Having dealt with the town’s appearance, principally from an architectural
point of view, in the preceding pages, because architecture is so
essential in expressing a people’s character and aspirations, we must now
give our attention to another condition instrumental in completing a
town’s aspect, namely, the daily life which is animating it. We,
fast-living twentieth-century people, are apt to suppose that life some
centuries ago was moving steadily but slowly, that people were spared the
enervating excitements of our own days and that they consequently had a
much more quiet and regular existence. Contemporary documents prove that
this opinion is wrong, at least in so far as Amsterdam is concerned.
Already in 1618 the Venetian Antonio Donato wrote of Amsterdam that the
streets and public places were so thronged “that the scene looked like a
fair to end in one day”; and did not Descartes write in 1631, when he
resided in Amsterdam, that nobody noticed him because he was the only
non-tradesman in Amsterdam amidst a trading population, attentive to its
profits. This reveals the bustling of the great commercial centre. The
facts have nothing astonishing in them if we realise that Holland’s
commercial ships numbered half of the world’s trading-fleet and that
Amsterdam harboured most of them.(3) No wonder that, in such a town, life
was intense and that its strong pulsation was felt everywhere: in crowded
streets and quays, in numerous offices and warehouses, on the large
exchange, around the Public Weighing Houses, in the shops and
market-places, etc. The ease and self-contentment with which the Dutch
were so often reproached at the time of the French Revolution, were then
unknown; on the contrary all was enterprise, action, and movement. A
salutary freshness of spirit was favoured by the variety of people
crowding in this centre: the hospitality shown to people of various
religions, from the busy Jews, to the refugees of Antwerp and Flanders,
created a rivalry of interests, benefiting trade in general.
To this animation caused by commerce we must add the life brought into the
town’s thoroughfares by the people’s domestic and social existence, which
was in those days much more out-of-doors than it is now, just as there was
also a much less marked separation between the various classes: housewives
going to the markets, children playing in the streets, families reposing
in or before their open street-doors, people of the lower classes seeking
in the street what their narrow and close dwellings could not give them,
travellers being seen off at the harbourside or on the canal-quays,
costermongers praising their wares. There was, for example, the daily
fishmarket behind the Dam, Amsterdam’s central square, of which the poet
Brederode has left us such vivid pictures, bringing to our ears all the
bargaining, shouting, and quarrelling of former days; there were numerous
other markets necessitated, not only by the town’s trade, but by its
every-day needs: the weekly market for butter and cheese, which until 1669
enlivened the Dam, where now electric cars circulate and a much
less-varied traffic passes by; the apple- and fruit-market on the Singel,
opposite the house where Rembrandt’s only son Titus passed the few months
of his married life; the flower-market, where the middleclass people found
the cheap floral decorations for their often gloomy interiors: the
meat-market in the Nes: the Monday’s market, on the Singel, of small
furniture and kitchen-utensils: the vegetable- and peat-market on the
Prinsengracht, etc. That all good housewives, even those of middle and
upper classes, made it a rule to frequent these markets is revealed to us
not only by contemporary pictures but also by a passage in one of
Huygens’s letters to the Prince of Orange, in which this refined diplomat
from The Hague expresses his astonishment at seeing the wife of Admiral de
Ruyter go daily to market « le panier au bras. »
[Plate 24. The Star of the Kings. ]
Plate 24. The Star of the Kings. Children before a street door on
Epiphany-evening. After the drawing by Rembrandt, in the British Museum,
London. Salting Bequest.
All these thousands of people, business-men, workmen, housewives, small
traders, went about in comparatively simple dresses, in which the black
and discreet colours predominated. Against this sober background, the
multi-coloured garments of the numerous strangers from over-seas were set
off sharply: those of the Levantines, Persians, Poles, and others, who
congregated in this international mart. What was said of the citizens’
dress does not imply that luxurious costumes were unknown in Amsterdam;
the younger people of course donned lighter and more elegant clothes, and
married ladies at home knew very well how to charm the eyes of their
visitors. Gradually, as Amsterdam’s wealth increased, the upper classes
became more luxurious, and towards the end of Rembrandt’s life we see a
complete change effected: we may say that when the architects preferably
imitated the Italian Palladio or the French Mansart, and when the feebler
painters followed the degenerating taste of the public,— then the leading
classes took to French fashions, and wigs came into use. Rembrandt’s
pictures show us sufficiently that he kept aloof from this deplorable but
fated change, and we must imagine him moving within the classes which
remained loyal to the solid habits of the first period of his life in
Amsterdam.
Mingling with this traffic we find the children amusing themselves,
venting their love of ridicule and, above all things, fighting, in those
parts from which they were later on banished on account of a more regular
education, or because of certain districts turning into exclusive shop- or
office-quarters. Their playfulness fell again and again into wild
excesses, which forced the magistrate to pass prohibitive laws, in order
to protect citizens from injury and damage. Add to this the great number
of beggars, peasant-people, many of them, impoverished by the wars,
bohemians, highwaymen, remnants of army-trains, all flocking to the great
centre in the hope of finding assistance, strolling musicians,
quacksalvers and mountebanks at market time (_plate 26_), periodic parades
of gaily-dressed civic guards. Add to this the fairs, and we shall have
completed in our imagination a scene which is of the liveliest, and
certainly of a far greater charm and variety than our present more
monotonous and regulated existence. Rembrandt’s [Plate 25. Children
Refore A Street Door: The One In The Middle With A “Rommelpot”]
Plate 25. Children Refore A Street Door: The One In The Middle With A
“Rommelpot”. After the drawing by Rembrandt, in the British Museum, London
etchings and drawings give us numerous little illustrations in this
respect, as may be seen from the superb drawing lately added to the
British Museum by the Salting bequest, showing children going about with
the star (a structure of oiled paper on a stick, lit from behind with a
candle) on Epiphany-evening, and singing before the houses, as they also
did, some months later, on Shrove Tuesday, accompanying their songs with
the rommelpot, a musical instrument well known from Hals’s pictures, and
consisting of an earthenware pot, covered with parchment or bladder,
through which a stick was moved up and down (plates _24_ and _25_).
Rembrandt’s etchings reproducing tramps and street-types, like his
rat-killer, are no doubt so familiar to our readers that we need not
recall them by means of reproductions.
The tidiness and orderly habits of the Dutch were effective in putting
limits to the disorder and dirt which are so often the nuisance of
seaports. This was still more obvious in the interiors of the
dwelling-houses where the Dutch housewives exerted the supremacy of their
cleaning and washing propensity, « cette propriété hollandaise qui
commence par étonner et qui finit, quand on demeure dans le pays, par
devenir un besoin, une nécessite…une vertu contagieuse, » as Havard says.
A similar sense of order was to be noted in the administration of public
charities: orphanages, asylums, hospitals, and similar institutions were
founded and generously endowed, mostly by private initiative, and were
organised in such a careful and sensible way that most of them have
lasted, under the same rules, until our days.(4) Ascending [Plate 26. A
Quacksalver on a Market-Place. ]
Plate 26. A Quacksalver on a Market-Place. After the drawing by
Rembrandt. In the collection of Frederich August II, in Dresden.
to higher levels we again observe, in the town’s democratic magistrates,
that orderly spirit and caution which enabled these practical, vigilant
authorities to consolidate the town’s importance and to develop it to the
highest power in the Netherlands, dreaded by foreign competitors and
possessing, so to say, the supremacy of the sea. They were characteristic
representatives of the citizens’ nature: cool-headedness and a very strong
feeling of independence, rooted in their own and their fathers’
emancipation from Spanish domination, and in their energetic
tradesmanship. We here touch a more abstract subject, not less essential
in constituting the general disposition of the town, namely, the nature
and spirit of its individuals, forming, so to say, the town’s own soul.
This is a point that should not be overlooked, as the Dutch character and
demeanour are two things often misunderstood, which certainly require some
insight and explanation in order to be appreciated.
The modern civilized person who found himself transplanted in Amsterdam
250 years ago, might certainly be displeased with the behaviour of even
the better classes. We readily concede that their manners were rather raw
and lacking in refinement. Sir William Temple, in his “Observations,”
published three years after Rembrandt’s death, calls the Hollanders
“clownish and blunt,” and this typifies them in their attitude towards
intellectual foreign people. Amongst themselves, even in circles where a
taste for art and science was well developed, coarse festivals, excessive
meals, and gross humour was often met with, peculiarities, however, which
the Dutchman had in common with Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and other Northern
races at that time. The sense of independence and self-reliance, then
very strongly developed in the Hollanders, hindered the improvement which
the experience gained from foreign journeys to France and Italy, of a few
patricians, might have brought. There was also the fact of Amsterdam
never having been, like The Hague, a princely residence with its trail of
ambassadors and nobility, for which reason the Hollanders in Amsterdam
remained more themselves, a characteristic even evident in our day. But
if their manners formerly lagged somewhat behind, we must not forget that
most of their natural sterling qualities were allowed to develop freely.
These characteristics do not always strike the foreigner at first sight,
hidden as they are by a certain slowness in expression and heaviness in
deportment, springing from the Hollander’s habit of deliberation. What
frequently is taken for coldness, for insensibility, for haughtiness,
appears to be reserve which is put aside only when the Hollander feels
very sure of his opinion. To these typical qualities of a trading nation
must be added a perseverance of will and a determination to attain, which
are often wrongly interpreted as egotism. Any one who has a real friend
among Dutchmen will appreciate him as a very staunch one, although it may
have taken some time to break the reserve! Openness, good-heartedness,
generosity, will then be detected where they were at first not suspected.
It may now be understood that the intercourse with Rembrandt was far from
easy, because he was a typical Hollander, good-natured, but with an extra
amount of impulsiveness and self-esteem, as may be gathered from his
biography and from his work. Consequently, if he had numerous
acquaintances, his real friends were not many. We find for instance few
traces of intimate friendship with other painters, excepting his pupils,
although his fellow-artists were very numerous. The landscape-painter
Roghman and the rich marine painter-amateur Van de Cappelle, perhaps also
Asselÿn, are about the only ones who seem to have been in close relation
with the master. Of his pupils the most promising ones, Bol and Flinck,
rapidly estranged from their master both socially and artistically,—others
like Maes, de Gelder, and Hoogstraten returned to their native town
Dordrecht. Only Van den Eeckhout and Philips Koninck appear to have
remained on intimate terms with Rembrandt. To his artist-friends we may
here add the calligrapher Lieven Coppenol, whose fine etched portraits by
Rembrandt the reader will remember, and very likely, too, the celebrated
silversmith _Lutma_, a man of a very personal talent.
After what was said of the town’s and its burghers’ outward appearance, we
would do well to devote another moment’s attention to what we called the
town’s soul and observe more closely the intellectual life of Amsterdam,
thus facilitating a more general understanding of the period.
At the time when Rembrandt established himself in Amsterdam, a great
improvement had taken place in its religious conditions. Ever since 1578
the town had [Plate 27. Portrait Of Jan Lutma. ]
Plate 27. Portrait Of Jan Lutma. From an impression, in the First State,
of Rembrandt’s etching, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
been exclusively Protestant, but internal dissensions had succeeded the
abolition of the Roman Catholic Church, and in the beginning of the
seventeenth century had resulted in intense factional feeling. Towards
1630 this storm had subsided and the magistrates, although themselves
clinging to the Reformed Protestant Church, did not further molest other
sects, such as the Remonstrants, Lutherans, Mennonites, and Walloons, who
were permitted to build their own churches. The Catholics also were again
able to fulfill their religious duties on condition that they avoided
ostentation. The Jews officiated in their own Synagogues and nowhere
enjoyed greater liberty than in Amsterdam.(5) The royal road of religious
tolerance, rare in those days, was more and more deliberately taken, and
it sounds well to hear how in 1660 Governor Stuyvesant, of New-Amsterdam
(New York), receives from his directors in Amsterdam the following
admonition to be less rigorous against other sects: “Let everybody remain
unmolested as long as he behaves modestly and peacefully, as long as he
does damage to nobody and does not oppose the magistrates. This principle
of statesmanship and forbearance was always honoured by the government of
this city and the consequence was, that the persecuted and the downtrodden
from all countries congregated in this haven of refuge. Tread in its
footsteps and you will be blessed.” This attitude, taken by the public
authorities, greatly promoted general welfare, spiritually as well as
materially. We may conclude from Rembrandt’s work how prejudices were then
overcome and how freely the leading intellects intermixed: the Calvinistic
Reformed Minister Sylvius, the Mennonite Minister Cornelis Anslo, the
Jewish doctor Ephraim Bonus, the Rabbi Menasseh-ben-Israel, whom we have
mentioned before, were among the master’s intimate friends, or were at
least so portrayed by him that we understand from the loving application,
manifested in his work, how deeply he appreciated their highly cultured
mind and heart.
This freedom of religion went hand in hand with an animated mental
evolution and naturally favoured it considerably. At the time of
Rembrandt’s settlement in Amsterdam we find proof of this in the
foundation, in 1632, of a classical school, the forerunner of the later
university, called the “Athenæum illustre,” where the celebrated
professors Vossius and Van Baerle (or Barloeus) initiated many youths into
the secrets of philosophy, languages, and other sciences. Within the
leading classes of Amsterdam’s population, supported by the great
merchants, interest in matters of art and science strongly develops,
though as we noticed before, in the case of the town-hall architecture,
with a marked preference for classicism and all foreign civilization. It
seems as though these clever merchants could not understand that their own
genial countrymen were sufficiently gifted and quite capable of
astonishing the world by their work; this increasing lack of mutual
appreciation is not so astonishing, if we take into consideration
Holland’s, and especially Amsterdam’s, rapid growth, making all those
people (aside from the great artists, who were sufficiently confident in
their own powers), feel small and humble in face of the firmly established
fame and merits of the classics and the Italians. The large and fertile
School of Amsterdam painters, Rembrandt foremost among them, felt this
keenly: landscapes of Italy and allegorical and mythological subjects were
preferred to the productions of an art intensely national, the sincerity
of which failed to impress the Dutch amateurs. Even portraiture, an art
where sincerity is so indispensable, felt the effects of the people’s
blindness, and in the last years of Rembrandt’s life we see those
portrait-painters coming to the fore, who did away with true expression of
character and joined the private burghers in their decadent predilection
for artificiality in dress and appearance.
It is not to be wondered at, that on this fertile Amsterdam soil intellect
and art blossomed splendidly in other ways also. Music was in great
favour and could boast a celebrity: Sweelinck, the organist and composer.
Besides this there was a great literary movement; to emphasize its
importance it suffices to say that half of the literary productions of the
Netherlands in the seventeenth century were by Amsterdam writers. The
ordinary public was rather slow in recognising their merits, and as a rule
only estimated poetry when it had an edifying and moralising tendency. A
practical use was made of the poets, when pithy verses or inscriptions for
gables or institutions were needed and when wedding-parties, births and
deaths, necessitated the scarcely ever failing poems. Nevertheless highly
meritorious and lasting work was produced by the popular poets, such as
Brederode and Starter, and Samuel Coster, who founded in 1617 the first
permanent theatre (de Duytsche Akademie, i.e. the Dutch Academy), the more
refined and classically educated Hooft, who, like Gerard Brandt, also
produced excellent prose, the genial and universal Vondel, the greatest of
all, and the poets of less originality like Andries Pels, Reyer Anslo (not
to be confuted with Rembrandt’s friend the clergyman Cornelis Claesz.
Anslo), Jan Vos, Jan Hz. Krul, Jeremias de Decker, passing over in silence
those of a subsequent generation. Only the last three are known to have
been on intimate terms with Rembrandt; no traces appear in the artist’s
work of any friendly relation with the others, especially with the great
Vondel, and on this ground we may safely say that such a relation is not
very likely to have existed, because the hard-working painter had a homely
life, and all relations he had with lending men of his time generally
reflect themselves either in his pictures, drawings, or etchings. Amoug
the latter we meet one person whom we should not omit, because he is the
representative of another class of people than we have mentioned above,
namely Jan Six, the son of a wealthy silk-dyer and textile manufacturer,
who continued his fathers business till 1652 and who, after Rembrandt’s
death, rose to important functions in the magistracy. Excepting this
influential person, Rembrandt obviously had little intimate intercourse
with the town’s patricians or authorities, his art absorbing him so much
that even public events of note, do not appear to have claimed his
attention. We may therefore pass in silence the historic events
coinciding with his lifetime. Suffice it to say that those concerning
Amsterdam exclusively, were not many and that even the greatest events in
the history of the Netherlands were in those times generally accounted by
Amsterdam’s citizens as secondary to their town’s interest as the greatest
commercial centre. Their magistrates, if they wanted to promote the
city’s particular interest, did not hesitate to oppose the Stadhouder’s
power and the will of the States General. Their solicitude and vigilance
for their town’s welfare are quite remarkable; but that their attachment
often blinded them to their country’s more general interests, becomes
clear, if we consider that Amsterdam was more important than all the towns
of the province of Holland together and that the province of Holland alone
provided 60 per cent of the total income of the Seven Provinces forming
the Dutch Republic. Hence, until the present time, the name of Holland is
generally used in designating the Netherlands.
Taking all in all and remembering especially what was said about the
town’s outward appearance and population, we must conclude that no place
could have been more appropriate than Amsterdam, as the abode of the
typically Dutch genius Rembrandt. A noted Dutch writer, Van Deyssel, has
expressed this well in the following words: “Rembrandt and Amsterdam,
these belong so amazingly together! There are northern cities, that are
like Amsterdam, but it seems to us that Amsterdam for the one who beholds
her quietly, has a unique, unequalled, deep charm. Amsterdam is the heart
of Holland and this means that it lies in the middle of Holland as the
heart in a flower, and that it is the spot where the most delicate beauty
of Holland is found.” No art is more akin to the city’s beauty and
embodies it better than the art of Rembrandt.
It is hard to take leave of Rembrandt and his unique abode, without
allowing the town’s immediate surroundings to fascinate us by their quite
original charm. The excursion, which we could offer our friends through
Amsterdam’s immediate neighbourhood, in Rembrandt’s company, would,
however, give rise to so many comments, often of great local interest,
that they would far exceed the limits of this periodical. The reader
shuuld therefore look for an account of such an excursion along the Amstel
River, past diked, across meadows, illustrated by Rembrandt’s works, in
one of the coming numbers of the Dutch art-periodical “Oud-Holland.”