... Artists should descry abundant worth
In trivial commonplace, nor groan at dearth
If fortune bade the painter's craft be plied
In vulgar town and country!
ROBERT BROWNING: _Gerard de Lairesse_.
The Dutch and Flemish schools were formerly hung together at the
National Gallery. They are now separated, and with the _early_ Flemish
school we have already dealt. We take up the story here at the point
where it leaves off there, and proceed to discuss the Dutch school;
passing afterwards to the later Flemish school. The confusion between
Dutch and Flemish art is, it may first be remarked, historical. Just as
Flanders derived its earliest artistic impulse from German painters, so
did the Dutch derive theirs from the Flemings. In the two first periods
of Flemish art, Dutch art runs precisely parallel with it. During the
sixteenth century a new development began in both schools. This is the
period of Italian influence, of the "Romanists" or "Italianisers," as
they are called, represented typically by Bernard van Orley and Mabuse.
At the end of the sixteenth century, however, a national movement
began in both schools--corresponding closely to political changes. In
1579 the "Union of Utrecht" was effected, whereby the Dutch "United
Provinces" (= roughly what is now Holland) were separated alike from
the Spanish Netherlands and from the Empire, and Dutch independence
thus began. Within the next fifty years nearly all the great Dutch
painters were born--Berchem, Bol, Cuyp, Frans Hals, Van der Helst,
De Keyser, Rembrandt, Ruysdael. In characteristics, as well as in
chronology, Dutch art was the direct outcome of Dutch history. This
art has come to be identified in common parlance, owing to its chief
and distinguishing characteristic, with what is known as "_genre_
painting,"--the painting, that is, which takes its subject from small
incidents of everyday life. Three historical conditions combined to
bring this kind of painting into vogue. First, the Reformation. The
Dutch, when they asserted their independence, were no longer Catholics;
but Protestantism despised the arts, and hence the arts became entirely
dissociated from religion. There were no more churches to ornament,
and hence no more religious pictures were painted[31] whilst religious
rapture is superseded by what one of their own critics describes as
"the boisterous outbursts which betoken approaching drunkenness"
(Havard: _The Dutch School_, p. 12).[32] Secondly, the Dutch were
Republicans. There was no reigning family. There were no palaces to
decorate, and hence no more historical or mythological pictures were
in demand. This point of distinction may best be remembered by the
supreme contempt which the great King Louis XIV. of France entertained
for the _genre_ style. _Eloignez de mot ces magots_, he said, "take
away the absurd things," when some one showed him some works by
Teniers. But the "plain, simple citizens" of the United Provinces
did not want their faces idealised--hence the prosaic excellence of
Dutch portraiture,--nor had they any ambition to see on their walls
anything but an imitation of their actual lives--of their dykes,
their courtyards, their kitchens, and their sculleries. Thirdly,
the Dutch were a very self-centred people. "With the Dutch," says
Sir Joshua Reynolds (Discourse iv.), "a history piece is properly a
portrait of themselves; whether they describe the inside or outside
of their houses, we have their own people engaged in their own
peculiar occupations; working or drinking, playing or fighting. The
circumstances that enter into a picture of this kind, are so far from
giving a general view of human life, that they exhibit all the minute
particularities of a nation differing in several respects from the rest
of mankind." "Those innumerable _genre_ pieces--conversation, music,
play--were in truth," says Mr. Pater, "the equivalent of novel-reading
for that day; its own actual life, in its own proper circumstances,
reflected in various degrees of idealisation, with no diminution of the
sense of reality (that is to say), but with more and more purged and
perfected delightfulness of interest. Themselves illustrating, as every
student of their history knows, the good-fellowship of family life, it
was the ideal of that life which these artists depicted; the ideal of
home in a country where the preponderant interest of life, after all,
could not well be out of doors. Of the earth earthy,[33] it was an
ideal very different from that which the sacred Italian painters had
evoked from the life of Italy; yet, in its best types, was not without
a kind of natural religiousness. And in the achievement of a type of
beauty so national and vernacular, the votaries of purely Italian art
might well feel that the Italianisers, like Berghem, Bol, and Jan
Weenix, went so far afield in vain" (_Imaginary Portraits_, p. 99).
The same awakening of a national taste made itself felt in the native
school of Dutch landscape--a landscape excellent in many ways, but
cabin'd, cribbed, and confined, like their own dykes. "Of deities or
virtues, angels, principalities, or powers, in the name of our ditches,
no more. Let us have cattle, and market vegetables" (_Modern Painters_,
vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vi. § 11). But the Dutch School of landscape
had the qualities of its defects. "The Dutch began to see what a
picture their country was--its canals, and _boompjis_, and endless
broadly-lighted meadows, and thousands of miles of quaint water-side;
and their painters were the first true masters of landscape for its own
sake" (Pater, _ib._ p. 98).
[Illustration]