School was the painting of flowers, dead game, and birds, it is not to
be assumed that still-life is unrepresented in the other schools. The
catalogues contain the names of no less than a hundred painters in this
department, distributed throughout the various cities, and, as time
goes on, congregating especially in Amsterdam. To the latter Weenix and
Hondecoeter migrated; and it is interesting to note how the change of
locale affected their art. Corresponding to the wealth of the capital,
their pictures became much larger, designed as superb decorations for
the walls of sumptuous houses.
The School of Haarlem includes the following: the portrait-painters
Bray, Hals, and Terborch, the last also a genre painter, like Ostade of
this city; and the landscapists Salomon and Jacob Ruisdael, Wynants,
Everdingen, Wouwerman, Esaias van de Velde, and Berchem. The array of
names, in the first place, suggests the importance of Haarlem at this
period, as a center of commerce, society, and art. We may remember that
it was particularly given to “corporation” pictures, as its museum to
this day proclaims in the works of Bray and Hals, while Terborch,
commencing under the influence of this place, later on painted the
equivalent of a corporation picture in his _Peace of Münster_, now in
the National Gallery. Another clue to be derived from this grouping of
names is that Hals, the acknowledged leader, exerted a direct influence
on Terborch and Ostade; and through the latter upon Steen, who came over
from Leyden to be Ostade’s student.
Further, we recognize that this school was as fertile in landscape as in
portraiture. With the exception of Van Goyen of Leyden, the founders and
chief exponents of the art were associated with Haarlem; even Hobbema of
Amsterdam, through his having been a pupil of Jacob Ruisdael. The
latter’s career, also, is made clearer by this classification. Haarlem
was his birthplace and the scene of his personally inspired work. When,
discouraged by lack of recognition, he moved to Amsterdam, it was the
example of his fellow-townsmen that made him change his own style. For
Everdingen, who had visited Sweden, was painting romantic scenes of
waterfalls and rocks, and Ruisdael, observing how they found favor with
the Amsterdammers, abandoned his study of the Holland landscape to
invent similar subjects. Finally, we may connect Wouwerman with two of
his townsmen. From Wynants he learned the landscape, and by Hals was
influenced in his incomparable treatment of the accompanying groups of
figures.
The School of Leyden boasts the great name of Rembrandt, who, however,
moved finally to Amsterdam in 1631, when nearing his twenty-fifth year.
After him the names that appear in the School of Leyden are: Dou, Steen,
Metsu, Mieris, and Van Goyen; all of them, the last named only excepted,
genre painters. Dou studied with Rembrandt, who was seven years his
senior, during the last three years of the latter’s stay in Leyden. He
himself became the teacher of Gabriel Metsu, who, however, was also
influenced by Frans Hals, and also, after his move to Amsterdam, where
he died, by Rembrandt. Dou was also the instructor of Frans van Mieris.
Steen, on the other hand, the greatest of the Leyden group, escaped the
influence of Dou, becoming, as we have seen, a pupil of Van Ostade at
Haarlem, and later of Van Goyen, after the latter had moved to The
Hague. Van Goyen, though born in Leyden, is associated also with the
Haarlem School, for after he had had several masters, including Van
Swanenburch, in Leyden, he served apprenticeship to the Haarlem painter
Esaias van de Velde. Moreover, by the time that he had mastered his art,
he settled in The Hague. Thus the characteristic of the School of Leyden
remains its genre.
The names from our list that the School of Delft includes are those of
Mierevelt, Fabritius, Van Aelst, Palamedesz, De Hooch, and, most
distinguished of all, Vermeer. Mierevelt, as a portrait-painter, found
better opportunities for his art at the seat of government, and became a
member of the Guild of Painters of The Hague. Carel Fabritius was early
attracted to Amsterdam by the fame of Rembrandt, and only returned to
work in Delft during the last four years of his short life of
thirty-four years. Van Aelst, also, the still-life painter, after
oscillating between Delft and Florence, finally settled in Amsterdam. So
did the portraitist and painter of fashionable genre, Palamedesz. He
derived help at first from Mierevelt and was influenced by Hals, and in
1621 his name appears as a member of the guild in Delft, but he spent
the latter part of his life in Amsterdam. This city also absorbed De
Hooch, who, before he finally settled there, had been influenced by
Rembrandt. In fact, his participation in the School of Delft was limited
to the two years in which he was a fellow-member of the guild with Jan
Vermeer. They were of the same age, but Vermeer was his senior in the
guild by two years, and it is scarcely to be questioned that the
influence of his refined feeling and exquisite craftsmanship must have
affected De Hooch considerably. In contrast to the flux of change that
characterized the lives of the other members of the Delft School is the
consistency of Vermeer’s attachment to the city of his birth. We shall
discuss his art later. Here it is enough to recall that his only teacher
was Carel Fabritius; but that his art, as it developed, was individually
his own, conspicuously unique, and so admirable that when one speaks of
the Delft School it is to think almost exclusively of its greatest
artist, Jan Vermeer of Delft.
In connection with The Hague it is more correct to speak of a group than
of a school. Among the artists in our list the only one born actually in
this city was Ravesteyn, although it is true that Schalcken’s native
place was a village in the vicinity. But the same reason that made the
former constant to the seat of government attracted thither other
artists. The Hague was also a center of society and fashion. Mierevelt
found there a market for his portraits, Van Goyen for his landscapes,
and Netscher, Schalcken, and De Hooch for genre pictures. The last named
spent some years there, but retired to Amsterdam. The rest continued
working at The Hague until their deaths. Among them Van Goyen is easily
the most distinguished. The rest are rather symptomatic of the
atmosphere of their surroundings. The portraits by Mierevelt and
Ravesteyn have the perfunctoriness of official and society products,
eminently dignified and _comme il faut_, irresistibly uninteresting,
while the genre of Netscher and Schalcken is petty and frivolous by
comparison with that of the older and greater painters, and Netscher’s
portraits are frequently insipid as to character and over-occupied with
the niceties of millinery.
Of Dordrecht or Dort our list contains only one name, that of Aelbert
Cuyp, whose versatile genius embraced portraiture, landscape and animal
painting, genre, still-life, church interiors, and marines. We may add
one other name, that of Hoogstraten, not, however, so much on account of
his art as because he was the George Vasari of his day, the historian
and story-monger of the painters of Holland in the seventeenth century.
It remains to summarize the School of Amsterdam. As may have been
gathered from the foregoing, it was rather an aggregate of artists,
drawn thither by two causes: the wealth of the commercial capital and
the fame and influence of Rembrandt. The latter, as we have seen, moved
finally from his native city, Leyden, to Amsterdam in 1631, when he was
in his twenty-fifth year. Two years later he painted _The Lesson in
Anatomy_, and pupils began to flock to him; among the most notable being
Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Eeckhout, Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Fabritius,
and De Hooch. On the other hand, among those whom the importance of the
city attracted were several from the neighboring School of Haarlem; the
portrait-painter Van der Helst, for example, and the landscape-painters
Berchem, Jan Wynants, Everdingen, and Jacob Ruisdael; while from Utrecht
came the still-life painters Hondecoeter and Weenix, and from Delft Van
Aelst.
On the other hand, the native-born artists of Amsterdam included that
early genre painter Pieter Aertz; the portrait-painter Thomas de Keyser;
and the landscapists, Hercules Seghers, Philips Koninck, Adriaen van de
Velde, Aert van der Neer, and Hobbema. But the distinctively local
characteristic of the school, situated as it was in this great emporium
of foreign commerce, is its group of marine-painters; among whom we may
mention Simon de Vlieger, Bakhuysen, and the elder and the younger
Willem van de Velde. Their pictures are particularly interesting for the
faithful and spirited representation of shipping: fishing craft,
coasting vessels, East-Indiamen in harbor, and men-of-war in action. The
pictures of these last are the most important of the occasional
indications to be found in Dutch painting that throughout this period of
productivity in the arts of peace the country was involved in war. Not
that the soldier is absent from pictures. On the contrary, he figures
frequently, but usually in the intervals of fighting, while enjoying the
pleasures of a furlough; though occasionally we come upon some positive
hint of the prevailing disturbance, as in a scene of bivouac, or of
peasants and soldiery fighting, or of soldiery attacking a
traveling-coach or party of hunters. Generally, however, the subjects of
the Holland pictures are rather suggestive of a profound tranquillity.
As a matter of fact, by the time that painting reached its maturity,
Holland had ceased to be the battle-ground. She had become rather a
focus point of intrigue, involved in distant complications with France,
Germany, and England. There are in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam two
pictures which hint at this: _The Fishers for Souls_, by Adriaen van de
Venne, and _The Enraged Swan_, by Jan Asselyn.
The former, painted in 1611 during the truce, represents a river dotted
with boats, the occupants of which
[Illustration: LANDSCAPE WITH OAK JAN VAN GOYEN
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
are fishing for the men and women that swim around them, while the banks
are crowded with spectators. On the left are serried ranks of
Hollanders, closing round those in whom they have confidence, namely,
the Princes of Orange, Maurice and Frederick Henry, James I of England,
and the young King of France, Louis XIII. On the opposite bank a less
orderly mass of people confronts them, headed by the Archduke Albert and
the Duchess Isabella, to whom Philip had made over the sovereignty of
the Netherlands. So far the allegory epitomizes the political situation
in which the Hollanders found themselves. Meanwhile, the religious
aspect of the situation is suggested in the circumstances of the
fishing, which seems to refer both to the old struggle between
Catholicism and Protestantism and also to the new one arising out of the
dissension in the latter between the rival sects of the Gomarists and
Arminians. The happy outcome of it all is prefigured in the rainbow that
spans the scene.
To appreciate the allegory involved in _The Enraged Swan_ it is
necessary to summarize the events that followed the conclusion of the
truce in 1621. Spain would have been glad to substitute for the truce a
permanent peace, but held out for terms that were unacceptable to the
Hollanders; and war in a desultory fashion was renewed. By this time the
Thirty Years’ War had commenced, and the religious and political
struggle, that hitherto had centered in Holland, was being continued in
a distant and larger field. Maurice died in 1625 and was succeeded in
the office of Stadtholder by Frederick Henry, an able soldier and wise
and patriotic statesman, who set himself to consolidate the internal
resources of the republic. The latter showed its recognition of his
services by the fatal expedients of making the office of Stadtholder
hereditary in the house of Orange and of agreeing to the marriage of
Frederick’s son William with the eldest daughter of Charles I. The
effects of this were, on the one hand, to create within the republic an
Orange party that in time intrigued for absolutism of government, and,
on the other, to embroil Holland in the struggle between the Stuarts and
the Parliament of England, and later, upon the restoration of the
monarchy in the person of Charles II, to involve the republic both in
diplomacy and in war with that utterly unprincipled person.
Meanwhile peace was finally concluded with Spain in 1648, by the Treaty
of Westphalia, or, as the compact is also styled, the Peace of Münster,
which was proclaimed on June 5, 1648, the day on which Egmont and Horn
had been executed by Alva eighty years before. By this time Frederick
had been succeeded in the Stadtholdership by his son William, who, with
the assistance of the Orange party, was intriguing for absolute rule.
Fortunately for the republic, his death occurred two years later, a few
days before the birth of his son, who eventually became Stadtholder and
subsequently William III of England. Meanwhile, during the prince’s
minority, the government was in the hands of Johan de Witt, whose book
“The Interest of Holland” is an able summary of the political and
commercial conditions of the republic at the time. His patriotism had
been whetted to a personal edge by the fact that he had been imprisoned
illegally and arbitrarily by the late Stadtholder, and his opposition to
the pretensions of the Orange party was in consequence unceasing
throughout his official term, which lasted from 1650 to 1672. It is this
that is commemorated in _The Enraged Swan_.
The picture represents a swan standing above its nest of eggs, in a
fierce and threatening attitude, prepared to repel the attack of a dog.
Above the latter is an inscription in Dutch, signifying “The Enemy of
the State,” while one of the eggs is lettered “Holland,” and beneath the
swan are the words “Grand Pensionary,” the title of the office of Johan
de Witt. Since the artist, Jan Asselyn, died in 1652, it is possible
that his picture originally had no allegorical intent, but that its
owner, seeing its application to the political situation, caused the
inscriptions to be added. However this may be, it remains a curious
document of the internal dissensions that at this period rent the little
republic, and ended with the murder of De Witt and his brother by an
Orange mob in 1672.
Of the entanglements into which the union of the house of Orange with
the Stuarts eventually led the country, it is enough here to recall that
the enmity of Spain had been replaced by that of France. The ambition of
Louis XIV threatened not only Holland but Europe; and it was against
this that William III during his Stadtholdership, and later, when he
also occupied the throne of England, directed the military resources of
both countries and his own unrivaled genius as a diplomatist. The result
was a war, interrupted temporarily by nominal treaties of peace, but
actually protracted beyond the lifetime of William, until the power of
France had been beaten down by Marlborough, and peace was secured by the
Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Hobbema, the last of the great Dutch painters
of the seventeenth century, had died six years before.
Peace removed the barriers that Holland had erected for her
self-preservation. Her artists, like her traders, wandered afield. The
old centripetal tendency, which compelled the artist to find initiative
in his own surroundings at home and so bred a distinctly Holland school,
was superseded by the tendency to look for motive outside. The painter
found it in Italy; he and his art became Italianate. This is not to say
that the Holland painters of the eighteenth century are without merit.
The best undoubtedly have a charm of their own; but it is not of the
kind that one has learned to recognize and respect in the earlier
pictures, as being a characteristic product of a nation fighting to
maintain the integrity and independence of its nationality. The charm is
by comparison slender and superficial, the product, not of originality,
but of imitation. For the art of Holland had ceased to be the expression
of conviction, and no longer exemplified the morality that had given
character to its motive and unimpeachable integrity to its technique.
CHAPTER IV
FRANS HALS
The readiest way to study the art of Holland in the seventeenth century
is under the separate heads of portraiture, landscape, marine, genre,
and still-life. In this way one obtains a comprehensive survey of the
development of each of these branches, and is not confused by the fact
that many of the artists practised in more than one of them. But at the
start it must be observed that these separate departments are inclosed
in a common motive. As Fromentin says, the art of Holland was
essentially an art of portraiture. It followed from the character of the
people and the conditions under which they found themselves. They were a
nation of burghers, practical in mind, direct in action, self-centered,
and full of personal and local pride. What more likely, in fact more
inevitable, than that they should need and their painters should supply
an art which gave a complete, exact, and for the most part unembellished
portrait of the country, its people, and their habits of life.
But while this common motive of portraiture, which distinguishes every
branch of Holland painting, was in response to a common and collective
need of the people, it was modified and shaped by the example of two
leading personalities: Hals and Rembrandt. So determining was their
influence that an analysis of their respective motives and methods is
not only a necessary preliminary but the quickest way to a comprehension
of the development of the whole school.
They had characteristics in common. One might almost represent the two
men by concentric circles; Hals being the inner, Rembrandt the
indefinitely larger one. Hals was an epitome of the genius of the Dutch
race; Rembrandt was also this, but more--the expression of a genius
peculiarly his own. Both manifested, Hals invariably, Rembrandt at
times, the quality of direct seeing and doing that was a national
characteristic; but at other times Rembrandt was possessed of a
spirituality, if one may so call it, that was directly opposed to the
prevailing practicalness. Let us study each for the purpose of
discovering what was his own personal art and how it affected the art of
others.
Hals, then, the leader of the Haarlem School, we will examine first, not
only because he was the oldest of the famous men of the seventeenth
century, but also because his own genius was so closely representative
of that of his countrymen. Of his life there is little to record. He was
born in Antwerp, in 1584, but of parents of good Haarlem stock,
temporarily driven from home by the vicissitudes of the war. He may have
begun his studies in Antwerp, but by 1608 was probably settled in
Haarlem. It must have been about two years later that he married a lady
named Anneke Hermanszoon, for their child, Harmen Hals, was baptized on
the 2d of September, 1611. The marriage appears to have been
unfortunate, a record, dated 1616, showing that the husband was
summoned and reprimanded by the magistrates for drunkenness and violent
conduct toward his wife. She died a few days later, apparently from
natural causes, and the following year Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers,
with whom he lived for fifty years, bringing up a large family. That his
conduct toward the first wife was not very seriously viewed by the
community seems to be proved by the fact that in 1617 and 1618 he and
his brother Dirck were elected members of the School of Rhetoric. Later
they were elected to the Civic Guard and to the Painters’ Guild of St.
Luke in Haarlem.
Like almost all the artists of his time, he was involved in pecuniary
difficulties. In 1652 a baker sued him for the amount of two hundred
guilders, a debt incurred for bread supplied and for small loans
occasionally advanced. He obtained possession of the artist’s movables,
but allowed him to continue in the use of them. Ten years later we find
Hals, now seventy-eight years old, applying for relief from the city
government, which granted him one hundred and fifty dollars in quarterly
instalments. This exhausted, he renewed his application for public
assistance, and was granted a yearly pension of two hundred guilders.
Two years later, on or about the 26th of August, 1666, he died in his
eighty-second year and was buried beneath the choir of the Church of St.
Bavon in Haarlem.
These few circumstances represent practically all that is known of Frans
Hals’s life as a man. The main suggestion to be derived from them is
that he was held in considerable esteem by his fellow-townsmen. The
painters enrolled him in their guild; his creditor did not unduly press
him, and the municipality attended to the needs of his declining years.
It is fit to dwell on these points, because a tradition, apparently
started by Houbraken, the painter-historian of the artists of the
period, has clung about the memory of Hals, representing him to have
been a frequenter of pot-houses and generally dissolute. But, except for
the reprimand administered to him in the affair of his first wife, there
is nothing on record to prove the accuracy of this tradition. One is
therefore permitted to believe that the incident was a single offense;
sufficiently reprehensible, but not to be counted against his whole
life. On the other hand, the leniency of the baker and the relief voted
by the municipality may be fairly taken as arguments against the story
of his worthlessness. But the most reliable evidence of its falsity is
to be found in his work as an artist. It is inconceivable that the
portraits and character studies which he executed in such numbers could
have been produced by a man whose brain was fuddled with dissipation.
The very character of his technique gives the lie to such a suspicion;
for, as we shall see presently, it was the product of a particularly
vigorous comprehension of facts, and was rendered in a method
extraordinarily direct and sure, and often under circumstances of great
rapidity. While his work is uneven in quality, it is only toward the end
that there is a falling off in the certainty and the completeness of his
technique. But the pathos that attaches to the two memorable examples of
this decline, which now hang in the Haarlem Museum, the groups of male
and female _Regents of the Hospital for the Poor_, is due to their
revelation, not of any premature loss of power, but of the sapping of
vitality which comes after fourscore years.
On the other hand, it would be fatal to a just appreciation of Hals to
try to shape him to our modern notions of propriety. His character was
certainly not staid; it may well have been, by present-day comparisons,
unregulated. He was a man of his own time, and the character of his
fellow-citizens may be seen in the groups he has left behind of the
officers of the Civic Guard. They were men of vigorous personality, of
strong passions; they lived high and, maybe, at times a bit recklessly.
They had faced death in battle, and enjoyed the leisure which their own
exertions had helped to bring about. That they enrolled Hals in their
organization suggests that he was a man after their own heart. He must
have been; otherwise he never could have painted them as he did,
realizing at once their individualities of character and the general
character of enthusiastic good-fellowship that united them. In none of
these portraits is there any hint of excess, but in all the declaration
of conviviality. It is quite reasonable to assume that this represents a
truer portrait of the artist’s own personal character than the one
suggested by Houbraken.
Moreover, there is another phase of his character that is positively
revealed in his work. It is that of humor. Whether he is painting one of
the curious and sometimes discreditable characters that haunted the
streets and resorts of Haarlem, or the portrait of some burgomaster,
fully alive to his own importance, or recording the puissance and the
pageantry of the military guilds, it is always in a genial mood, not
seldom with manifest humor. In fact, if ever there was an artist to
whom, as revealed in his work, the epithet “jolly” were appropriate, it
is Frans Hals.
And here we may note a shrewd observation by the German critic W. Bode.
“The artist’s particular gift,” he says, “which we find in nearly every
one of his portraits, consists in his establishing a lively connection
between the person or persons represented and a supposed third person.”
He does not represent the individual or group as if posing for himself,
but as if he had surprised them in the presence of a third person, or as
if he had in mind the impression that would be produced in a third
person’s mind by the scene in front of him. His own point of view, in
fact, is more than objective, more than a recognition of direct, visible
facts; it is rather expansive, drawing into the circumference of its own
observation the points of view and feeling of others than himself. One
may almost say that he has the gift of revealing his personages not only
as they appeared to him, but also as they were regarded by their
contemporaries. Whether singly or in groups, they seem to be perfectly
at home in an atmosphere at once sympathetic and conducive to the most
spontaneous expression of their own natures. Thus, as Bode adds, “he has
a great gift of rendering any passing moment of psychical agitation.”
Before proceeding to an analysis of his technique, we may note two other
general characteristics: the vigor and the imagination that it involves.
An artist’s technique is a measure of his personality, even though his
[Illustration: THE JOLLY TOPER FRANS HALS
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
motive be as impersonal as Hals’s. The latter’s point of view was
objective, intent on seeing and rendering the facts of things as they
confronted him; but, unlike many objective painters whose technique
presents merely a correct and efficient record, because their own mind
is little more than a mirror, reflecting mechanically what is in front
of it, Hals’s mind was an active vitalizer of the impressions that it
received. The distinction corresponds pretty completely to the
difference which may exist between two lecturers. One will give a
careful presentation of his subject which we listen to with interest,
and, if we have confidence in his ability, with a willingness to accept
his conclusions; but another will do more. Because of the gusto with
which he attacks his subject, the genial, expansive outlook with which
he views it, the broadly human spirit in which he treats it, even
because of the tone of voice and gesture of body with which he lends
color and warmth to his remarks, he will so stimulate his audience that
they cease to be mere listeners. Their own brains are at work; they
become active participators in the train of thought. It is in this kind
of way that Hals’s technique affects one. It is the product of so ample
and genial an outlook, so teems with gusto, and manifests itself with
such an assurance of conviction and so vigorously facile a style, that
it stimulates the imagination. In the presence of his portraits one is
no passive spectator, but aroused to an activity of appreciation.
I have spoken of imagination; and I mean to imply a twofold exercise
thereof: that Hals himself exhibited imagination and kindles it also in
the spectator. To some people it may seem to be an abuse of the word to
speak of imagination, in the case of an artist so content to be occupied
with the objective traits of his subject as Hals was. But they overlook
the fact that, while an artist may exercise no imagination in the choice
of a subject, he may display a great deal in the rendering of it. He may
not give reins to his imagination as Rembrandt did, peering below the
surface of things, exploring the hidden recesses of the human soul; he
may, on the contrary, be satisfied to be an able craftsman, handling the
material presented to him, intent only on giving to it form and
character; yet, even so, he will exhibit what one may call a technical
imagination. And it is precisely this which characterizes the technique
of Hals. It appears in the arrangement of his compositions, especially
in the group-portraits, where it takes the form of a superior kind of
inventiveness, which is but a phase of imagination. This gift abounds in
the corporation pictures at Haarlem. The problem of disposing so many
figures in such a way that each shall have its due share of individual
emphasis, and yet that the whole group may have, on the one hand, a
naturalness and spontaneity of suggestion, and, on the other, a
reasonable amount of artistic unity, was one to try to its utmost
capacity an artist’s inventiveness. Hals was the first to solve it; and,
while other artists profited by his example, none could attain to the
completeness of his success. You may be thinking of Rembrandt’s _Syndics
of the Cloth Guild_; but the latter’s composition contains only six
figures, whereas in Hals’s masterpiece, _The Reunion of the Officers of
the Archers of St. Andrew_, there are fourteen. For a just comparison
you should rather choose Van der Helst’s great composition in the Rijks
Museum, _The Banquet of the Civic Guard_, an amazing example of
inventiveness, but lacking in the suppleness, spontaneity, and gusto
that Hals exhibits.
But the latter’s imagination is not alone displayed in the management of
intricate compositions. It is displayed also in the treatment of each
figure and in his pictures of single individuals; manifesting itself in
two ways, both in the way he has seen his subject and in the way he has
rendered it. And first for the imaginative quality of his vision. It is
concerned with externals, or at least with traits of character that lie
close to the surface; but with what an alertness it has observed the
idiosyncrasy of each person, and how completely it has comprehended it!
This is more than objective clear-sightedness; it implies a capacity to
reconstruct the retinal impression, and to clothe it with actual living
consciousness, that involves a marked exercise of the creative faculty
of imagination. If you still doubt it, again compare Hals with Van der
Helst, next to himself the most accomplished of the painters of
corporation pictures, and the verdict concerning the latter’s work will
surely be that by comparison it is prosy. At least that is the word that
seems to me to express the difference, and it conveys the suggestion
that the work is merely objective, unvitalized by the imaginative
faculty.
Further, observe how Hals treats the costumes and the accompaniments of
still-life in his pictures. He has not merely seen them; he has felt
them, realized in his imagination their distinctive character and their
relation to the whole impression. For those were brave days in Holland,
succeeding the expiration of the truce; an underlying bravery of spirit
and an external bravery of demeanor and manners characterized the life
of the burghers. It was not for nothing that their trade had absorbed
the finest weavers and artificers in the world; they decked themselves
and their families in the costliest fabrics of their looms and loaded
their tables with objects of fine plate. These things were more to them
than vanities; they were the expression of the proud preëminence they
had won. Now it is the spirit and the meaning of all this that Hals was
so skilful in rendering. Van der Helst’s displays of costume rather
suggest that “fine feathers make fine birds,” while the suggestion of
Hals is of fine fellows appropriately bedecked with finery. His
imagination, in fact, had caught the enthusiasm of the time and
discovered its interpretation. And, further still, apart from the
relation which this beauty of display bore to the temper of the times,
it needs imagination in an artist to interpret the beauty of a fabric or
an object of still-life. Mere imitation of its appearance is not
sufficient. Such merely represents the appearance; it does not interpret
it. The distinction will be clear to any one who is a student of
photography and has seen the still-life studies of flowers and fruit and
glassware by Baron A. de Meyer. In them the crude notion of merely
representing appearances has been superseded by the desire to make the
picture express the enthusiasm which their beauty has inspired. The
result is an interpretation of the sentiment of beauty. Such, too, is
Hals’s rendering of the silks and velvets and lawn ruffs, the dishes
and
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF NICOLAES VAN DER MEER FRANS HALS
BURGOMASTER OF HAARLEM
HAARLEM MUSEUM]
goblets, the fruit and wine, banners and weapons. He has not only seen
these things, he has felt their beauty; discovered, in fact, by an act
of imagination, the sentiment of beauty they involve.
And here I may add, in the way of anticipation, that, if a person is
dull to the sentiment of beauty that things inanimate may suggest, he is
not going to proceed very far toward an appreciation of the art of
Holland in the seventeenth century, for it was largely concerned with
the beauty that is inherent in material things. If he is conscious of
nothing more in the rendering of costumes and accessories with which
these pictures abound than the cleverness of material representation, he
will soon tire of the study, for the skilfulness is so frequently
repeated, and its very repetition will fatigue. He may begin by
exclaiming: “How wonderfully that sash, this velvet gown, or what not is
painted!” but, unless he can go on and share the enthusiasm for beauty
that inspired and assured the artist’s skill; if, in a word, his own
imagination cannot conspire with the imagination of the artist, he will
very shortly be an exceedingly tired student of Holland art.
So far we have discussed the imagination with which Hals observed his
subjects; it remains to note how imagination was involved in the
rendering of them. Really the two processes, the mental and the manual,
are inextricably united, for it was the way he felt his subject that
determined the impression he received of it, and the impression itself
that suggested the mode of rendering it. Yes, he was an Impressionist.
The term, as we know, is modern, dating from about 1871, but the idea
involved in it has been derived from the example of Frans Hals and of
his great contemporary Velasquez, with whom, however, so far as is
known, he had no possible chance of conferring. These two original
minds, separated by distance and the difference of race and by the
barrier of hostilities that precluded any acquaintance with each other
or each other’s work, were nevertheless kindred geniuses who
simultaneously discovered a new way of seeing and rendering their
subject. It did not survive their generation, for the artists of the
next century turned again to Italy, and Hals and Velasquez were
practically forgotten, until in the early sixties of the nineteenth
century Edouard Manet rediscovered Velasquez, and the study of him led
to the recognition of Hals, so that both became an example and
inspiration to modern art. It produced, in fact, a revolution in the
artist’s point of view and method of painting, and the principle
involved was dubbed Impressionism.
Some confusion still exists as to what is implied by this term. Many,
for example, having heard that Claude Monet is an Impressionist and
observing that he covers his pictures with little dabs of paint, suppose
that in this consists Impressionism. Others of wider observation, having
found themselves puzzled and even outraged by the vagaries in paint that
are committed under cover of Impressionism, have concluded that
Impressionism is something which, in the words of the late Lord
Dundreary, “No fellah can understand”; no layman, at least; and,
according to their temperament, they either foam at the mouth with
disgust of Impressionism or regard it as a comparatively harmless form
of lunacy. In either case they miss the fact that Impressionism has
become a vital principle of modern thought, expressing itself not only
in the arts: in painting, sculpture, literature, play-writing, acting,
music, and dancing, but also in modern methods of education, and, by a
natural extension of the idea involved, even in the modern attitude
toward matters of criminology and sanitation. These, however, are modern
evolutions from the single, simple principle involved in the
Impressionism of Hals and Velasquez. Before discussing this, let us note
what is surely interesting and extremely suggestive, namely, that both
the rudimentary principle, as it appears in Hals, and the efflorescence
to which it attained in the nineteenth century were contemporary with a
signal advance in the growth of the scientific spirit. It is, in fact,
of the latter that Impressionism is a phase.
With Hals, as with modern Impressionists, it represents a more natural
way of seeing. When the eye is directed toward an object, it sees the
latter as a whole; it perceives some details and fails to perceive
others; it automatically selects and eliminates. There is another way of
seeing, as when the object is kept for a long time under observation,
and the eye travels over it at leisure and exhaustively examines every
part. Of a picture that records the results of this way of seeing, we
exclaim, “How realistic!” And so in a sense it is; but, on the other
hand, we know that it does not really represent the way in which we see
things in every-day life. What our eye usually records is not an
inventory of details, but a summarized impression of a personality; and
the more vivid the impression, the less likely is it to be distracted
by a number of details. We are impressed by the general significance of
the personality, and note only those details that most contribute to it;
the details that are themselves most significant and characteristic.
Such was Hals’s way of seeing his subject; and, if it resulted in a very
vivid impression in the case of an individual portrait, how much more
when it embraced the complicated impression of a group! The latter, as a
matter of fact, does include more than any eye could possibly embrace in
a single act of vision; but this was a necessary concession to the
difficulties of the problem, which was to effect a compromise between
the conflicting claims, on the one hand, of the group as a whole, and,
on the other, of each of the individual units composing it. Admitting
the need of this reconciliation of opposites, we can scarcely hesitate
to acknowledge the vividness of the total impression and the no less
vivid impression of each one of its component units.
When we analyze the principle of this method of seeing, it is found to
be that of relativity. In selecting this or rejecting that the artist
has been guided by its more or less of value in relation to the whole.
The composition, in fact, is an adjusted balance of varieties of values;
an interlocked scheme of mutual relations; shrewdly calculated to assert
the significance of the whole without undue impairment of the varying
character of the parts. And this principle, thus applied to the whole
composition, operates also in the treatment of every part. Whether it be
the folds of a sash, the modeling of an arm in a sleeve, the substance
and set of a ruff, or the construction of a face, each is attained by
observing the relation of the values. In this case, however, one uses
values, not to measure the amount of relative importance that they play
in the general scheme, but in the technical sense of the amount and
quality of light reflected from the several facets of the surface. Hals
chose to view his subject in a diffused light that permitted practically
no shadows, but reduced the whole to a tissue of more light and less
light, of higher and lower values. While this sounds like the method of
the modern _plein-air_ painters, which has been evolved from the example
of Hals and Velasquez, it is not quite the same; for Hals does not
represent the light as being independent of the figures and enveloping
them, but still adheres to the old convention of making the figure
itself a center of light, as, for instance, a lamp is. Thus in one of
his groups, where a window appears at the back, the light beyond it is
of lower value than that which illumines the figures; and, in another
case, a landscape presents a darker background. But, having adopted this
convention, he adheres to the logic of it, and, like the modern painter
who has followed his example, but with the difference that he tries to
represent the effect of _plein-air_, models his forms in colored light
by the juxtaposition of the various values.
And it is characteristic of Hals that in doing this he overlooks minute
distinctions of value, seizing only the most salient ones and laying
them on the canvas with a broad brush and a remarkable decision. Thus
his technique presents a bold and vigorous generalization of the values;
often conspicuous for what it omits, as when he indicates the back of a
hat or a ruff by a flat tone that is almost uninterrupted by contrasting
tones. It is a technique, in fact, that relies very largely on
suggestion; hence its stimulating character, for one’s own imagination
is invited to assist in the illusion.
Nor does this suggestive generalization involve the slovenliness or
crudeness of brushwork that often disfigures the modern impressionistic
picture. While a canvas by Hals should be viewed from some distance off,
it does not offend at close range. On the contrary, one can enjoy the
orderliness and finesse, the result of fluency and assurance, that the
brushwork reveals, the ensemble having that quality of perfected
craftsmanship which characterizes the whole Holland School. And, though
Hals is scarcely to be classed as a colorist, the compositions being
decked with color rather than interwoven of color, yet his color has a
distinctly positive charm. For he takes so frank a delight in local
colors, whether gravely or gaily sumptuous, preserves their purity of
hue and invests them with luminousness. His color-schemes, too, have
this distinction, that, for all their bravery of show, they are never
commonplace and seldom without a clear suggestion of virility.
A unique opportunity of tracing the development of his style is
presented by the series of corporation pictures at Haarlem. I will not
attempt a detailed description of each, but rather recall the
impressions that were jotted down in the presence of them. The earliest,
then, is _The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George_,
dated 1616, when Hals was thirty-two. How magnificent the display of
still-life, the table-cloth, fruit, dishes, and goblets painted with
such skill and evident delight; what a vigorous enthusiasm is manifested
in the treatment of the uniforms, mostly black, and the scarfs of white
and crimson silk! Each head is strongly characterized, and so are the
hands. The heads are so disposed that they form a band across the
picture, below which another band contains the more sprinkled
arrangement of the hands. Two of the latter, close together near the
center of the table, form the nucleus from which the lines of the
composition radiate. The composition, in fact, is quite formal, and the
heads, one notices, are lighted from the side and constructed of shadow
as well as light; meanwhile no light comes in from the window at the
back, through which appears a landscape, less vividly lighted than the
scene indoors. Indeed, the whole arrangement is still influenced by the
arbitrary devices of the studio; nor does one fail to note that the
space occupied by the heads is flattened almost into one plane, as a
modern photographic group is apt to be.
These points are emphasized by a comparison with Nos. 117 and 118,
painted eleven years later. _The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers
of St. George_, this time, is presented in an interior without a window
visible. The whole apartment seems to be filled with lighted air; the
heads are no longer so obviously arranged to secure a contrast of dark
against light and light against dark; they are evenly illuminated, and
take their places justly in their several planes. For the planes here
extend farther back, and the composition is more varied, with less
suggestion of studied artfulness. Moreover, the treatment of the
costumes has become finer, the blacks especially yielding a variety of
delightful grays that give increased sparkle and animation to the
color-scheme. The flesh parts also are more luminous, and reveal a
greater fluency of brushwork, as if the artist had “got there” with more
ease and rapidity. The effect of all this is very arresting and
satisfying until one examines _The Banquet of the Officers of the
Archers of St. Andrew_.
The latter belongs to the same year, 1627; but the artist has surpassed
himself. Here the faces literally scintillate with animation of color.
Those of the other picture are discovered by comparison to be less
illuminated; after all, they have been modeled to some extent with
shadow, and the flesh in parts is inclined to be greenish gray or drab.
The hands also in the latter picture have more expression and a more
individual characterization, while the gestures are more natural and
spontaneous. The composition, too, is at once more varied and more
coördinated. Again, as in both the previous pictures, the nucleus of it
is a hand; in this case the center of two diagonal axes. But, while the
design is geometrical, the naturalness of the grouping is quite
extraordinary in its mingling of ease and propriety. Further, the color
masses are more inventively arranged; their spotting is more effectively
distributed, and the gaiety of the color is prolonged into the lower
part of the composition. This picture commemorates the banquet given by
the corps on the eve of its departure to the siege of Hasselt and Mons.
Six years later Hals painted a _Reunion_ of the same corps, though only
one member appears in both scenes. It is Captain Johan Schatter, who in
the earlier picture is seated in front of the table, facing left. He
occupies the same position in the later group,
[Illustration: REUNION OF THE OFFICERS OF ST. ANDREW FRANS HALS
HAARLEM MUSEUM]
but is now standing and looking over his shoulder toward the spectator.
He has exchanged his costume of black and golden brown, with its scarf
of rose and white, for a snuff-colored jerkin, pearl-gray under-coat,
and a sky-blue sash and feather; and the difference is reflected in the
superior delicacy of color that distinguishes the later picture.
In this _Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew_ the
corporation pictures reach their highest water-mark. The background,
however, of brownish-olive foliage, showing through an opening some red
roofs against the sky, is dry in color and lacking in luminosity. The
heads, in consequence, do not present the same suggestion of being
enveloped in light as those in the previous picture. In what, then, does
the superiority of this acknowledged masterpiece consist? Comparing it
with the earlier examples, we discover that its color-scheme of blue and
amber, while less resplendent, is more choice, delicate, and subtle, and
that the loveliness of color has been made contributory to the
characterization of the figures. This is scarcely to be appreciated from
the photographic reproduction, but in presence of the original one has a
lively sense of it. There is no suggestion of the display of color
having been considered by itself or as itself an end; the tonal harmony
so accords with the harmony of expression that characterizes the
separate individualities of the group that tone and expression are in
complete unity. Again, as a result or, more probably, a cause of this
harmony of expression, there is a complete simplicity of attitude and
gesture. “What shall I do with my hands?” Any one who has stage-managed
amateur theatricals knows how frequently this question is asked by the
performers. In nine cases out of ten the best advice, though the hardest
to follow, is to do nothing. It is just the fact that the members of
this group are so admirably doing nothing which gives at once such a
naturalness and so high a distinction to this picture.
Here, in fact, we touch perhaps the clue to the whole superiority of
this canvas. In one word, it is control; that almost unconscious
self-control on the artist’s part which results from his consciousness
of assured capacity. He has won beyond the point of experiment, beyond
the later temptation to indulge in display of knowledge and skill; he
has so absolutely acquired both and attuned the one to the other, that
the tricks and devices of his craft no longer sway his imagination; he
shows, in fact, his mastery not so much by what he does as by what he
withholds; he has reached in this great work a plane of extraordinary
artistic conscientiousness. The picture, in fact, has that appearance of
inevitableness, that suggestion of having grown rather than of having
been made, which is the highest expression of genius. It represents Hals
at his zenith. The date is 1633 and the artist’s age forty-nine.
The next picture, _Officers of the Archers of St. George_, is dated
1639, six years later. It is conspicuously inferior not only to the
masterpiece (that were excusable), but to all the preceding works. It
represents a falling off not so much in actual craftsmanship as in
artistic morality. The artist appears to have been satisfied to do less
well than he could; to do, in fact, as little as he might. He has saved
himself expenditure of invention in the composition by stringing the
figures out in a line across the front, and raising another line of
figures behind them; this having been the niggard, unimaginative
arrangement of the older corporation pictures, from which his other work
had presented so happy a departure. Correspondingly the heads, while
forcible in characterization, are lacking in luminosity, and the fabrics
are without vivacity. The general effect is stockish; the breath of life
and of art, as Hals could suggest both, is absent.
Nor in the next picture, dated two years later, the _Regents of the
Hospital of St. Elizabeth_, do we detect the true Frans Hals. The faces
are trickily modeled, brilliant high lights being contrasted with heavy
greenish-drab shadows; and the figures are lumpish, except the second
from the right, which alone reveals sympathy and enthusiasm.
Of the last two groups nothing need be said but that they are the work
of a veteran of eighty years, whose hand has lost its cunning, while his
brain, no longer active, retains only some wavering recollections of its
original activity.
The important point to be suggested in conclusion is that Hals’s best
period included the years from 1625 to 1635; that after the latter
period this enthusiasm waned, and his work became too often perfunctory.
In such cases the flesh parts exhibit an uninspired use of green lower
tones that have a tendency to become drab; features are often crudely
emphasized by a stroke or dab of exaggerated value, and luminosity has
faded into a dull, sometimes lumpish inertness. Even so, however,
compared with the work of other Hollanders, apart from Rembrandt, it
still had a quality and a character that render it distinguished; but
much of this distinction disappears when you compare him with himself,
the later with the earlier Hals. Many of his portraits suggest the
perfunctoriness of a man who has got his method down pat, and tediously
repeats it. In a word, his technique was so personal and so dependent
upon the mood of the moment that it needed the stimulus of enthusiasm,
and when this was absent, the vitality of the technique became
impaired.
CHAPTER V
REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN
It is surely no accident that the name of Rembrandt is familiar to
thousands who know little or nothing of his art. It has, in fact, become
so embedded in the mental consciousness of modern times, that, even as
it must have been a household word in his own day, so almost it has
grown to be in ours. And for this there seem to be two reasons. In the
very use of the word “household” there is a hint of one: the homely, in
the sense of plain and simple, and very heartfelt appeal that his
conception of the subject-matter generally makes to the imagination. But
there is another reason and a greater. It is the magnitude of his
personality as an artist. This was but dimly recognized in his own day,
in the succeeding century forgotten, and is only beginning to be fully
understood in our own times. The influence with which he fertilized art
was to prove so great, that it needed a long period of gestation before
it came to birth, and a correspondingly long period of development
before it reached maturity. Now it has grown to be recognized and felt,
until, like all the great contributions to human ideas, it is, so to
say, in the air. Unwittingly as well as by conviction the world is
conscious of it. Briefly, the nature of the influence is that it has
revolutionized our attitude toward beauty. It has not eliminated the
old idea of beauty, but supplemented it with a newer one, no less potent
and far more adapted to our modern needs. The absolutism of the classic
ideal has been overthrown by it. Art, that once was solely aristocratic,
has been expanded to include the democratic ideal. It was therefore
necessary for the world to have mastered the latter, as a principle of
life and conduct, before it could be capable of appreciating Rembrandt
to the full.
For Rembrandt’s art is the antithesis of Greek art. The Greek is founded
upon a hypothesis, upon the assumption of a possible perfection;
Rembrandt’s upon an acceptance of imperfection, upon the facts of life
in relation to things as they exist. The one is based upon an
artificially constructed absolutism, and is technically expressed
through form--form, absolute and supreme. The other, in its recognition
of the relativity of everything in life, is based upon tone, as affected
by its environment of light. The difference is fundamental both in its
technical and psychological aspect.
As long as society was conditioned by the aristocratic theory, Greek
art, and the Renaissance interpretation of its principles, sufficed;
but, with the growth and spread of the democratic, a new principle
became necessary. Rembrandt conceived it, and our own age is learning to
apply it. Our appreciation of the character of beauty has become
enlarged by a realization of the beauty of character. The latter may be
associated with beauty of form and features, though in real life it is
more often not; yet, even when it is, we have discovered that the beauty
of character is due, not to the form itself, but to the expression
inherent in the form, and that character, as revealed by expression, is
discernible also in things homely, even in the ugly. Art, in fact, has
extended its province until it more nearly corresponds with the
universal scheme of earthly conditions, wherein the good is mingled with
the bad, and the sun shines alike on the just and the unjust. Meanwhile,
even as humanity gropes toward some divine reconciliation of the
coexistence of evil with good, so art must find some means of
spiritualizing the facts of life and of idealizing the homely and ugly.
This preëminently was Rembrandt’s gift.
* * * * *
THE few known facts of Rembrandt’s life are clearly associated with his
art. Born on the 15th of July, 1606, in Leyden, he was the son of Harmen
of the Rhine, a miller in comfortable circumstances. He was sent to a
Latin school as a preparation for entrance into the University of
Leyden, that “when he became of age he might serve the city and the
republic with his knowledge.” But he was destined to serve them in
another way. Since he showed no taste for Latin and a single desire to
be an artist, he was removed from school and placed with the local
painter, Jacob van Swanenburch. He was then about twelve years old, and
after spending three years with this teacher had made such progress that
the father decided to send him to Amsterdam to study under Pieter
Lastman, whose pictures of religious subjects had made him the most
popular painter of that day.
With this master Rembrandt remained only six months. Lastman’s
influence, however, had been considerable, though scarcely in a direct
way. In fact, what he did for Rembrandt was to pass on to the latter
the influence which he himself had derived from Elsheimer during a two
years’ stay in Rome. For this German painter had made a great reputation
by treating Biblical subjects in the natural or anti-classic manner. The
scene was suggested by the Italian landscape, and the personages were
real men and women, clothed in ordinary costume of the period. It is
this translation of the Bible story into the vernacular of the day,
corresponding as it did to the motive of Lucas van Leyden in his picture
at Leyden of _The Last Judgment_, which must have been familiar to
Rembrandt, that affected the latter’s imagination.
He returned to Leyden and for seven years in his father’s house
continued a course of self-study. It was based on direct study from
life, his models being himself and his relations, and included (where
again one may trace the influence of Lucas van Leyden) the practice of
etching. The earliest date recorded of any of these products of his
needle is 1628, which appears on _An Old Woman’s Head_, _Full Face, seen
only to the Chin_, and _Bust of an Old Woman_.[B] In 1624 appeared
another dated etching, _Rembrandt, a Bust_, and the following year a
series of small plates for which he himself was the model: _Rembrandt
with an Open Mouth_; _with an Air of Grimace_; _with Haggard Eyes_, and
_Laughing_.
These prints give a remarkable clue to a phase of Rembrandt’s
personality that has not been sufficiently emphasized. They show that it
included the instinct and faculty of an actor; the consciousness that
in his body he possessed a muscular instrument capable of expressing the
emotions of the mind; and, moreover, the capacity to play upon it. This
throws a new light upon the habit, exhibited at intervals throughout his
life, of making portraits of himself and frequently in costume. The
latter particular is apt to be dismissed as a harmless pleasantry,
whereas it should rather be considered extraordinarily suggestive. For
he was not merely “dressing up,” but enacting a part in his own person;
actually realizing in his body the idea that possessed his mind. That he
could do this and needed to do it for the satisfaction of his own mental
and physical impulses, helps to explain his extraordinary facility and
power as a draftsman. For the virtue of great drawing consists in its
quality of expression, in its ability to infuse feeling into a gesture
or movement and so correlate the latter to the mood of mind, presumed to
be dominating the subject. This virtue cannot be gained at second hand
from a model; it must be inherent in the artist himself, and will be
efficient according to the degree in which the artist can feel the
emotion in himself and is capable of physically expressing it; in a
word, to the degree in which he possesses the instinct of an actor.
Viewed in this light Rembrandt’s habit of grimacing before a mirror,
dressing up and posturing, gives a most illuminating clue to the source
of his amazing versatility and capacity of expression as a draftsman.
In the same year, 1630, which produced the small prints, appeared also
two “serious” etchings of himself; also two Biblical subjects, _Jesus
Disputing with the Doctors_ and _The Presentation with the Angel_; and,
further, several fine portrait studies. In this year he moved to
Amsterdam.
He was twenty-four years old, and, as far as etching is concerned, “was
already in the peculiar situation,” I quote from Hamerton, “of an artist
who has left himself no room for improvement except in attempting art of
another kind, and in overcoming new, though possibly not greater,
difficulties.” Among the oil-paintings that he had already executed are
_St. Paul_ (Stuttgart); _St. Jerome in a Cave_ (Berlin); two portraits
of old men (Cassel); and one of a young man, resembling himself, at The
Hague. It was the fame of his portraits that, according to Orlers,
brought invitations from Amsterdam to settle there; and during the first
years of his sojourn over a shop on the Bloemgracht he executed six that
are still in existence. But the most remarkable picture of this year is
the _St. Simeon in the Temple_, now in the Gallery of The Hague. Here we
detect for the first time the power and strangeness of Rembrandt’s
imagination, displayed in the mysteriously lighted expanse of mammoth
architecture and in lustrous fabrics, and, more essentially, the
foretaste of his lifelong effort to construct a composition out of
colored light.[C] It is the first revelation of his peculiarly
individual self.
Meanwhile he had been attending the anatomy classes of the famous Dr.
Tulp, and the following year, 1632, produced the Hague picture, _The
Lesson in Anatomy_, as remarkable for clearly defined characterization
as the _St. Simeon_ had been for its imaginative treatment of light.
Both have elements of indecision, for the artist was only twenty-six,
but in them the qualities of Rembrandt’s personality are already
established.
_The Lesson_ brought him fame. Pupils flocked to his studio, clients
sought his pictures, and the ten years that followed teemed with
productivity and fortune. They cover his life with Saskia van
Uylenborch, whom he married in 1634 and lost by death in 1642. She
appears in frequent portraits and inspired many of his pictures. He
occupied houses successively on the Nieuwe Doelstraat, Binnen-Amstel,
and the Jodenbreedstraat, living simply, but indulging profusely in the
collection of works of art. This heyday of prosperity in the
companionship of Saskia is commemorated in the superb portrait of his
wife sitting upon his knee, in the Dresden Gallery.
In 1642 his fortunes received a double blow. Saskia died, and his
corporation picture, _The Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company_,
popularly but erroneously called “The Night Watch,” was received with
disfavor. It proved to be a turning-point in his career. Public
recognition began to wane, and financial embarrassments to increase; yet
his artistic fecundity continued, marked by more frequent examples of
landscape. Toward the end of the forties he enjoyed the sympathetic
support of the burgomaster, Jan Six, an enthusiastic lover of books and
collector of works of art, whose friendship lasted till his death in
1658. Meanwhile, about 1653, Rembrandt seems to have married the woman
who had devoted herself to his care, Hendrickje Stoffels. She died in
1656 and money troubles crowded upon him. He was declared a bankrupt;
his household goods were seized by his creditors and later sold at an
appalling sacrifice; the house in the Jodenbreedstraat also passed under
the hammer, and Rembrandt retired to a house on the Rosengracht. This
was in 1658. The house, which still exists, was a comfortable one; and
it seems probable that the eleven years during which Rembrandt lived in
it, until his death in 1669, were a time of tranquillity, as they
certainly were of continued artistic activity. This period, indeed,
produced _The Six Syndics of the Cloth Hall_ (Amsterdam), a masterpiece
of assured self-possession and complete achievement. It also was marked
with many portraits of himself, no less than four having been painted in
the last year of his life. One of them shows him blear eyed, with red
and bulbous face, but laughing, and holding his maulstick like a
scepter.[D]
* * * * *
EUGÈNE FROMENTIN, skilled alike as a man of letters and a painter,
analyzes in his “Maîtres d’Autrefois” the art of Rembrandt. The argument
has been so generally accepted, that it must be described here. It may
be compressed as follows: Fromentin discovers contradictions in the art
of Rembrandt. It is at one time so realistic, and at another so
visionary. He explains this apparent contradiction by the theory that
Rembrandt’s was a dual nature. On the one side he shared with his
fellow-artists their practicalness, direct seeing, and love of clear and
definite expression; while on the other he was a solitary dreamer, a
visionary, to whom the mystery of things made
[Illustration: THE SYNDICS OF THE CLOTH GUILD REMBRANDT
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
chief appeal. Thus, by turns he was realist and idealist; occasionally,
as in _The Sortie_, his pictures seem to have been the battle-ground of
his two irreconcilable natures.
Fromentin calls the realist in Rembrandt the “exterior man” as
contrasted with the “interior man,” revealed in his examples of
idealism. The former he characterizes as an accomplished technician,
with certainty of hand and a keenly logical mind. “His aim is to be
comprehensible and veracious; he emulates the true colors of the
daylight; draws with a fidelity and thoroughness that, while it makes
you forget that it is drawing, itself forgets nothing. It is excellently
physiognomical. It expresses and characterizes, in their individuality,
traits, glances, attitudes, and gestures, that is to say, normal habits
of behavior and the furtive accidents of life. His execution has the
propriety, the ampleness, the high bearing, the firm tissue, the force
and conciseness that belong to passed masters in the art of fine
idiomatic expression.” The original of this last phrase is _l’art des
beaux langues_; and we may note, in passing, its significance in
connection with the context. Indeed, the whole paragraph might as
accurately characterize some fine literary production, such as would
satisfy the high standard of the French Academy. It is based upon the
clear comprehension and logic of form.
On the contrary, when Rembrandt is in the mood of idealism, Fromentin no
longer discovers in him the consummate technician. He sacrifices form to
chiaroscuro. And what of his use of chiaroscuro, so peculiar to himself
that it has come to be called by his name? Fromentin, in a beautiful
passage, first suggests the general value of chiaroscuro. Ordinarily
used, it is the art of rendering the atmosphere visible and of painting
an object enveloped in air. “But it is more than any other medium the
form of intimate sensations or ideas. It is light, vaporous, veiled,
discreet; it lends its charm to things which are concealed, invites
curiosity, adds an attraction to moral beauties, and gives a grace to
the speculation of conscience. In fine, it is concerned with sentiment,
emotion, the uncertain, the undefined and infinite; with dreams and the
ideal. And that is why it is appropriately the poetic and natural
atmosphere, which the genius of Rembrandt did not cease to inhabit.”
It was natural, therefore, that Rembrandt should bring to perfection
this method of chiaroscuro, which Fromentin describes as the art of
“enveloping everything, of immersing everything, in a bath of shadow, of
plunging into it even the light itself, in order to draw out the light
therefrom so that it shall appear more distant, more radiant; to cause
waves of shadow to revolve round lighted centers; and to modulate these
shadows, to hollow them, make them dense and yet render the obscurity
transparent, and the less obscure parts easy to penetrate; in a word, to
give to the strongest colors a kind of permeability which stops them
from being black.”
But it is Rembrandt’s peculiar characteristic that he carried the method
of chiaroscuro much further. Fromentin thus sums the matter up: He calls
him a luminarist, apologizing for the word, which, when he wrote in
1876, was still a “barbarous” one. And a luminarist he defines to be one
who conceives of light as outside of
[Illustration:
SORTIE OF THE BANNING COCK COMPANY REMBRANDT
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
fixed laws, attaches to it an extraordinary meaning, and makes great
sacrifices for it. And, he adds, “if such is the meaning of this newly
coined word, Rembrandt is at once defined and judged, for the word
expresses an idea difficult to render, but a true idea, a rare eulogy
and a criticism.”
Briefly, then, Fromentin’s argument is this: Rembrandt in his ideal
moods essayed to use light as the actual material out of which to
construct form; he composed in light. The result was admirable, when the
character of the subject justified such treatment; but open to serious
criticism when it did not. The famous instance of the latter, in
Fromentin’s judgment, is _The Sortie_ or “Night Watch.”
“Rembrandt had to represent a company of men-at-arms. It would have been
easy enough to tell us what they were going to do; but he has told us so
negligently, that people are still unable to comprehend it, even in
Amsterdam. He had to paint some likenesses, they are doubtful; some
characteristic costumes, they are for the most part apocryphal; a
picturesque effect, and this effect is such that the picture becomes
undecipherable. The subject, the personages and details have disappeared
in the shadowy phantasmagoria of the palette. Ordinarily Rembrandt
excels in rendering light, he is marvelous in the art of painting an
imaginary subject (_fiction_); his habit is to think, his master faculty
is the expression of light. But here imagination is out of place, life
is wanting, and the thought atones for nothing. As for the light, it is
unnatural, unquiet, and artificial; it radiates from the inside to the
outside, it dissolves the objects that it illuminates. I see some focal
spots of brilliance, but I see nothing illuminated; the light is neither
beautiful, true, nor reasonable (_motivée_).”
Before discussing this judgment let us note Fromentin’s approval of
Rembrandt’s use of light--in the case of subjects that seem to him to
justify it. He instances particularly _The Supper at Emmaus_ and _The
Good Samaritan_, both in the Louvre. He speaks with fine sympathy of the
original and infinitely human conception of Christ in the former
picture, while upon the technique of the latter he comments as follows:
“The canvas is enveloped in smoke (_enfumée_), all impregnated with
somber golds, very rich in depth and, above all, very grave. The
material is muddy, yet transparent; the brushwork heavy, yet subtle;
hesitating and resolute; labored and free; very unequal, uncertain,
vague in some parts, astonishingly precise in others. No contour
appears, not an accent added in the way of routine. There is evident an
extreme timidity, which is not the result of ignorance and proceeds, one
would say, from the fear of being banal or from the price which the
thinker attaches to the immediate and direct expression of life. The
objects have a structure that seems to exist in itself, almost without
the help of formulas, rendering, without any means that you can seize
upon, the uncertainties of nature. There are some nude limbs and feet of
irreproachable construction--moreover, ‘style.’ In the pale, pinched,
groaning visage of the wounded man, there is nothing save expression,
something that comes from the soul, from within outward; tonelessness
(_atonie_), suffering; as it were, the sad joy of collecting one’s self
when one feels about to die. Not a contortion, not a trait that
overreaches moderation, not a touch in this rendering of the
inexpressible that is not pathetic and restrained; everything dictated
by profound emotion and interpreted by means altogether extraordinary.”
And, adds Fromentin: “Examine other painters of sentiment, of
physiognomy and characterization, the men of scrupulous observation or
of _verve_. Take account of their intentions; study their scrutiny,
measure their domain, weigh well their language, and ask yourself, if
anywhere you perceive an equal intimacy in the expression of a visage,
an emotion of this nature, such ingenuity in the manner of feeling;
anything, in a word, which is as delicate to conceive, as delicate to
say, and is said in terms more original, more exquisite, or more
perfect.”
Nothing else, I suppose, has ever been written about this phase of
Rembrandt’s art that is at once so fine in thought and diction, so
enlightening, and so memorable. For one here meets in union the trained
thinker and practised writer and the painter; thus getting much more
than the painter’s exclusive point of view, and at the same time the
latter, interpreted by the painter at first hand. The gist of it is
that, when the subject involved an idea, Rembrandt was not only
justified in sacrificing the corporeal to the incorporeal, but was
master of a technique that could express the idea conclusively and with
supreme emotional appeal.
In conclusion, Fromentin considers that the whole life of Rembrandt
represents a struggle between the two sides of his nature. The earliest
battle-ground was _The Sortie_, from which, owing to the nature of the
problem, he came off worsted. But did he ever succeed in reconciling the
“exterior” and the “interior” man? If ever, Fromentin concludes, surely
in _The Syndics_, which, in a word, is a work of imagination and yet of
real life.
* * * * *
THE whole exposition of Fromentin’s argument, from which these fragments
have been gathered, is worth careful study, particularly because of the
constructive nature of the criticism. In its combination of technical
information and logical point of view, in its subtlety and human
sympathy, it affords a model for the method of approaching the serious
examination of a great artist’s work. One may acknowledge its value and
the benefit derived from it, without subscribing entirely to its
conclusions. It may be possible to feel that it has the defect, if one
is to find a single word for it, of excessive concentration. It centers
too exclusively around one picture, _The Sortie of the Banning Cock
Company_.
This picture has suffered from too much exploitation. It has been
praised “not wisely but too well” by artists and has been worshiped by
the public. Fromentin may have approached it with undue expectations; at
any rate, he found himself disappointed; and, being at variance with the
general judgment, felt the need of justifying his own attitude. He has
done it so exhaustively as to warp his own judgment, until what there is
of weakness in the picture has become almost an obsession with him. It
is never absent from his thoughts, and continually peeps in on one page
after another, and mingles with the judgment of other pictures.
Fromentin has used it as a pivot around which to swing his whole
appreciation of Rembrandt; and, more than this, has himself been sucked
into the vortex of his own revolving argument. It is an expedient
scarcely to be warranted by breadth of criticism to select one picture
of any artist as a focusing-point for a consideration of his whole work,
and least of all in the case of an artist so universal as Rembrandt.
Moreover, Fromentin does not persuade us that he had a very wide
acquaintance with the master’s work. He knew his Louvre well; grew up
with it, and had become habituated to it and fixed in the impressions he
had derived. Later in life he made the acquaintance of the National
Gallery and visited Dresden. Then he makes the pilgrimage to Holland. He
first reaches The Hague, where _The Lesson in Anatomy_ fails to satisfy
his expectations. He is alive to its excellence in parts, but does not
find the strength and character of two or three of the heads sustained
throughout the canvas. He feels that an unreasonable amount of adulation
has been lavished on the picture. It arouses his antagonism and piques
in him the critical vein. Then an interval in his approach to Rembrandt
ensues. He alights at Haarlem and notes with what definitive skill and
clearness of comprehension Frans Hals treated the corporation subject.
Fresh from these impressions, he finds himself in front of Rembrandt’s
treatment of a corresponding theme. By contrast it seems to him a work
of confused motives and manifold uncertainties. Yet how extravagantly it
has been lauded! Like _The Lesson in Anatomy_, _The Sortie of the
Banning Cock Company_ has been prejudiced by uncritical applause. The
critic in Fromentin is now thoroughly roused. With every wish to be
fair to Rembrandt, he proceeds to build upon these two pictures a fabric
of constructive and destructive criticism. His faculties are narrowed to
a focus spot of concentrated heat, are swept into the ardor of their
centripetal momentum, and become caught up in the subtleties of their
own compressed invention. He elaborates a theory, and into its compact
limits would squeeze the genius of Rembrandt.
Further, what kind of mind did Fromentin bring to bear upon this
examination? A generous one, desirous of being broad; but a Frenchman’s
and an Academician’s; one, that is to say, which clings to logic and
bases its expression upon form. It exhibits and demands clarity of
reasoning; declares itself in refined exactness. It knew of
Impressionism, yet was too old in its convictions, too fixed in earlier
traditions, to comprehend it. But, since the day when Fromentin’s mind
was in the forming, the world’s point of view toward art, even one may
say toward life, has changed; and its attitude toward the manner of
expression has progressed, until it has come back to Rembrandt with a
new and more intimate comprehension. It recognizes him as an
Impressionist of sensations and tries to judge him by what we now know
and feel about Impressionism.
Briefly, we have learned that there may be something in art more
valuable than the record of a person, place, or incident, and this is,
the impression of it conceived and rendered by the artist; that, through
this interpretation, the place, person, or incident becomes illuminated,
more vitally represented. How, for example, can Bartholdi’s
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH BAS REMBRANDT
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
Statue of Liberty compare with the interpretation of the idea evolved by
such a man as Lincoln? The idea thus logically and formally shaped in
the Statue will not even bear comparison with that which is expressed by
the spontaneous utterance of some poor emigrant, as he finds his foot at
last planted on the free soil of his imaginings. In life, as in art, the
real thing to us is what we feel about it; in Rembrandt’s art, what _he_
feels about his subject and makes _us_ feel.
Then, again, we have discovered that often we are made to feel most
deeply, not by detailed statement, but by suggestion: in the case of a
speaker, perhaps by a momentary gesture, or play of features, by a
sudden inflection of the voice, or a pause in speech, and the occasional
accent of a word or sentence; in the case of a writer, often as much by
what he leaves unsaid, by the thought that is veiled behind the
statement, by the choice and emphasis of certain features of his record.
Further, we may have learned to find occasional value even in
uncertainty or indecision. We may sometimes tire of, and possibly
distrust, the world’s tendency to “get things down fine.” The latter may
seem to imply that the thing itself is small, or that there is smallness
in the vision of the man who thus approaches life. We may be conscious
of life itself as an aggregate of moments of brilliant realization and
more frequent half-tones, enveloped in a sea of shadow; and may reach
nearer to the heart and meaning of it by welcoming its mystery.
Surely something of this sort was Rembrandt’s attitude toward life, and
therefore his point of view toward art. He has been called unlearned,
because he had small taste for Latin and no scholastic acquisitions.
But in the wisdom of life, as drawn from life itself and distilled
through the brain and temperament of one who searched life deeply and
lived his own life ardently, he has had few equals, at least among
artists. For the explanation of Rembrandt is that to him life presented
itself as an _idea_.
Thus he is without a rival in the sympathetic rendering of old age. He
saw more than the exterior of it; he penetrated into its psychology.
For--how shall I express it?--the fruit of living is experience, and
experience tends more and more to lose sight of the concrete in the
abstract, to replace the substance of the form with the higher reality
of the idea. The young man, as he ceases to depend upon the
ministrations of the mother, enshrines her in a personal idea of
motherhood; the old lover rediscovers the bride of his youth in the idea
with which time has enveloped the wife. The idea is the aureole or
nimbus that gathers about the form and proclaims its sanctity. It is the
idea, then, that Rembrandt, the artist of ideas, the searcher after the
higher reality inherent in form, discovered in old age.
On the other hand, while Rembrandt exalted the idea above the substance,
he was not indifferent to form. No great artist whose domain is the
world of sight can be.
Indeed, the wider the acquaintance with the master goes, whether in the
galleries throughout Europe, or through the examples which occasionally
emerge from private collections, as in the recent extraordinary display
in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more one is impressed
not only with Rembrandt’s feeling for form, but also with his amazing
power of rendering it.
Sometimes, as in the marvelously detailed _Portrait of Elizabeth Bas_
(Amsterdam), the impression he derived of the original was one which he
could render only by enforcing the bulk and character and precision of
form. This lady, though not of gentle birth, was, as the widow of
Admiral Swartenhout, a figure in society. This much we know from the
written record; the rest is recorded in the portrait. As Rembrandt saw
her, she was a woman of determined personality; a narrow and rigid
believer in her own importance, and a stickler for its recognition; an
ingrained precisionist, as upright as her backbone and as set in
formalism as her corseted figure. Yet the flesh of her face and hands
has the dimpled softness and delicate contours of well-preserved old
age. She is fully conscious of prerogatives, but her hardness has been
made gracious by the kindly touch of time. All this, no doubt, was
written in detail on her ample person, and Rembrandt, feeling the
intimate value of its completeness, has detailed it in the portrait.
Or take another example of the record of an impression, _The Portrait of
Hendrickje Stoffels_ in the Berlin Gallery. The devotion of this woman
had stayed the artist in his trials, and her exuberant youth had put
fresh force into his courage. He had learned to depend upon her watchful
solicitude, to lean upon her abundant vitality, and to warm his
imagination in the glow of her physical ardor. In the portrait he wraps
her strong figure in the rich grandeur of a mantle that burns with
wonderful brown lights above an under-robe of golden cream, while a
flash of crimson glows in her brown hair, and a golden warmth is exhaled
from the full, firm features and hovers above the ripe harvest of her
bosom. The portrait is an artist’s apotheosis of the glory and the
benediction of physical vitality; and, let us not forget, in the
strength of this woman’s companionship Rembrandt achieved his
masterpiece of austere and virile intellectuality--_The Syndics of the
Cloth Workers’ Guild_.
And so we might take one by one the pictures of this master, and,
whether the impression that it records is drawn mainly from the exterior
of its subject or from a penetration of the character or soul within,
whether it be the expression of the soul of some fact of Bible story, no
matter what the degree of idealism involved, every time it is form or
some interpretation thereof, that is the foundation of the picture. Not
form, however, for its own sake, for the purpose of rendering it in its
logical and reasoned completeness or of exploiting the master’s
efficiency in doing what every student aspires, and many can learn, to
do; but form so felt, so rendered, that what we are made conscious of is
not alone the physical sense of form, but its abstract significance; in
a word, if I may say so, the soul of form, as from time to time it is
used to interpret some one or other of the artist’s impressions.
You cannot pass from one to the other of the thirty-seven examples of
Rembrandt in the exhibition that, as I write, is being held in the
galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, or travel round the galleries of
Europe, intent upon the wealth of Rembrandts that they contain, without
reaching a conviction, that grows more and more assured, of the profound
knowledge and feeling for form
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF HENDRICKJE STOFFELS REMBRANDT
BERLIN GALLERY]
that Rembrandt possessed and communicates. He may reveal clearly but a
portion of a figure, veiling or obscuring the rest; but what is revealed
is sufficient for the physical appreciation of the whole figure, and
enforces the physical significance, while the spiritual significance is
profoundly increased by the demand that has been made upon our
imagination. After long study one comes to believe, not only that
Rembrandt treated form differently from other artists, which no one, I
suppose, denies; but also that no other artist has ever treated it with
such a mingling of power and subtlety, with so fine and sure a reliance
upon its physical qualities, and yet with so marvelous a capacity to
interpret its spiritual significance.
Almost similar in motive is Rembrandt’s use of color. He is not a
colorist in the sense that the great Venetians were, for they extolled
the glory of local color--the actual splendor of hue with which they
clothed their radiant figures and wove about them a triumphant
orchestration. This also is an abstract use of color, involving a
consciousness and suggestion of the effect that color as color has upon
the imagination. But Rembrandt went further. He, too, had the love of
beautiful fabrics, bought them freely, and as freely used them on his
models. But here he parts company with the Venetians; for by this time
he has ceased to think of the fabric or its color as something of value
in itself. It has become merged in the impression that he has formed of
the whole subject. It may occupy a large or small part in the total
impression; that is as it may be; but henceforth it is only contributory
to the physical and spiritual sensations that he has received and is
set upon interpreting. Thus he is at no pains to preserve the material
integrity of the local color; he uses it as he does form: extracting
from it this or that, here forcing or there veiling its emphasis,
plunging much of it in shadow. Therefore, even as his treatment of form
has proved an enigma to some critics, so some hesitate to call him a
colorist. After the manner of the Venetians, I repeat, he is not. But
need theirs be the only manner of the colorist?
Rembrandt used color as he used form, as a symbol of expression; and, to
repeat, what he sought to express was the impression that the form and
color had aroused in his imagination. When the impression was derived
merely from the externals of form, he would elaborate in detail the
retinal impression and in such cases usually preserve the integrity of
the local color. But it was otherwise when the impression was extracted
from the soul of the subject, whether the latter were an individual
whose portrait he was painting, or a Biblical incident the significance
of which he was elaborating out of his own inner consciousness of its
meaning. For then he is not representing things as he sees them, but
recreating the impression that they have made in his imagination. The
local color becomes merged in the color of his imagination; gathers
brilliance from its certainties, fades into the half-lights of its
questionings, is threaded through and through with strands of
discrimination, and plunged in the mystery of the unknowable.
* * * * *
Finally, in this use of form and color, Rembrandt is nearer to what is
most modern in the art of to-day than has been generally recognized. For
of late Impressionism has entered on a new development. During some
time it was intent upon a more vivid and truthful representation of the
facts of life. It sat at the feet of Velasquez, trying to do again what
he did so supremely well. It did not succeed in equaling his authority,
for the sufficient reason that an imitator never rivals the master; but
at the same time it added something to what Velasquez stands for. Helped
by science, it has carried further than he did the study of light in the
variety and quality of its manifestations, and has gained, especially in
landscape, an instrument for interpreting sentiment and moods of
temperament. In the intellectual analysis of the appearance of nature
Velasquez said the last word; and now in the domain of emotion and of
spiritual expression, as interpreted by the representation of nature,
there is nothing further to be said. In a word, the ideal of graphic
art, as based upon the representation of nature, which since the
thirteenth century has occupied the artists of the Western world, is now
found to have reached a development beyond which no further development
is possible. As a commentary upon this is the development of
photography, which along the line of representation vies with painting.
Certain original minds,[E] therefore, have realized the need of a new
ideal, a new motive with which to refertilize their art. They are
seeking to discover it in a new conception of Impressionism. Their
position, in effect, is this: Need the impression that is derived from
nature be limited by the necessities of naturalistic representation? Can
it not free itself from the liability of being judged by the standard
of what it is derived from, and claim to be enjoyed for its own abstract
qualities of form and color? May it not detach itself more freely from
the concrete, and attain nearer to the abstract? Are there not further
possibilities in the conception of form and color as symbols?
The new movement, for such it has grown to be, in France, Germany,
Austria, and England, has come by way of the East. The harvest of a
century of Eastern exploration, ripened during the last fifty years by
an increasing intimacy with the art of Egypt, China, Korea, Japan,
India, and Mesopotamia, is at length being stored. We are beginning to
realize the Oriental conception of art as decoration, relying upon the
abstract qualities of form and color, and using them, not as vehicles of
natural representation, but as symbols, appealing freely, without
concrete reference, to the imagination. To repeat, these pioneers of the
new movement find themselves at the point where the Renaissance started
in the thirteenth century. The latter broke away from the remnant of the
Oriental ideal, left in Byzantine art, to conquer a new world of natural
representation, and its evolution has been completed. The new movement
has recovered the Oriental standpoint from which to attempt the conquest
of a new ideal. It is a movement, at present, mainly of experiment, and
necessarily so. For all of us, whether artists or laymen, are as yet too
much under the influence of centuries of inherited tradition to be able
to free ourselves from the consciousness of what it stands for.
The artist of our own time whose intuition steered him first in the
direction of this new conception and use of form and color is Whistler;
and among the potent influences of his own life was Rembrandt. That the
latter was habitually desirous of evading the concrete significance of
form is contradicted by innumerable pictures; but that in some he did
evade it, even as Whistler did in his _Nocturnes_, is undeniable.
Moreover, Rembrandt showed less regard for the traditional use of form
and color than any artist up to our own day. With all his sense of its
significance, he used it with the complete freedom of personal
expression; and so enveloped it in the half-lights and obscurities of an
atmosphere of his own invention, that, while the picture represents an
incident, it contradicts the idea of material representation. It is, to
a more abstract degree than has been reached by any other Caucasian
artist, the record of a spiritual impression, based on the symbolic use
of form and color. It approaches the brink of that still further
detachment from the necessities of natural representation that
characterizes the New Thought in modern art.
CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT
Both Hals and Rembrandt, each in his different way, have influenced the
art of modern times much in the same way in which they influenced their
contemporaries. Hals was and still remains a great exemplar of technical
method which may be practically adopted, while Rembrandt, with a
technique that defies imitation, has influenced his own times and ours
by inspiring principles not only of technique but of motive. The
difference is inherent in their characters--Hals the raconteur;
Rembrandt the thinker.
Hals, with his masterful gift of summarizing the incidents and accidents
of an occasion or a personality, resembles the best examples of the
modern journalist and magazine writer; keenly alive to the temper of his
own time; reflecting everything vividly, as in a mirror, yet with a
discrimination for effects. Rembrandt, on the other hand, so absorbed in
his own contemplation as to be an enigma to the man who runs and reads,
is yet so passionately human that the place he by degrees makes for
himself in the imagination and the heart of those who learn to know him
expands and deepens. The difference between them is epitomized in their
respective kinds of technique. While Rembrandt is a constructor, Hals is
a “follower of surfaces.”
[Illustration: THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS REMBRANDT
LOUVRE, PARIS]
This may possibly explain the immediate and direct hold that Hals has
exerted upon modern art. The latter has been mainly concerned with
imitation, casting around for borrowed motives and for an appropriate
method of expressing them. In portraiture especially it has been
confronted with the problem of catering to the luxurious and extravagant
superficialities of a society largely composed of _nouveaux riches_. For
such the grave intellectuality of that other example of our day,
Velasquez, was inappropriate, but Hals’s glib, effective following of
surfaces, just the thing. It has authority and style, while its
essential commonness of feeling is discreetly veiled by a veneer of
aristocratic suggestion, and its evasion of the problems of construction
is disguised beneath a handsome showing of virility. His, in fact, was
precisely the style that met the demands and suited the temperament of
society in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Many, I suppose, will repudiate the notion that Hals was either
commonplace or faulty as a constructor of form. He is so much a man of
our own time, and in consequence has been so belauded, that to some it
may sound like _lèse-majesté_ to dispute his position in modern
estimation. On the other hand, if one tries to get beyond the barrier of
approbation with which artists and the public have blocked the free view
of Hals in relation to other portrait-painters of his own school, such
as Rembrandt or Terborch, or of other schools or periods, the suspicion
of his comparative commonness of feeling may grow into a conviction.
Whether it does so or not is so purely a question of individual point of
view and feeling that it would be futile to try to reason the matter
out. I can scarcely explain my own conviction. Perhaps I have hinted at
the basis of it in applying to Hals the term a raconteur, and in
likening his style to that of a brilliant newspaper man. It is the
function of both of these latter to make an immediate appeal, not
necessarily flashy but certainly striking, to a mixed gathering of
listeners or readers, whose first and sole demand is that the gist of
the matter shall be hit off attractively. Each in a greater or less
degree is addressing a crowd, and, since the latter’s aggregate of
mentality and feeling is of a lower order than the mentality and taste
of some, at least, of the individuals composing it, the speaker or
writer, to prove attractive, must, consciously or unconsciously, adjust
his thought and expression to this lower level. Such is the suggestion
of Hals and his modern imitators, when their work is compared with that
of the great portrait-painters, whose feeling and style are the products
of their own high-bred aloofness and self-sustained individuality. The
work of the former, by comparison, seems designed to attract, as
directly as possible and in a way to make the least demand upon
reflection. It skims the surfaces and summarizes the most obvious of
their features in the raciest of ways.
On the other hand, it is easier to transmit the conviction that Hals was
a follower of surfaces, for one’s eyesight here assists one’s feeling.
Look at one of his portraits and observe the fluent skill with which the
several planes of the features are rendered; the finesse with which a
glove is fitted to the hand, the folds of a costume are expressed, and
even protuberances of the form suggested. It is admirable, marvelous!
When painters can achieve such magic, it is no wonder that we have a
phrase, “as clever as paint.” But compare this portrait with one of
Rembrandt’s, and the latter’s superiority in the matter of solidity and
structural strength becomes apparent. The suggestion of form in Hals’s
is altogether slighter; you will not be convinced of bone and muscle
structure beneath the surfaces, and, if you continue the comparison from
gallery to gallery or choose to vary it by comparing Hals with Van Eyck,
Dürer, Holbein, and the great portrait-painters of the other schools,
will hardly fail to be convinced of his inferiority as a constructor.
On the other hand, it was his skill in following the surface that made
his influence so valuable to his contemporaries. The sense of structural
form cannot be imparted. It is constitutional; a man has it or he has
not. But it is possible to teach efficiency in brushwork; and Hals, one
of the most brilliant painters who ever lived, set a standard of
painter-like craftsmanship that, passed on by his immediate pupils to
others, gave to Holland the merit of producing the most efficient school
of painters in the world. The most important of his pupils were
Terborch, Metsu, Wouwerman, and Adriaen van Ostade, the last named the
teacher of Jan Steen. It is a noticeable fact that all these men were
genre painters, for even Wouwerman, by a slight straining of the word,
can be included, since the individual charm of his landscapes consists
in their animated groups of figures, and it was in his treatment of
these that he was especially indebted to Hals. In fact, the latter’s
influence on the men of his own day was directly and most
characteristically and emphatically shown, not, as in our day, in
portraiture, but in genre; in shaping, refining, and giving new
distinction to the tendency for genre pictures that the Hollanders had
inherited from the united School of Flanders.
In a previous chapter we have spoken of the encouragement which Hals’s
example gave to the still-life painting; it was no less effective in
encouraging the use of still-life in genre. The motive of the new genre
became less that of depicting an incident than of picturing the
environment of home life, its accompaniments of furniture and
belongings; and these were made contributory to recreating the spirit of
the life.
Immediately from this proceeds the second point which the genre painters
gained from Hals: namely, an inspiration for the composition of their
pictures. It is marked no less by naturalness than propriety, and by an
extraordinary feeling of unity. There is an excellent discretion alike
in the choice and in the arrangement of details; everything is
characteristic and made subservient to the general harmony.
The latter results from the third point enforced by Hals’s example: the
principle of relativity in the use of values. Color became the basis of
the new genre, and color treated from the point of view of tone; hence
again the incomparable unity of impression which examples of the best
genre artists exhibit. Some mass of local color, either cool or warm in
hue, affords a dominant note. To this, by means of contrasts and
repetitions, the whole scheme is tuned. The contrasting values of other
local colors are opposed to that of the dominant mass, and higher and
lower values of all these colors repeated throughout the scheme. The
harmony that ensues may be rich and low or high in key and sprightly,
but in the finest examples, and they are very numerous, is always
characterized by a choice refinement.
This quality is due in no slight measure to the fourth way in which
these artists were indebted to Hals, namely, their skill in brushwork.
For they learned from him to lay the color on frankly and directly,
without fumbling or indecision. They constructed their forms in color,
building them up with layers of modulated values, working generally with
a small brush, but one that was fully charged with pigment which was
floated on to the surface. Thus the color has not only body and
substance, but also a limpid transparency, a quality as of liquidized
gems. It is this blend of lightness of touch, of purity of pigment, and
withal of solid underpainting, that gives breadth and dignity to the
delicacy of these harmonies. To assure one’s self of this it is but
necessary to compare a Vermeer or Terborch with a Netscher. The last is
felt at once to have less breadth and dignity, and altogether slighter
charm; and an examination of his technique helps to explain the reason.
There is less underpainting, and in the minute and dainty passages the
pigment has not been floated but stippled over the surface. The result
is a comparative tightness of feeling and, in place of limpid
transparency, a suggestion rather of thinness and hardness.
The influence exerted by Hals in these four directions--namely, in the
treatment of still-life, in composition, in regard for values, and in
the habit of skilful brushwork--was supplemented by that of Rembrandt,
which dates from 1632, the year in which he moved to Amsterdam. The
latter also affected the development of genre, but not in the line of
direct suggestion. Rembrandt’s technique in its most characteristic
aspects was and still remains too personal an expression of his own
attitude of mind and of its changes of mood, varying according to the
nature of each subject interpreted, to permit of imitation. Rembrandt
contributed ideas. He enlarged the scope of genre by the suggestion, on
the one hand, of a further range of subject, and, on the other, of a new
motive in technique. It was especially the example of his religious
pictures that affected the idea of subject, either directly leading
other artists to a similar treatment of religious themes or indirectly
encouraging them to include some kind of sentiment in the domestic
scenes they depicted. Meanwhile, by the example of his own use of
chiaroscuro, he encouraged a more subtle study of values, at once more
intimate and varied and more expressive.
An admirable epitome of the character of Rembrandt’s influence upon his
contemporaries is in the old Pinakothek in Munich. In the first place
there is a _Holy Family_, painted in 1631, the year before he moved from
Leyden. It is about six feet high, the figures being life-size; but the
conception and treatment of the subject are thoroughly in the way of
genre. The picture presents a glimpse of the interior of a Dutch home:
the tools hanging on the walls, the face, figure, and costume of the
mother, the Child swathed in a shawl, and the familiar accompaniment of
the cradle--all are distinctively Dutch in character. The mother, with a
pretty gesture of tenderness, is fondling one of the Baby’s feet,
looking down at it with a gentle smile, while the father bends forward
over the cradle in an attitude of reverent solicitude. The whole scene
breathes the quiet happiness of domestic life. In its character the
picture is essentially a genre subject. At the time it was painted Dou
was working in Rembrandt’s studio, and to its influence it is not
unreasonable to trace at least some of the tendency that Dou exhibited
in later years to introduce just such tender and reverential sentiment
into his own work, as witness _The Young Mother_ at the Hague Gallery
and _The Old Woman Saying Grace_ in the Pinakothek in Munich. In fact,
_The Holy Family_ is already characteristic of the sentiment that became
infused into genre by the example of Rembrandt.
Intimately connected with this is the example of Rembrandt’s technical
use of chiaroscuro, used either for the purpose of interpreting
sentiment or of simply adding to the interest of the color-scheme. The
foretaste of this is given in a series of six pictures of Biblical
subjects in the Pinakothek, painted for the Stadtholder, Frederick
Henry: two of them, _The Descent from the Cross_ and _The Elevation of
the Cross_, in 1633; _The Ascension_, 1636; _The Burial_ and _The
Resurrection_, 1639; and _The Adoration of the Shepherds_, 1646. About
three feet high, they approximate to the familiar size of genre, and are
distinctly genre in conception and treatment. Moreover, they are arched
over at the top, a device that became popular with Dou and other genre
painters, who frequently substituted for the formal arch a draped
curtain, the result being to set the main part of the scene back, and
thus increase the effect of looking into it. This, however, is not
merely to suggest more vividly the third dimension. For Rembrandt in
these pictures has set the example of concentrating the high light on a
few features of the composition, surrounding these with lighted objects
of lower value, and finally inclosing all in a ring of shadow, so that
one seems to be looking into a circular concavity out of the gloom of
which certain objects emerge into view with greater or less
distinctness. The device is used by Rembrandt to heighten the dramatic
and emotional significance of the composition, and was so applied by
some of his followers, notably by Maes, while by others the principle
was adopted as a means of giving force, variety, and added charm of
mystery to their color-schemes. It became, in fact, one of the most
characteristic of the technical methods of Holland genre.
Apropos of this series it is interesting to note, as a side-light on
Rembrandt’s use of models, that one, _The Elevation of the Cross_,
contains a striking figure of an Oriental. It was transferred in reduced
size from a picture of the same subject painted in the preceding year,
1632, which is now owned by the New York collector Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt.
Moreover, the head and bust of this man appear as the subject of another
picture, painted in the same year as _The Elevation_, which now hangs in
the Munich Pinakothek.
To recapitulate, then, in this series of the Old Pinakothek we have a
striking example of Rembrandt’s motive in the treatment of Biblical
subjects, developed during the period from 1633 to 1646 of his greatest
popularity in Amsterdam. It involved, as we have seen, the translation
of the heroic and grandiloquent style of religious subjects, as
practised by the Italians, into the homelier poignancy and intimate
personal suggestiveness of meaning that commended themselves to the
simple directness and home-love of the Hollanders. It practically
converted the religious picture into one of genre; and its example led
to a similar treatment of these subjects by other painters, notably
Carel Fabritius, Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and Gerbrandt van den
Eeckhout, while to the painters of domestic genre pure and simple it
also supplied the motive of sentiment and a new motive of technique.
It is true that sentiment plays a comparatively small part in Holland
genre. Dou has been mentioned as following the example of Rembrandt in
this respect, and the other prominent instance is Nicolaes Maes, who
entered the master’s studio in 1648, that is to say, two years after the
completion of _The Adoration of the Shepherds_, the latest of the Munich
series. How far Rembrandt had influenced the bias of Maes’s temperament
toward sentiment is conjectural, but that he supplied the younger man
with a technical principle for its expression is certain. Maes
discovered the possibilities of emotional suggestion that existed in the
device of heightening the luster of certain parts of the composition by
the contrast of veiled and shadowed color elsewhere. With him it does
not reach the dramatic force or depth of emotional appeal that the
master’s use of it involves, but nevertheless becomes the expression of
a sentiment that, as Bode remarks, is nearer to the sentiment of
Rembrandt than that of any other artist of the school.
On the other hand, by those genre artists of the period who were not
given to sentiment, the principle of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro was adopted
for the sake of æsthetic considerations, founded upon the facts of
sight. It may or may not be true that Rembrandt himself derived it from
his observation of the light in the dim recesses of his father’s mill,
but at any rate the artists of genre interiors soon saw its application
to their subjects, and were led by it to study with more discrimination
the infinite variety of light value. The result was twofold. Their
color-schemes grow more subtle and refined, and the tonality becomes
impregnated with the suggestion of atmosphere. Thus the example of
Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro wedded to that of Hals’s facile craftsmanship
developed the inimitable perfection of technique which characterizes the
best works of Holland genre.
It is the latter, one may observe in conclusion, that has most affected
the modern revival of painting in Holland. While foreign painters, in
portraiture especially, have been disposed to follow the direct example
of Frans Hals, the Hollanders themselves, both in landscape and genre,
have been influenced by the so-called “little masters,” and, in the case
of Josef Israels, by Rembrandt himself. And the result of this influence
has been to make modern Dutch painters, as a group, the best brushmen of
their age.
CHAPTER VII
DUTCH GENRE
The tendency toward genre painting began before the separation of the
Holland Free State from the Spanish Netherlands. Pieter Brueghel the
Elder, who died in Brussels in 1570, is regarded as the leader of the
group of painters who depicted the life of the people, particularly in
open-air surroundings. His work, for example, and that of one of his
pupils, Lucas van Valckenborch, make a very lively showing in one of the
galleries of the Art-History Museum in Vienna. Here, in a number of
canvases of considerable size, crowded with figures, are pictured scenes
of peasants, merrymaking, harvesting, engaged in a vintage festival, or
skating and sleighing, while there is even a representation of rich folk
enjoying a picnic in a park. These painters and their contemporaries in
similar subjects are to be reckoned in the Flemish School. But there is
one, Pieter Aertz, surnamed “Long Pieter,” who, although he died in
1575, before any separation from Flanders was dreamed of, may be
considered as a forerunner of distinctly Dutch genre, since he was born
in Amsterdam and lived there for the greater part of his life. An
interesting example of his work, _The Egg Dance_, is in the Rijks
Museum. The scene is a kitchen, opening into a garden, and the floor is
scattered with various articles--a bowl, a shoe, onions and eggs--among
which a young man is jauntily dancing, while a group beside the hearth
applauds. As far as the character and spirit of the scene go, the
picture is thoroughly representative of the older kind of genre, which
portrays the type rather than the individual, and numerous little
episodes massed into a group, rather than a single incident or phase of
life wrought out completely. For this becomes the tendency of the later
and distinctively Holland genre, which, as the technical motives of the
artists grew in refinement and possibly as the taste of the public
became more refined, resulted in the subjects being drawn more and more
from the home life of the well-to-do and fashionable. By this time the
genre pictures have ceased to represent an amusing picture-book of
manners and customs; they have in a sense lost their interest of
subject, the matter of which they treat counting for very little in
comparison with the charming manner of the treatment.
The three greatest masters of Holland genre, Vermeer, Terborch, and Jan
Steen, must be considered separately. Meanwhile we will summarize the
method and manner of some of the most important among the able but
lesser artists.
ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE
VAN OSTADE, who was a pupil of Hals and later became influenced by
Rembrandt, stands midway between the earlier and the later motives of
genre. His favorite and, on the whole, most characteristic subjects are
groups of peasants reveling or squabbling in the kitchens or around the
doors of inns. The figures are squat and lumpish, curiously like
animated roly-poly puddings, only redeemed from commonness by the limpid
coloring and the suave, facile manner of the brushwork that he had
derived from Hals. Sometimes, however, he selects a few figures and
gives them an individual characterization. In fact, the latter pictures,
as well as his groups of peasants, show a remarkable affinity to
Brouwer’s treatment of similar subjects. For this eccentric and original
artist, an “Adonis in rags,” as he has been called, a refined painter of
coarse themes, though Flemish by birth, seems to have come under the
influence of Frans Hals, lived in Haarlem and Amsterdam, and was really
in his art representative of the Holland School of genre. Van Ostade,
therefore, must have known him and may well have been affected by his
example. At any rate, the character and spirit of his earlier pictures
correspond with those of Brouwer’s, though the latter’s work exhibits a
more refined artistic sense. In time, however, Van Ostade came under the
Rembrandtesque manner; the thinness of his painting develops into a
richer impasto, the feeling of the composition becomes larger, the
choice of subject more distinguished, and his treatment more studied and
sympathetic, while the tone is warmer and more luminous in consequence
of the shrewder use of chiaroscuro. Later his manner again changes to
one of extreme refinement, almost finical. The surface, to use an
expressive French word, _léché_, seems licked into glossiness; the tone
has become cold and grayish; the compositions are more studied but less
picturesque; yet the colors have an extraordinary transparency. The
whole canvas has less the air of intimate observation than of something
wrought over in the studio.
These three phases of Van Ostade’s development can be studied side by
side in the examples of his work in the Gallery of The Hague.
Representative of his first manner is _Peasants’ Holiday_, painted in
163-(the last figure is undecipherable); of the second, _Marriage
Proposal_, which belongs to the period between 1650 and 1655; and of the
third manner, _Peasants in an Inn_ and _The Fiddler_, painted
respectively in 1662 and 1673.
Van Ostade died in Haarlem in 1685. Among his pupils were his brother
Isaac van Ostade (1621-1649), Cornelis Bega (1620-1664), and Cornelis
Dusart (1660-1704). The last named inherited a great number of his
master’s studies and sketches, which he worked upon and finished. These
after Dusart’s death were sold as his own, a fact which helps to explain
the similarity of his style to that of Adriaen van Ostade. Bega often
imitated the latter’s choice of subject, and also with some success his
manner of gray tonality, but his colors lack transparency, and the flesh
parts are dry and brickish. The outdoor scenes of Isaac van Ostade,
alive with figures in characteristic action, are exceedingly interesting
as pictures of the “passing show” of Dutch life. Lastly, it is to the
credit of Adriaen van Ostade that he was the teacher of, or at least
exercised considerable influence over, Jan Steen during the latter’s
sojourn in Haarlem. But the manner of his own pictures is that of the
earlier genre which preceded the great School of Holland.
[Illustration: PEASANTS ROUND A HEARTH ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
GERARD (GERRIT) DOU
THIS artist, born in Leyden, 1613, and dying there in 1675, spent his
whole life in his native city, helped to found its Guild of St. Luke,
and influenced several other genre painters. Among the latter were
Gabriel Metsu, Godfried Schalcken, Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland, and
Frans van Mieris the Elder, who handed on the tradition of the Leyden
School to his son, Willem van Mieris. Dou himself had enjoyed the
influence of Rembrandt, in whose studio he worked during the three years
preceding the master’s move to Amsterdam in 1631. But before this time
he had been instructed by his father, who was a painter on glass, and by
Bartholomeus Dolando, an engraver. Dou’s own matured style very
remarkably reflects both the earlier and the later experiences of his
training. While he learned to feel his subject in the manner of
Rembrandt, he contrived also to see it with a precise eye for detail and
to render it with the nicety of a painter on glass or of one who uses
the burin. He was an impeccable draftsman and a good composer, so long
as the subject contained only a few figures and was treated in a small
size. For large canvases and the handling of a complicated composition
his style was altogether too minute in character. On the other hand, his
color is always harmonious, though in some works inclined to an
excessive polish; and the chiaroscuro, skilfully applied, is, when the
subject permits, very charmingly expressive of the sentiment. He devoted
himself to the representation of interiors and, as we have seen,
adopted the device of showing them through an arch or beyond a
lambrequin, formed of a heavily draped curtain, frequently also
representing one or more figures at a window with the obscurity of the
room behind them. In thus adapting Rembrandt’s principle of chiaroscuro
to the rendering of the physical phenomenon of a concave space more or
less immersed in shadow, no one was more skilful than Dou. To give depth
and quality to the obscurity of the distance and especially of the
ceiling, he would hang a chandelier or lantern in the middle distance
and catch the light upon it. Similarly, he would place some objects in
the foreground to bring the latter forward, and then between these two
foci of secondary light concentrate or scatter the main group of figures
in highest illumination.
The two finest examples of his skill in thus building up a composition
of values of light are _The Young Mother_, in the gallery of The Hague,
and _The Dropsical Woman_ of the Louvre. The former, because of its
charming sentiment, is Dou’s most popular picture; but the other, in
consequence of the superior simplicity and concentration of its
composition, the comparative breadth of its treatment and fuller
richness of color and quality of chiaroscuro, is without much doubt his
masterpiece. However, another example which approaches it very closely
is _A Lady at her Toilet_, in the Munich Gallery. Dou’s interest in
chiaroscuro led him to experiment with so-called night-pieces, where the
gloom of the interior is illuminated by a candle that makes a central
spot of brilliance, fitfully reflected in a partially diffused glow.
Such are _An Old Woman who has Lost her Thread_ and the _Young Man and
Girl in a Cellar_, both in the Dresden Gallery; while the most elaborate
and famous example is _The Night School_ of the Rijks Museum, somewhat
damaged by time, in which there are five separate points of varying
degrees of illumination.
In a picture in the Dresden Gallery Dou has represented himself at work
in his studio, a bare and homely room, lighted by a large window on the
left. This window, with slight differences of shape and size, appears in
many of his works, occupying a similar position; while, even when it is
not shown, its effect is noticeable in the artist’s tendency to light
his compositions from the left. Another instance of his tendency to
repetition of motive may be traced in the frequency with which he used
over and over again the same piece of furniture or object of furnishing.
For example, in a still-life (No. 1708) in the Dresden Gallery appears
the same candle-stick that is introduced in a number of other pictures.
The point is interesting as showing the way in which Dou artificially
arranged his subject-matter; and he was followed in this respect as in
others by all the genre painters. Each had his particular motive of
composition and freely repeated it; his particular bit of costume or
article of furnishing that with variations of arrangement he used
repeatedly. Holland genre, in fact, ceased almost from its beginning to
be a direct representation of actual domestic life. It was based upon
the latter, but the artist reserved a complete liberty of selection and
arrangement. He was not intent upon illustrating the life, and only
borrowed hints from it to assist him in creating a picture of his own
invention. It is a point to be observed by the modern public, which is
apt to resent, as shallow in motive and uninteresting in subject, a
picture which has been designed mainly or solely as a picture; that is
to say, for the beauty of form, color, light, and tone that may be
expressed in a composition of objects, arbitrarily brought together for
this purpose. Such an attitude on the part of an artist is, however,
thoroughly justified by the example of the Holland School of genre,
which it is the fashion to-day to admire so generously.
NICOLAES MAES
SOME may criticize this placing of Maes among the lesser artists of
genre. Bode ranks him with Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch among the “great
genre painters of Holland,” and adds that “there is scarcely any pupil
of Rembrandt’s who approaches the great master so nearly as Maes does in
this series of pictures.” He is alluding to _Dreaming_, or, as it is
sometimes called, _A Reverie_, a young girl gazing out of a window, and
to _Asking a Blessing_, in the Rijks Museum; to _The Young
Card-Players_, in the National Gallery, and to _Nurse_ and _Children
with Goat-Carriage_, in a private collection; and also to certain
pictures of old women, such as the one owned by Mr. John G. Johnson of
Philadelphia, that was recently seen in the Exhibition of Dutch Art in
the Metropolitan Museum. In all of these pictures the figures are
life-size, and, to quote Bode, “one weakness is common to all of them:
that they present simple motives on a large canvas with rough execution
and without the powerful
[Illustration: OLD WOMAN SPINNING NICOLAES MAES
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
and individual language with which Rembrandt renders similar genre
pieces.”
The truth of this criticism seems to be sufficient of itself to exclude
Maes from the ranks of the great genre painters, whose works are great
of their kind just because these painters so admirably fitted the size
of their pictures to the scope of their intention and their powers, and
wrought their canvases to the highest pitch of a personally inspired
technical perfection. This became the ideal of Holland genre and remains
its chief distinction; and Maes only attains to it in his smaller
canvases, such as the two examples of _An Old Woman Spinning_, in the
Rijks Museum, and _An Old Woman Peeling Apples_ (the spinning-wheel near
her), in the Berlin Gallery, and _The Cradle_ and _The Dutch Housewife_
of the National Gallery. The period of these small genre pictures,
beginning about 1655 and lasting for ten years, represents the
high-water mark of Maes’s artistic career.
In his earlier period he shows a preference for red, juxtaposed with
black and less frequently with yellow, that continues to characterize
his work. But at first, as in _The Dreamer_, it is the brightness of hue
that seems to attract him. He has bathed the red shutter and the girl’s
figure and the leaves and fruit of the apricot-tree, that grows beside
the window from which she leans, in a warm sunlight, and the latter,
blended with soft shadows, glows upon her face and hands. All the
several textures are rendered with admirable veracity, and a resemblance
to life, that would be startling but for the quiet, pensive expression
of the girl’s figure that pervades the canvas. The picture attracts and
charms, but does it hold one’s interest? Scarcely, if you come back to
it after seeing the more imaginative treatment of chiaroscuro in the
_Card-Players_ of the National Gallery; and still less, if you compare
it with one of Maes’s smaller genre pictures in the Rijks Museum; for
example, _An Old Woman Spinning_ (No. 1504). Here the red reappears in
the table-cloth, and the black spot is made by her head against the
drabbish white of the wall, but the yellow is disguised in her
olive-green dress, which shows the whitish-gray sleeves of the
undergarment. It is a cooler scheme of color, more restrained yet
richer, and it is lighted without any striking contrasts of chiaroscuro.
Instead, the humble apartment is permeated with a dimly luminous
atmosphere, out of which certain parts of the composition emerge into
clearness, while the rest is veiled in half-tones and shadow. The
picture is extraordinarily real, exquisite in technique, and deeply
moving in its suggestion of the half-lights of existence among the aged
and the poor. The secret is, that what was experiment or assertion in
the larger canvas has here become the free expression of the artist’s
simple and sincere sentiment. Sentiment and expression are united in a
natural and complete equipoise.
During the last twenty-five years of his life Maes seems to have gained
a rather scanty subsistence by painting portraits. Some of these are of
high merit; the _Portrait of a Man_, for example, in the Fine Arts
Museum at Budapest, which represents a gray-haired and bearded man, with
black velvet cap and black coat edged with brown fur, sitting in a
red-backed chair. Thus it repeats the artist’s favorite color-scheme,
and moreover,
[Illustration: OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATION GABRIEL METSU
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
in its grave, tender rendering of old age, preserves the fine sentiment
of his best period. But such noble characterization of humanity is rare
with him, for, impelled by need and very likely by the taste of his
public, he became an imitator of Van Dyck’s elegance. With Maes this
elegance became pinchbeck, his fine ladies and gentlemen being very
cheap imitations of their models.
GABRIEL METSU
BORN in Leyden in 1630, the son of a painter, Gabriel Metsu was one of
the precocious talents of the Holland School, for in his sixteenth year
he helped to form the Guild of St. Luke in his native city. For the
purpose of studying his art, his brief career of thirty-seven years (he
died in 1667) may be conveniently divided into two parts, preceding or
following the year 1655, in which he moved to Amsterdam and came under
the direct influence of Rembrandt. But it would appear from his own
early pictures, that even during his life in Leyden he had by some means
obtained a knowledge of this master’s work. Metsu’s actual teacher,
according to Houbraken, had been Dou, though his own work shows no
direct trace of the latter’s influence. On the other hand, that of Hals
is apparent. Meanwhile he experimented for himself and produced several
pictures which, like _The Blacksmith_, in the Rijks Museum, are founded
on the motive of a workshop, lighted fitfully by a forge and scattered
with tools. In fact, as Bode says, the work of his early period is
distinguished by “restless composition, hurried movement, and careless
treatment.”
Moving to Amsterdam, he became one of the group that circled round
Rembrandt, and at first was directly influenced by Maes, and perhaps by
Rembrandt himself; witness his _Old Woman in Meditation_ of the Rijks
Museum and his fine portrait of an old lady in the Berlin Gallery. Then
almost at a jump he reaches an individual style of his own. It grows out
of his attitude toward the subjects that--with occasional exceptions of
marketing scenes, such as the two pictures respectively of a man and of
a woman selling poultry, in the Dresden Gallery, and the _Vegetable
Market_ of the Louvre--he now favors. They are intimate presentations of
the graciously prosperous life of the middle-class burghers, before
extravagance and ostentation had eaten their way into Dutch society.
That his art thus settled to a distinct purpose may be partly attributed
to the fact that the artist himself settled down to domestic life,
marrying Isabella Wolff, April 1, 1663. A picture in the Dresden
Gallery, dated two years earlier, _Lovers at Breakfast_, shows himself
and the lady sitting side by side, one of his arms about her shoulders
and the other lifted as he holds a tall wine-glass. It is curiously
interesting in its resemblance and difference to Rembrandt’s picture of
himself and Saskia that hangs in an adjoining gallery of the same
museum.
The style which Metsu formed for himself is in accordance with the
character and treatment of the subjects to which he now devoted himself.
He abandons the Rembrandtesque principle of chiaroscuro, for there is no
mystery or depth of sentiment in his point of view. He is frankly and
simply interested in the genial externals of his subject; yet something
of the Maes influence still affects his outlook. He sees the comfort and
happiness of the home life and reflects it in the composure and refined
orderliness that now pervade his compositions. Devoting himself to the
simplest and directest way of presenting the subject, he avoids all
striving after effect and secures a quietly balanced ensemble, wherein
every figure and object is rendered with sureness of drawing, regard for
the beauty of local color, and the utmost perfection of truthful
realization. The date at which Metsu thus found himself is placed about
1660, and the picture in the Metropolitan Museum, _A Music Party_, dated
1659, serves to mark the transition. Its composition is still inclined
to be “restless”; but the treatment, far from being “careless,” is
distinguished by a very sincere feeling for the objective beauty of the
salient details, while at least one figure, that of the cavalier on the
right, exhibits the concentrated repose of movement which became one of
the most delightful elements of Metsu’s art. It is seen developed
throughout the whole composition in Mr. J. P. Morgan’s _Visit to the
Nursery_, where, notwithstanding the sprightliness of feeling that
animates the figures, each of them has its own plastic individuality of
self-contained movement. Every detail has a perfection of finish that is
never finical or at the expense of the unity of the whole. The hands and
heads have a special distinction of fluent modeling and of exquisite
expression. These qualities, combined with richness of local color,
characterize the pictures of the sixties, as may be seen in the examples
in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the galleries of
Dresden, Amsterdam, and The Hague. Toward the end of this ten years of
highest production Metsu’s pictures grow stiffer in composition, colder
in color, and harder in their surfaces. The beginning of this change is
noticeable in the portrait group of _The Family Geelvink_, in the Berlin
Gallery, and characterizes also some of his latest genre subjects.
Probably the cause was failing health, for toward the end of his life he
suffered from the effects of a bungled operation.
PIETER DE HOOCH
PIETER DE HOOCH, the son of a butcher, was born in Rotterdam in 1630,
being therefore the same age as Metsu and two years older than Maes and
Vermeer. With these last two he has been ranked by some critics, who
consider that the trio represents the high-water mark of Holland genre.
With Maes’s claim to this distinction one has ventured to disagree, and
may also dispute De Hooch’s for somewhat the same reason. The latter’s
best period was confined to ten years, 1655-1665, and outside of that,
especially toward the end of his life, he did some quite indifferent
work.
Houbraken makes the statement that his teacher was Nicolaes Berchem. It
is accepted as a fact, the presumption being that Berchem at the time
was living in Amsterdam, in which case De Hooch would have become
acquainted with Rembrandt’s style. That it did not affect him,
immediately at any rate, is evident from his early work, which
represents lively scenes of soldiers and young girls, painted rather in
the manner of Dirck Hals or Duyster. It is possible, however, that even
thus early the Rembrandt influence may have been operating upon him, as
upon so many of the painters in Amsterdam at that time, by drawing his
attention to problems of light, which eventually became the
characteristic of his art.
From 1653, for two years, he served as “painter and footman” to Justus
de la Grange, a rich merchant adventurer, with whom he lived both in
Haarlem and The Hague. Then he married a girl from Delft and moved to
that city, his name appearing among the members of its guild from 1655
to 1657. It was now that he came in touch with Vermeer, whose example
helped to bring out all that was best in him. His pictures now became
veritable poems of light, wrought with extraordinary conscientiousness
and to a high pitch of refinement. He paints the courtyards of city
houses, aglow in bright sunshine, cool rooms opening into warmly lighted
ones, the vista often terminating in a street or canal. Always the
varieties of light are rendered with delightful naturalness and in a way
that gives a special charm to every detail which the light illumines. He
is not very skilful in the representation of figures, but a master in
the art of placing them. They and every object in the scene not only
occupy their respective planes with absolute justness, but the position
assigned to them has been selected with an unerring eye for decorative
effect. Moreover, no artist has been so successful in rendering what
visitors to Holland rarely fail to observe--the propriety and
cleanliness of the Dutch home, and the sentiment that seems to attach
to every object in it and around it. Among the loveliest of these
interiors is No. 426 in the Munich Pinakothek; _The Mother_, in the
Berlin Gallery; _The Interior_ of the National Gallery; _The Pantry_ and
_The Interior_, in the Rijks Museum, and an _Interior_ in the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts; while two notable outdoor scenes are the National
Gallery’s _A Dutch Courtyard_ and the _Family Group_ of the Berlin
Gallery. All these and others that might be cited belong to the period
between 1655 and 1665. But the enthusiasm which these arouse is sadly
dashed by many examples of his later manner, which are disconnected or
restless in composition, hot in color rather than luminous, and heavy in
the shadows, while others are marred by excessive hardness of surface
and triteness of overwrought detail. The latest date that appears on any
of his paintings is 1677, wherefore it is surmised that De Hooch’s death
occurred about this time.
FRANS VAN MIERIS THE ELDER
OF the painters bearing the name Van Mieris the most considerable was
Frans van Mieris, surnamed the Elder, to distinguish him from his
grandson, Frans van Mieris the Younger. Between them came Willem van
Mieris, and the merit of the three as artists corresponds with the order
of their succession.
The elder Frans, born at Leyden in 1635, became a pupil of Gerard Dou,
though, like the latter, he had first been taught by a painter on glass.
The earliest part of his career was still within the best period of
Holland genre, but before he died in 1681 the decline was come; and it
was to this that his son and pupil, Willem, succeeded. Willem’s pictures
are still clever but tricky, hard and glossy in texture, trivial and
often silly in motive. As for his son, Frans the Younger, he belongs to
the decadence, and the Dutch consider his pictures of no merit. There
was still another Mieris, Jan by name, the brother of Willem, who,
however, lived mostly abroad and died at the age of thirty in Rome.
Frans the Elder was popular in his own day and continued to be held in
high esteem by collectors of the eighteenth century. He has been ranked
with Metsu, but not with justice to the latter, for some of his work
betrays that pettiness of motive and method which marked the decadence
of genre and has been aptly called the “snuff-box” style. On the other
hand, he had his moments of more genuine artistry, when he would paint a
picture that even in comparison with Metsu is acceptable. These are
chiefly to be found in the galleries of Munich, Vienna, and St.
Petersburg. Among the Munich examples is _The Sick Woman_; she seems to
have sunk to the floor in a faint and is being tended by an old woman,
while a doctor in the shaded background is holding up a bottle of
cordial to the light and gazing at it--a figure very familiar in Dutch
genre. Unfortunately the subject suggests Jan Steen and the superior
_esprit_ with which he would have treated it. The lady wears a reddish
jacket trimmed with white fur, and the same garment reappears in _The
Oyster Breakfast_. Here a girl is seated at a table holding an oyster in
one hand and a wine-glass in the other. The picture represents the
finer side of Van Mieris, though it is surpassed by another example in
the Munich Gallery, _The Girl Before a Mirror_, which possesses the
quality that has suggested the coupling of this artist’s name with that
of Metsu.
In the Art-History Museum of Vienna is _A Lady and Her Doctor_, in which
he stands feeling her pulse as she sits beside a bed. It is
sentimentally imagined, but extremely clever in a superficial way, the
fabrics being imitated with extraordinary skill. Far more satisfactory
is _Cavalier in a Shop_. On the right of the foreground is a mass of
sumptuously colored stuffs, but the man’s costume and the jacket of the
woman, who stands at a table offering something to his notice, are of
black velvet. Beside her is a curtain of ashy purple, and the color of
the background of the dim interior is a darkish olive, the whole forming
a tonal scheme of subdued richness. But the cavalier is chucking the
woman under the chin, her coy smile responding to his smile of amorous
complacency, while an old man out of the shadow of the ingle-nook
watches them. It is this sort of thing, coupled with the skill in
imitating textures, that especially commended this artist to the taste
of the eighteenth century.
* * * * *
THE decline of genre reflects the changed conditions of Holland society.
For the old ideal of liberty had given way to one of money and the power
that comes in its train. Statesmen, soldiers, and patriots had been
succeeded by self-seeking politicians and ambitious tradesmen, who
disdained to be burghers and aspired to the luxury and ostentation of
merchant princes. “Taste” now became the shibboleth, and it was a taste
that aped
[Illustration: LADY AT THE CLAVICHORD CASPAR NETSCHER
DRESDEN GALLERY]
the standards and manners of the French, whose influence became more and
more powerful in Holland as the seventeenth century drew to a close.
Gerard de Lairesse, a painter of Flemish extraction, who settled in
Amsterdam in the sixties, helped to establish the vogue of “taste.” He
had a considerable following of students and _dilettanti_ to whom he
expounded his views on art, assailing the vulgarity of such as Hals, and
advocating the courtly style by which the theme is “ennobled.” He
himself introduced the fashion for historical pictures, vapid and
theatrical; and these qualities, interpreted in a minute and precise
style, found their way into genre. The Dutch interiors became
transformed into palatial chambers, decked with columns, amid which the
inmates strut and pose with affectation of superior elegance and
refinement. Such are the genre pictures of Caspar Netscher. Now and
then, as in _A Lady at the Clavichord_ of the Dresden Gallery, his
motive and execution remind us that he had the privilege of being a
pupil of Terborch; but these moments are rare. Usually his pictures are
but petty and meretricious echoes of the great days of genre. Nor are
his portraits less trivial. They are numerously represented in the Rijks
Museum and other galleries, suggesting the popularity that he enjoyed
and also explaining it; for, with few exceptions, they exhibit the
shallowness and display of a society that, like the jackdaw in the
fable, has borrowed the plumes and is aping the manners of the peacock.
The same is true of the portraits of Godfried Schalcken, who also
indulged in genre that supplemented the poverty of the artistic motive
by the mild humor of its subjects. To these names of the decadence may
be added that of Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland.
Before completing the story of Dutch genre with a separate notice of
Terborch, Jan Steen, and Vermeer, allusion must be made to the “society
pictures.” Their prototype appears in Flemish painting, in such canvases
of fashionable life as we have already noted by Lucas van Valckenborch.
The Dutch development of this motive, however, produced smaller
canvases, very carefully composed, with superior quality of color and
skilful rendering of detail. The leader in this class of picture was
Dirck Hals (1591-1656), who was a pupil of his brother Frans; and it is
the latter’s corporation pictures that became the model for
corresponding groups of “society people,” banqueting, engaged in
concerts, or disporting themselves in garden-parties. Dirck’s pictures
are bouquets of gay color, animated with lively and characteristic
action, and, notwithstanding their slightness of motive and
superficiality of technique, form attractive spots in the galleries of
Europe. He, like the rest of the society painters, varied these subjects
with others of an unfashionable and sometimes coarse description,
involving the amusements of the soldiery on furlough or in the intervals
of peace. Willem Cornelisz Duyster, who died in 1635, painted creditably
both these kinds of picture; and two other names, frequently met with in
the galleries and not unacceptably, are Palamedesz (1601-1673) and
Pieter Codde (1600-1678).
[Illustration: THE DESPATCH GERARD TERBORCH
HAGUE MUSEUM]
CHAPTER VIII
GERARD TERBORCH, JAN VERMEER, AND JAN STEEN
Terborch is the aristocrat among Dutch painters, Rembrandt excepted. But
Rembrandt’s is an aristocracy of genius, while Terborch’s is an
aristocracy of talent and temperament. He owed something of this to his
father, who, besides being a painter, held an official post in his
native town, Zwolle, where Gerard was born in 1617. The father had
enlarged the horizon of his life, by travel and the study of foreign
languages, and the son followed his example. He was already a good
draftsman, when he moved to Haarlem to study with the landscape-painter,
Pieter Molyn. After three years spent in Haarlem, during which he
experienced the influence of Frans Hals, he spent some time in England
and later in Italy. Then followed some five years in Amsterdam, where he
profited by the example of Rembrandt. In 1646 he went to Münster, in
Westphalia, being present there during the negotiations of the peace,
mingling with the delegates and painting portraits, which he afterward
embodied in the famous group-picture, _The Peace of Münster_, now in the
National Gallery, to which it was presented by the late Sir Richard
Wallace. On the completion of this picture in 1648 he visited Spain and
made the acquaintance of Velasquez and his work. Returning to Holland,
he spent four years in Zwolle, and then, in 1654, the year in which he
married Gertrude Matthyssen, settled in Deventer. Here he continued to
reside until his death in 1681.
All these details of his career are pertinent, for they point not only
to the various influences, successively of Hals, Rembrandt, and
Velasquez, under which he came, but also to the scarcely less important
fact that he had mixed with a variety of men of parts and consequence
and become acquainted with various kinds of civilizations. His
experiences enabled him to form a very distinguished technique of his
own, and at the same time cultivated in him an extraordinarily refined
taste and a very high regard for the dignity of human nature. In
technique, taste, and point of view he became essentially a true
aristocrat.
His portraits eminently epitomize these qualities. Usually very small in
size, they suggest Velasquez in miniature; exhibiting the same
discretion in avoiding unnecessary accessories, the same eloquent use of
blacks and grays, occasionally relieved with old rose or blue, and,
despite their minuteness, a corresponding breadth and distinction of
fluency and simplicity. All these traits of technique are the expression
of his attitude toward his subject, which is essentially one of respect
for its humanity. This attitude is a rarer one in portrait-painting than
might be expected. Certainly in the Dutch School one is not impressed
with its prevalence. There is characterization, good, bad, and
indifferent, and the suggestion of the subject’s position in his or her
social
[Illustration: OFFICER WRITING A LETTER GERARD TERBORCH
DRESDEN GALLERY]
environment, but of the reverence for humanity as such, very little.
Indeed, outside of the portraits by Rembrandt, Terborch, and
occasionally Maes, I question if you will often find it.
A similar reverence for humanity and its environment--the product, I
take it, of the artist’s high-bred respect for himself and his
art--distinguishes also Terborch’s genre pictures. He began by painting
guardroom scenes and continued to be fond of subjects in which officers
and soldiers figured. Sometimes the circumstances are equivocal, but
their salience is not enforced; indeed, as Bode points out, the models
for the ladies appear to have been his sisters, while his brothers posed
for the military. The scene and the occasion are but an excuse for a
picture. In fact, the subject counts with him for very little; it is the
pretext that it offers for pictorial representation in which he is
interested first and last. And to this he brings an extraordinary degree
of refined sensibility and of virile and at the same time exquisite
realization.
The virility appears in the drawing and construction of his figures, to
which Fromentin has paid so high a tribute in his analysis of _The
Gallant Soldier_, in the Louvre. And, as the French critic points out,
in discussing the representation of the man’s shoulder and arm, it is a
virility tempered with extreme sensibility. It has nothing of the
improvisation of Hals in the following of surfaces, but rather
Velasquez’s mastery of plane-construction; only here, in the case of
this small figure, it is not with the open palm but with most sensitive
touch of finger-tips that we imagine ourselves discovering the reality
of the form. Or, again, examine the wonderful example of drawing in _The
Concert_ of the Berlin Gallery, where the foreground is occupied by a
seated figure of a lady, whose back is toward us, as she plays the
violoncello. Even more remarkable than the fine structural reality of
the figure is its play of expression, as it bends over the instrument
and seems to be vibrating to the touch of the strings. Again, what
extraordinary realization of action, at once broadly and subtly
characterized, appears in the two figures of _Officer Writing a Letter_,
in the Dresden Gallery; or, in the same museum, in the figures of the
mistress and her maid in _Lady Washing Her Hands_; or in the action of
the hands followed so absolutely by the gesture of the head in the _Old
Woman Peeling Apples_ of the Art-History Museum, Vienna! These are but
examples, taken more or less at random, of Terborch’s gift of drawing,
which in its mingling of virility and exquisite sensibility is
unsurpassed in Holland painting.
Nor less admirable is the marvelous unity that he imparts to the whole
scene. Tonality has much to do with it, yet that is but a means. The
cause is in himself, in the reverence that he has even for the
accessories in his pictures; and the result is a harmony that is at once
esthetic and intellectual. Mind, as well as taste, has ordered
everything. All the artists of Dutch genre had more or less the faculty
of heightening the value of beauty in the accessories they used; but
none, not even Vermeer, to so extraordinary a pitch of artistic
propriety as Terborch.
His discretion in the selection is so choice, and his feeling for
arrangement at once so big and simple and so concentrated, that the
presence of his own high-bred feeling pervades almost every interior he
has painted and makes its privacy a thing of exquisite aloofness and, if
I may say so, of consecrated self-possession.
Equally distinguished is Terborch’s use of color. His gamut of local hue
is larger than Vermeer’s, and his treatment of values scarcely less
subtle; while his feeling for color is, I believe, superior. He has the
faculty of raising a local color to its highest power of esthetic
suggestion; witness the lady’s jacket in _The Concert_ of the Berlin
Gallery, a gallery, by the way, exceptionally rich in examples of this
artist’s work. To specify its color we may call it salmon, but this only
vaguely suggests its place on the palette; the precise register of its
hue and, still more, its quality are indescribable. Similarly evasive
and yet profoundly suggestive is his treatment of blue, yellow, red,
black, and the hues of gray from drab to pearly white. These are
enveloped in tonality. For in this respect particularly Terborch differs
from Vermeer. The latter in his most characteristic pictures shows
himself a student of daylight. But in Terborch’s pictures, so far as I
recall them, there appears no window; the interior is dim, and the light
has no pretensions to being natural. It is a studio invention,
distributed or concentrated to suit the imagined scheme of harmony,
Vermeer is, in the modern phrase, a _plein-airist_, while Terborch, true
to the traditions of the Dutch School, is a tonalist. It is in the
invention and realization of his tonal scheme that he is the superior
of the other genre tonalists, and the reason in the final analysis is
that to taste and technique he brought the refining discretion of a
superior quality of mind.
JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER OF DELFT
JOHANNES or JAN VERMEER, who is also called Johannes van der Meer of
Delft, was born at Delft in 1632. His life was spent continuously in
this city until his death in 1675. There are records to show that he
studied with one of Rembrandt’s pupils, Carel Fabritius, and that he was
not only a high official in the local Guild of St. Luke, but highly
esteemed in his community. After his death, however, his very existence
as a painter of the Dutch School was forgotten, and his pictures, very
few of which bear signatures, were attributed to a Vermeer of Haarlem
and to another painter of the same name in Utrecht, and to De Hooch and
others. The reason for this seems to have been the unaccountable
omission of the artist’s name in Houbraken’s book of Dutch painters.
Anyhow, the silence of more than a century and a half was not broken,
until the French connoisseur Thoré, who wrote under the _nom de plume_
of “W. Bürger,” attracted by the beauty of some of the signed pictures,
set on foot an investigation which resulted in the rehabilitation of
Vermeer. Since then criticism has disproved some of Bürger’s
ascriptions, but included other pictures, until now there are thirty
assigned with certainty to Vermeer’s brush. A few others, shown
[Illustration: GIRL AT THE WINDOW JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK]
by the records to have existed, are as yet unidentified; but it is
assumed that the total output of his twenty years of activity did not
much exceed the number already discovered. It falls far short of the
productivity of most of the Dutch painters--a fact which has been
explained by the scrupulous care with which Vermeer painted, and the
degree of perfection to which he wrought each canvas.
The appreciation of Vermeer’s art has increased rapidly during the last
twenty-five years, until to-day he is generally ranked as the finest of
the artists of genre, and, as a painter, without rival in the Dutch
School, while some are disposed to consider him the most accomplished
painter in the history of art. These extreme admirers are, as a rule,
painters, who find in Vermeer’s technique and point of view precisely
what they value most highly in painting. For this artist is a modern
among moderns. He is not so in the sense that Rembrandt’s influence is
now being felt. The latter is indirect in its suggestion of a conception
of beauty other than the classical, and in its equally indirect
suggestion of the expressional value of light and of the symbolic use of
form and color. Rembrandt’s appeal is rather to the mind; Vermeer’s to
the eye. He saw the world as the modern painter sees it, enveloped in
natural light, and rendered it, as the modern painter tries to render
it, by a close discrimination of delicately different values. To produce
a harmony he did not introduce an arbitrary tonality, but, following
nature’s plan, drew all the local colors into a balanced relation by the
unifying effects of diffused light. In this respect Vermeer was unique
in the Dutch School, and it is because the artist of to-day, if he is
alive to the modern spirit, works with the same motive and in the same
way, that he prizes Vermeer so highly. If, as one enthusiast remarked to
me, “the whole art of painting consists in the right relation of values,
and there can be no doubt that it does, then Vermeer is the greatest
painter that ever lived.”
The value of the criticism, of course, depends upon the acceptance of
the major premise, respecting which this individual had no doubt. On the
other hand, one may beg to doubt it, without depreciating Vermeer. For
it comes dangerously near the position that the whole art of painting
consists in its technique; it is an echo, in fact, of that old
shibboleth of our youth, “art for art’s sake.” It lays undue stress on
the purely sensuous appeal of painting, upon the “mint and cummin,” and
neglects the “weightier matter” of possible appeal to the higher
faculties of the imagination. Moreover, it overlooks the fact that the
method which Vermeer brought to such perfection, and which because of
its perfection is so justly admired, is essentially one for small
canvases. And it was not until Vermeer settled down to these that he
developed his characteristic style.
The earliest of his dated pictures is _The Proposal_, in the Dresden
Gallery, which belongs to the year 1656. The figures are of life size,
and the treatment is proportionately broad, almost “rough” as Bode says,
who adds: “It does not yet show us Vermeer in his developed
individuality.” Yet some elements of the latter are already established:
the superb plasticity in the modeling of the forms and the frank
enjoyment in local colors, the lemon yellow of the girl’s jacket forming
a splendid spot
[Illustration: HEAD OF A GIRL JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
HAGUE GALLERY]
against the equally brilliant scarlet of the young man’s coat. Again, a
minor point, an Oriental rug of crimson and yellow and blue design
appears here as in later pictures, such as the _Girl with Water-Jug_ of
the Metropolitan Museum. But the Dresden masterpiece of the artist’s
youth--he was only twenty-four--differs from his later work not only in
the size of the figures and breadth of brushwork, but also in the
treatment of the chiaroscuro. The scene is not illumined with diffused
light, but with a stroke of light which gives brilliance to the two
principal figures and leaves the subordinate ones in shadow. It is an
arrangement, suggestive of the example of Rembrandt, and hints at the
fact that the picture was produced while Vermeer was still close to the
influence of his teacher, Carel Fabritius.
Another early example, betraying the same influence, is _Diana at Her
Toilet_ of the Hague Gallery, which in the 1905 edition of the Catalogue
is still assigned to Vermeer of Utrecht, though later criticism accepts
it as by the artist of Delft. Closely following in subject a _Diana and
Her Nymphs_, painted by Jacob van Loo in 1648, which is now in the
Berlin Gallery, this picture is in the freer, looser method of _The
Proposal_, and even repeats the same colors of red and yellow, though
subtilized here to a delicate rose and a kind of snuff color. The light
is still partially distributed so as to dapple the figures, and these
are painted with a flickering brushstroke that helps to increase the
fluttering effect of the light.
Two other examples have been acquired in recent years by the Hague
Gallery: an allegorical picture, _The New Testament_, and _Head of a
Girl_. In both are introduced the cool blue and white that characterize
many of Vermeer’s later pictures. The subject of the former, which is
owned by Dr. Bredius of The Hague, is curiously affected, representing a
lady in blue and white silk costume, resting her foot on a globe, as she
sits beside a table on which are a crucifix, chalice, and book. On the
wall behind her hangs a large picture of Christ upon the cross, attended
by Mary and John; and on the left of it is a superb tapestry of orange,
blue, and mellow green, while a crystal ball is suspended from the
ceiling. In contrast with the glowing warmth of the curtain and the
shadowed warmth of the picture on the wall, the lady’s figure presents a
cool, white-lighted spot. The plastic feeling is strongly pronounced,
the brushwork wonderfully limpid and firm, and the tonality
extraordinarily fine. For the picture is still a study of tone, in which
it differs from the _Head of a Girl_. For the latter is represented in a
clearly diffused light, which is brightest around the head, and
illumines in a subtle way the tender flesh-tints of the face, the
bluish-white linen head-dress, and the bright full blue of a portion of
the gown. The face wears a charming expression of concentration. This
picture, indeed, very decidedly forecasts Vermeer’s developed
individuality, yet Bode places it among his earlier pieces, about 1656.
To this period also probably belongs the beautiful _Sleeping Girl_,
recently acquired from the Rudolph Kann Collection by Mr. B. Altman.
To a somewhat later date following close on 1656 Bode assigns the _View
of Delft_, one of the greatest treasures of the Hague Gallery. There is
a record of its sale in 1696, together with two other landscapes, one
of which has disappeared, while the other is in the Six Collection in
Amsterdam. The Hague picture is an unusual example of the artist, not
only because it is a landscape, but also because of the warm light that
pervades it. From a triangle of rosy yellowish foreground one looks
across the quiet sheet of grayish-blue water to the line of houses of
reddish-drab and brown bricks, and red and blue and yellow roofs, above
which shows a high expanse of sky. The coloring, which again, it is to
be observed, includes red and yellow, is brilliantly variegated, yet
held in control by the stretches of sky and water. The ensemble is
superbly artistic, while as a presentation of a late afternoon scene it
could not be surpassed in naturalness. The picture, in fact, stands out
among all the landscapes of the seventeenth century as being
extraordinarily modern in feeling and manner, and its influence has been
very great in the modern development of landscape-painting in Holland.
Another picture of the period immediately following 1656 is _The Cook_,
in the Rijks Museum. She is standing in front of a whitish wall, lighted
from a window on the left, pouring milk into a red earthenware pitcher
that stands upon the table. The latter hides the lower part of her
figure, which is clad in a lemon-colored body, reddish-brown skirt, and
deep-blue apron, while a white cap covers her head. Here in these
details--cap against light wall, prominent note of blue, the
three-quarter length of figure, the cool lighting from a window on the
left, lastly, the plasticity of the form--we find the ingredients of
Vermeer’s later manner; but as yet the brushwork has not the limpid
exquisiteness, compressed yet fluent, of his full development. On the
contrary, it is broad, inclined to roughness, loose and free,
magnificent in the gusto with which it has been applied, and vigorously
stimulating in its appeal to sense imagination.
Also in the Rijks Museum is a picture which recalls the fact that De
Hooch was a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Delft from 1655 to 1657,
and that, while he benefited most by contact with Vermeer, the latter
was also somewhat influenced by him. For in this picture, _The Letter_,
Vermeer seems to have experimented, not over-successfully, with De
Hooch’s device of showing one room beyond another. For an anteroom opens
into two others, side by side, in one of which on the black and white
marble floor a lady is seated in an amber dress trimmed with ermine. She
pauses in her playing of a lute to take a letter from a servant. The
picture is exceedingly choice in color and technique, but the
composition is a little awkward in its division into two parts--a
device, by the way, that recalls De Hooch’s _The Visit_, owned by Mrs.
Henry O. Havemeyer, the composition of which is open to a similar
criticism.
Again, in the Rijks Museum is _Young Woman Reading a Letter_. Here in
the delicate modeling of the face one observes the exquisite gray tones
that distinguish so many of the examples of Vermeer’s fully developed
style. Also notable is the arrangement of the composition, the girl
facing left, her feet hidden by a chair and table, the latter forming a
dark spot so as to increase the luminosity on the figure and the wall.
It is repeated very closely in _The Lady with a Pearl Necklace_ of the
Berlin Gallery, where chair and table occupy the same
[Illustration: THE COOK JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
SIX COLLECTION NOW IN RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
position, and the girl stands between them with her hands similarly
raised, only as she holds the necklace she looks up, instead of down to
the table as in the other picture. She wears a canary-colored jacket
edged with ermine, that appears again in Mrs. Collis P. Huntington’s
_Lady with Lute_. In the Berlin picture it sounds a note of liveliness
that is exquisitely sustained in the silvery resonance of the lighted
room; the effect of which is induced by the tones of olive in her skirt
and the table-cloth, by a deep almost colorless blue drapery over the
latter, and a shaft of dull yellow, formed by the velour of the
window-curtain. The ensemble, in fact, is one of piquant decision and
indescribable delicacy, illustrating Vermeer’s faculty of sight
imagination, so that he not only renders what he sees, but actually
creates.
Between Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’s _Lady Writing_ and _The Lace-Maker_ of
the Louvre there is a remarkable companionship of arrangement and
feeling. In each case the figure is seated, bending over a table; the
jacket is canary-colored, and blue is introduced in the table-cloth of
the former picture and in a cushion in the other, while in both the
sensitive expression of the head and hands is echoed in the delicate
precision of the objects on the table. In both cases the luminosity of
the scene is enhanced by a shadowed mass on the left of the foreground.
Mr. Morgan’s picture in loveliness of color, exquisiteness of handling,
and inexpressibly subtle feeling rivals its sister piece of the Louvre.
It is in this element of feeling alone that these two pictures possibly
excel the _Girl with Water-Jug_ of the Metropolitan Museum. For the
latter’s beauty of color, with its deep bell-like note of blue and the
resonance of blue, more or less faintly hovering over the cap and
kerchief and permeating the atmosphere, is unsurpassable. Perfect also
is the handling of this picture, both as to its suggestion of the
plastic reality of everything represented and its consummate delicacy of
manipulation; while in one particular it surpasses both the others and
is in Vermeer’s finest possible manner. This is the extraordinary
propriety with which each detail of the composition is introduced.
Everything has been selected and placed with the choicest discretion;
nothing is confused or unexplained, everything is a triumph of
incomparable simplicity and exquisite adjustment. Only, I repeat, in
feeling; in the expression of the head, arms, and hands is there lacking
something of the exquisite _finesse_ of the above two pictures and of
certain other examples.
Occasionally, as in _The Coquette_ of the Brunswick Gallery, _A Lady at
a Spinet_, in the National Gallery, and _The Music Lesson_, owned by Mr.
Henry C. Frick, the figures display a consciousness of themselves or of
the onlooker; their personality looks out from its own surroundings. On
the other hand, it is rather a characteristic of Vermeer as of Terborch,
that the people in his pictures seem immersed in themselves. The scene
is wrapped in privacy, undisturbed by the suggestion of an outsider. But
the most signal instance of a scene, actually arranged, and posed as if
to be viewed by others, is the example of _The Artist in His Studio_, in
the Czernin Gallery, Vienna. In color and mingled breadth and delicacy
of treatment it is superb; but in place of the artist’s usual sincerity
of feeling, it is possible to detect a suspicion of affectation.
[Illustration: THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
CZERNIN GALLERY, VIENNA]
A signal example of Vermeer’s sincerity and, inasmuch as it is a
portrait, unique, hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. It is
the _Portrait of a Lady_. She is heavy-featured and of homely type,
rather resembling the woman in the Rijks Museum picture, _The Cook_. A
white cap tightly grasps her head; a broad white collar, fastened with a
tuft of gold braid, falls over her black dress, the cuffs of which are
of white lawn. She folds her hands at the waist, one of them in a cream
kid glove, trimmed with gold braid, the other suspending its fellow,
while she holds a black fan. The face is relieved on one side by
greenish-black transparent shadows and wears an expression of dull
self-oblivion that is almost poignant and gives to the portrait a grave
distinction.
In conclusion, it is worthy of note that Vermeer’s painting-career of
scarcely more than twenty years passed from its experimental stage to a
full development from which there was no decline. He did not toward the
finish lapse from his finest ideals, like Maes and De Hooch, nor mingle
pot-boilers with masterpieces in the manner of Jan Steen. He maintained
consistently the artistic integrity of a scrupulously exacting
conscience.
JAN STEEN
JAN STEEN was the chameleon of Dutch painting. Besides genre he essayed
portraiture and Biblical subjects; alternated between small and large
canvases; at one time suggests a recollection of some other artist, by
turns Van Ostade, Terborch, Maes, Metsu, Van Mieris, or even Vermeer;
at other times is incomparably himself, and still again not infrequently
falls below his own standard. He has left more examples than any other
genre artist; for dozens mentioned in old catalogues have disappeared,
yet still some five hundred survive. He is numerously represented in
public and private collections, yet in so many styles and varieties of
quality that his artistic personality is apt to seem evasive, while the
impression he arouses is by turns one of enthusiasm, indifference, and
resentment.
By degrees, however, his personality emerges, as one becomes conscious
of a trait that is shared by all his pictures. It is their liveliness of
characterization, exhibited not only in the individual figures, but also
in the inventiveness of grouping and in the peculiar vivacity with which
the spirit of the scene has been rendered. He is of all the genre
artists the supreme delineator of Dutch life among the lower middle
classes in the Leyden and Haarlem of his day; depicting it, by turns,
with something of the large-heartedness of a Shakspere, the wit and
satire of a Molière, and the coarseness of a Rabelais. But in every
vein, whether of broad survey or trenchant scrutiny, he is human; for
the most part genial in his outlook, and always fresh in observation. It
is probably because of this that Waagen characterizes him as “next to
Rembrandt certainly the greatest genius among the painters of the Dutch
School,” an opinion which is shared by W. Bürger (Thoré), while Dr.
Bredius styles him “the greatest genre painter of the seventeenth
century, one of the wittiest delineators of human folly, the character
painter _par excellence_.”
The standard, in fact, by which these and other admirers test him, and
which must be applied by every one who would reach a just estimate of
this many-sided artist, is bigger than that of technique. Steen drew
well, but could be slipshod and incorrect in drawing; exhibited an
extraordinary gift of improvised and occasionally studied composition,
yet could huddle his canvases with a superabundance of material; in one
picture would display a fine sense of color, to lose it in another; now
would work with a juicy and limpid brushstroke, now in a thin method as
dry as brick-dust, and could be indifferent to tonality, while at other
times a tonalist of choice distinction. Therefore you cannot measure him
as you do a Terborch or a Vermeer, or, indeed, range him for comparison
alongside of any of the other genre artists. With them, at their best,
the pictorial representation is the chief concern, and they invite you
to judge them by their technique. But it is otherwise with Steen. You
cannot hold him to so narrow a test, any more than you can Shakspere.
Both are technicians who at times throw technique to the winds. You may
regret it or resent it; but, to be just, must condone the fact in face
of the bigness that looms behind.
The jovial humanity of Steen and the joy that he took in humorous
characterization were responsible for the deficiencies he often
exhibited as a painter. He would frequently be more interested in the
subject than in the technicalities of an artistic problem; which, as we
have seen, is precisely the reverse of the attitude that most of the
great genre painters came to adopt. They were concerned primarily with
the making of a picture; Steen was quite frequently engrossed with the
delineation of a phase of life. He was so interested in the
story-telling element of the subject that under some circumstances he
permitted himself to supersede the pictorial quality of the
presentation. This should be frankly recognized in approaching the study
of Jan Steen, otherwise by coming upon one or two of his inferior
examples we may be led into a hasty depreciation of this great artist.
He belonged to an old respected family of Leyden, where he was born
about 1626, his father being a brewer in prosperous circumstances. The
son’s name is inscribed in the records of the University of Leyden, as
having been one of its students in 1646; then we hear of him as a pupil
of Nicolaes Knupfer, the painter of genre and of Biblical and
mythological subjects. Afterward Steen studied with Jan van Goyen, whose
daughter Margaret he married. He was one of the first members of the
local Guild of St. Luke, established in 1648. From 1649 to 1654 he lived
at The Hague; then returned to Leyden for seven years, during which time
he owned a brewery near Delft. From 1661 to 1669 he resided at Haarlem,
but in the last year lost his wife and returned to Leyden, where he
remained until his death in 1679. In 1672 he had obtained permission
from the magistrate of Leyden to maintain a café at his house, and the
following year took a second wife, Maria van Egmont, the widow of a
local bookseller. Houbraken states that they lived happily together,
though their larder was often ill-stocked; but he is not so charitable
toward Steen’s connection with the liquor trade. This fact, coupled with
the jovial character of the artist’s pictures and enlivened
[Illustration: THE INN JAN STEEN
HAGUE MUSEUM]
by hearsay information from a painter, Carel de Moor, led this
story-monger into much tittle-tattle about the artist’s reckless habits.
To-day, by the best authorities, this view of Steen is discredited. It
is, however, quite clear that he was often in desperate states; for
example, in the February after his first wife’s death an apothecary
seized his goods and sold his pictures to satisfy a debt of ten florins!
But the reason was not idleness, for he was the most prolific painter of
his day; it is to be found in the miserable price for which he had to
sell his work. No wonder he tried to eke out his finances by keeping a
brewery, which, by the way, was a privilege specially granted at that
time only to a few families of particular respectability. As to the
café, since he had to turn to trade, he naturally adopted the one with
which his family had been connected; the disgrace, if there were any,
not being his, but the public’s, who paid him better for drinks than for
his pictures.
So far as the dates on his pictures show, his period of production
lasted for twenty-five years, from 1653 to 1678, so that his output
averaged more than twenty pictures a year. The best period may probably
be reckoned during the years from 1654 to 1669, which covered his second
sojourn in Leyden and his visit to Haarlem. His family was growing up
around him, and the children from year to year figure in his pictures,
and his handsome wife, Margaret, appears as a center of kindliness and
comfort, while his own person often adds the note of jollity. To these
pleasant times belong the incomparable “family scenes”--_A Homely
Scene_, _The Feast of St. Nicholas_, and _The Happy Family_ of the Rijks
Museum; _The Christening Party_ of the Berlin Gallery; _While the Old
Ones Sing the Young Ones Pipe_ of the Hague Gallery; and the Cassel
Gallery’s _Twelfth Night_, where Margaret appears for the last time,
since the picture was painted in the year of her death.
These and other group-pictures, such as _The Prince’s Birthday_ of the
Rijks Museum, are works of genius, unique in painting. For they are not
constructed according to the methods of the schools, but are the
products of a natural gift of seeing and rendering naturally a glimpse
of busy life. Yet with a tact that avoids confusion; places everything
in its own plane of space with admirable precision and propriety; leaves
no intervals of uncertainty or obscurity; but secures to the whole an
artistic reasonableness and completeness; and all this with an art that
conceals art, and makes the scene appear to be one of complete
naturalness. No other artist has ever reconciled nature and art quite so
happily; and when one passes from the technical appreciation to a study
of the varieties of character, depicted in the personages of all ages
from the baby to the grandparents, and notes the mingling of humor and
tenderness in the sentiment and the embracing large-heartedness that has
inspired the whole, it is to marvel at and rejoice in the uniqueness of
Steen’s genius.
Then, by way of contrast, mark his treatment of a subject in which only
a few persons figure. To myself his series of medical visits presents
perhaps the most charming example of this concentrated phase of his art.
Witness _The Sick Lady_ of the Rijks Museum, where the young woman sits
with her head supported by a pillow, its whiteness against the pallor
of her face, while the doctor stands counting her pulse. It is a
masterpiece of tender characterization, for here the physician also is
gentle and solicitous. However, he is not so in _A Doctor Visiting a
Sick Young Woman_ (No. 166) of the Hague Gallery. There he is boorish in
appearance and suggests ignorance; in rough contrast to the pathetically
fragile little lady, lying in bed and so ruefully gazing at the
medicine-glass in the maid’s hand. The picture is not dated, but I
wonder if it was painted after the artist’s rude experience with the
apothecary who sold him up for ten florins! Again, in _The Doctor’s
Visit_ of the National Gallery, the man presents a different trait of
behavior. It is not tenderness toward a delicate young thing as in the
Amsterdam picture, but respectful solicitude toward an older woman, who,
by the way, reminds one of Steen’s wife, Margaret. She is dressed in a
jacket of old rose, edged with fur, and a silvery-blue skirt, while the
doctor wears a suit of black with olive velvet sleeves. In the Amsterdam
picture his black costume is relieved by a silk cloak of ashy brown,
while the young woman is in pearly-gray satin, trimmed with white fur, a
peep of blue slipper appearing from beneath the skirt. In fact, the
color of these pictures is exceedingly choice; differing from the
richness and liveliness of the family groups; corresponding in its
subtle delicacy to the delicate pointedness of the characterization that
is not without a certain dry flavor of wit.
It is between these two extremes of generous freedom and highly wrought
restraint that the pendulum of Steen’s art swings, with such wealth of
variety that it is impossible to specialize further. However, a word or
two must be said in conclusion about his treatment of Biblical subjects,
of which _The Marriage at Cana_ and _The Expulsion of Hagar_, both in
the Dresden Gallery, may be cited as typical examples.
Steen’s treatment of Biblical, as of occasional mythological, subjects
was purely in the vein of genre; not, however, with any resort to
emotional or dramatic appeal, as in the case of Rembrandt. In
translating the old scene into the vernacular of Dutch middle-class or
low-class life, Steen preserves nothing of its religious significance,
or even of its epic dignity. The theme with him becomes simply a vehicle
for characterization and possible humor. Thus, in _The Marriage at
Cana_, Christ is standing at the table in the act of blessing a Dutch
wedding-party, but all this is in the background. The salient features
of the scene are occurring in the foreground, where a fat cellarer hands
a glass of wine to a fiddler, and a slattern woman leans against a cask,
giving a drink to a boy. In _The Expulsion of Hagar_, Sarah sits inside
the door, “examining” the little Isaac’s head; Hagar weeps as Abraham
sadly dismisses her: while Ishmael strings his bow, two spaniels are
catching fleas, and sheep, cows, and poultry are scattered through the
yard. Meanwhile, though the pictures make no appeal to the spiritual
imagination, the sensuous imagination may be stimulated by the
choiceness of their charm of color. Perhaps, however, if one wishes to
epitomize Steen’s attitude toward the subjects he took from the Bible
and the classics, one may best compare his rendering of _The Disciples
at Emmaus_ (Rijks Museum) with Rembrandt’s treatment of the same
subject in the Louvre. Instead of Christ being the pathetic center of
divine illumination, as in the latter picture, Steen has placed Him in
the shadow of the background, leaving the room, while the disciples,
attended by a serving-woman, are gazing disconsolately at the table,
which is garnished with--of all imaginably incongruous things--a lemon.
CHAPTER IX
BIBLICAL SUBJECTS AND PORTRAITURE
To the Dutch method of treating Biblical subjects we have already
alluded in the case of Rembrandt and Jan Steen. It shows in common the
motive of translating the story into the vernacular of Dutch life,
accompanied on the part of Rembrandt with strong emotional and dramatic
appeal, expressed by means of color and chiaroscuro. It was also
Rembrandt’s practice to employ models selected from the Ghetto in
Amsterdam. Among his followers was a group of men who emulated his
treatment of Biblical subjects, while they also distinguished themselves
in portraiture. Hence the convenience of considering these two branches
of Dutch painting in the same chapter. Moreover, the incongruity between
the two is not so great as it may appear at first sight, since the Dutch
perpetuated the Flemish tendency, which was also German, of not only
personifying the sacred characters by personages of their own day, but
of reproducing so faithfully their characterization that the heads were
practically portraits.
Among the pupils of Rembrandt who varied portraiture with pictures from
the Bible story were, in order of their age, Govert Flinck, Ferdinand
Bol, Carel Fabritius, Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout, and Aert de Gelder;
while another, who is known solely as a portrait-painter, was Dirck
Dircksz Santvoort.
GOVERT FLINCK
THIS artist (1615-1660) began by being so close an imitator of
Rembrandt’s method of chiaroscuro that many of his pictures used to be
taken for his master’s; later, however, when the fashion for Italian art
was revived, he abandoned the chiaroscuro and devoted himself to line
and form. Indeed, he seems to have been an able opportunist; but to
mistake him for Rembrandt suggests a shallow conception of the latter.
Flinck’s Biblical masterpiece is probably the _Isaac Blessing Jacob_; in
the Rijks Museum. The patriarch’s half-figure, as he sits propped up by
pillows, is clad in a splendid crimson robe; the gesture of the arms is
full of dignity, and the head crowned with the majestic character of old
age. And the aged face of Rebecca is reverently characteristic. The
color throughout is rich, and the light and shadow are warm and
luminous. It is an effective rendering of a grave incident, but the
latter has been seen rather than felt, and certainly not with the depth
and poignancy of feeling that Rembrandt would have suggested. Another
fine example of Flinck’s is in the Dresden Gallery--_David Handing the
Letter to Uriah_. Crimson again appears in the king’s robe, contrasted
with which is a large mass of golden yellow with red border, formed by
the cloak of a secretary at his side, while Uriah’s figure, kept in
shadow, is clad in peacock blue and purplish brown. The whole forms a
splendid scheme of color, and again the characterization is extremely
interesting, especially that of the black-haired and-bearded king, who
shows a certain mingling of hardness and nervousness in his face and
demeanor. The treatment is seriously conceived, but with rather a faint
grasp of the dramatic possibilities involved in the theme.
In the _Angel and the Shepherds_ of the Louvre there is still less
feeling for the scene, except in so far as it offered an opportunity for
chiaroscuro. Even the composition is rather perfunctory, the shepherds
being huddled on the right, balanced by a cow and sheep on the opposite
side of the foreground, while the angel who brings the message of
Christ’s birth appears above in the center with cherubs. Nor is the
chiaroscuro satisfactory, for while there are some nice passages of
color in the lighted parts, the shadows are without quality and seem
used only as foils to the light, and not as having individual value.
More successful in its recollection of the Rembrandt manner, and
altogether a picture of considerable charm, is the classical subject,
_Diana and Endymion_, in the Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna.
In the Dresden Gallery are two of the old-men studies that this artist
frequently painted, while a more important example of his fondness for
representing old age is shown in the Art-History Museum, Vienna. This
_Gray-Bearded Old Man_ suggests, like the others, the influence of
Rembrandt, but superficially. It has the venerableness of old age, but
not the power of expression that makes Rembrandt’s treatment of this
subject so spiritually compelling.
The Louvre has a charming _Portrait of a Little Girl_, in an olive-green
dress, holding a spade. In arrangement of costume and choice of color it
is quite Rembrandtesque. Again, in the Berlin Gallery is a very pleasing
_Portrait of a Young Woman_. But it is in the Rijks Museum that the
portraiture of Flinck can best be studied, both in corporation pictures
and single figures. They vary in quality from the quite impressive bust
portrait (No. 931) of _M. Johannes Wittenbogaert_ (?), with its mellow
flesh tints and strong suggestion of character, to the showy but
perfunctory _Fête of the Civil Guard, Münster,, 1648_. In this there is
no charm of flesh and little of fabrics. The whole is pompously
theatrical, done apparently for “business,” with no eye to anything but
satisfying the vanity of the subjects.
FERDINAND BOL
FERDINAND BOL (1616-1680) in the beginning of his career reproduced the
manner of Rembrandt. His coloring was mellow and enriched by
chiaroscuro. Later, about 1650, the chiaroscuro became less pronounced
and the color insipid. While he is esteemed chiefly for his portraits,
he also treated Biblical subjects, as may be seen by three examples in
the Dresden Gallery and two in the Rijks Museum. The most pleasing of
the Dresden pictures is _Jacob Presented to Pharaoh by Joseph_. There is
a very characteristic look of scrutiny in Pharaoh’s face, while his
jewel-bespangled cloak, with its broad border of white and black fur,
affords a fine mass of scintillating color, juxtaposed to the rich
creamy costume of Joseph and the crimson of the old man’s. The picture,
indeed, presents a very handsome color-scheme, though one may discover a
certain stiffness and theatricality in the gesture of Joseph’s hands.
The accompanying picture, _Rest of the Holy Family during Its Flight
into Egypt_, is over six feet high and suggests a canvas too large for
the material introduced, so that one third of it is filled up with
supernumerary articles, such as a saddle and a basket of tools. One
suspects that the picture may have been intended as a decoration for
some wall-space, as the very large example in the Rijks Museum certainly
was. For this, _Abraham Receiving the Angels_ was one of five panels
painted for a room in a house at Utrecht, the other four being now in
the abbey of Middelburg in Zeeland. A mild reflection of Italian
Renaissance feeling is suggested by the _comme il faut_ disposition of
the angels’ draperies, but their coloring of golden amber is finely
Rembrandtesque; so, too, the glow of the yellowing beech-tree that
spires up into the top of the composition, and the plum-gray velvet of
Abraham’s robe. The picture, in fact, while shallow in its treatment of
the incident, is finely decorative. On the other hand, the _Salome
Dancing before Herod_, a work apparently of Bol’s later period, is an
absurdly bad picture, bright and flimsy in color and entirely trifling
as a study of form.
Of Bol’s capacity in portrait-painting a good example is _Portrait of a
Mathematician_, in the Louvre. He is shown resting one arm on a
balustrade, the body, in black with a white collar, being in profile,
while the gray-haired head, covered with a black cap, is facing round to
the spectator, as he points with a ruler to a geometrical figure on a
blackboard. It is a piece of honest characterization, blending vivacity
and dignity. In quite a different vein is his portrait of a girl in
profile in the Liechtenstein Gallery. She has soft pale blond hair, and
the figure is enveloped in that yellow tonality which marks Bol’s
transition from the Rembrandtesque manner to his later one. The girl
with her protruding forehead bears a striking resemblance to a girl,
painted by Rembrandt, in Room VI of the same gallery, and a comparison
of the two pictures offers an interesting commentary upon the essential
difference between the master and one of his most successful pupils.
Among five portraits by Bol in the Munich Pinakothek No. 338 may be
specified as particularly handsome. It is that of a man with dark-brown
hair and a mustache and imperial of lighter hue, possibly Govert Flinck.
He wears a black cap and cloak and leans his arm upon a table. The
following number in the catalogue is allotted to a portrait of this
man’s wife. She is shown as far as the waist, where her hands are
folded, the body full front, the head a little to the left. The face is
beautifully modeled in clear flesh-tones, surrounded by golden-brown
hair in ringlets. Beneath her white stomacher is a dull-red gown with
olive sleeves. Thus the color-scheme is Rembrandtesque, with an envelop
of warm amber atmosphere, while the serious sympathy with which the
characterization has been rendered would not be unworthy of Bol’s great
master.
Unfortunately, Bol by no means maintained this high standard, as may be
seen among the numerous examples of his portraits in the Rijks Museum.
They mostly belong to his later period. The best is the earliest one,
painted in 1657, representing the _Six Governors of the Huiszittenhuis_,
seated round a table in black clothes and steeple hats. The heads are
well characterized and the flesh-tones luminous; but an air of
attitudinizing pervades the assemblage, which has rather the prim, set
manner of a photographic group. And much the same feeling is aroused by
the _Four Governors of the Leper House_, which is considered in Holland
his masterpiece. In fact, it is not in the formal arrangement of a
corporation picture, but in a single figure, that Bol is seen to best
advantage. Yet some of the examples of these in the Rijks Museum, such
as the _Roelof Meulenaar_ and _Maria Rey_, are commonplace parodies of
Rembrandt’s manner, while that of the sculptor _Artus Quellinus_ is a
parody of Van Dyck’s elegance. Bol, in fact, was an able assimilator of
his master, Rembrandt, and as long as he retained the enthusiasm of his
youth, painted creditable and often excellent portraits. Later, however,
he drifted into the swim of social decadence, and his work is
characterized by affectation, vapidity, and perfunctoriness.
CAREL FABRITIUS
FABRITIUS (about 1620-1654), after studying with Rembrandt, resided in
Delft, where he became, it will be recalled, the teacher of Jan Vermeer.
His life was prematurely cut short by the explosion of a
powder-magazine, while he was in the act of painting the portrait of
Simon Decker, sacristan of the old church at Delft. In consequence, the
number of his pictures is small, and some of those which appear under
his name in the catalogues are of disputed attribution. He must have had
a precocious talent, for the _Portrait of Abraham de Notte_, in the
Rijks Museum, is dated 1640, when the artist was scarcely twenty. It is
a bust portrait in which the black-haired head, set against a light
background, is well enveloped in atmosphere, while the features are
fluently modeled in warm, luminous tones. It proves him to have been an
exceptionally apt pupil of the master, and helps to justify the
attribution to him of the other picture in the Rijks Museum, _The
Decapitation of St. John the Baptist_, a powerful and attractive work. A
golden luminosity, rich in quality, pervades the whole canvas. The
characterization of the figures is striking. The executioner, a sturdy,
brutal figure, with a rubicund, swollen face, showing above his white
shirt, holds the head upon a salver, with the absolute unconcern of a
butcher serving meat. A corresponding lack of emotion is apparent in the
two female figures, daintily dressed and of girlish refinement, Salome’s
eyes gazing into vacancy with a wistful expression, while Herodias,
looking but little older, gazes at the head with a slight air of
curiosity. The conception of these women is early Italian rather than
what one would associate with Dutch of the seventeenth century, and
recalls the expression of Mantegna’s _Judith with the Head of
Holofernes_. They suggest a sexless abstraction, moved by no active
impulse, yet hauntingly fascinating in its young passionlessness. In
the Berlin Gallery a _Study of a Man Praying_ is attributed to
Fabritius, while in the Munich Pinakothek are two portraits of young men
associated with his name. The bust portrait, No. 344, is definitely
assigned to him, while the half-length, No. 345, once attributed to him,
is now assigned to Rembrandt. It represents a young man with long hair
parted in the center, who, holding a sheaf of paper and a pen, seems to
have paused in his writing and is looking up and out of the picture with
an expression of rapt meditation. In its different way it is akin to the
expression of the _Salome_ in the other picture. That so gravely fine a
picture should have passed for a Fabritius suggests the character of the
estimation which hangs about the memory of this artist, who did not live
to fulfil the promise of his youth. Moreover, what is known and what is
conjectured about him suggests the value of his influence upon Jan
Vermeer, whose own tendency to give his figures a concentrated
absorption may possibly be traced to this source.
GERBRANDT VAN DEN EECKHOUT
EECKHOUT (1621-1674), the son of an Amsterdam goldsmith, was the first
pupil to enter Rembrandt’s studio and one of his closest imitators. For
example, in _The Woman Taken in Adultery_ of the Rijks Museum, the face
of the lonely figure of Christ is the center of light amid the
coruscation of rich coloring formed by the costumes of the scribes and
Pharisees, while a quieter note of dignity appears in the fine green and
plum draperies of the kneeling woman. The color is sonorous, yet its
echo does not penetrate to the depths of the surroundings, the shadows
of which are inclined to be opaque and unexplorable. Better in this
respect, that its shadows are more luminous, is the _Christ with the
Doctors_ of the Munich Pinakothek. Here the strongest light centers on
the head of an old rabbi, so as to bring out the color of his turban and
beard while leaving his face in shadow; a device which makes the little
face of the Child Christ, though it is clearly illuminated, seem by
comparison pathetically insignificant. Meanwhile the light touches here
and there the other figures in the group and penetrates their
environment of shadow. It is worth while to compare this picture with
the series of Biblical subjects by Rembrandt in the same museum,
particularly the _Adoration of the Shepherds_. In the Berlin Gallery
Eeckhout is represented by _Raising of Jairus’s Daughter_ and a
_Presentation of Christ in the Temple_. These pictures, particularly the
latter, are wonderfully reminiscent of Rembrandt, finely composed in
masses of light and shade and sumptuous in color. In a third example,
_Mercury and Argus_, Eeckhout has treated this mythological subject with
some charm. The young nude figure of Mercury, with a blue drapery over
his knees, as he sits playing his pipe, is a charming white spot against
the warm ruddiness of the rocky landscape, where beside a white and red
cow the brown nude form of Argus is stretched, as if in sleep. Farther
back in shadow are the sheep and goats. The feeling of the picture is
pleasant; but its suggestion is inclined to be rather superficial.
Of this artist’s portraits there is an example in the Brunswick Gallery
and one excellent specimen in the National Gallery. This is _The Wine
Contract_, in which the four governors of the Wine Guild of Amsterdam,
dressed in black, are seated at a table, examining a contract.
AERT DE GELDER
DE GELDER was a pupil of Rembrandt’s old age. He himself was not born
until 1645, and, it is supposed, was little over fifteen when, after
studying with Hoogstraten in their native city, Dordrecht, he went to
Amsterdam. Then he returned to Dordrecht and resided there until his
death in 1727. He is thus one of the latest of the artists of the period
we are considering. An early work, dated 1671, directly inspired by
Rembrandt, is in the Dresden Gallery. _The Presentation of Christ in the
Temple_ is a reproduction in color of Rembrandt’s well-known etching of
this subject, worked out in red and brown and olive green, enveloped in
a dull, warm glow, which, however, has more of mannerism than of
suggestion to the imagination. The accompanying example in this gallery,
_An Important Document_, shows a man and woman seated at a table,
covered with a red cloth, examining a paper. The coloring is warm, the
hands and faces, however, inclining to an unpleasant brickiness of red,
while the whole aspect of the scene is lifelike but uninspired. The
Dresden Gallery also owns the _Portrait of a Halberdier_, a well-painted
and fairly interesting study of a stout man, with rosy, glowing face
beneath a fur-brimmed hat, whose uniform is of various tones of olive
green.
De Gelder is also represented by three portraits in the Rijks Museum and
by a Biblical subject, _Judah and Thamar_, in the Hague Gallery, but the
best example of the latter kind is in the Museum of Art at Budapest.
This _Esther and Mordecai_, dated 1685, shows the queen, seated at a
table before an open book, resplendent in a brocaded and jeweled cloak
and a tagged and tufted dress, listening while Mordecai, bending forward
with humble admiration, addresses her. The coloring is rich and mellow,
and the delineation of character, especially in the case of Mordecai,
has considerable suggestion of the spirit of the story.
DIRCK DIRCKSZ SANTVOORT
IF it is a fact, as generally supposed, that Santvoort (1610-1680) was
one of Rembrandt’s pupils, he did not follow the master’s use of
chiaroscuro, but rather the example of his elaborately detailed
portraits. In Santvoort’s own case, as he may be studied in the Rijks
Museum, this led at first’ to hardness of modeling, as may be seen in
the portrait group of the _Dirck Bas Jacobsz Family_, dated 1634, where
the stiffness of the composition is increased by the gaze of every face
being focused to one point. Still hard, but full of character, is a
later portrait, dated 1638, of _Four Ladies of the Spinhuis_. The latter
was the house of correction, and these guardians and matrons look
competent to rule it firmly. More theatrical in arrangement, with hands
pointing this way and that, is the _Four Governors of the Serge Hall_
(1643). Meanwhile, three years earlier, Santvoort painted the single
portrait of _Frederick Dircksz Alewyn_, which again is harsh in texture
and bronze-like in color. On the other hand, the portrait of this man’s
wife, _Agatha Geelvinck_, has a distinct charm. The light falls upon her
forehead and soft hair, which is frizzed out with little curls, while
the features are modeled with a dainty discretion that recalls a
Florentine primitive. Then follow two portraits of children,
respectively ten and nine years old, _Martinus_ and _Clara Alewyn_. They
are represented as a shepherd and shepherdess, the former in a rose
tunic, with a scarf of goldish sheen, quite Rembrandtesque in quality,
the latter in a satin dress of the hue of strawberries and cream. She
carries a bow and arrow, and is accompanied by lambs, while the boy is
attended by a black greyhound. The hands and faces are well modeled and
have expression, while the painting throughout is fluent and limpid. The
pictures are inclined to sentimentality, which, however, is more easily
excused because of the youngness of the children and the painter-like
quality of the technique.
BARTHOLOMEUS VAN DER HELST
From the above followers of Rembrandt, who reflect the manner but so
little of the greatness of the master, it is a relief to turn to a
portrait-painter who, while he owed something to Rembrandt in the way of
chiaroscuro, was
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF PAUL POTTER BARTHOLOMEUS VAN DER HELST
HAGUE MUSEUM]
an independent personality and one of force. It is Bartholomeus van der
Helst, born in Haarlem in 1613, whose life, however, was spent in
Amsterdam, where he died in 1670. It is in the Rijks Museum that he is
most brilliantly represented, though his single portraits stud the
galleries of Europe. Their usual feature is direct and vivid
characterization, conveyed without much persuasiveness of manner, but
singularly sincere. One example, however, the _Portrait of Paul Potter_,
is an exception, being both in technique and feeling one of the most
persuasive portraits to be met with. It has in it also a suggestion of
the feeling for decorative arrangement, which was elaborated on so
sumptuous a scale in the corporation pictures of the Rijks Museum.
In the chapter on Hals I alluded to Van der Helst as his inferior in
composition and characterization. And the judgment stands, especially
when you find yourself at Haarlem in the presence of the superb facility
and quality of Hals’s genius. None the less, when you face the
prodigious output of Van der Helst’s talent in the Rijks Museum, you
realize that, while he was less efficient as a painter, less gifted with
the ease, as it were, of improvisation, in his compositions, he had yet
an exuberance of invention and a gusto for characteristic
generalization, so amazing that from a distance one may be disposed to
question if Hals, after all, was so much greater. At his best he
undoubtedly was, having the artist’s fine gift of heightening the
significance of what he handled, and even in his less memorable work
exhibiting more or less of that magical manipulation which is itself an
inspiration. Beside him Van der Helst is less the artist than a mighty
craftsman, and, when one grows enthusiastic over him, it is not because
he has heightened the appeal of his material, but because he realizes so
wonderfully the prodigal physical exuberance of his day. This reaches
its culmination in his masterpiece, _The Banquet of the Civic Guard_
(No. 1135). Grouped around the standard-bearer, who is in black velvet
with a sash of the same blue silk as the flag, are some two dozen
figures, arranged in natural positions, with easy gestures and heads and
hands individually characterized. In these particulars and the treatment
of the fabrics there is more than mere craftsmanship. The latter has
been regulated by a superior order of intellect.
It is here that one seems to discover the essential difference between
Van der Helst and Hals. The former is intellectually the bigger man,
while Hals’s distinction is a superiority of feeling. His work,
therefore, has the sensuous charm in which the other’s is deficient.
When in the light of this you reëxamine Van der Helst’s masterpiece, it
is to discover that what is lacking in it is the esthetic quality. The
composition is not pervaded with atmosphere, in the various planes of
which the figures might take on differences of subtle value; and, while
there is an arrangement of light and shade, it is used only to assist
the modeling of the figures, and with no feeling for heightening the
beauty of the color-scheme by the luminosity of the hues. The result is
that the scene, for all its assertion of vital force, is lacking in
vivacity. The same test, applied to the other corporation pictures and
single portraits by this artist in the Rijks Museum, corroborates the
conviction that, apart from Rembrandt, Van der Helst was the biggest
intellectual force among the portrait-painters of Holland, but that he
lacked the esthetic feeling and accordingly the quality of technique
which alone make him inferior to Hals.
THOMAS DE KEYSER
SON of an architect and sculptor, Thomas de Keyser was born in
Amsterdam, 1596 or 1597, and died there in 1667. His career is divided
by a date about 1628. Before this his portraits are similar in character
to those of Nicolaes Elias, with which they have been confused. The
figures have a hardness and some stiffness, but unmistakable carrying
power; the flesh is leathery, dull in color, and expressionless, and the
composition either formally arranged in rows, or artlessly strung out in
separate items. Thus his earlier portraits present a curious mingling of
power and naïveté. They are representative of real people, but are not
yet conceived with an artist’s eye. Then by 1628 a change begins to
appear in De Keyser’s work, as it also did a few years later in that of
Elias. Atmosphere creeps into his pictures; the flesh becomes more
luminous, the composition at once more varied and more unified, and the
figures, without losing their character, acquire amenity and dignity. It
is said that De Keyser’s work influenced the young Rembrandt when he
first settled in Amsterdam, and it would seem as if also the older man
gradually gained something from the younger.
In the Rijks Museum an example of De Keyser’s early style is _The
Company of Captain Cloeck_ (No. 1300). It is true it is dated 1632; but
it still exhibits the hard-fleshed, vacantly staring faces, the figures
in unimaginative poses and in no atmospheric envelop, and spiritless
treatment of the fabrics. But compare _The Family Meebeeck Cruywaghen_
(No. 1349). Here the group is held together by a pleasing background of
trees and house, bathed in a yellow glow. It is the homestead, and the
comfort of it is reflected in the charming spontaneousness of feeling in
the figures--father, mother, and grandmother, and six happy children.
Each is delightfully individualized, and the expression of the whole
picture is one of dignity and sweetness. Or for dignity, again, of a
very refined order, take the equestrian _Portrait of Pieter Schout_ (No.
1650). There is here a fine feeling for color, the black horse and its
rider’s black hat and yellow coat showing grandly against the drab gray
of the lofty sky, below which are sand-dunes with light-green verdure.
The picture, though scarcely three feet high, has a sense of space and
the bigness of a large canvas.
The startling difference between De Keyser’s two styles is well
exemplified in the Berlin Gallery, where you can compare the hard
spread-out arrangement in black dresses of _An Old Lady and Her Three
Daughters_ with the genial dignity of _An Old Man and His Two Sons_. An
exceedingly interesting _Portrait of a Woman_ hangs in the Museum of Art
in Budapest. About fifty years old, she is seated in an arm-chair almost
facing us; in a handsome black silk dress, trimmed with brown fur, with
a wide starched ruff and a lawn cap
[Illustration: FAMILY OF ADMIRAL PIETER PIETERSZ THOMAS DE KEYSER
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
with wings over the ears. Her honest face is modeled in firm planes, and
is ruddy with health. This painter-like and admirably human portrait is
dated in the year that has been adopted as separating the artist’s two
periods: namely, 1628.
* * * * *
AMONG the portrait-painters whose work exhibits the characteristic
qualities of Dutch seventeenth-century art are Michiel Jansz van
Mierevelt (1567-1641) and Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn, both of whom
lived at The Hague, where they are well represented in the Mauritshuis;
Salomon de Bray (1597-1664), who lived in Haarlem, where he can be seen
to best advantage, and Paulus Moreelse (1571-1638), who was born and
lived the greater part of his life in Utrecht. To the average student of
painting the last named is probably the most interesting. The others are
highly esteemed in Holland, though it is pointed out that in the latter
part of their lives quality gave way to quantity. Indeed, they were so
prolific that one tires of trying to pick good examples out of the mass
of mediocrity. In the case of Moreelse, however, it is different. His
works, less numerous, have a choiceness of feeling and execution, his
portraits of women and children being especially gracious in conception
and treatment. Witness, for example, in the Rijks Museum the _Maria van
Utrecht_ and the portrait of a child of some seven years, _The Little
Princess_. In place of breadth and freedom, these pictures are precise
and meticulous in brushwork, the details of the costumes elaborately
reproduced, the faces softly modeled with faint greenish-gray shadows.
Yet they have character and suggest reality and possess an undeniable
charm. Somewhat broader in method is his _Portrait of a Young Lady_, in
the Budapest Museum. Seen to the waist, she is in black velvet, with
cuffs and a deep collar of exquisite point-lace. Her pleasantly
thoughtful face is painted with a somewhat dull and heavy brush, yet the
expression is that of life, and its charm is increased by the soft hair
being worn in large rolls over the ears and confined in a cap, of which
only the dainty edges of lace appear. It is a portrait of singularly
choice refinement.
To the occasional portraiture of the genre artists Maes, Terborch, and
Netscher we have alluded in another chapter.
CHAPTER X
LANDSCAPE
In the Berlin Gallery are two small examples of _Holland Landscape with
the Hamlet of Rhenen_. They are by Hercules Seghers, whom Bode points to
as the father of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape. Similar in general
design, they are distinguished by a fine sweep of almost clear sky,
swimming with vapor, from which a level country, dotted with the roofs
and church towers of a hamlet and threaded by a stream, stretches in
pale-yellow tones, broken up with brownish shadows, to the foreground.
The identification of the scene and the assignment of these pictures to
Seghers have been made possible by comparison with some etchings of the
same artist that modern Dutch research has discovered. By the same means
other pictures, including a _Landscape_ in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence,
which used to be attributed to Rembrandt, have been restored to Seghers.
This one again shows a plain, intersected by a stream, but bounded on
the right by the abrupt shoulder of a mountain, whose top is merged in
dark cloud, while the rest of the sky is an open expanse of whitish
light. In the contrast of this with the dark tones of the ground,
weirdly interspersed with fitful gleams, there is an extraordinary
impressiveness. It is no wonder that it was mistaken for a Rembrandt;
and the interest in Seghers deepens when it is ascertained that
Rembrandt himself was strongly influenced during his earlier years in
Amsterdam by the older artist. This has been proved by a comparison of
certain of the etchings of the two men.
Hercules Seghers, in fact, seems to have been in his own day very much
what Michel was to the modern revival of landscape-painting in France.
He was a forerunner of the later movement, but unrecognized by the
world, while almost the only records that exist of him are documentary
evidences of debts. He was born in 1590, probably in Haarlem; worked in
Haarlem, Utrecht, and The Hague, but chiefly in Amsterdam, where he died
about 1640.
In the few examples of his work that still survive, we can trace the
twofold tendency of Dutch landscape: in one direction its note of simple
truthfulness to the facts of nature, and in the other the tincture of
these facts with a romantic spirit. And, in addition to thus setting the
motive, Seghers proclaimed the Dutch artist’s fondness for effects of
sky, for tonalities of grays and browns, sparingly enlivened with
greens.
For the Dutch landscapists were tonalists. With the single exception of
Jan Vermeer, who approximated the _plein-air_ of modern art, they
transposed the hues of nature into a scheme of color which is none the
less arbitrary and unnatural, although it preserves the values of
nature’s coloring. In comparison with the naturalistic achievements of
the modern artist, who studies nature in her own environment of light
and renders her hues as actual light affects them, the Dutch artist was
a composer on the theme of nature, but not a naturalist. The same,
however, in only a less degree, is true of the Barbizon artists. They,
too, were composers of schemes of tonality, so that, students of nature
though they were, their landscapes will not compare in naturalness of
suggestion with the work of many a modern man who will probably never
enjoy their fame. Let me add that I do not mean to imply by this the
essential superiority of the modern landscape-painter. That is another
question, and only to be decided by each person for himself, according
as he selects or does not select naturalistic representation as the
standard of his taste. To one who does not the tonal transposition may
seem preferable. Both methods, indeed, have their warrant in art.
But I press the distinction because, unless it is recognized, Dutch
landscape-painting cannot be properly appreciated. If people approach
it, and it is my experience that many do, with modern _plein-air_
achievements in their eye and basing their judgment upon them, they can
only suffer disappointment. The Dutch paintings will seem
“old-fashioned,” false to nature, and uninspired. On the other hand,
once the necessary attitude is assumed of accepting this transposition
of color and light phenomena of nature into an equivalent of tonal
values, proper appreciation is possible. Then one begins to study the
examples partly for the quality of their tonality, partly for the degree
in which they embody the character and spirit of the landscape, and
partly, and probably chiefly, for the quality of the artist’s
personality infused into them.
REMBRANDT
REMBRANDT was a master of both landscape motives, able alike to record
with truthfulness the physical aspects of a scene or to infuse it with
romantic suggestion; and nowhere more remarkably than in his etchings.
In these, with a few lines that summarize the salient features of the
scene, or with tonal effects of light and shade that elaborate and
enrich the facts, he executed plates of pure landscape or of landscape
as a setting for the figures. Among his paintings the examples of pure
landscape are rare. The beautiful _Tobit and the Angel_ of the National
Gallery may be considered one, as the figures are insignificant, and
another, which, however, is a sea-piece, is in the Liechtenstein Gallery
(No. 606): water, dotted with a boat and a few distant sails, stretching
back to a low horizon, over which spreads a vast open creamy sky, with
some finely buoyant clouds. It is as a setting to figures, especially in
the Biblical subjects, that Rembrandt’s use of landscape may best be
studied. Here it serves as an orchestration to the theme, enriching it
with sensuous and emotional suggestion, and giving a free range to the
artist’s romantic and dramatic imagination.
PHILIPS KONINCK
REMBRANDT’S best-known pupil in landscape was Philips Koninck, who was
born in Amsterdam, 1619, and died there in 1688, some of his career
being spent abroad. The character of his work suggests that he, too,
may have been influenced directly by Hercules Seghers, for he affected
far-reaching panoramas of flat country, interrupted by occasional low
hills and traversed by streams. A fine sky extends above the ground,
which is constructed in tones of warm pale yellow, olive green, and
reddish brown. Notwithstanding the comparatively large size of the
canvases and the extent of the scene included, the latter has been felt
so synthetically, as well as comprehensively, that there is no lack of
unity. An excellent example is _The Dunes_, “The Valley of the Rhine
near Arnheim,” owned by Sir William van Horne of Montreal. Another
memorable example is in the Dresden Gallery, _Dutch Landscape_, a view
from the dunes looking across the level country. This canvas is scarcely
so large, but involves the same sense of bigness. The foreground, which
shows some red-roofed cottages amidst the olive greens, is constructed
in an ample way; a river occupies the middle distance, and the further
plain is dotted with little trees. Overhead is a sky of drabbish gray
and rosy cream. The Berlin Museum owns a handsome example with figure
and cattle in the foreground, and the Rijks Museum contains two. Here
also are to be seen four portraits by Koninck of _Joost van den Vondel_,
two at the age of seventy-eight and two at eighty-seven; the subject
evidently being a friend of the artist, for on the back of one of the
pictures is a dedicatory inscription.
* * * * *
THE great nursery of Holland landscape was the city of Haarlem. Van
Goyen, it is true, belonged to Leyden, while Amsterdam, which produced
Seghers and Koninck, in course of time claimed many others. But the
majority were citizens of Haarlem or at least spent a portion of their
working life in that city. They include Salomon van Ruisdael and his
nephew Jacob; Pieter Molyn, Jan Wynants, Allart van Everdingen, and the
painters of landscape with animals and figures, Philips Wouwerman,
Adriaen van de Velde, and Nicolaes Berchem.
* * * * *
SALOMON VAN RUISDAEL (about 1600-1670), it has been conjectured, may
have been a pupil of Van Goyen’s because of a similarity between the
early work of both, that has lead to their pictures being attributed to
each other. But later the similarity disappears, Van Goyen displaying an
ampler and more poetic style, while Salomon van Ruisdael continues to be
the industrious painter of landscapes that, while admirably faithful to
the appearance of nature, are comparatively prosaic in feeling. While he
was a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem and lived there
continuously, he visited other cities, for some of his pictures exhibit
views of Leyden, Dordrecht, and Nimwegen. The characteristic of his work
is a quiet, homely dignity, that, while it gives a pleasant record of
the Holland of his day, seldom stirs one to enthusiasm. Perhaps his
chief claim to recognition is that he was the teacher of Jacob van
Ruisdael.
* * * * *
PIETER MOLYN (about 1600-1661) was a successful teacher, who had the
capacity to foster the individuality of his pupils. Among these the most
famous was Gerard Terborch, who occasionally collaborated with his
master by introducing figures into his landscapes. Molyn’s own pictures
were inclined to be meager in composition, and dryly precise in
execution.
* * * * *
JAN WYNANTS (about 1605-1679), again, was fortunate in having a
collaborator, for more than one hundred and fifty of his pictures were
enlivened with figures by that skilful and attractive artist, Adriaen
van de Velde. They add brilliance and animation to landscapes that in
themselves are painstaking but apt to be monotonous.
* * * * *
ALLART VAN EVERDINGEN (1621-1675) is not to be confounded with his
brother Cæsar, who was a rather indifferent painter of portraits, genre
and historical pictures. Allart was a pupil of Pieter Molyn and then
worked in Sweden, subsequently spending seven years in Haarlem and the
last twenty-two years of his life in Amsterdam. His fame also rests on
his connection with Jacob van Ruisdael, who was induced by the success
of Everdingen’s Swedish landscapes to abandon the direct study of nature
and to invent scenes of romantic impressiveness. In the Rijks Museum
there is a chance, in Nos. 2078 and 907, to compare side by side the
work of these two men. The result, I think, is to discover that, while
they may use practically the same material in the same way, Ruisdael
gives a character to each object, that makes you feel as if he had
penetrated into the heart as well as the marrow of the scene, while
Everdingen remains merely a lover and recorder of the picturesque.
AERT VAN DER NEER
VAN DER NEER was born in Gorkum in 1603, and died in poverty at
Amsterdam in 1677. In his youth he was steward in the family of the Van
Arkels, and at this time only occasionally indulged his love of
painting. Later he devoted himself to art, but found few purchasers for
his pictures and was continually harassed by creditors, and at one time,
like Jan Steen, kept a tavern. He is distinguished particularly for his
winter and moonlight scenes, the best of which date from about 1646.
They exhibit not only a close study of nature but a poetic feeling,
which is deep and sincere and often very impressive. He was a painter of
moods, expressing the sentiment usually in delicate tonalities, so
delicate, indeed, that his pictures, hidden away in the corners of
galleries or confronted with more robust pictures, seem at first
monotonous and cold. It is not until, as Bode points out, they are
isolated in a good light that their merit becomes apparent. This famous
expert also compares the method of Van der Neer’s moonlight scenes with
that of Rembrandt’s interiors. The latter projects a shaft of light into
the hollow gloom, while Van der Neer represents a concavity of light,
the luminosity of which is heightened by the shadows. His method, in
fact, is the exact reverse of Rembrandt’s.
Two memorable examples of his moonlight scenes appear in the Berlin
Gallery, where one is impressively somber, while the other is
dramatically stirred by the yellow and red flare and turbid smoke from a
burning house, and figures in movement agitate the foreground. Others
are in the National Gallery and in the Imperial Art Museum at Vienna.
The example in the latter shows a darkened canal, with a boat,
stretching back to a town that broods beneath a sky in which the moon
rides at full, surrounded by fleecy clouds.
In the Vienna Gallery also is an example of one of his winter scenes,
others appearing in the National Gallery and in the Wallace Collection.
In these the artist indulges in a freer and livelier use of color,
though the animation of the ground and its group of figures does not
interfere with the delicate observation and sensitive feeling, that
still regulate his treatment of the skies. It is on this that Van der
Neer, like all painters of poetic moods, relies chiefly for expression.
In one of Van der Neer’s landscapes in the National Gallery, cattle were
painted by Cuyp. The reminder may serve at this point of our story for
an introduction to the important part played in Holland landscape by
those artists who enlivened it with figures and animals.
LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES AND ANIMALS
THE popularity of this branch of painting in the seventeenth century can
be explained by its affinity to genre painting. It is but a step from
depicting a party of people in an interior to showing them engaged in
some sport or occupation in the open air. The same tendency to depict
the incidents of Dutch life, or to use such incidents as the theme of a
pictorial presentation, appears in both; and some of the artists of
this out-of-door genre, Wouwerman, Adriaen van de Velde, Cuyp, and
Berchem, reached proficiency that compares favorably with the
masterpieces of interior genre. As for the fondness for depicting
cattle, we may recollect how Troyon, after visiting Holland, turned from
pure landscape to cattle studies, while every observant visitor to that
country has enjoyed the spots of rich color which the grazing herds make
in the far stretches of green pasture. They form one of the notable
features of the Holland landscape, and it would have been surprising if
the painters, so intent on the study of their home surroundings, had
overlooked it. The signal member of this group of painters is Paul
Potter.
PAUL POTTER
POTTER is the prodigy among Dutch artists. At the age of twenty-two he
produced a masterpiece that, despite its shortcomings, has compelled the
admiration of the world. This is a work of trenchant, even brutal force,
while the majority of his work, especially in his later years, wins by
its charm of persuasiveness. He is personally known to us through the
beautiful portrait by Van der Helst. It was painted in the year of
Potter’s death, and shows him a man of distinguished mien, with soft
auburn hair curling upon his shoulders, and a face that is marked by a
high forehead, heavy-lidded eyes, a strong nose, and full, impulsive
lips; a face upon which consumption has set the impress of fell
refinement.
[Illustration: THE YOUNG BULL PAUL POTTER
HAGUE MUSEUM]
The son of an obscure painter, Potter was born at Enkhuizen in 1625.
From 1646 to 1648 he resided at Delft, where his masterpiece, _The Young
Bull_ of the Hague Gallery, was painted. In 1649 he moved to The Hague
and married the daughter of an architect, Adriana Balckeneijnde. In 1652
he moved to Amsterdam and continued to reside there until his death in
1654.
_The Young Bull_ is an amazing achievement of self-discipline and almost
passionate pursuit of truth. It suggests the attitude of the painter to
have been that once and for all he would master the creature’s
appearance. He set himself a great task of prolonged endurance and has
carried it through to an extraordinary realization. The character of the
beast, as it shows itself to the eye; the incidents of its form and
carriage; the glossy pelt with its actual surface of hair, the brilliant
eye, the damp nozzle--every detail is of life. Having completed this
study, which established for himself the knowledge and skill he had
sought and became a model for the instruction of other artists, he
filled in the rest of the canvas in a somewhat perfunctory manner. The
sky has good quality, but remains a background in the rear of the
composition; the intermediate landscape, overspread effectively with a
pale light, does not maintain its proper plane. The beasts in the
foreground are as hard as wood, the details of the tree niggling, and
the figure of the man ill drawn and tamely comprehended. In fact, it is
not as a picture that the canvas is remarkable, but for its consummately
realistic treatment of the one overpowering detail.
Other large canvases, also products of the artist’s extreme youth, are
the _Bear Hunt_ of the Rijks Museum and the _Boar Hunt_ in the
Carstanjen Collection of the Berlin Gallery. They are open to the same
general criticism, without the wonderful exception. They are evidences
of a young man’s exuberant indiscretion, though he was probably induced
to it by the high value that clients set upon such pictures. Meanwhile,
as early as 1646, that is to say, when he was twenty-one, he was
settling down to the smaller pictures, artistically felt and rendered,
that mark the end of his career. One of the earliest of these, dated
1648, is the scene of _Cattle and Bathers_, in the Hague Gallery; finely
composed and full of happy observation of country life, but somewhat
hard in texture. Yet the previous year had produced the _Horses at the
Door of a Cottage_ of the Louvre, where the scene is enveloped in the
soft half-light of a glowing evening sky. Another beautiful evening
scene is _Landscape with Cattle_ of the National Gallery.
PHILIPS WOUWERMAN
THIS charmingly original and versatile artist, whose works abound in
public and private collections, was born in Haarlem in 1619 and died
there in 1668. He studied landscape with Jan Wynants, but the teacher
who set the tenor of his career was Frans Hals. It was from the latter
that he derived his skill in handling figures, composing them in groups,
placing them in space, and rendering them with fluency and vitality of
brushwork; and the principles thus acquired were applied by him also to
the treatment of the landscape. On his own part he brought to his work a
singularly alert observation, that was happy in hitting upon the
fugitive and accidental aspects of a scene, and a fancy that invests his
subject with a lyrical grace.
His fecundity was such that it is estimated he left some seven hundred
examples, which may be divided into those of his early period, which
extended through the forties, and those of his maturity, which belong to
the fifties and early sixties. He was brought up during the vicissitudes
of the Thirty Years’ War, and the impressions of soldiering suggested
many of his subjects of cavalry, skirmishing, on the march, or halting
at an inn. Elsewhere it is hunting parties, riding parties, gay
cavalcades of ladies and gentlemen; then, again, scenes of farming life:
the bringing home of hay, watering of horses, scenes in the smithy--an
inexhaustible array of incidents in which figure men and women and their
friends, the horse and dog. With such unusual productivity it is not
strange that some of his pictures suffered by haste of execution. This
is especially true of his latest pictures, where the shadows have come
through and destroyed the brilliance of the colors. For, though
Wouwerman was not a colorist, he was an adept at suggesting the gaiety
of color, and his best pictures are bouquets of animated brilliance.
AELBERT CUYP
SON of a prosperous portrait-painter of Dordrecht, Aelbert Cuyp enjoyed
ample means, married a widow, rich and well connected, was highly
esteemed and held public offices in his own community, and throughout
the eighteenth century continued to be prized by collectors as the
“Dutch Claude.” The result was that he could paint to please himself. It
is true that occasionally he was persuaded to paint portraits of his
wife’s aristocratic connections, some on horseback, but these less
characteristic pictures are exceptions. Living far from the centers of
artists, he was devoted to country life, making visits occasionally
along the Maas to Nimwegen or up the Rhine as far as Bergen, but for the
most part indulging his love of nature in the neighborhood around his
native city. The happiness of the man and the artist’s joy in the life
of simple things--his ample means made possible the simple life--are
reflected in the sunniness of his landscapes, and in the big, lazy,
comfortable kine that graze and bask and chew the cud beside slowly
moving waters in the neighborhood of pleasant homesteads, steeped in the
warmth of sunshine. “Only in his own home on the lower Maas,” writes the
modern artist, Jan Veth, himself a native of Dordrecht, “only near
Dordrecht, could he find this happy country, where a delicate vapor from
the rich marshy lands lies over the meadows, which in the morning and
evening hours are covered with a peculiar golden veil.”
His best pictures are in private collections in England and Paris and in
the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the galleries of St.
Petersburg and Budapest. They number nearly fifty that can be regarded
as masterpieces. On the other hand, the pictures by which he is
represented in many galleries will disappoint the student who has formed
a high expectation of this artist’s merit. For he was as unequal in his
manner as he was varied in his choice of subjects, which, besides
landscape and portraiture, included also genre, still-life, church
interiors, and historical paintings.
He was born in Dordrecht in 1620 and died there in 1691. Besides the
instruction that he received from his father, he is supposed to have
been influenced by Van Goyen, for his early work shows a recollection of
the latter’s grayish tones.
ADRIAEN VAN DE VELDE
IN the Rijks Museum is a portrait by Adriaen van de Velde that
represents himself and his family. In a country spot they have alighted
from their carriage, and while a groom attends to the handsome horses,
the artist and his young wife, a little child, and a nurse with the baby
in her arms are grouped in the road. The artist is of refined and
gracious mien, while the spirit of the whole scene breathes prosperity
and happiness. The portrait is indicative of his art, of the gracious
freshness, joyousness, and sweet tranquillity that characterize his
landscapes. For, though he painted some Biblical and historical
subjects, his true métier was landscape, with the ingratiating addition
of groups of figures and animals. So highly appreciated was his gift of
treating these groups that many of the landscape artists of Amsterdam
employed him to introduce them into their pictures. Hobbema was among
the number, as may be seen in that artist’s picture, _The Water Mill_,
owned by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, where the cow and the figures of the
man and woman are by Van de Velde.
Born in Amsterdam in 1636, Adriaen belonged to the Van de Velde family
of artists, his earliest teacher being his father, the naval painter,
Willem the Elder. Then he studied with Jan Wynants at Haarlem and later
with Philips Wouwerman. He was also influenced by Potter and Nicolaes
Berchem, perhaps gaining from the latter his occasional fondness for the
Italianized kind of landscape. But this is mere supposition.
Even Berchem (1620-1683) is only supposed to have visited Italy, because
of the character of the subjects he represented. All that is definitely
known about him is that he resided in Haarlem and Amsterdam. His
treatment, however, of the Italianized landscape, with its goats and
cows and peasants, is inferior to the art of Van de Velde. It charms at
first by its sunny picturesqueness; but it is discovered by degrees to
be a product of routine and mannerism. A studied affectation becomes
apparent in the arrangement of the groups, and a monotonous reiteration
of the effects of light: some object always placed near the center to
catch the chief illumination, while a corresponding formality is
repeated again and again in the distribution of the light and shade.
But such mechanics of picture-making never occur in Van de Velde’s
landscapes. There is always a freshness of vision, characterized,
moreover, by delicate observation, that puts him on a par with
Wouwerman, though the sentiment of his pictures is his own.
THE NAVAL AND MARINE PAINTERS
IT has already been remarked that the naval and marine pictures are an
exception to the general rule that Dutch painting reflects nothing of
the war and the turbulence of the times. The headquarters of the craft
was naturally the great shipping and commercial center, Amsterdam. Here
in the early part of the seventeenth century lived Hendrick Cornelisz
Vroom. Born in Haarlem in 1566, he had, previously to his settling down
in the Dutch capital, visited France, England, and Italy, while there is
good reason to believe that shipwreck had increased his experiences by
enforced sojourn on the west coast of Africa. He makes a brave showing
in the Rijks Museum with records of Dutch vessels running down Spanish
galleys and a sea-fight on the Haarlem Meer, and always his signature
appears proudly on a pennon at the masthead of a winning ship.
Simon de Vlieger, a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in 1693, is
another painter of stirring sea-fights, though he also represents the
peaceful side of shipping; witness _A River Scene_, in the Rijks Museum,
where a big-sailed merchantman from the Indies lies near some little
boats on the wind-flecked water, a picture full of bracing suggestion.
Lieve Verschuier (1630-1686), also a native of Rotterdam, could present
with vigorous effect the busy aspect of the harbor, as may be seen at
the Rijks Museum in his _Charles II Entering Rotterdam, 24 May, 1660_.
But the greatest of this stalwart group were Willem van de Velde the
Elder, and his son, Willem the Younger. Both were born in Leyden, the
former in 1611, the younger in 1633, and, after a period in Amsterdam,
settled in England, where the father died in London, 1693, and the son
at Greenwich, in 1707. The characteristic of these men is their
treatment of the shipping; for with them, as with the others, the
shipping and the sky are of more concern than the water. They give the
great galleons and bulky Indiamen the personality almost of sentient
things: creatures of power and importance, swelling with the pride of
consequence.
CHAPTER XI
VAN GOYEN AND HOBBEMA
The greatest name in Holland landscape, second only to Rembrandt, as
many believe, in Dutch art, is Jacob van Ruisdael. Of the comparative
merits of the other two leaders of Dutch landscape, opinions may differ;
but personally I give the palm to Van Goyen.
Jan Josephsz van Goyen, to give his full name, was born in Leyden, in
1576. He was the pupil of several teachers, including Esaias van de
Velde. At about the age of twenty-one he made a journey to France in the
company of one of his teachers. Later he visited Belgium and the
northern part of France, the sketches of this trip being still preserved
in the Print Collection of Dresden. Moreover, from the subjects of his
pictures, it is evident that he traveled extensively in Holland. Toward
1634 he settled at The Hague, continuing to work there until his death
in 1656. His pictures found ready sale, but he speculated unfortunately
in houses and pictures and was a victim of that Dutch “South Sea
Bubble,” the speculative mania in tulips. Consequently he died poor.
His work embraces three manners. The first, which lasted until about
1630, shows a tendency to brown, with highly colored figures in which
notes of red predominate. This is the period of Esaias van de Velde’s
influence. In the second period he begins to be himself; the color
becomes more subdued, the skies more clear, and the tonality mingles
grayness with the browns or becomes greenish. This lasts for some years,
and then gradually a finer sense of picturesqueness regulates the
compositions; the technique gains in breadth and authority; the tonality
is attained almost without color.
An example of the early method is _View of Dordrecht_, in the Hague
Gallery. The town is seen in the distance across an expanse of water,
furred by the wind; in the left foreground, the harbor bank with figures
and horses; a sail-boat scudding toward the right. It is a gray day,
translated into tones of brown; an exquisitely impressionistic vision of
the occasion and scene.
A very remarkable picture of the transition stage between the first and
second periods is the _Landscape_ (No. 990) of the Rijks Museum,
illustrated in this book. In the coat of the man on the left the vivid
spot of red appears; his companion’s coat is blue; and these two notes
of color vibrate sharply against the drabbish lowering sky. The ground
is buffish green and the oaks brown. It is a picture of extraordinary
dramatic effect.
Two fine examples of the artist’s middle and later period are in the
Berlin Gallery: _View of Arnheim_ (1646) and _View of Nimwegen_ (1649).
The former shows a horseman in the foreground and a cart farther back,
where a gleam of light strikes, while the distant town is in shadow; and
above this striking contrast is a magnificent height of sky filled with
light and scattered with a few loose, well-constructed clouds. The
tonality is composed of cream, gray, brown, and green. The later
example already shows the prevalence of brown. The architecture is
constructed in tones of pale brown and buff; the water in front is
grayish white, and the ample sky admits a little rose amid the grayish
blue. It is a picture of large feeling, and yet the details are still
drawn in with that wriggling stroke of the brown brush which
characterizes Van Goyen’s work, especially in the beginning and more or
less to the end. It exhibits the feeling of one who is an engraver, as
indeed he was; it is drawing rather than painting. The result is that
some of his pictures seem more than a trifle niggling in their method.
On the other hand, while he never gets away from it, he gets the better
of it. He continues to model with these diminutive curlicues of
vermicelli, now brown, now green, but the method disappears in the big
impression aroused by the ensemble. Other notable examples of his later
period are _The River_ and _Banks of a Canal_, in the Louvre.
But in the final analysis it is not the manner of an artist that is of
most account, but the quality of his appeal. In the case of Van Goyen it
is _spirituel_, not infrequently expressive of spirituality. Transmuted
by his vision, the corporeality of the scene has been dissolved into a
spiritual impression. It is, as it were, a mirage of nature that is
offered to one’s imagination. Van Goyen lacks at once the height and
depth of Jacob van Ruisdael; his moods are dreamy rather than poignant,
and he appeals where the other compels. But his moods are those of a
highly rarefied spirit, that seeks to interpret the bigness and the
subtlety of what it feels by means as abstract as possible.
MEINDERT HOBBEMA
HOBBEMA is the very contrary to Van Goyen. A plain, practical,
matter-of-fact man, he is content to paint what he sees, the objective
appearances of the landscape, viewed through the unimaginative medium of
a healthy naturalism. He was as little addicted to moods of feeling as
to dreams; neither curious for new experiences nor moved to artistic
ambition, for, having found a motive to his liking, he repeated it again
and again with slight variations. Gifted with a strong sense of form and
with an unusual faculty of representing it, he learned from Jacob van
Ruisdael to cultivate both, but was too phlegmatic to receive
inspiration from the master’s genius. Now and then he rose from his
usual level to a height of objective grandeur; but for the most part was
a prosy bourgeois, pottering round the parish.
He was born in 1638, his birthplace being variously assigned to Haarlem,
Koevorden, and the village of Middelharnis, though it may have been
Amsterdam, where he spent his life. At the age of thirty he married a
maid-servant four years his senior. She had been in a well-to-do family,
and through the influence of the latter a place was found for Hobbema in
the Wines-customs. It was sufficient to keep him from actual want, but
the fact did not spur him on to artistic effort. He painted, it would
seem, only when he “felt like it,” which was not often, for the number
of his pictures is for a Dutch artist inconsiderable. The earliest date
on any of his pictures is 1650; the last that can be assigned with
certainty is 1670, for though it is generally accepted that the date
[Illustration: THE AVENUE, MIDDELHARNIS, HOLLAND MEINDERT HOBBEMA
NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON]
of _The Avenue of Middelharnis_, in the National Gallery, is 1689, the
“8” is scarcely decipherable. If this date is accepted, it leaves the
last twenty years of his life, for he died in 1709, unproductive. No
reason for this is known, nor whether he retained his official position;
the only fact ascertained being that, like his great master and so many
other Dutch artists, he died in extreme poverty.
Neglected by his own countrymen, his best works found their way into
English private collections, from which they are beginning to emerge
into the hands of American collectors: witness _The Water Mill_, known
as the “Trevor Landscape,” and the _Wooded Landscape_, or “Holford
Landscape,” now owned by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, and the _Wooded Road_,
in the possession of Mrs. William L. Elkins. Meanwhile Hobbema’s
masterpiece is _The Avenue of Middelharnis_, in the National Gallery,
while the Louvre also owns a fine example in _The Water Mill_, and the
popularity and reputation which these works have so worthily obtained
has led to an overestimation of this artist’s rank. He has even been
classed with Van Ruisdael. On the evidence of _The Avenue_ this is
intelligible, but unfortunately this picture is a unique example. The
other pictures mentioned above are also examples to stir enthusiasm, but
they, too, are exceptional. You will not find their equals anywhere in
the galleries of Europe. On the contrary, those which you do find are
dryly objective reiterations of oak-trees, water, mills, and houses,
perfunctorily seen and rendered. They inspire little enthusiasm and
weary by repetition.
_The Avenue_, on the contrary, is an extraordinary instance of a
moment’s heightened vision of the facts, boldly grasped and carried
through unerringly to a grand conclusion. Again, in the other pictures
named, especially in Mr. Morgan’s _The Water Mill_, there is evidence of
something more than talent. A consummate knowledge of forms, skill of
compositional construction, and ability to create an ensemble of
tonality are here reinforced by a comprehension of the feeling of the
scene, that has lifted it out of mere representation and enhanced its
significance. But unfortunately the talent, transfigured in these
examples, is, in the general run of this artist’s pictures, squandered;
used without conscience and permitted to drift into heartless mannerism.
The fact is that, judged by the final test of the quality of the
painter’s mental and artistic attitude toward his subject, the majority
of Hobbema’s pictures rank considerably below par. It is such work as
the generality of his, which makes the student of Dutch art sometimes
pause in his wanderings through the galleries and ask himself whether
there is not a great deal of perfunctoriness and tedious iteration among
these old masters of Holland. There is, and the fact may as well be
grasped first as last. It is a school of great craftsmen, who sometimes
worked indifferently, punctuated with a considerable number who rise
conspicuously above their fellows, but among these exceptions, save on
rare occasions, Hobbema is not to be reckoned.
[Illustration: VIEW OF HAARLEM JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
FROM HILL OF OVERVEEN
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
CHAPTER XII
JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
There is a tendency to identify Jacob van Ruisdael too exclusively with
his pictures of mountainous scenery and rocky waterfalls; hence to speak
of him as a romantic painter. But the true Ruisdael must be sought
elsewhere. These romantic subjects belong to his latest period, in the
seventies, when the indifference shown by the public to his own manner
had induced him to imitate that of Everdingen’s Swedish landscape, and
of the pictures of Swiss scenery by Roghman and Hackaert. How superior
he was to Everdingen, we have already noticed[F] in comparing the
examples of these two men that hang close together in the Munich
Pinakothek. Ruisdael’s knowledge of and feeling for form, his power of
construction not only of the details but also of the ensemble, his
mastery of sky and cloud effects, and, above all, his individual and
powerful personality combine to produce in these scenes of wild solitude
with their plunging cataracts a suggestion as of great organ music,
beside which Everdingen’s pictures have only the tinkle of
picturesqueness. Yet while Ruisdael, as was to be expected, was superior
to Everdingen, he is in these pictures inferior to himself. That his
health was failing may possibly account for it; that he painted on dark
grounds and the black has in many cases come through and dulled the
resonance of the colors, overdarkening the shadows, is another reason;
but the chief one is to be found in his changed attitude. He was no
longer drawing his inspiration direct from nature itself.
The finer examples of his latest style, such as the _Landscape with
Waterfall_ of the National Gallery, still exhibit his power in rendering
the movement and the mass of water, while others are impregnated with
that solitary grandeur which was a characteristic quality of his genius.
But it is in these instances touched with moroseness, with something
possibly of the sentimental sorrows of a Werther. The great artist,
whose lonely bachelor life had been spent in meditating upon the bigness
of nature, was now brooding over the littleness of the world’s
appreciation of himself; introspection had taken the place of that large
looking out upon the world which hitherto had been the habit of his
life. These romantic subjects, in fact, represent the waning of his
powers; for the complete revelation of his genius we must look
elsewhere, beyond the invented landscapes, to those in which nature
itself has inspired the mood which dominates its interpretation.
Meanwhile let us glance at the brief facts of the artist’s life. He was
born in Haarlem, in 1628 or 1629, the son of a picture-frame maker, and
nephew of Salomon van Ruisdael, who was probably his teacher. At about
the age of twenty he was enrolled in the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. Some
years later he settled in Amsterdam and was admitted to the rights of
citizenship.
[Illustration: OAK-WOOD JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
THE BERLIN GALLERY]
Among his pupils at this period was Meindert Hobbema. At the age of
fifty-three he returned to his native city, broken in health and without
means of subsistence, and through the intervention of some friends of
the Mennonite faith was given refuge in the poorhouse. Here he lingered
a few months and died in 1682, one more example among so many in the
story of Dutch painting of an artist dying in poverty. This is the ugly
side of the story. In telling it we have tried to do justice to the part
played by the young republic, out of whose hard-won nationality a great
school of artists grew; but at the same time we have not overlooked the
quick decadence of national and social spirit that followed upon the
attainment of political liberty. And of this sapping of the morality of
the people the indifference paid to her great artists was not the least
notable symptom.
Ruisdael’s youth and the prime of his manhood were spent in studying the
wooded dunes, open country, seashore, and large stretches of water in
the neighborhood of Haarlem and Amsterdam. These supplied the subjects
for his finest and most characteristic pictures, while others suggest
that he traveled in different parts of Holland and even penetrated into
the neighboring German principality of Münster, a hilly country with
forests and old castles: witness _Castle Bentheim_ of the Dresden
Gallery. The dated pictures are comparatively rare and belong chiefly to
Ruisdael’s earliest period, but it is possible to assign approximate
dates to many later ones through examination of the figures which were
introduced by other artists. As Bode points out, those to which Adriaen
van Ostade, Nicolaes Berchem, and Wouwerman contributed may with much
probability be assigned to the Haarlem period, which terminated about
1655; on the other hand, when, among the Amsterdam artists, Adriaen van
de Velde was his collaborator, the picture must antedate that artist’s
death in 1672.
Like all the greatest artists of landscape, Ruisdael was a close student
of form, his drawings and etchings being often so conscientious in
treatment as to suggest that he was something of a botanist. At any
rate, few men have shown a more thorough knowledge of trees, their
character of bulk and build, their branch-growths and manner of leafage,
while the same constructive sense appears in his delineation of ground,
rocks, water, and in that final test of great landscape-painting, the
comprehension and rendering of skies. In his earlier work this
preoccupation with form results in an excess of detail and a
considerable tightness and hardness of method, as may be observed in the
little _Village in the Wood_ of the Dresden Gallery.
Later his works acquire breadth; details are treated more freely and are
less obtrusive; the feeling for ensemble is more complete. And
corresponding with this ampler motive is a clearer eye for the local
colors, a richer and fuller tonality. Then, by degrees, the true
Ruisdael discovers himself. As we know him in the finest works of the
Amsterdam period, his genius is declared in the amplitude of his
conception of nature. We are in the presence of one who has comprehended
the vastness of its suggestion, and entered into it, merging therein the
pettiness of personality. At these great moments it would be hard to
mention a landscape-painter whose outlook is larger, freer, and more
impersonal than Ruisdael’s, whose attitude is more truly epic; usually
with an ample expression of serene benignity, but, even when there is
stir of conflict, with an all-embracing vision that merges the
accidental in the universal.
In the attainment of this magnificent composure it is the skies that
play the greatest part. They occupy a large, often the larger, portion
of the canvas. They are not only expanses of light, contrasted with the
darker tones of the ground, as in the case of most Holland landscapes,
but are pervaded with vibrating atmosphere that, while it penetrates to
the front, seems to communicate with endless space. To this element of
universal suggestion is added the stimulus of the poised or drifting
cloud-forms. They are not merely shapes of vapor, but have bulk and
weight and carrying power. They are to the fluid mass of the sky what
the wave is to the ocean: a manifestation of its boundless energies.
While to him the ground and its forms of tree and rock or dune are
symbols of stability and static force, the sky is symbol of dynamic
energy unbounded. It is because Ruisdael thus felt and could interpret
the symbolism of nature that his finest landscapes and marines create
and maintain so profound an impression.
Among the pictures prior to 1655 is _View of Haarlem from the Hill of
Overveen_, a subject by which Ruisdael seems to have trained and
disciplined himself, for he often repeated it. There are said to be
twenty examples, some of which are in the galleries of The Hague and
Berlin, in the Rijks Museum, and used to be included in the Holford and
Kann collections. From the elevation in the foreground one looks down
and across a stretch of level country, broken up with trees and houses
and a field where strips of linen are bleaching, to the city, over which
rises the mass of the Groote Kerk, St. Bavon. But two thirds of the
canvas is given to the sky. The picture presents an elaborate study in
the art of ground-and sky-construction, in the difficult differentiation
of the planes of a level country, and in building the sky’s volume and
depth. Already there are distance and spaciousness, but as yet little
expression, while, in the case of the Berlin example especially, the
technique is still a trifle hard and dry.
But, without attempting any chronological order, turn to _The Beach_ at
the Hague Gallery, a replica of which, _Shore at Scheveningen_, is in
the National Gallery, while there are others elsewhere. A cliff projects
on the right; otherwise the water, dotted with wading figures and
sail-boats, extends clear back from the front to a low horizon, above
which is a sky piled and scattered with loose, buoyant clouds. There is
wind in them, and it ruffles the long reaches of waves that glide in
over the sand. Here is freedom not only of brushwork but of imagination,
which has been stirred by the sense of vastness and of movement. The sea
itself spreads far and is alive with briskness, but in the endless
distance of the sky the clouds are moving grandly. This picture already
gives the clue to Ruisdael’s fully developed genius. It prefigures his
capacity to comprehend the big in nature; to go out to it and mingle
with it; to find it, not in stupendous spectacles, but in the sense of
vastness that even familiar scenes may convey to one who realizes and
[Illustration: THE MILL NEAR WYK-BY-DUURSTEDE JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
feels the bigness in nature everywhere about us. For compare _The Mill
near Wyk-by-Duurstede_, Ruisdael’s masterpiece in the Rijks Museum.
Familiar enough in Holland are the ingredients of this scene: gray
water, gray lowering sky, olive-green, brown, and pale-buff ground and
trees, a gleam of light on the body of the mill; yet with what a majesty
of conception they are clothed! Everything is heightened and made
poignantly compelling by a beautiful, tremendous dignity.
Nor was it only under aspects of stirring movement that Ruisdael found
bigness. He could find it in calm: witness _The Swamp in the Wood_, in
St. Petersburg, and the _Oak Wood_ of the Berlin Gallery. In front, pale
amber-green lily-pads, floating on depths of olive-green water, in the
mingled light and shade of rich, somber golden-green and ruddy foliage;
distant water and dunes, and over all a sky in which balloons of clouds
hang drowsily. It recalls another masterpiece, this time of the Imperial
Art-History Museum, Vienna, _The Big Wood_. Again a clump of oaks and a
shattered silver birch, massed high and wide against a sky of wonderful
luminosity. Everything is simplicity itself, yet expresses magisterial
authority. The amplitude of conception on this occasion has no trace of
stress or poignancy, nor is it one of calm; it is buoyant with a
glorious joyousness.
Another remarkable example, heightened into grandeur by impulse of the
imagination, is the _Landscape with Fence_, in the Vienna Academy: a bit
of sloping ground with some wooden sheep-cotes and a willow. But the
light from a dull-gray slaty sky pales upon the willow and gleams with a
strange whiteness on the boards of the fence. The picture, moreover, is
painted with unerring mastery of form and splendid fluency, which,
combined with its startling arrangement of light, produces an effect of
extraordinary impressiveness.
By a method of lighting, somewhat similar, a mood of profound and bitter
melancholy has been interpreted in _The Jewish Cemetery_ of the Dresden
Gallery. In the murk of the distance a ruin glooms gauntly under a heavy
purplish slaty sky, where a faint rainbow shows amid the turbid clouds.
In the foreground a blasted tree-trunk cuts white against a dull mass of
trees; but the brightest light, pallid and cold, is concentrated upon
one of a group of tombs. The stillness is broken by a stream that
shatters itself on the stones and rushes on. Is this solemn picture an
allegory of Ruisdael’s own darkened life and its approaching end?
Possibly, for his signature, undated, appears upon a tombstone on the
left.
The examples quoted above are fairly representative of an artist who
handled the prose of nature with so large a sense of its significance
that he lifts it up to poetry, of epic and occasionally tragic grandeur.
For Ruisdael, like Rembrandt, saw into the soul of facts. That in a
period of fifty years or thereabouts a school of artists could be
formed, wherein there are so many excellent craftsmen, not a few masters
of technique and expression, and two great masters of the soul, is a
marvelous record. Such was Holland’s legacy of the seventeenth century
to the civilization of the modern world.
[Illustration: THE JEWISH CEMETERY JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
DRESDEN GALLERY]
INDEX
A
_Abraham Receiving the Angels_ [Bol], 154
Actor’s instinct in art, 75
_Adoration of the Shepherds_ [Rembrandt], 103, 159
Aertz, Pieter, 19;
studied at Amsterdam, 43
Albert, Archduke, 45
Altman, Mr. B., owner of _The Sleeping Girl_ [Vermeer], 136
Alva, Duke of, 22, 23, 46
Amsterdam, school of painting, 38, 43;
artists born there:
Aertz, 107;
Eeckhout, 158;
De Keyser, 165;
Koninck, 172;
Adriaen van de Velde, 184;
school of:
Scovel, 16;
Rembrandt, 73;
Maes, 115;
Metsu, 117;
Fabritius, 157;
Eeckhout, 158;
De Gelder, 160;
De Keyser, 165;
Koninck, 170;
Hobbema, 190;
residence of:
Rembrandt, 76;
Aertz, 107;
Van Ostade, 109;
Lairesse, 125;
De Keyser, 165;
Seghers, 170;
Koninck, 170;
Van der Neer, 176;
Potter, 179;
Van de Velde, Willem, Elder and Younger, 186;
Van de Velde, Adriaen, 184;
Berchem, 184;
Hobbema, 190;
Ruisdael, Jacob, 194
_Angel and the Shepherds_ [Flinck], 152
Antwerp, glory of, 7;
“Image-Breaking” at, 22;
school of painting, 22;
birthplace of Hals, 50
Antwerp Museum, _Day of Judgment_ [Van Orley], 15
Art:
the need of the people, 4;
French at time of Revolution, 5;
imitation death of national art, 6;
decline of Dutch in eighteenth century, 6;
affected by imperialism, influenced by Church, 11;
by Renaissance, 12;
condition at abdication of Charles V, 14;
realism of Dutch, 27;
moral and scientific character of, 28;
commencement of great period of, 29;
still-life, 31;
portraiture, 49;
beauty of inanimate things, 59;
democratic ideal of Dutch, 72;
Rembrandt’s compared to Greek, 72;
actor’s instinct shown by painters, 75;
abstract in, 94;
decorative, 94;
Barbizon, 171
Art-History Museum, Vienna. See _Vienna_
_Artist in his Studio_ [Vermeer], 140
_Asking a Blessing_ [Maes], 114
Asselyn, Jan, 44;
_Enraged Swan, The_, 44
_Avenue of Middelharnis_ [Hobbema], 191
B
Bakhuysen, Ludolf, 44
Balckeneijnde, Adriana, wife of Paul Potter, 179
_Bank of a Canal_ [Van Goyen], 188
_Banquet of the Civic Guard_ [Van der Helst], 164
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew_ [Hals], 66
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George_ [Hals], 64
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George_ [Hals], 65
Barbizon artists, 171
Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, 87
_Beach, The_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 198
_Bear Hunt, The_ [Potter], 180
Bega, Cornelis, 110
“Beggars, The,” 21
“Beggars of the Sea,” 23
Berchem, Nicolaes, 30, 39, 43, 174, 178, 184, 195
Berlaymont, 21
Berlin:
pictures in gallery:
_St. Jerome in a Cave_, Rembrandt, 76;
_Portrait of Himself_, Rembrandt, 78;
_Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels_, Rembrandt, 89;
_Old Woman Peeling Apples_, Maes, 115;
_Portrait of Old Woman_, Metsu, 118;
_Family Geelvink_, Metsu, 120;
_The Mother_, De Hooch, 121;
_The Concert_, Terborch, 130;
_Diana with her Nymphs_, Vermeer, 135;
_Lady with a Pearl Necklace_, Vermeer, 138;
_The Christening Party_, Steen, 146;
_Portrait of a Young Woman_, Flinck, 153;
_A Man Praying_, Fabritius, 158;
_Raising of Jairus’s Daughter_, _Presentation of Christ in the Temple_,
_Mercury and Argus_, Eeckhout, 159;
_Old Lady and her Daughters_, _Old Man and his Sons_, De Keyser, 166;
_Landscape and Cattle_, Koninck, 173;
_Boar Hunt_, Potter, 180;
_View of Arnheim_, _View of Nimwegen_, Van Goyen, 188;
_View of Haarlem from the Dunes_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 197
Biblical pictures, 74, 103-105, 150;
by Steen, 148;
Flinck, 151;
Fabritius, 156;
Bol, 163;
Eeckhout, 158;
De Gelder, 160;
Van de Velde, 183
_Big Wood, The_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 199
_Blacksmith, The_ [Metsu], 117
_Boar Hunt, The_ [Potter], 180
Bode, W., quoted, 54, 114, 117, 134, 176-195
Bol, Ferdinand, 30;
school, 43;
appreciation, 153;
_Jacob Presented to Pharaoh_, _Rest of the Holy Family_,
_Abraham Receiving the Angels_, _Salome Dancing
before Herod_, 154;
_Portrait of a Girl_, _Portraits_ in the Pinakothek, 155
Boston Museum, pictures in:
_An Interior_, De Hooch, 122
Both, Johannes, 30
Boucher, 5
Bray, Jan de, 19
Bray, Salomon de, 39, 167
Brederode, feast at, 21
Bredius, Dr., 136;
estimate of Steen, 142
Brueghel, Pieter the Elder, 107
Brunswick Gallery, pictures in:
_The Coquette_, Vermeer, 140;
_Portrait_, Eeckhout, 160;
_Oak Wood_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 199
Brussels, scene of abdication of Charles V, 7;
ancient grandeur of, 7;
treaty of 1577 signed at, 23
Budapest, Fine Arts Museum, pictures in:
_Portrait of a Man_, Maes, 116;
_Portrait of a Lady_, Vermeer, 141;
_Esther and Mordecai_, De Gelder, 161;
_Portrait of a Woman_, De Keyser, 166;
_Portrait of a Young Lady_, Moreelse, 168;
_Landscape_, Cuyp, 183
_Burial, The_ [Rembrandt], 103
C
Cassel Gallery, picture in: _Twelfth Night_, Steen, 146
_Castle Bentheim_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 195
_Cattle and Bathers_ [Potter], 186
_Cavalier in a Shop_ [Van Mieris], 124
Charles V, abdication, 3-8;
birth and education, 7;
rule in the Netherlands, 7
Chiaroscuro, Rembrandt’s, 79
_Christ with the Doctors_ [Eeckhout], 159
_Christening Party, The_ [Steen], 146
Church, influence of, on art, 11;
attempt to fasten Catholic on Holland, 20;
schism in Protestant, 37
Codde, Pieter, 126
_Concert, The_ [Terborch], 136
_Cook, The_ [Vermeer], 137
_Coquette, The_ [Vermeer], 139
Count of Orange, William, 8
_Cradle, The_ [Maes], 115
Craftsmanship, Dutch love of, 32
Cuyp, Aelbert, 30, 178;
appreciation, 182
Czernin Gallery, Vienna, pictures in:
_The Artist in his Studio_, Vermeer, 140;
_The Company of Captain Cloeck_, De Keyser, 166
D
_David Handing the Letter to Uriah_ [Flinck], 151
_Day of Judgment_ [Van Orley], 15
_Decapitation of St. John the Baptist_ [Fabritius], 157
Delft, School of, 38, 41;
born in: Vermeer, 132;
studied at: Vermeer, 132;
residence in: Vermeer, 132;
Steen, 144;
Fabritius, 156
_Descent from the Cross_ [Rembrandt], 103
_Diana and her Nymphs_ [Vermeer], 135
_Diana at her Toilet_ [Vermeer], 134
_Disciples at Emmaus_ [Steen], 148
_Doctor Visiting a Young Woman_ [Steen], 147
_Doctor’s Visit, The_ [Steen], 147
Dordrecht, School of, 38, 43;
De Gelder, 160;
Cuyp, 182;
residence of Cuyp, Hoogstraten, 43;
of De Gelder, Potter, 179
Dort, assembly of Estates, 23
Dou, Gerard, 30;
school, 40;
life, 111;
appreciation, 111;
_The Young Mother_, 103;
_Old Woman Saying Grace_, 103;
_The Dropsical Woman_, 112;
_Lady at her Toilet_, 112;
_Old Woman who has Lost her Thread_, 112;
_Young Man and Girl in a Cellar_, 113;
_Night School_, 113
Dresden Gallery:
_Old Woman who has Lost her Thread_, Dou, 112;
_Young Man and Girl in a Cellar_, _Still-life_,
_Portrait of Himself_, Dou, 113;
_Man and Woman Selling Poultry_, _Lovers at Breakfast_, Metsu, 118;
_A Lady at her Clavichord_, Netscher, 125;
_Officer Writing a Letter_, _Lady Washing her Hands_, Terborch, 130;
_The Proposal_, Vermeer, 134;
_The Marriage at Cana_, _The Expulsion of Hagar_, Steen, 148;
_David Handing the Letter to Uriah_, Flinck, 151;
_Jacob Presented to Pharaoh_, Bol, 153;
_Rest of the Holy Family_, Bol, 154;
_Presentation of Christ in the Temple_, _An Important
Document_, _Portrait of a Halberdier_, DeGelder, 160;
_Dutch Landscape_, Koninck, 173;
_Castle Bentheim_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 195;
_Village in the Wood_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 196;
_Jewish Cemetery_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 200
_Dropsical Woman, The_ [Dou], 112
_Dunes, Valley of the Rhine near Arnheim_ [Koninck], 173
Dürer, Albrecht, 15
Dusart, Cornelis, 110
Dutch, pioneers of modern era, 3;
independence of, declared, 24;
defeated Spain by sea, 26;
love of genre, 30, 31;
advance in commerce, science, agriculture, and the crafts, 36;
political and religious dissensions, 37;
art one of portraiture, 49;
character of genre, 107-109;
change of conditions of society, 124;
society pictures, 126;
landscape, 170;
with cattle, 177;
occasional tediousness of landscapes, 192
_Dutch Courtyard_ [De Hooch], 122
_Dutch Housewife_ [Maes], 115
Duyster, Willem Cornelisz, 121, 126
E
Eeckhout, Gerbrandt van den, 30;
school, 43, 151;
life, 174;
appreciation, 175;
_The Woman Taken in Adultery_, 158;
_Christ with the Doctors_, _Raising of Jairus’s
Daughter_, _Presentation of Christ in the
Temple_, _Mercury and Argus_, 159;
_The Wine Contract_, 160
_Egg Dance, The_ [Aertz], 107
Egmont, Count, 22, 46
Egmont, Maria van, 144
_Elevation of the Cross_ [Rembrandt], 103, 104
Elias, Nicolaes, 165
Elizabeth of England assists Dutch, 25
Elkins, Mrs. William L., owner of _Wooded Road_, Hobbema, 191
Elsheimer, German painter who influenced Rembrandt, 74
_Enraged Swan, The_ [Jan Asselyn], 44
_Esther and Mordecai_ [De Gelder], 161
Etchings of Rembrandt, 74:
_Old Woman’s Head_;
_Bust of Old Woman_;
_Rembrandt, a Bust_;
_Rembrandt with an Open Mouth_;
_Rembrandt with an Air of Grimace_;
_Rembrandt with Haggard Eyes_;
_Rembrandt Laughing_
Everdingen, Allart van, 30;
school, 39;
paints in Sweden, 39;
in Amsterdam, 43
Everdingen, Cæsar van, 175
_Expulsion of Hagar_ [Steen], 148
F
Fabritius, Carel, 30;
school, 41;
in Amsterdam, 43;
teacher of Vermeer, 132;
Biblical subjects, 150;
appreciation, 156;
tragic death, 157;
_Portrait of Abraham de Notte_, 157;
_The Decapitation of St. John the Baptist_, 157
_Family Geelvink_ [Metsu], 120
_Family Group_ [De Hooch], 122
_Feast of St. Nicholas_ [Steen], 145
_Fête of the Civic Guard, Münster, 1648_ [Flinck], 153
_Fiddler, The_ [Van Ostade], 110
_Fishers for Souls, The_ [Van de Venne], 44
Flanders, School of, 100, 107
Flemish nobles aid Holland, 21
Flinck, Govert, 30;
school, 43;
Biblical pictures, 150;
appreciation, 151;
_Isaac Blessing Jacob_, _David Handing the Letter to Uriah_, 151;
_Angel and the Shepherds_, _Gray-Bearded Man_, 152;
_Portrait of a Little Girl_, _of a Young Woman_,
_of M. Johannes Wittenbogaert_, _Fête
of the Civic Guard, Münster_, 153
Fragonard, 5
Frederick Henry, Stadtholder, 37, 45
Frick, Henry C., owner of _The Music Lesson_, Vermeer, 140
Fromentin, quoted, 6, 49;
on Rembrandt, 78-85;
Terborch, 129
G
_Gallant Soldier, The_ [Terborch], 129
Gelder, Aert de, 151;
appreciation of, 160;
_Presentation of Christ in the Temple_,
_An Important Document_, _Portrait of a Halberdier_, 160;
_Judah and Thamar_, _Esther and Mordecai_,
_Three Portraits_, 161
Genre painting, 107;
inspiration from Hals, 100;
high-water mark of, 120;
decline of, 124;
society picture, 126;
of Terborch, 129;
not realistic, 130;
Valckenborch, Aertz, 107;
Van Ostade, 108;
Dou, 111;
Maes, 114;
Metsu, 117;
De Hooch, 120;
Willem and Frans (Elder and Younger) van Mieris, 122;
Lairesse, Netscher, Schalcken, 125;
Dirck Hals, Duyster, Palamedesz, Codde, Slingeland, 126;
Terborch, 127;
Vermeer, 132;
Steen, 141
Gerard, Balthasar, assassin of William of Orange, 25
Ghent, birthplace of Charles V, 7
_Girl before her Mirror_ [Van Mieris], 124
_Girl with Water-Jug_ [Vermeer], 134
Gorkum, 176
Goyen, Jan Joseph van, 19, 39, 40, 42, 173, 174, 183;
life, 187;
appreciation, 188;
compared to Ruisdael, 189;
_View of Dordrecht_, _of Arnheim_, _of Nimwegen_, _Landscape_, 188;
_The River_, _Banks of a Canal_, 189
Grand Pensionary, 47
Grange, Justus de la, employer of Pieter de Hooch, 121
_Gray-Bearded Man_ [Flinck], 152
Greek art compared to Rembrandt’s, 72
Guild of St. Luke, the Painters’ Guild, at Delft, 121, 132;
Haarlem, 51, 174, 194;
Leyden, 111, 117, 144
H
Haarlem, school, 39, 50;
Scovel, 16;
Hals, 50;
Terborch, 127;
De Bray, 167;
Ruisdael, Salomon and Jacob, 174;
Molyn, 174;
Wynants, 174;
Everdingen, 174;
Van de Velde, 174;
Berchem, 174;
birthplace of Seghers, 170;
Wouwerman, 180;
Ruisdael, 194;
residence of Hals, 51;
Van Ostade, 110;
De Hooch, 121;
De Bray, 157;
Seghers, 170;
Van de Velde, 174;
Wouwerman, 180
Haarlem Municipal Museum, 32, 39, 52;
corporation pictures, Hals, 64:
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George_, 64;
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George_, 65;
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew_, 66;
_Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew_, 67;
_Officers of the Archers of St. George_, 68;
_Regents of the Hospital for the Poor_, 52;
_Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth_, 69
Hague:
Dutch independence declared, 24;
school, 38, 42;
Ravesteyn, 167;
Mierevelt, 167;
residence of De Hooch, 121;
Steen, 144;
Seghers, 170;
Potter, 179;
Van Goyen, 187
Hague Royal Museum, 37;
_Portrait of a Young Man_, _St. Simeon in the Temple_,
_The Lesson in Anatomy_, _Rembrandt_, 76;
_The Young Mother_, Dou, 103;
_Peasants’ Holiday_, _Peasants at an Inn_,
_Marriage Proposal_, _The Fiddler_, _Van Ostade_, 110;
_Diana at her Toilet_, _New Testament_, _Head of a Girl_, Vermeer, 135;
_View of Delft_, Vermeer, 136;
_While the Old Ones Sing_, etc., Steen, 146;
_Doctor Visiting a Sick Woman_, Steen, 147;
_Judah and Thamar_, De Gelder, 161;
_The Young Bull_, Potter, 179;
_Cattle and Bathers_, Potter, 180;
_View of Dordrecht_, Van Goyen, 188;
_View of Haarlem from the Dunes_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 197;
_The Beach_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 198
Hals, Dirck, 5;
place in art, 126
Hals, Frans, 19;
birth, 29;
life, 50;
Guild of St. Luke, 51;
death and burial, 51;
personal character, 52;
technique, 52;
humor, 53;
point of view, 54;
still-life, 57;
compared with Van der Helst, 57;
an Impressionist, 59;
use of values, 63;
light, 63;
brushwork, 64;
color, 64;
simplicity of gesture, 67;
decline of power, 69;
Hals and Rembrandt, 96;
modern influence, 97;
overestimated, 97;
pupils, 99;
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George_, 64;
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George_, 65;
_Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew_, 66;
_Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew_, 67;
_Officers of the Archers of St. George_, 68;
_Regents of the Hospital for the Poor_, 52;
_Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth_, 69
Hals, Harmen, 58
_Happy Family, A_ [Steen], 145
Harmen van Rijn, father of Rembrandt, 73
_Head and Bust of Oriental_ [Rembrandt], 104
_Head of a Girl_ [Vermeer], 135
Helst, Bartholomeus van der, 43;
compared with Hals, 57;
appreciation, 164;
_Banquet of the Civic Guard_, 57, 164;
_Portrait of Paul Potter_, 163, 178
Hendrickje, 78;
_Portrait of_, 89
Hermanszoon, Anneke, 50
Heyden, Jan van der, 31
Hobbema, Meindert, 31, 39, 43;
life, 190;
appreciation, 192;
_The Water Mill_, 191, 192;
_Avenue of Middelharnis_, _Wooded Landscape_,
_Water-Mill_ (Louvre), _Wooded Road_, 191
Holland, growth of, 3;
pioneer of modern era, 3;
misrule of Philip, 19;
independence of, 24;
birthplace of new art, 26;
Duchess Isabella, 45;
consolidated, 45;
Stadtholdership hereditary, 46;
family of Orange entangled with Stuarts, 47
_Holy Family_ [Rembrandt], 102
_Homely Scene, A_ [Steen], 145
Hondecoeter, Melchior d’, 31;
school, 38;
in Amsterdam, 43
Hooch, Pieter de, 31;
school, 41;
in Amsterdam, 43;
life, 120;
influence of other painters, 138;
_The Mother_, _Interior_, _The Pantry_, _A Dutch
Courtyard_, _Family Group_, 122;
_The Visit_, 138
Hoogstraten, Samuel van, 43
Horn, Count van, 22, 46
_Horses at the Door of a Cottage_ [Potter], 180
Houbraken, historian-painter, 52, 120, 144
Huntington, Mrs. Collis P., owner of _Lady with a Lute_, Vermeer, 139
I
_Important Document, An_ [De Gelder], 160
Impressionism, 59, 60;
of Rembrandt, 86, 92, 93
_Interior_ [De Hooch], 122
_Isaac Blessing Jacob_ [Flinck], 151
Isabella, Duchess, 45
Israels, Josef, 106
J
_Jacob Presented to Pharaoh by Joseph_ [Bol], 154
_Jerome in a Cave, St._ [Rembrandt], 76
_Jesus Disputing with the Doctors_ [Rembrandt], 75
_Jewish Cemetery_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 200
Johnson, Mr. John G., collector of Philadelphia, 114
_Judah and Thamar_ [De Gelder], 160
_Judith with the Head of Holofernes_ [Mantegna], 157
K
Kalf, Willem, 31
Keyser, Thomas de, 43;
appreciation, 165;
_Company of Captain Cloeck_, _Family Meebeeck Cruywaghen_,
_Portrait of Pieter Schout_, _Old Lady and her
Three Daughters_, _Old Man and his Two Sons_,
_Portrait of a Woman_, 166
Koninck, Philips, 30;
in Amsterdam, 43, 174;
appreciation, 172;
_The Dunes_, _Valley of the Rhine near Arnheim_,
_Dutch Landscape_, _Landscape with Cattle_ (Berlin),
_Landscape with Cattle_ (Rijks), _Four Portraits
of Joost van den Vondel_, 173
L
_Lace-Maker, The_ [Vermeer], 139
_Lady and her Doctor_ [Van Mieris], 124
_Lady at a Spinet_ [Vermeer], 140
_Lady at her Toilet_ [Dou], 112
_Lady at the Clavichord_ [Netscher], 125
_Lady Washing her Hands_ [Terborch], 136
_Lady with a Lute_ [Vermeer], 139
_Lady with the Pearl Necklace_ [Vermeer], 138
_Lady Writing_ [Vermeer], 139
Lairesse, Gerard de, 125
Landscape, 169;
painters of:
Seghers, 169;
Rembrandt, 173;
Jacob van Ruisdael, 173, 193;
Salomon van Ruisdael, 174;
Molyn, 173;
Berchem, 174;
Wouwerman, 174, 180;
Wynants, 175;
Van der Neer, 176;
Van de Velde, 183;
with cattle, Potter, 179
_Landscape with Cattle_ [Koninck], 173
_Landscape with Cattle_ [Potter], 180
_Landscape with Fence_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 199
_Landscape with Waterfall_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 194
_Last Judgment_ [Van Leyden], 74
Lastman, Pieter, 73
League of Nobles, 21
_Lesson in Anatomy_ [Rembrandt], 76
_Letter, The_ [Vermeer], 138
Leyden, founding of university, 35;
School of, 38, 40;
Dou, 111;
Steen, 144;
birthplace of Rembrandt, 73;
Dou, 111;
Metsu, 117;
Mieris, 122;
Steen, 144;
Willem van de Velde, Elder and Younger, 186;
Van Goyen, 187;
residence of Rembrandt, 74;
Dou, 111;
Steen, 144
Liberty, Statue of, 87
Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna:
_Portrait of a Girl_, Bol, 155
Louvre:
_The Supper at Emmaus_, _The Good Samaritan_, Rembrandt, 82;
_The Dropsical Woman_, Dou, 112;
_Vegetable Market_, Metsu, 118;
_The Gallant Soldier_, Terborch, 129;
_Angel and the Shepherds_, Flinck, 152;
_Portrait of a Little Girl_, Flinck, 153;
_Portrait of a Mathematician_, Bol, 154;
_Horses at the Door of a Cottage_, Potter, 180;
_The River_, _Banks of a Canal_, Van Goyen, 189;
_Water Mill_, Hobbema, 191
_Lovers at Breakfast_ [Metsu], 118
Lucas van Leyden, 15, 74;
_The Last Judgment_, 74
Luminarist, 80
M
Maas, River, 182
Maes, Nicolaes, 31, 144;
school, 43;
influenced by Rembrandt, 105;
life, 114;
appreciation, 115;
_A Reverie_, _Asking a Blessing_, _Nurse and Children_, 114;
_The Young Card-Players_, 114, 116;
_Old Woman Peeling Apples_, _The Cradle_, _Dutch Housewife_, 115;
_Old Woman Spinning_, 115, 116;
_Portrait of a Man_, 116
_Man and Woman Selling Poultry_ [Metsu], 118
Manet, Edouard, 60
Mantegna, _Judith with the Head of Holofernes_, 157
Marine-painters, 44;
Vlieger, 44, 185;
Bakhuysen, 44;
Verschuier, 185;
Willem van de Velde, Elder and Younger, 44,
Vroom, 185
_Marriage at Cana_ [Steen], 148
_Marriage Proposal, The_ [Van Ostade], 110
Matisse, French artist, 93
Maurice, Stadtholder, 37, 45
_Mercury and Argus_ [Eeckhout], 159
Metropolitan Museum, New York, 88, 90;
_A Music Party_, Metsu, 119;
_Girl with Water-Jug_, Vermeer, 135
Metsu, Gabriel, 31;
school, 40;
in Amsterdam, 43;
pupil of Hals, 99;
influenced by Dou, 111;
life, 117;
appreciation, 117-119;
_The Blacksmith_, 117;
_Old Woman in Meditation_, _Man and Woman Selling
Poultry_, _Lovers at Breakfast_, 118;
_A Music Party_, _Visit to the Nursery_, 119;
_Family Geelvink_, 120
Meyer, Baron A., photographs of, 58
Mierevelt, Michiel Jansz van, 19, 41, 167
Mieris, Frans van, the Elder, 40;
influenced by Dou, 111;
life, 122;
appreciation, 123;
_The Sick Woman_, _The Oyster Breakfast_, 123;
_The Girl before a Mirror_, _A Lady and her Doctor_,
_Cavalier in a Shop_, 124
_Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 199
Models, Rembrandt’s use of, 104, 150
Monet, Claude, 60
Moral character of Dutch painting, 27
Moreelse, Paulus, 167
Morgan, Mr. J. Pierpont, owner of _Visit to the Nursery_, Metsu, 119;
_Lady Writing_, _The Lace-Maker_, Vermeer, 139;
_The Water Mill_, Hobbema, 184, 191;
_Wooded Landscape_, Hobbema, 191
Moro, Antonio, 16
_Mother, The_ [De Hooch], 122
Munich Pinakothek. See _Pinakothek_
_Music Lesson, The_ [Vermeer], 140
N
National Gallery, London:
_Peace of Münster_, Terborch, 39, 127;
_The Young Card-Players_, Maes, 114, 116;
_The Cradle_, _Dutch Housewife_, Maes, 115;
_An Interior_, De Hooch, 121;
_A Dutch Courtyard_, _Family Group_, De Hooch, 122;
_Lady at a Spinet_, Vermeer, 140;
_The Doctor’s Visit_, Steen, 147;
_The Wine Contract_, Eeckhout, 160;
_Tobit and the Angel_, Rembrandt, 172;
_Moonlight Landscape_, _Landscape with Trees_,
_Landscape with Cattle_, Van der Neer, 177;
_Landscape with Cattle_, Potter, 180;
_Landscape with Cattle_, Cuyp, 182;
_Avenue of Middelharnis_, Hobbema, 191;
_Landscape with Waterfall_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 194;
_Shore at Scheveningen_, Ruisdael, 198
Neer, Aert van der, 30;
school, 43;
appreciation, 176;
_Moonlight Scenes_, in National Gallery and
Imperial Art Museum, Vienna, 177;
_Winter Scene_, _Scene with Cattle_, 177
Netscher, Caspar, school, 42;
appreciation, 125;
_A Lady at the Clavichord_, 125
_New Testament, The_ [Vermeer], 136
_Night School, The_ [Dou], 113
_Night Watch, The_ [Rembrandt], 77, 79, 81, 84
_Nurse and Children_ [Maes], 114
O
_Officer Writing a Letter_ [Terborch], 136
_Old Lady and her Three Daughters_ [De Keyser], 166
_Old Man and his Two Sons_ [De Keyser], 166
_Old Woman in Meditation_ [Metsu], 118
_Old Woman Peeling Apples_ [Maes], 116
_Old Woman Peeling Apples_ [Terborch], 136
_Old Woman Saying Grace_ [Dou], 103
_Old Woman Spinning_ [Maes], 114
_Old Woman who has Lost her Thread_ [Dou], 112
Orange, Prince William of, 23, 29, 46
Oriental art, 94
_Oriental Figure_ [Rembrandt], 104
Orley, Barend van, 15;
_The Day of Judgment_, 15
Ostade, Adriaen van, 30;
school, 39;
pupil of Hals, 99;
life, 108;
appreciation, 109;
pupils, 110;
_The Peasants’ Holiday_, _Peasants at an Inn_,
_Marriage Proposal_, _The Fiddler_, 110
Ostade, Isaac van, 110
_Oyster Breakfast, The_ [Mieris], 123
P
Palamedesz, Antonie, school, 41;
appreciation, 126
_Pantry, The_ [De Hooch], 122
_Paul, St._ [Rembrandt], 76
Peace of Münster, 46
_Peace of Münster_ [Terborch], 39, 127
_Peasants at an Inn_ [Van Ostade], 110
_Peasants’ Holiday_ [Van Ostade], 110
Petersburg, St., _The Swamp in the Wood_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 199
Philip I, 3, 9, 10
Philip II:
misrule of Netherlands, 19;
nobles resist, 21;
ambition, 25;
close of reign, 26
_Pieter Schout, Portrait of_ [De Keyser], 166
Pinakothek, Munich:
_Holy Family_, Rembrandt, 102;
_The Descent from the Gross_, _The Elevation of
the Cross_, Rembrandt, 103, 104;
_The Burial_, _The Resurrection_, Rembrandt, 103;
_The Adoration of the Shepherds_, Rembrandt, 104, 159;
_Old Woman Saying Grace_, Dou, 103;
_Lady at her Toilet_, Dou, 112;
_The Sick Woman_, _The Oyster Breakfast_, Van Mieris, 123;
_Girl before a Mirror_, Van Mieris, 124;
_Portraits of Man and Wife_, three others, Bol, 155
Plein-air, 63, 131, 170, 171
_Portrait of a Girl_ [Bol], 155
_Portrait of a Little Girl_ [Flinck], 153
_Portrait of a Man_ [Maes], 116
_Portrait of a Woman_ [De Keyser], 160
_Portrait of a Young Man_ [Flinck], 152
_Portrait of A. de Notte_ [Fabritius], 157
_Portrait of Elizabeth Bas_ [Rembrandt], 89
_Portrait of Himself_ [Rembrandt], 78
_Portrait of M. Johannes Wittenbogaert_ [Flinck], 152
_Portrait of Old Woman_ [Metsu], 118
_Portrait of Paul Potter_ [Van der Helst], 178
Portraits, painters of, 33;
school of Haarlem, 39;
Delft, 41;
The Hague, 42;
Hals, 49;
Rembrandt, 89;
Maes, 116;
Terborch, 128;
Vermeer, 141;
Santvoort, 151, 161;
Flinck, 151;
Bol, 155;
Fabritius, 156;
Eeckhout, 160;
De Gelder, 160;
Van der Helst, 162;
De Keyser, 165;
Mierevelt, 167;
Ravesteyn, De Bray, Moreelse, 167
_Portraits of Man and Wife_, three other portraits [Bol], 155
Portraiture, 150
Potter, Paul, appreciation, 178;
life, 179;
_The Young Bull_, 179;
_Bear Hunt_, _Boar Hunt_, _Cattle and Bathers_,
_Horses at the Door of a Cottage_,
_Landscape with Cattle_, 180
Pourbus, Pieter, 16
_Presentation of Christ in the Temple_ [De Gelder], 160
_Presentation of Christ in the Temple_ [Eeckhout], 159
_Presentation with the Angel_ [Rembrandt], 75
_Prince’s Birthday_ [Steen], 146
_Proposal, The_ [Vermeer], 134
R
_Raising of Jairus’s Daughter_ [Eeckhout], 159
Ravesteyn, Jan Anthonisz van, 19;
school, 42, 167
_Regents of the Hospital for the Poor_ [Hals], 52
_Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth_ [Hals], 69
Rembrandt, Harmensz van Rijn, 71;
individuality, 4;
birth, 30;
School of Leyden, 40;
Amsterdam, 43;
Holland’s leading painter, 49;
life, 72;
etchings, 74:
personality, 75;
in Amsterdam, 76;
beginning of fame, 77;
marriage and death of Saskia, second marriage, 77;
bankruptcy, 78;
Fromentin’s criticism, 79, 85;
chiaroscuro, 80;
abstract idea, 88;
color, 91;
symbolism, 92;
Impressionist, 93;
compared with Hals, 96;
influence on genre, 102;
use of the arch, 104;
_St. Paul_, _St. Jerome in a Cave_, _St. Simeon in the Temple_, 76;
_The Lesson in Anatomy_, 76, 85;
_Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company_
(_The Night Watch_), 77, 79, 81, 84;
_The Syndics of the Cloth Guild_, 78;
_Portrait of Himself_, 78;
_Supper at Emmaus_, 82, 148;
_Good Samaritan_, 82;
_Portrait of Elizabeth Bas_, 89;
_Holy Family_, 102;
_Descent from the Cross_, 103;
_Elevation of the Cross_, 103, 104;
_Burial_, _Resurrection_, _Adoration of the Shepherds_,
_Oriental Figure_, _Head and Bust of an Oriental_, 104;
_Tobit and the Angel_, 172
Renaissance art, 72
_Rest of the Holy Family_ [Bol], 154
_Resurrection, The_ [Rembrandt], 104
_Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew_ [Hals], 66, 67
_Reverie_ [Maes], 114
Reyniers, Lysbeth, 51
Rijks Museum, Amsterdam, 44, 59;
_The Enraged Swan_, Asselyn, 44;
_Fishers for Souls_, Van de Venne, 44;
_Syndics of the Cloth Guild_, Rembrandt, 78;
_Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company_, Rembrandt, 78, 79, 81, 84;
_Portrait of Elizabeth Bas_, Rembrandt, 89;
_The Egg Dance_, Aertz, 107;
_The Night School_, Dou, 113;
_A Reverie_, Metsu, 114;
_Asking a Blessing_, _Old Woman Spinning_, Metsu, 115, 116;
_The Blacksmith_, Metsu, 117;
_Old Woman in Meditation_, Metsu, 118;
_The Interior_, _The Pantry_, De Hooch, 122;
_The Cook_, Vermeer, 137;
_Young Woman Reading a Letter_, Vermeer, 138;
_A Homely Scene_, _The Happy Family_,
_The Feast of St. Nicholas_, Steen, 145;
_The Prince’s Birthday_, _The Sick Lady_, Steen, 146;
_The Disciples at Emmaus_, Steen, 148;
_Isaac Blessing Jacob_, Flinck, 151;
_Portrait of M. Johannes Wittenbogaert_,
_Fête of the Civic Guard, Münster, 1648_, Flinck, 153;
_Abraham Receiving the Angels_, _Salome Dancing before Herod_, Bol, 154;
_Six Governors of the Huiszittenhuis_,
_Four Governors of the Leper House_,
_Roelof Meulenaar_, _Maria Rey_, _Artus Quellinus_, Bol, 156;
_Portrait of Abraham de Notte_, _Decapitation of St.
John the Baptist_, Fabritius, 157;
_Woman Taken in Adultery_, Eeckhout, 158;
_Three Portraits_, De Gelder, 161;
_Portrait of Dirck Bas Jacobsz Family_, _Four Ladies
of the Spinhuis_, Santvoort, 161;
_Banquet of the Civic Guard_, Van der Helst, 57, 164;
_Portrait of Paul Potter_, Van der Helst, 163;
_Company of Captain Cloeck_, _Family Meebeeck Cruywaghen_,
_Portrait of Pieter Schout_, De Keyser, 166;
_Maria van Utrecht_, _The Little Princess_, Moreelse, 167;
_Four Portraits of Joost van den Vondel_,
_Two Landscapes with Cattle_, Koninck, 173;
_Landscape_, Everdingen, 175;
_The Bear Hunt_, Potter, 180;
_Portrait of the Van de Velde Family_, Van de Velde, 183;
_Charles II Entering Rotterdam, 24 May, 1660_, Verschuier, 186;
_Landscape_, Van Goyen, 188;
_View of Haarlem from the Dunes_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 197;
_Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 199
_River_ [Van Goyen], 188
Rotterdam, birthplace of De Hooch, 120;
Vlieger, 185;
Verschuier, 185
Rubens, Peter Paul, 18
Ruisdael, Jacob van, compared to Goyen, 189;
appreciation, 193;
life, 194;
increase of power, 196;
compared to Rembrandt, 200;
_Landscape with Waterfall_, 194;
_Castle Bentheim_, 195;
_Village in the Wood_, 196;
_View of Haarlem from the Hill of Overveen_, 197;
_The Beach_, _Shore at Scheveningen_, 198;
_The Mill near Wyk-by-Duurstede_, _The Swamp in the Wood_,
_The Oak Wood_, _The Big Wood_, _Landscape with Fence_, 199;
_Jewish Cemetery_, 200
Ruisdael, Salomon van, 174
S
_St. Simeon in the Temple_ [Rembrandt], 76
_Salome Dancing before Herod_ [Bol], 151
Santvoort, Dirck Dircksz, 151;
appreciation, 161;
_Portrait of Dirck Bas Jacobsz Family_,
_Four Ladies of the Spinhuis_, 161;
_Four Governors of the Serge Hall_, _Frederick Dircksz Alewyn_,
_Agatha Geelvinck_, _Martinus Alewyn_, _Clara Alewyn_, 162
Saskia van Uylenborch, 77
Schalcken, Godfried, 42;
influenced by Dou, 111;
appreciation, 125
Schatter, Captain Johan, 66
Scovel, Jan van, life, 16;
appreciation, 17;
portrait group of twelve Knights Templars, 17
Seghers, Hercules, 19;
born at Amsterdam, 43;
appreciation, 169;
influenced Koninck, 173, 174;
_Holland Landscape with the Hamlet of Rhenen_, _Landscape_, 169
_Shore at Scheveningen_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 198
_Sick Woman, The_ [Van Mieris], 123
Sidney, Sir Philip, 25
_Sleeping Girl_ [Vermeer], 136
Slingeland, Pieter Cornelisz van, influenced by Dou, 111, 126
_Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company_ [Rembrandt], 77, 79
Spain, downfall of, 26
Spanish Fury, 22
Steen, Jan, 31;
school, 39, 40;
appreciation, 141;
humor, 143;
life, 144;
stories of reckless life, 145;
_A Homely Scene_, _Feast of St. Nicholas_, _Happy Family_, 145;
_The Christening Party_, _While the Old Ones Sing the Young Ones Pipe_,
_Twelfth Night_, _The Prince’s Birthday_, _The Sick Lady_, 146;
_Doctor Visiting a Sick Young Woman_, _A Doctor’s Visit_, 147;
_The Marriage at Cana_, _Expulsion of Hagar_, _Disciples at Emmaus_, 148
Still-life, Dutch interest in, 31;
Van Heem, Weenix, Kalf, Hondecoeter, 31, 38
Stoffels, Hendrickje, 78
_Supper at Emmaus_ [Rembrandt], 82, 148
_Swamp in the Wood_ [Jacob van Ruisdael], 199
Swanenburch, Jacob van, 41;
teacher of Rembrandt, 73
Symbolism, 95, 197, 200
_Syndics of the Cloth Guild_ [Rembrandt], 56
T
Technique, as a motive, 28
Terborch, Gerard, 30;
school, 39;
pupil of Hals, 99;
appreciation, 127;
life, 128;
influence of Hals, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, 128;
portraits, 128;
color, 131;
_The Peace of Münster_, 127;
_The Gallant Soldier_, 129;
_The Concert_, _Officer Writing a Letter_,
_Lady Washing her Hands_, _Old Woman Peeling Apples_, 130
Tintoretto, 14
Titian, 14
_Tobit and the Angel_ [Rembrandt], 172
Tulp, Dr., 76
_Twelfth Night_ [Steen], 146
U
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, _Landscape_, Seghers, 169
Union of Utrecht, 23
Utrecht, school of painting:
Scovel, 16;
birthplace of Moreelse, 167;
residence of Scovel, 16;
Moreelse, 167;
Seghers, 170
Uylenborch, Saskia van, 77
V
Valckenborch, Lucas van, 107;
appreciation, 126
Values, 134
Vanderbilt, W. K., collector, 104
_Vegetable Market, The_ [Metsu], 118
Velasquez, 60;
influenced Rembrandt, 93;
Hals, 97
Velde, Adriaen van de, 31, 43, 178;
appreciation, 183, 196;
_Family of Van de Velde_, 183
Velde, Esaias van de, 39, 187
Velde, Willem van de, the Elder, 30, 184;
appreciation, 186
Velde, Willem van de, the Younger, 44;
appreciation, 186
Venne, Adriaen van de, 44
Vermeer, Johannes, 31;
school, 41;
life, 132;
appreciation, 132;
comparison with Rembrandt, 133;
_plein-air_, 170;
_The Proposal_, 134;
_Girl with Water-Jug_, 135, 139;
_Diana at her Toilet_, _New Testament_,
_Head of a Girl_, _Diana and her Nymphs_, 135;
_Sleeping Girl_, _View of Delft_, 136;
_The Cook_, 137;
_The Letter_, _Young Woman Reading a Letter_,
_Lady with Pearl Necklace_, 138;
_Lady with a Lute_, _Lady Writing_, _The Lace-Maker_, 139;
_The Coquette_, _Lady at a Spinet_,
_The Music Lesson_, _The Artist in his Studio_, 140;
_Portrait of a Lady_, 141
Veronese, Paolo, 14
Verschuier, Lieve, 185;
_Charles II Entering Rotterdam_, 186
Veth, Jan, 182
Vienna Art-History Museum, 107;
_A Lady and her Doctor_, _Cavalier in a Shop_, Mieris, 124;
_Old Woman Peeling Apples_, Terborch, 130;
_Gray-Bearded Man_, Flinck, 152;
_The Big Wood_, Ruisdael, 199
Vienna Imperial Art Museum:
_Moonlight_ and _Winter Landscapes_, Van der Neer, 177;
_Landscape with Fence_, Jacob van Ruisdael, 199
_View of Arnheim_ [Van Goyen], 188
_View of Delft_ [Vermeer], 137
_View of Dordrecht_ [Van Goyen], 188
_View of Nimwegen_ [Van Goyen], 188
_Visit, The_ [De Hooch], 138
_Visit to the Nursery_ [Metsu], 119
Vlieger, Simon de, 34, 44;
appreciation, 185
_Vondel, Joost van den, Portrait of_ [Koninck], 173
Vroom, Hendrick Cornelisz, 185
W
Wagner, quotation on art, 4
Wallace Collection:
_Winter Scene_, Van der Neer, 177;
_Landscape with Cattle_, Cuyp, 182
_Water Mill_ [Hobbema], 191
_Water Mill_ (Louvre) [Hobbema], 191
Watteau, 5
Weenix, Jan, 31;
school, 38, 43
Westphalia, Treaty of, 46
_When the Old Ones Sing the Young Ones Pipe_ [Steen], 146
Whistler, 95
William, Prince of Orange, 8;
resists Spain, 21;
price put on his head, 23;
offered the crown, 24;
death, 25
William III of England, 47
_Wine Contract, The_ [Eeckhout], 160
Witt, Johan de, 46
_Woman Taken in Adultery_ [Eeckhout], 158
_Wooded Landscape_ [Hobbema], 191
_Wooded Road_ [Hobbema], 191
Wouwerman, Philips, 30, 174;
school, 39;
pupil of Hals, 99, 178;
appreciation, 180, 184, 195
Wynants, Jan, 30, 174, 175;
school, 39, 43, 84
Y
_Young Bull, The_ [Potter], 179
_Young Card-Players, The_ [Maes], 114, 116
_Young Man and Girl in a Cellar_ [Dou], 113
_Young Mother, The_ [Dou], 103
_Young Woman Reading a Letter_ [Vermeer], 138
FOOTNOTES:
[A] The author’s indebtedness to Motley in this chapter, as in
subsequent ones, should not escape the reader’s notice.
[B] The topic of this book being painting, Rembrandt’s fecundity and
genius as an etcher have not been considered.
[C] Compare the reference on page 103 to the series of Biblical
subjects, executed in 1633, which are now in the Munich Gallery.
[D] In the Adolf v. Carstanjen Collection, Berlin Gallery.
[E] I allude to the men who are working more or less in sympathy with
and along the lines of the French artist, Matisse.
[F] See page 175.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Story of Dutch Painting" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.