PETER DE HOOGH AND CUYP
Let us now turn from the splendid gloom of Rembrandt's 'Knight in
Armour,' to delight in this beautiful little interior of a Dutch house
by Peter de Hoogh. Still you see the prepossession for light, but for
more tempered rays and softer shadows. The sunshine is diffused by
the yellow curtains throughout the room. The old lady need not fear
its revelations, to be sure, for it is Holland--she knows that the
whole house has been duly scrubbed with soap and water. Dust and dirt
are banished. It is a cloudless day and dry under foot, otherwise the
little boy would have worn clogs over his shoes, and you might see
them outside. Mud on the polished stones of the passage would have
ruffled the housewife's calm. As it is, we can see she has had no worries
this morning. She has donned her fresh red dress and clean white apron,
and will soon be seated to prepare the vegetables and fruit that are
being brought her. Perhaps they are a present from the old lady in
the house over the way, who from her front door watches the child
delivering the gift.
[Illustration: AN INTERIOR
From the picture by Pieter de Hoogh, in the Wallace Collection, London]
It is a domestic scene that you might witness in any of the old towns
of Holland to this day. The insides and outsides of the houses are
still scrubbed with soap and water; rows of clogs stand outside the
front doors on muddy days; the women wear the same bright coloured
gowns fully gathered round the waist, with the cleanest of white
aprons; their faces are placid and unruffled as they pursue the even
tenour of their way.
This atmosphere of Dutch life, peaceful, home-loving, and competent,
is rendered by Peter de Hoogh in most of his pictures. It is not the
atmosphere of Rembrandt's art, yet he never could have painted thus
except for Rembrandt. The same love of sunlight and shadows prevailed
with Peter de Hoogh, and it was no less the aim of his art to attain
mastery over the painting of light, but light diffused and reflected.
He loved to show the sunlight shining through some coloured substance,
such as this yellow curtain, which scatters its brightness and lets
it fall more evenly throughout the room. He never painted such extreme
contrasts as make manifest Rembrandt's power. Rembrandt's light had
been so vivid that it seemed to overwhelm colours in a dazzling
brilliancy. Peter de Hoogh's lights are just strong enough to reveal
the colours in a milder illumination. In our picture the sunshine
diffused by the yellow curtains mingles with the red of the woman's
dress and creates a rich orange. Little does she know how well her
dress looks. But it was only after incessant study of the way in which
Rembrandt had mastered the whole range from light to dark, that Peter
de Hoogh became able to paint as he did within his narrower scale,
abridged at both extremes.
Begin with the room, then the passage, then the farther hall, then
the highway open to the unseen sky above, then the house-front beyond
it, and the hall beyond the lady in the neighbouring doorway; there
are at least four distinct distances in this picture each differently
lighted, and the several effects worked out with scrupulous
painstaking fidelity. It is worth your while, with your own eyes rather
than with many words of mine, to search out on the original all these
beautifully varied gradations. In many of his pictures one part is
lighted from the sunlit street, and another from a closed court.
Sometimes his figures stand in an open courtyard, whilst behind is
a paved passage leading into the house. All his subjects are of the
domestic Dutch life of the seventeenth century, but the arrangement
in rooms, passages, courtyards, and enclosed gardens admitted of much
variation. We never feel that the range of subjects is limited, for
the light transforms each into a scene of that poetic beauty which
it was Peter de Hoogh's great gift to discern, enjoy, and record.
The painting is delicate and finished, meant to be seen from near at
hand. It is always the room that interests him, as much as the people
in it. The painting of the window with its little coats of arms,
transparent yet diffusing the light, is exquisitely done. A chair with
the cushion upon it, just like that, occurs again and again in his
pictures, the cushion being used as a welcome bit of colour in the
scheme. Most of all, the floors, whether paved with stone as in this
picture, or with brick as in the courtyards, are painted with the
delightful precise care that the Van Eycks gave to their accessories.
In Peter de Hoogh's vision of the world there is the same appreciation
of the objects of daily use as was displayed by the fifteenth-century
Flemish painters whenever their sacred subjects gave them opportunity.
In the seventeenth century it was more congenial to the Flemish and
Dutch temperament to paint their own country, and domestic scenes from
their own lives, than pictures of devotion.
Other artists besides Peter de Hoogh painted people in their own houses.
In the pictures of Terborch ladies in satin dresses play the spinet
and the guitar. Jan Steen depicted peasants revelling on their holidays
or in taverns. Peter de Hoogh was the painter of middle-class life,
and discovered in its circumstances, likewise, abounding romance.
The Dutchman of the seventeenth century loved his house and his garden,
and every inch of the country in which he lived, rescued as it had
been from invasions by armies and the sea. Many painters never left
Holland, and found beauty enough there to fill well-spent lives in
painting its flatness beneath over-arching clear or clouded skies.
Although the earlier Flemings had had a great love of landscape, they
had not conceived it as a subject suitable for a whole picture, but
only for a background. In the sixteenth century the figures gradually
get smaller and less important, and towards the end of the century
disappear. As the song says, 'a very different thing by far' is painting
a landscape background and painting a whole landscape picture. Before
the end of the century Rubens painted some wonderful landscapes, and
he was soon followed by a great number of very fine landscape painters
in Holland. Cuyp was one of many.
In a Dutch landscape we cannot expect the rich colouring of Italy.
The colouring of Holland is low toned, and tender gradations lead away
to the low and level horizon. The canals are sluggish and grey, and
the clouds often heavy and dark. We saw how the brilliant skies and
pearly buildings of Venice made Venetian painters the gayest
colourists of the world. So the Dutch painters took their sober scale
of landscape colouring as it was dictated to them by the infinitely
varied yet sombre loveliness of their own land. In the great flat
expanses of field, intersected by canals and dotted with windmills,
the red brick roof of a water-mill may look 'loud,' like an aggressive
hat. But the shadows cast by the clouds change every moment, and in
flat country where there is less to arrest the eye the changes of tone
are more marked.
In an etching, Rembrandt could leave a piece of white paper for the
spot of highest sunlight, and carry out all the gradations of tone
in black and white, until he reached the spot of darkest shadow. A
painted landscape he indicated in the same way by varying shades of
dull brown. In all of them you seem to feel the interposition of the
air between you and the distant horizon at which you are looking. What
else is there? At each point in the picture the air modifies the
distinctness with which you can see the objects. This consciousness
of air in a picture of low horizon is a very difficult thing to describe
and explain. We know when it is there and when it is not. It has to
be seen, to be enjoyed, and recorded. Holbein painted Edward VI.
standing, so to speak, in a vacuum. Every line of his face is sharply
defined. In real life air softens all lines, so that even the edge
of a nose in profile is not actually seen as a sharp outline. The figures
in Richard II.'s picture stand in the most exhausted vacuum, but Hubert
van Eyck had already begun to render the vision or illusion of air
in his 'Three Maries.' In this respect he had learnt more than the
early painters of the Italian Renaissance; but Raphael and the
Venetians, especially Giorgione and Titian, sometimes bathed their
figures in a luminous golden atmosphere with the sun shining through
it.
The Dutch painters carried this still further, particularly in their
pictures of interiors and landscapes. It is the atmosphere in the rooms
that makes Peter de Hoogh's portrayal of interiors so wonderful. In
our little picture the light coming through the window makes the air
almost golden. When this painting of air and tone is set forth by the
exquisite colour of Peter de Hoogh, you see this kind of Dutch
achievement at its best. Cuyp's love of sunshine is rare among Dutch
landscape painters. He suffuses his skies with a golden haze that
bathes his kin and kine alike in evening light. In our picture you
can feel the great height of the sky and the depth of the air between
the foreground and the horizon. The rendering of space is excellent.
But Cuyp has not been content with the features of his native Holland.
He has put an imaginary mountain in the distance and a great hill in
the foreground. It is certainly not a view that Cuyp ever saw in Holland
with his own eyes. He thought that the mountain's upright lines were
good to break the flatness; and the finished composition, if beautiful,
is its own excuse for being.
[Illustration: LANDSCAPE WITH CATTLE
From the picture by Cuyp, in the Dulwich Gallery]
Rembrandt is an exception to all rules, but most of the Dutch painters
did not allow themselves these excursions within their studios to
foreign scenes. They faithfully depicted their own flat country as
they saw it, and added neither hills nor mountains. But they varied
the lighting to express their own moods. Ruysdael's sombre tone befits
the man who struggled with poverty all his life, and died in a hospital
penniless. Cuyp is always sunny. In his pictures, cattle browse at
their ease, and shepherds lounge contented on the grass. He was a
painter of portraits and of figure subjects as well as of landscapes,
and his little groups of men and cattle are always beautifully drawn.
Ruysdael, Hobbema, and many others were landscape painters only, and
some had their figures put in by other artists. Often they did without
them, but in the landscapes of Cuyp, cows generally occupy the
prominent position. The black and white cow in our picture is a fine
creature, and nothing could be more harmonious in colour than the brown
cow and the brown jacket of the herdsman.
There were some painters in Holland in the seventeenth century who
made animals their chief study. Theretofore it had been rare to
introduce them into pictures, except as symbols, like the lion of St.
Jerome, or where the story implied them; or in allegorical pictures,
such as the 'Golden Age.' But at this later time animals had their
share in the increased interest that was taken in the things of daily
life, and they were painted for their handsome sakes, as Landseer
painted them in England fifty years ago.
Thus the seventeenth century in Holland shows an enlargement in the
scope of subjects for painting. Devotional pictures were becoming rare,
but illustrations, sacred and secular, portraits, groups, interiors,
and landscapes, were produced in great numbers. Dutch painters
outnumbered those of Flanders, but among the latter were at least two
of the highest eminence, Rubens and Van Dyck, and to these we will
next direct our attention.