before their eyes--the home. The long winters, the stubborn rains, the
humidity, the continual changes in the climate, compel the Hollander
to spend a great part of the year and of the day in the house. He
loves his little home, his nutshell, much more than we love our
houses, because it is much more necessary to him, and he lives in it
much more; he provides it with every comfort, caresses it, adorns it;
he delights in looking at the falling snow and drenching rain from its
tight windows, and in being able to say, "Let the storms rage--I am
safe and warm." In his little nest, beside his good wife and
surrounded by his children, he passes the long evenings of autumn and
winter, eating much, drinking much, smoking much, and amusing himself
with honest mirth after the fatigues of the day. Dutch artists paint
these little houses and this home-life in little pictures adapted in
size to the little walls they must adorn; bedrooms which make one
drowsy; kitchens with tables ready spread; the fresh, kindly faces of
mothers of families; men basking in the warmth of the hearth; and, as
they are conscientious realists who omit nothing, they add blinking
cats, gaping dogs, scratching hens, brooms, vegetables, crockery, and
plucked chickens. This life is painted in every class of society and
under every circumstance; evening-parties, dances, orgies, games,
holidays, all are represented, and thus Ter Borch, Metsu, Netscher,
Dou, Mieris, Steen, Brouwer, and Ostade became famous.
From home-life they turned to the country. The hostile climate gave
them a very short time in which to admire nature, and for this reason
the Dutch artists admire it only the more and salute the spring with
greater joy. The fleeting smiles of the heavens are strongly impressed
on their imagination. The country is not beautiful, but it is doubly
dear to them because it has been wrested from the sea and from the
hands of strangers. They painted it with affection, making their
landscapes simple, ingenuous, and full of an intimacy with nature that
neither the Italian nor the Belgian landscapes of this time possess.
Their country, flat and monotonous, presented to their appreciative
eyes a marvellous variety. They noted every change in the sky, and
revealed the water in its every appearance, its reflection, its grace
and freshness, and its power of diffusing light and color everywhere.
There are no mountains, so they put the downs in the background of
their pictures; and, lacking forests, they saw and expressed the
mysteries of a forest in a group of trees, and animated all with noble
animals and sails. The subjects of their pictures are poor indeed--a
windmill, a canal, a gray sky--but how much they suggest! Some of
them, not content with their native land, came to Italy in search of
hills, bright skies, and great ruins, and became a circle of choice
artists, such as Both, Swanevelt, Pijnacker, Breenbergh, Van Laer, and
Asselin; but the palm remains with the true Dutch landscape
painters--with Wynants, the painter of morning; Van der Neer, the
painter of night; Ruysdael, the painter of melancholy; Hobbema, the
painter of windmills, cottages, and kitchen-gardens; and with others
who contented themselves with expressing the charm of the modest
scenes of their native land.
Side by side with landscape painting arose another branch of art,
which was peculiar to Holland--the painting of animals. Cattle are the
riches of the country, and the splendid breed of Holland is unequalled
in Europe for its beauty and fecundity. The Dutch, who owe so much to
their cattle, treat them, so to speak, as a part of the population;
they love them, wash them, comb them, dress them. They are to be seen
everywhere; they are reflected in the canals, and the country is
beautified with their innumerable black and white spots dotting the
wide meadows, giving every place an air of peace and repose, and
inspiring one with a feeling of Arcadian sweetness and patriarchal
serenity. The Dutch artists studied the differences and the habits of
these animals; they divined, one may say, their thoughts and feelings,
and enlivened the quiet beauty of the landscapes with their figures.
Rubens, Snyders, Paul de Vos, and many other Belgian artists had
painted animals with wonderful ability, but they are surpassed by the
Dutch painters, Van de Velde, Berchem, Karel du Jardin, and Paul
Potter, the prince of animal painters, whose famous "Bull" in the
gallery at the Hague deserves to be hung in the Louvre opposite
Raphael's "Transfiguration."
The Dutch have become pre-eminent in another branch of art
also--marine painting. The ocean, their enemy, their power, and their
glory, overhanging their land, ever threatening and alarming them,
enters into their life by a thousand channels and in a thousand forms.
That turbulent North Sea, full of dark color, illuminated by sunsets
of infinite gloom, and ever lashing its desolate banks, naturally
dominated the imagination of the Dutch artists. They passed long hours
on the shore contemplating the terrible beauties of the sea; they
ventured from the land to study its tempests; they bought ships and
sailed with their families, observing and painting; they followed
their fleets to war and joined in the naval battles. Thus a school of
marine artists arose, boasting such men as William Van de Velde the
father and William the son, Bakhuisen, Dubbels, and Stork.
Another school of painting naturally arose in Holland as the
expression of the character of the people and of republican customs. A
nation that without greatness had done so many great things, as
Michelet says, required an heroic style of painting, if it may be so
called, destined to illustrate its men and achievements. But simply
because the nation was without greatness, or, to speak more
accurately, without the outward form of greatness--because it was
modest, and inclined to consider all alike equal in face of the
fatherland, because all had done their duty, yet each abhorred that
adulation and apotheosis which glorify in one person the virtues and
triumphs the mass,--this style of painting was needed, not to extol a
few eminent men or extraordinary events, but to represent all classes
of citizens by occurrences of the most ordinary and peaceful moments
of bourgeois life. Hence those large pictures representing groups of
five, ten, or even thirty persons, gunners, syndics, officials,
professors, magistrates, men of affairs, seated or standing round
tables, feasting or arguing, all life-size and faithful portraits,
with serious open countenances, from which shines the quiet expression
of a tranquil conscience, from which one divines, rather than sees,
the nobility of lives devoted to their country, the spirit of that
laborious and dauntless epoch, the manly virtues of that rare
generation. All this is relieved by the beautiful costumes of the
Renaissance, which so admirably combined grace with dignity,--those
ruffs, jerkins, black cloaks, silken scarfs, ribbons, arms, and
banners. Van der Helst, Hals, Govert, Flink, and Bol were masters in
this style of art.
To leave the consideration of the different branches of painting, and
to inquire into the particular methods which the Dutch artists adopted
and the means they employed to accomplish their results, one chief
feature at once presents itself as the distinctive trait of Dutch
painting--the light.
The light, because of the peculiar conditions under which it manifests
itself in Holland, has naturally given rise to a peculiar style of
painting. A pale light, undulating with marvellous changes, playing
through an atmosphere heavy with vapor, a misty veil which is
repeatedly and abruptly penetrated, a continual struggle between
sunshine and shadow,--these were the phenomena that necessarily
attracted the attention of artists. They began by observing and
reproducing all this restlessness of the sky, this struggle which
animates the nature of Holland with a varied and fantastic life, and
by the act of reproducing it the struggle passed into their minds, and
then, instead of imitating, they created. Then they themselves made
the two elements contend; they increased the darkness to startle and
disperse it with every manner of luminous effects and flashes of
light; sunbeams stole through the gloom and then gradually died away;
the reflections of twilight and the mellow light of lamps were
delicately blended into mysterious shadows, which were animated with
confused forms which one seems to see and yet cannot distinguish. So
under their hands the light presents a thousand fancies, contrasts,
enigmas, and effects of shine and shade as unexpected as they are
curious. Prominent in this field, among many others, were Gherard Dou,
the painter of the famous picture of the four candles, and Rembrandt,
the great wonder-working superhuman enlightener.
Another of the most striking characteristics of Dutch painting is
naturally color. It is generally recognized that in a country where
there are no distant mountains, no undulating views, no prominent
features to strike the eye--in short, no general forms that lend
themselves to design--the artist is strongly influenced by color. This
is especially true in the case of Holland, where the uncertain light
and the vague shadows which continually veil the air soften and
obscure the outlines of objects until the eye neglects the form it
cannot comprehend, and fixes itself on color as the chief quality that
nature possesses. But there are yet other reasons for this: a country
as flat, monotonous, and gray as Holland is has need of color, just as
a southern country has need of shadow. The Dutch artists have only
followed the dominant taste of the people, who paint their houses,
their boats, their palisades, the fences of the fields, and in some
places the very trunks of the trees, in the brightest colors; who
dress themselves as of yore in clothes of the gayest hues; who love
tulips and hyacinths to distraction. Hence all the Dutch painters were
great colorists, Rembrandt being the first.
Realism, favored by the calm and sluggish nature of the Dutch, which
enables their artists to restrain their impetuosity, and further aided by
the Dutch character, which aims at exactness and refuses to do things by
halves, gave to the paintings of the Hollanders another distinctive
trait--finish. This they carried to the last possible degree of
perfection. Critics say truthfully that in Dutch paintings one may
discover the first quality of the nation--patience. Everything is
portrayed with the minuteness of a daguerreotype: the furniture with all
the graining of the wood, the leaf with all its veins, a thread in a bit
of cloth, the patch with all the stitches showing, the animal with every
hair distinct, the face with all its wrinkles,--everything is finished
with such microscopic precision that it seems to be the work of a fairy's
brush, for surely a painter would lose his sight and reason in such a
task. After all, this is a defect rather than a virtue, because painting
ought to reproduce not what exists, but rather what the eye sees, and the
eye does not see every detail. However, the defect is brought to such a
degree of excellence that it is to be admired rather than censured, and
one does not even dare to wish that it should not be there. In this
respect, Dou, Mieris, Potter, Van der Helst, and indeed all the Dutch
painters in greater or less degree, were famous as prodigies of patience.
On the other hand, realism, which imparts to Dutch painting such an
original character and such admirable qualities, is, notwithstanding,
the root of its most serious defects. The Dutch painters, solicitous
to copy only material truth, give to their figures the expression of
merely physical sentiments. Sorrow, love, enthusiasm, and the thousand
subtle emotions that are nameless, or that take different names from
the different causes that give them birth, are rarely or never
expressed. For them the heart does not beat, the eye does not overflow
with tears, nor does the mouth tremble. In their pictures a whole part
of the life is lacking, and that the most powerful and noble part, the
human soul. Nay more, by so faithfully copying everything, the ugly
especially, they end in exaggerating even that. They convert defects
into deformities, portraits into caricatures; they slander the
national type; they give every human figure an ungraceful and
ludicrous appearance. To have a setting for figures they are obliged
to select trivial subjects; hence the excessive number of canvases
depicting taverns and drunken men with grotesque, stupefied faces, in
sprawling attitudes; low women and old men who are despicably
ridiculous; scenes in which we seem to hear the low yells and obscene
words. On looking at these pictures one would say that Holland is
inhabited by the most deformed and ill-mannered nation in the world.
Some painters permit themselves even greater license. Steen, Potter,
Brouwer, and the great Rembrandt himself often pandered to a low and
depraved taste, and Torrentius sent forth such shameless pictures
that the provinces of Holland collect and burn them. But, overlooking
these excesses, there is scarcely anything to be found in a Dutch
gallery which elevates the soul, which awakens in the mind high and
noble sentiments. One enjoys, one admires, one laughs, and sometimes
one is silent before some landscapes, but on leaving one feels that
one has not felt a real pleasure--that something was lacking. There
comes a longing to look upon a beautiful face or to read inspired
poetry, and sometimes, unconsciously, one catches one's self
murmuring, "O Raphael!"
In conclusion, we must note two great merits in this school--its
variety and its value as an expression, as a mirror, of the country.
If Rembrandt and his followers are excepted, almost all the other
painters are quite different from each other. Perhaps no other school
presents such a number of original masters. The realism of the Dutch
painters arose from their common love for nature, but each of them has
shown in his work a different manifestation of a love all his own;
each has given the individual impression that he has received from
nature. They all set out from the same point--the worship of material
truth, but they each arrived at a different goal. Their realism
impelled them to copy everything, and the consequence is that the
Dutch school has succeeded in representing Holland much more
faithfully than any other school has illustrated any other country.
It has been said that if every other visible testimony to the
existence of Holland in the seventeenth century--its great
century--excepting the work of its artists were to disappear,
everything would be found again in the pictures--the towns, the
country, the ports, the fleets, the markets, the shops, the dress, the
utensils, the arms, the linen, the merchandise, the pottery, the food,
the amusements, the habits, the religion, and the superstitions. The
good and the bad qualities of the nation are all alike represented,
and this, which is a merit in the literature of a country, is no less
a merit in its art.
But there is one great void in Dutch painting, for which the peaceful
and modest character of the people is not a sufficient reason. This
school of painting, which is so essentially national, has, with the
exception of some great naval battles, passed over all of the grand
exploits of the war of independence, among which the sieges of Leyden
and Haarlem would have been sufficient to inspire a legion of artists.
Of this war, almost a century in duration, filled with strange and
terrible events, there is not a single memorable painting. This
school, so varied and so conscientious in reproducing its country and
its life, has not represented one scene of that great tragedy, as
William the Silent prophetically called it, which aroused in the
Hollanders such diverse emotions of fear and grief, rage, joy, and
national pride.
[Illustration: The Steiger, Rotterdam.]
The splendor of Holland's art faded with its political greatness.
Nearly all the great painters were born during the first thirty years
of the seventeenth or during the last years of the sixteenth century;
none of them were living after the first ten years of the eighteenth
century, and no others appeared to take their places. Holland had
exhausted its productiveness. Already toward the end of the
seventeenth century the sentiment of patriotism had commenced to
weaken, taste had become depraved, the painters lost their inspiration
with the decline of the moral energies of the country. In the
eighteenth century the artists, as though surfeited with nature,
returned to mythology, classicism, and conventionality; their
imagination was weakened, their style was impoverished, and every
spark of their former genius was extinguished. Dutch Art showed the
world the marvellous flowers of Van Huysum, the last great lover of
nature, then folded her weary hands and the flowers fell on his tomb.
The present gallery at Rotterdam contains but a small number of
paintings, among which there are very few works of the best artists
and none of the _chefs d'oeuvre_ of the Dutch School. Three hundred
paintings and thirteen hundred drawings were destroyed by fire in
1864, and most of the works that are now there were bequeathed to the
city of Rotterdam by Jacob Otto Boymans. Hence the gallery is a place
to see examples of some particular artist, rather than to study Dutch
painting.
In one of the first rooms are some sketches of naval battles, signed
by William van de Velde, who is considered the greatest marine painter
of his time. He was the son of William the elder, who was also a
marine painter. Both father and son were fortunate enough to live at
the time of the great naval wars between Holland, England, and France,
and were able to see the battles with their own eyes. The States of
Holland placed a frigate at the disposal of Van de Velde the elder;
his son accompanied him. Both made their sketches in the midst of the
battle-smoke, sometimes advancing so far among the fighting ships that
the admirals were obliged to order them to withdraw. The younger Van
de Velde surpassed his father. He painted small pictures--for the most
part a gray sky, a calm sea, and some sails--but so naturally are they
done that when one looks at them one seems to smell the salt air of
the sea, and mistakes the frame for a window. This Van de Velde
belongs to that group of Dutch painters who loved the water with a
sort of madness, and who painted, one may say, on the water. Of these
was Bakhuisen, a marine painter who had a great vogue in his day, whom
Peter the Great chose as his master during his visit to Amsterdam.
This Bakhuisen, it is said, used to risk himself in a small boat in
the midst of a storm at sea that he might be able to observe more
closely the movements of the waves, and he often placed his own life
and the lives of his boatmen in such danger that the men, caring more
for their skins than for his paintings, sometimes took him back to
land against his will. John Griffier did more. He bought a little ship
in London, furnished it like a house, installed his wife and children
in it, and sailed about on his own responsibility in search of
subjects. A storm dashed his vessel to pieces against a sandbank and
destroyed all he possessed; he and his family were saved by a miracle,
and settled in Rotterdam. But he soon grew weary of a life on land,
bought a shattered boat and put to sea again; he nearly lost his life
a second time near Dordrecht, but still continued his voyages.
The Rotterdam gallery affords very few examples of marine paintings,
but landscape painting is worthily represented by two pictures by
Ruysdael, the greatest of the Dutch painters of rural scenes. These
two paintings represent his favorite subjects--leafy, solitary spots,
which, like all his works, inspire a subtle feeling of melancholy. The
great power of this artist is sentiment. He is eminent in the Dutch
school for a gentleness of soul and a singular superiority of
education. It has been most truly said of him that he used landscape
as an expression of his suffering, his weariness, his fancies, and
that he contemplated his country with a bitter sadness, as if it were
a place of torment, and that he created the woods to hide his gloom in
their shade. The soft light of Holland is the image of his soul; none
felt more exquisitely than he its melancholy sweetness, none
represented more feelingly than he, with a ray of languid light, the
smile of a suffering fellow-creature. Because of the exceptional
delicacy of his nature he was not appreciated by his fellow-citizens
until long after his death.
Beside a painting by Ruysdael hangs a picture of flowers by a female
artist, Rachel Ruysch, the wife of a famous portrait-painter, who was
born toward the close of the sixteenth century, and died, brush in
hand, in the eightieth year of her age, after she had shown to her
husband and to the world that a sensible woman can passionately
cultivate the fine arts and yet find time to rear and educate ten
children.
And as I have spoken of the wife of a painter, I simply mention that
it is possible to write an entertaining book on the wives of Dutch
artists, both because of the variety of their adventures and the
important part they play in the history of art. The faces of a number
are known already, because many artists painted their wives'
portraits, as well as their own and those of their children, their
cats, and their hens. Biographers speak of most of them, confirming or
contradicting reports which have been circulated in regard to their
conduct. Some have hazarded the opinion that the larger number of them
were a serious drawback to their husbands. It seems to me there is
something to be said on the other side. As for Rembrandt, it is known
that the happiest part of his life was the time between his first
marriage and the death of his wife, who was the daughter of a
burgomaster of Leeuwarden, and to whom posterity owes a debt of
gratitude. It is also known that Van der Helst at an advanced age
married a beautiful girl, for whom there is nothing but praise, and
posterity should be grateful to her for having brightened the old age
of a great artist. It is true that we cannot speak of all in the same
terms. Of the two wives of Steen, for example, the first was a
featherhead, who allowed the tavern at Delft that he had inherited
from his father to go to ruin; and the second, from all accounts, was
unfaithful. Heemskerk's second wife was so dishonest that her husband
was obliged to go about excusing her peculations. De Hondecoeter's
wife was an eccentric and troublesome woman, who forced her husband to
pass his evenings in a tavern in order to rid himself of her company.
The wife of Berghem was so intolerably avaricious that if she found
him dozing over his brushes she awoke him roughly to make him work and
earn money, and the poor man was obliged to resort to subterfuges to
purchase engravings when he was paid for his pictures. On the other
hand, one could never end reciting the misdeeds of the husbands. The
artist Griffier compelled his wife to travel about the world in a
boat; Veen begged his wife's permission to spend four months in Rome,
and stayed there four years. Karel du Jardin married a rich old woman
to pay his debts, and deserted her when she had paid them. Molyn,
another artist, had his wife assassinated that he might marry a
Genoese. I doubt whether poor Paul Potter, as the story runs, was
betrayed by the wife whom he blindly loved; and who knows whether
Huysum, the great flower-painter, who was consumed by jealousy in the
midst of riches and glory for a wife who was neither young nor
beautiful, had real grounds for his doubts, or whether he was not
induced by the reports of his envious rivals to believe what was
untrue? In conclusion, I must mention with due honor the three wives
of Eglon Van der Neer, who crowned him with twenty-five children--a
family which, however, did not keep him from painting a large number
of pictures in every style, from making several voyages, and from
cultivating tulips.