RUBENS, 1577-1640--REMBRANDT, 1606 OR 1608-1669--TENIERS, FATHER AND
SON, 1582-1694--WOUVERMAN, 1620-1668--CUYP, 1605; STILL LIVING,
1638--PAUL POTTER, 1625-1654--CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630.
A long interval elapsed between the Van Eycks and Quintin Matsys, and
Rubens; but if Flemish art was slow of growth and was only developed
after long pauses, it made up for its slowness and delays by the burst
of triumph into which Flemish and Dutch art broke forth in Rubens and
his school, in Rembrandt and Cuyp and Ruysdael.
Peter Paul Rubens was born at Siegen in Westphalia, on the day of St
Peter and St Paul, 1577. But though Rubens was born out of Antwerp, he
was a citizen of Antwerp by descent as well as by so many later
associations. His father, John Rubens, a lawyer, an imprudent,
thriftless man in character and habits, had been compelled to leave
Antwerp in consequence of religious disturbances which broke out there
about the time that the northern provinces, more at one and more decided
in their union than the southern provinces, established their
independence. Rubens spent his early boyhood at Cologne, but on the
death of his father when he was ten years of age, his mother, a good and
'discreet' woman, to whom the painter owed much, and confessed his debt,
returned with her family to Antwerp. His mother had destined him for his
father's profession, but did not oppose her son's preference for art.
After studying under two different artists, and becoming a master in the
guild of St Luke, Rubens went to Italy in 1600, when he was a young man
of three-and-twenty years of age. He was eight years absent, entering
the service of the ducal sovereign of Mantua, being sent by him on a
diplomatic mission to Madrid to Philip III, of Spain, visiting on his
own account Rome, where he found the Carracci and Guido[22] at the
height of their fame, Venice and Genoa, 'leaving portraits where he
went.'
With Genoa, its architecture, and its situation, Rubens was specially
charmed, but he quitted it in haste, being summoned home to attend the
death-bed of his mother, from whom he had parted eight years before; and
arriving too late to see her in life. A man of strong feelings in sorrow
as in joy, he withdrew into retirement, and resided for his season of
mourning in a religious house.
Loving Italy with a painter's enthusiasm, so that to the latest day of
his life he generally wrote in Italian, and loved to sign his name
'Pietro Paolo Rubens,' he had intended to return and settle in Mantua,
but having been named court painter to the Governess of the Netherlands,
Clara Eugenia, and her husband Albert, Rubens had sufficient patriotism
and sufficient worldly foresight to induce him to relinquish his idea,
and establish himself in his native Antwerp. He was already a man of
eminence in his profession, and a man of mark out of it. Go where he
would he made friends, and he so recommended himself to his royal
patrons by his natural suavity, tact, and sagacity, that he was not only
in the utmost favour with them as a right courtly painter, but was
employed by them, once and again, on delicate, difficult, private
embassies. But it was not only to his patrons that Rubens was endeared,
he was emphatically what men call 'a good fellow,' alike to superiors,
equals, and inferiors; a frank, honest, bountiful, and generous man. His
love of courts and their splendour was the chivalrous homage which a man
of his cast of mind paid to the dignity and picturesqueness of high
estate.
He married a year after his mother's death, when he was in his
thirty-third year. His first wife, Isabella Brant, was a connection of
his own (and so was his second wife). He built and painted, in fresco, a
fine house in Antwerp, and laid out a pleasant garden, which contained a
rotunda, filled with his collection of pictures by the Italian masters,
antique gems, etc. etc., already gathered abroad. He set himself to keep
house in a liberal fashion, to dispense benefits, and to entertain
friends--above all, to paint with might and main in company with his
great school, the members of which, like those of Raphael's school where
Raphael was concerned, were, for the most part, Rubens' devoted
comrades. Counting his work not only as the great object, but the great
zest of his life, never did painter receive such sweeping and
accumulating commissions, and never, even by Tintoret, were commissions
executed with such undaunted, unhesitating expedition.
Withal Rubens frequently left his studio and went abroad, either to act
as an unofficial ambassador, or to paint at the special request of some
foreign sovereign. Thus he was residing in Paris in 1620, planning for
Marie de Medici the series of remarkable pictures which commemorated her
marriage with Henry IV. (When I was a little girl, I went occasionally
to a country house, the show place of the neighbourhood, where there
were copies of this series of Rubens' pictures. I can remember yet
looking at them with utter bewilderment, caused by the dubious taste
that impelled Rubens to indulge in the oddest mixture of royal
personages, high church dignitaries, patron saints, and gods and
goddesses.) In 1628 Rubens was in Spain on a mission from his sovereign
to her kinsman, Philip IV.; in the following year he was in England, on
a service of a similar description to Charles I., from whom, even as
Rubens had already received it from King Philip, the painter had the
honour of knighthood.
In the mean time Rubens' first wife died, after a union of seventeen
years, in 1626; and four years later, in 1630, the painter, when he was
a man of fifty years, re-married another connection of his own, Helena
Fourment, a girl only in her sixteenth year. Both of his wives were
handsome, fair, full-formed Flemish beauties. Elizabeth (in Spanish,
Isabella) Brant's beauty was of a finer order than that of her
successor, expressing larger capacity of affection and intellect. But on
Helena Fourment Rubens doted, while to both women he seems to have been
affectionately attached. He has painted them so often, that the face of
no painter's wife is so familiar to the art world, and even to the
greater world without, as are the faces of these two women, and above
all, that of Helena Fourment. He had seven children, who frequently
figure in their mothers' portraits. He has left notable portraits of his
two sons by his first wife, of his eldest daughter, Clara Eugenia, when
eight years of age, and of his daughter Elizabeth, a buxom baby, dressed
in velvet and point lace, playing with toys.
After a life of unbroken success and the highest honours, the last
distinction conferred on Rubens was, that he was chosen to arrange the
gala, and to be the right-hand man who should conduct the Cardinal
Infant, the successor of Clara Eugenia, on his first entrance into
Antwerp. But the hand of premature disease and death, which not even he
could resist, was already on the great painter; his constitution had
been undermined by repeated attacks of gout, and he died at the age of
sixty years, in 1640. He was the possessor of great wealth at the time
of his death, and only a part of his collection, which was then sold,
brought so large a sum in those days, as twenty thousand pounds. Rubens'
second wife, Helena Fourment, to whom he had been married ten years,
survived him, a widow at twenty-six years of age Rubens' portrait is
even better known than those of his wives, for, as I have said of
Raphael in his popularity, Rubens in his life is the beau-ideal of a
painter to the many. The portrait is worthy of the man, with something
gallant in the manliness, and with thought tempering what might have
been too much of bravado and too much of débonnaireté in the traits. His
features are handsome in their Flemish fulness, and match well with
hazel eyes, chestnut hair, and a ruddy complexion; his long moustache is
turned up, and he wears the pointed beard which we see so often in the
portraits by Rubens' scholar, Van Dyck. The great flapping hat, worn
alike by men and women, slightly cocked to one side, is the perfection
of picturesque head gear. Equally picturesque, and not in the slightest
degree effeminate on a man like Rubens, is the falling collar of pointed
mechlin, just seen above the cloak draped in large folds.
In his own day Rubens was without a rival as a painter. In a much later
day Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced Rubens 'perhaps the greatest master
in the mechanical part of the art, _the best workman with his tools_
that ever exercised a pencil.' His consummate excellence lay in his
execution and colouring. It is brought as a reproach against his
painting, that his noblest characters, even his sacred characters, were
but big, brawny, red and white Flemings. His imagination only reached a
certain height, and yet, if it were a very earthly Flemish imagination,
it could be grandly, as it was always vigorously, earthly and Flemish.
At the same time he could be deficient where proportion, and even where
all the laws of art, are concerned.
It is right that I should, with regret and shame, say this of Rubens,
whose geniality bordered on joviality, and whose age was a grosser age
than our own, that he debased his genius by some foul and revolting
pictures.
Of the general distinction between Rubens and some of his predecessors I
should like to quote Mr Ruskin's passage in his defence:
'A man long trained to love the monk's vision of Fra Angelico,
turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of
Rubens, which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But
is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten that, while
Angelico prayed and wept in his _olive shade_, there was
different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders:--wild seas
to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless
marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the
frosty clay; careful breeding of the stout horses and cattle;
close setting of brick-walls against cold winds and snow; much
hardening of hands, and gross stoutening of bodies in all this;
gross jovialities of harvest homes, and Christmas feasts, which
were to be the reward of it; rough affections, and sluggish
imaginations; fleshy, substantial, iron-shod humanities, but
humanities still,--humanities which God had his eye upon, and
which won perhaps, here and there, as much favour in His sight
as the wasted aspects of the whispering monks of Florence
(Heaven forbid that it should not be so, since the most of us
cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen and reapers still). And
are we to suppose there is no nobility in Rubens' masculine and
universal sympathy with all this, and with his large human
rendering of it, gentleman though he was by birth, and feeling,
and education, and place, and, when he chose, lordly in
conception also? He had his faults--perhaps great and lamentable
faults,--though more those of his time and his country than his
own; he has neither cloister-breeding nor boudoir-breeding, and
is very unfit to paint either in missals or annuals; but he has
an open sky and wide-world breeding in him that we may not be
offended with, fit alike for king's court, knight's camp, or
peasants cottage.'
Rubens' works are very many, nearly four thousand pictures and sketches
being attributed to him and his scholars. Many are still at Antwerp,
many at Madrid, but most are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and
cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at
Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as the great Duchess of
Marlborough would give any price for his works. I can only indicate a
very few examples in the different branches of art which he made his
own.
First, of his 'Descent from the Cross:' it is a single large group,
distinguished by luminous colouring and correct drawing, and with regard
to which the mass of white sheet against which the body of Christ is in
relief in the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An
enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the
daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for
composition, drawing, and colouring.' Its defects are held to be 'the
bustle of the incidents and the dreadfully true delineation of merely
physical agony--too terrible, real, picturesque, but not sublime--- an
earthly tragedy, not a divine mystery.'
'Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;
Close those wan lips! let that thorn-wounded brow
Stream not with blood.'
There is a tradition that an accident happened to the picture while
Rubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by
re-painting the cheek and chin of the Virgin and the arm of the
Magdalene.
With regard to another picture of Rubens at Antwerp, 'The Assumption of
the Virgin,' it is said that he painted it in sixteen days, for sixteen
hundred florins, his usual terms being a hundred florins a-day.
'The Virgin and Serpent' (from the 12th chapter of Revelation) in the
Munich gallery is very splendid. The Virgin with the new-born Saviour in
her arms is mounting on the wings of an eagle, surrounded by a flood of
light. The serpent, encircling the moon on which she stands, is writhing
beneath her feet. God the Father is extending his protecting sceptre
over her from above. The archangel, clothed in armour, is in fearful
combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the
child. Although struck by lightning, the dragon is striving to twist his
tail round the legs of the angel, and seizes the cloak of the Virgin
with one of his hands. Other infernal monsters are writhing with
impotent rage, and falling with the dragon into the abyss.'
'Nothing was more characteristic of Rubens than his choice of subjects
from the mythology of the Greeks and the works of the ancient poets; and
in nothing did he display more freedom, originality, and poetry.' Among
his most famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons,'
now at Munich. 'The women are driven back by the Greeks over the river
Thermodon; two horses are in savage combat on the bridge; one Amazon is
torn from her horse; a second is dragged along by a sable steed, and
falling headlong into the river, where others are swimming and
struggling. No other battle-piece, save that of the Amazons, can compare
with Raphael's "Battle of Constantine."'
Another great picture is The 'Carrying off of Proserpine.' 'Pluto in his
car is driven by fiery brown steeds, and is bearing away the goddess,
resisting and struggling. The picture absolutely glows with genial fire.
The forms in it are more slender than is general with Rubens. Among the
companions of Proserpine the figure of Diana is conspicuous for grace
and beauty. The victorious god of love hovers before the chariot, and
the blue ocean, warmly tinted with the sunbeams, forms a splendid
back-ground.'[23]
Rubens was famous for the loveliness and grace of his paintings of
children. Perhaps the most beautiful is that of 'The Infant Jesus and
John playing with a Lamb.'
Rubens was a great animal painter. One of his celebrated animal pictures
is 'Daniel in the Lions' Den,' now at Hamilton Palace, in which each
lion is a king of beasts checked in his fiercest have been painted by
Rubens in a fit of pique at a false report which had been circulated
that he could not paint animals, and that those in his pictures were
supplied by the animal-painter, his friend and scholar, Schneyders.
Rubens' landscapes are not the least renowned of his pictures. He gave
to his own rich but prosaic Flanders, all the breadth and breeziness and
matchless aerial effects of a master of painting, and a true lover of
nature under every aspect, who can indeed distinguish, under the most
ordinary aspect, those hidden treasures which all but a lover and a man
of genius would pass by. His 'Prairie of Laacken,' 'with the sun of
Flanders piercing the dense yellow clouds with the force of fire,' is of
great repute.
Among his famous portraits I shall mention that called 'The Four
Philosophers' (Justus Lepsius, Hugo Grotius, Rubens, and his brother),
with peaked beards and moustaches, in turned-over collars, ruffs and
fur-trimmed robes, having books and pens, a dog, and a classic bust as
accessories. The open pillared door is wreathed with a spray from
without, and there is a landscape in the background. This portrait is
full of power, freedom, and splendid painting.
Another portrait contains that sweetest of Rubens' not often sweet
faces, called 'the Lady in the Straw Hat.' Rubens himself did not name
the picture otherwise in his catalogue. Tradition says the original was
Mdlle Lundens, the beauty of the seventeen provinces, and that she died
young and unmarried. Connoisseurs value the picture because of the
triumph of skill by which Rubens has painted brilliantly a face so much
in the shade; to those who are not connoisseurs I imagine the picture
must speak for itself, in its graceful, tender beauty. Forming part of
the collection of the late Sir Robert Peel (I think he gave three
thousand pounds for 'the Lady in the Straw Hat'), which has been bought
for the country, this beautiful portrait is now in the National Gallery.
And now I must speak of the picture of the Arundel Family. But first, a
word about Thomas, Earl of Arundel. It is impossible to write an English
work on art and omit a brief account of one of England's greatest art
benefactors. Thomas, Earl of Arundel, representing in his day the great
house of Howard, had a love of art which approached to a mania; and
without being so outrageously vain as Sir Kenelm Digby, there is no
doubt that the Earl counted on his art collection as a source of
personal distinction. James I., himself an art collector, so far
humoured the Earl in his taste as to present him with Lord Somerset's
forfeited collection, valued at a thousand pounds. But Charles I, and
the Earl became rival collectors, and little love was lost between them.
The Earl of Arundel impairing even his great revenues in the pursuit,
employed agents and ambassadors--notably Petty and Evelyn--all over
Europe, to obtain for him drawings, pictures, ancient marbles, gems,
etc., etc. When the civil wars broke out, Lord Arundel conveyed his
priceless collection for safety to Antwerp and Padua. Eventually it was
divided among his sons and scattered far and wide. The only portion of
it which fell to the nation, in the course of another generation, was
the Greek Marbles, known as the Arundel Marbles, which were finally
presented to the University of Oxford. But in Rubens' day all this grand
collection was intact, and displayed in galleries at Arundel House,
which the mob thought fit to nickname 'Tart Hall;' and through these
galleries Rubens was conducted by the Earl.
Lord Arundel desired to have an Arundel family portrait painted for him
by Rubens. The Earl was rather given to having Arundel family portraits,
for there are no less than three in which he figures. One by Van Somer,
in which the hero is pointing somewhat comically with his truncheon to
the statues of his collection in the background, and the last one
projected by Van Dyck, but executed by an inferior artist, in which
various family pieces of armour, swords, and shields, worn at Flodden,
or belonging to the poet Earl of Surrey, are introduced in the hands of
the sons of the family.
But it is with Rubens' 'Arundel Family,' which, we must remember, ranks
second in English family pictures, that we have to do. Thomas, Earl of
Arundel, and the Lady Alathea,[24] are under a portico with twisted
columns, like those in Raphael's cartoons; a rich curtain, and a
landscape with a large mansion are seen beyond. The Countess is seated
in a chair of state, with one hand on the head of a white greyhound; she
wears a black satin gown, laced ruff, gold bracelets, and pearl
necklace. Her hair is light, and decked with pearls and plumes. The Earl
stands behind with a hand on her chair. His head is uncovered, the short
hair inclining to grey; the whiskers and beard pointed. His vest is
olive-coloured, and he has a brown mantle lined with crimson over the
shoulders beneath his ruff. There is a little boy--Earl Thomas's
grandson, Philip Howard, afterwards Cardinal Howard, in crimson velvet,
trimmed with gold lace, and a dwarf on the other side of the dog, with
one hand on its back.
Among other masterpieces of Rubens, including the 'Straw Hat,' which
are in the National Gallery, there are the 'Rape of the Sabines,' and
the landscape 'Autumn,' which has a view of his country château, de
Stein, near Mechlin. In Dulwich Gallery there is an interesting portrait
by Rubens of an elderly lady in a great Spanish ruff, which is believed
to be the portrait of his mother.
Rembrandt Van Rhyn is said to have been born near Leyden about 1606 or
1608, for there is a doubt as to the exact date. His father was a miller
or maltster, and there is a theory that Rembrandt acquired some of his
effects of light and shade from the impressions made upon him during his
life in the mill. He was a pupil at the Latin school of Leyden, and a
scholar in studios both at Leyden and Amsterdam.
In 1630, when Rembrandt was a mere lad, he seems to have settled in
Amsterdam, and married there in 1634, when he was six or eight and
twenty years of age, a young Dutchwoman possessed of a considerable
fortune, which, in case of her death and of Rembrandt's re-marriage, was
to pass to her children, a provision that in the end wrought Rembrandt's
ruin. The troubles of his country in the painter's time rendered his
prices comparatively small and precarious, and Rembrandt, like Rubens,
without Rubens' wealth, was eager in making an art collection and
surrounding himself with those very forms of beauty in the great Italian
masters' works, in the appreciation of which the Dutch master--judged by
his own works--might have been reckoned deficient.
Rembrandt's wife died after eight years of marriage, and left him with
one surviving son, Titus, and Rembrandt, having re-married, was called
upon to give up the lad's inheritance. This call, together with the
expenditure of the sums which Rembrandt had lavished on his collection,
was too heavy upon funds never very ample, and the painter, after
struggling with his difficulties, became a bankrupt in 1656. His son
took possession of Rembrandt's house, and from the sale of the
painter's art collection and other resources eventually recovered his
mother's fortune, but Rembrandt himself never rose above the misery,
degradation, and poverty of this period. He lived thirteen years longer,
but it was in obscurity--out of which the only records which reach us,
are stories of miserly habits acquired too late to serve their purpose,
a desperate resort to low company dating from his first wife's death,
and his gradual downfall.
Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of
light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.
It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I
add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt
painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and
stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows
are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded
by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double
chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. He has two rows of a
chain across his doublet, and one hand thrust beneath the cloak hanging
across his breast.
Rembrandt's great merits were his strong truthfulness, and his almost
equally powerful sense of a peculiar kind of picturesqueness. It seems
as if the German weirdness perceptible in Albrecht Dürer had in
Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective
Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark
days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight
in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at
Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by
fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat
grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of
the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is
this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good
painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather
under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness
of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in
that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and
alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise
prosaic, coarse, and sometimes vulgar Dutch men and women, that we have
coined a new word to express the charm, and speak of groups and
incidents being _Rembrandtesque_, as we speak of their being
picturesque.
Rembrandt did not always leave the vague thrill of doubt, terror, or
even horror, which he sought to produce, to imagination working in the
mysterious depths of his shadows. A very famous picture of his is 'Dr
Deeman (an anatomist) demonstrating from a dead subject.' In another
picture a man stealing from the gloom is in the act of stabbing in the
back the unconscious man in the foreground.[25] Rembrandt's originality
is as undoubted as his ability, and he was as great in etching as in
painting. His defect as a painter was the frequent absence of any
evidence in his work of a sense of refinement, grace, or even beauty;
this can be said of him who spent means not his own on gathering
together images of beauty and grace produced by the pencils and brushes
of others. Many of Rembrandt's pictures are in the galleries of
Amsterdam and the Hague, and we have many in London. The National
Gallery has several examples, including two of Rembrandt's portraits.
Passing over Van Dyck, whom I reserve, as I have reserved Holbein, to
class among the foreign painters resident in or closely connected with
England, I come to the Teniers--father and son. David the elder was born
at Antwerp in 1582, and David the younger also at Antwerp, in 1610.
David the younger is decidedly the more eminent painter, though the
works of the father are often mistaken for those of the son. The two
Teniers' class of subjects was the same, being ordinarily 'fairs,
markets, peasants' merry-makings, beer-houses, guard rooms.'
David the younger had great popularity, was court painter to the
Archduke of Austria, and earned such an independence, that he bought for
himself a château at the village of Perck, not very far from the Château
de Stein of Rubens, with whom David Teniers was on terms of friendly
intimacy. There Teniers, like his great associate, lived in the utmost
state and bounty, entertaining the noblest of the land. David Teniers
married twice, his first wife being the daughter of one of a family of
Flemish painters, who were known, according to their respective
proclivities in art, by the names of Peasant Breughel, Velvet Breughel,
and Hell Breughel. Teniers had many children.
The elder Teniers died at Antwerp in 1649; the younger died at Brussels,
and was buried at Perck, in 1694.
The distinction of the Teniers was the extreme fidelity and cleverness
with which they copied (but did not explain) the life they knew--the
homeliest, humblest aspect of life. They brought out with marvellous
accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of
poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even
coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who
ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the
Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to
those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking
that underlying strain of life, the mere rugged genuineness of the
Teniers' work recommends itself, and is not without its own pathos;
while to very many superficial observers the simple homeliness of the
life which the Teniers chose to represent, prevents the observers from
missing what should be present in every life. Men and women are only
conscious of the defect when the painters wander, now and then, into
higher spheres and into sacred subjects, and there is the unavoidable
recoil from gross blindness. I have taken the Teniers as the
representatives of a numerous school of Flemish and Dutch artists, whose
works abound in this country. David Teniers the younger appears at his
best, several times, in Dulwich Gallery and the National Gallery.
Philip Wouverman was born at Haarlem in 1620. He was the son of a
painter, able, but unrecognized in his own day. Philip Wouverman found
few patrons, disposed of his pictures by hard bargains to dealers, was
tempted by his want of success to abjure his art, and even went so far,
according to tradition, as to burn his studies and sketches, in order to
prevent his son pursuing the career which had been to him a career of
bitter disappointment. He died at Haarlem, 1668, when he was no more
than forty-eight years of age. Yet some nine hundred paintings bear
(many of them falsely) Wouverman's name.
With all the truth and excellent execution of his contemporaries and
countrymen', Philip Wouverman, who had, as he thought, missed his mark,
had something which those successful men lacked--he had not only a
feeling for grace, but a touch of sentiment. His scenes are commonly
'road-side inns, hunts, fights;' but along with an inclination to adopt
a higher class of actors--knights and ladies, instead of peasants--there
is a more refined treatment and a dash of tenderness and melancholy--the
last possibly born of his own disastrous fortunes. In his love of horses
and dogs, as adjuncts to his groups, he had as great a fondness for a
special white horse, as Paul Potter had for black and white cattle.
Albert Cuyp was born at Dort in 1605. He was a brewer by trade, and only
painted as an amateur. In spite of this, he was a great landscape
painter, and has given delight to thousands by his power of expressing
his own love of nature. Little is known of Cuyp's life, and the date of
his death is uncertain, farther than it was later than 1638.
In affected enthusiasm, Cuyp has been called the Dutch Claude, but in
reality, Cuyp surpassed, Claude in some respects. The distinction, which
Mr Ruskin draws between them, is that, while Claude, in the sense of
beauty, is the superior to Cuyp, in the sense of truth Claude is the
inferior. Besides Cuyp's landscapes, he painted portraits, and what is
called 'still life' (dead game, fruit or flower pieces, etc.), but Cuyp's
triumph was found in his skies, with their 'clearness and coolness,' and
in 'expressions of yellow sunlight.' Mr Ruskin admits, while he is
proceeding to censure Cuyp, parts might be chosen out of the good
pictures of Cuyp which have never been equalled in art.' On another
occasion, Mr Ruskin has this passage full of dry humour in reference to
Cuyp:
'Again, look at the large Cuyp in Dulwich Gallery, which Mr Hazlitt
considers "finest in the world," and of which he very complimentarily
says, "the tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple
light of the hills" have an effect ought to have apologized before now
for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with
terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to
observe, the other day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet
more gratifying information that he was "juicy;" and it is now happily
discovered that Cuyp is "downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this
first-rate Cuyp is very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say
about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky. We may see for
ourselves Cuyp's lovely landscapes both in the National Gallery and at
Dulwich.
Paul Potter was born at Enkhuysen, in North Holland, in 1625, and was
the son of a painter. Paul Potter settled, while still very young, at
the Hague as an animal painter, and died in his thirtieth year, in 1654.
His career, which was thus brief, had promised to be very successful,
and he had established his fame, while no more than twenty-two years of
age, by painting for Prince Maurice of Nassau that which continues his
most renowned, though probably not his best picture, his 'Young Bull,'
for some time in the Louvre, now restored to the painter's native
country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is
considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse,
representation of animal life in the main figure; but Paul Potter's
later pictures, especially his smaller pictures of pastures with cattle
feeding, having fine colouring and fine treatment of light, are now
regarded as equally good in their essential excellences, and of wider
scope. Paul Potter etched as well as painted. There is no example of
Paul Potter in the National Gallery.
Jan David de Heem[26] and his son Cornelius, the father born in 1603,
the son in 1630, and Maria Von Oesterwyck, the elder man's pupil, were
eminent Flemish and Dutch flower and fruit painters. The gorgeous bloom
and mellow ripeness in some of the flower and fruit pieces of Flemish
and Dutch painters, like those I have mentioned, are beyond description.
I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well
represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how,
as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they
are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted
and less lavishly-blossoming English flowers; so these Flemish and Dutch
full blown flower pieces have not a trace of the sentiment which modern
flower painters cannot help seeking, with good result or bad result, to
introduce into every tuft of primroses or of violets, if not into every
cluster of grapes and bunch of cherries.
From a fact which I have already mentioned, that so many Flemish and
Dutch pictures, which we may often come across, are in England, I am
sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to
other famous painters of these schools or school, for they merge into
one, to Snyders, Jan Steen, Gerard Dow, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde,
etc., etc.