Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
THE STORY
OF DUTCH PAINTING
[Illustration: MAN WITH A FUR CAP REMBRANDT
THE MUSEUM OF THE HERMITAGE, ST. PETERSBURG]
THE STORY OF
DUTCH PAINTING
BY
CHARLES H. CAFFIN
AUTHOR OF
“HOW TO STUDY PICTURES,” ETC.
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1911
Copyright, 1909, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published November, 1909_
THE DE VINNE PRESS
TO THE PRESENT AND FUTURE ART
OF THE NEW REPUBLIC OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THIS STORY OF THE ART OF THE OLD DUTCH REPUBLIC
IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER, 1909
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE END OF THE OLD 3
II THE OLD ORDER CHANGES 19
III BEGINNING OF THE NEW 35
IV FRANS HALS 49
V REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN 71
VI THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT 96
VII DUTCH GENRE 107
VIII GERARD TERBORCH, JAN VERMEER, AND JAN STEEN 127
IX BIBLICAL SUBJECTS AND PORTRAITURE 150
X LANDSCAPE 169
XI VAN GOYEN AND HOBBEMA 187
XII JACOB VAN RUISDAEL 193
INDEX 201
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MAN WITH A FUR CAP _Rembrandt_ _Frontispiece_
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Cie.
FACING PAGE
COUPLE DRINKING _Jan Steen_ 21
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST _Gerard Terborch_ 28
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
LANDSCAPE WITH FENCE _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 37
LANDSCAPE WITH OAK _Jan van Goyen_ 44
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
THE JOLLY TOPER _Frans Hals_ 54
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF NICOLAES VAN DER MEER _Frans Hals_ 59
REUNION OF THE OFFICERS OF ST.
ANDREW _Frans Hals_ 67
THE SYNDICS OF THE CLOTH GUILD _Rembrandt_ 78
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
SORTIE OF THE BANNING COCK COMPANY _Rembrandt_ 81
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH BAS _Rembrandt_ 87
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
PORTRAIT OF HENDRICKJE STOFFELS _Rembrandt_ 90
THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS _Rembrandt_ 96
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Cie.
PEASANTS ROUND A HEARTH _Adriaen van Ostade_ 110
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
OLD WOMAN SPINNING _Nicolaes Maes_ 114
OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATION _Gabriel Metsu_ 116
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
LADY AT THE CLAVICHORD _Caspar Netscher_ 125
THE DESPATCH _Gerard Terborch_ 127
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
OFFICER WRITING A LETTER _Gerard Terborch_ 129
GIRL AT THE WINDOW _Johannes (Jan) Vermeer_ 132
HEAD OF A GIRL _Johannes (Jan) Vermeer_ 135
THE COOK _Johannes (Jan) Vermeer_ 138
THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO _Johannes (Jan) Vermeer_ 141
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
THE INN _Jan Steen_ 144
PORTRAIT OF PAUL POTTER _Bartholomeus van der Helst_ 163
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
FAMILY OF ADMIRAL PIETER PIETERSZ _Thomas de Keyser_ 166
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
THE YOUNG BULL _Paul Potter_ 179
THE AVENUE, MIDDELHARNIS, HOLLAND _Meindert Hobbema_ 190
VIEW OF HAARLEM _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 193
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
OAK-WOOD _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 194
THE MILL NEAR WYK-BY-DUURSTEDE _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 199
From a photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl.
THE JEWISH CEMETERY _Jacob van Ruisdael_ 200
THE STORY OF DUTCH PAINTING
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE OLD
On the 25th of October, 1555, Charles V abdicated the imperial crown,
ceding Spain and the Netherlands to his favorite son, Philip II. The
event proved to be the prologue of a drama, which in its immediate
aspects involved the decay of Spain and the growth of Holland, but in
its wider significance was to be the beginning of a new era.
For the modern world dates from the seventeenth century, and its
pioneers were the Hollanders of that period. Practically everything that
we recognize to-day as characteristic of the modern spirit in politics,
religion, science, society, industry, commerce, and art has its
prototype amid that sturdy people; being either the cause or the product
of their struggle for independence and their self-development. Nor, in
paying honor to the Dutch, need we attempt to suggest that they were the
inventors of these characteristics. Most of the latter were, so to say,
in the air. In the progress of things they had been evolved. But our
debt to the Hollanders is that they attracted them and gave them
practical application, and thus set the world upon a definite path of
new progress. It is particularly with the newness of their art that we
are here concerned, but we will try to study it in its relation to the
material and mental environment of the nation itself, of whose newness
it was so immediate a product and so manifest an expression.
For it is in this way that the art of every country may be studied with
most interest and profit. Although there will appear from time to time
certain individual artists, whose genius cannot be satisfactorily
correlated to its environment, but will indeed, as in the case of
Rembrandt’s, seem to be actually contradictory to it, yet even they can
be more fully comprehended through the very contrast that they offer to
the mass of their contemporaries, whose relation to their environment is
readily discernible. Apropos of this customary connection between the
artist and the spirit of his time, may be quoted that phrase of Richard
Wagner’s, that all great art is produced in response to a common and
collective need on the part of the community. It may serve as an
excellent touchstone for testing the quality of this new Dutch art which
we are to study, so let us for a moment examine its face value, leaving
the fuller application of its meaning to all the subsequent pages of
this book.
In Wagner’s mind great art, as he conceived it, stood out in clear
contrast against a background of less art, of art which is produced in
response to some more restricted impulse than that of a common and
collective need of the people; for example, in catering to the whims of
fashion. Such was the major part of the art of France produced in the
last days before the Revolution. The great mass of the people were too
abased by ill rule and exactions to have any consciousness but that of
hunger, any common collective need but to fill their bellies. The only
articulate demand to reach the artists was from the ephemeral swarm of
courtiers, sycophants, and, as we should say to-day, “grafters,” who
buzzed in splendor and profligacy at court. For a moment the glamour of
this life inspired a great artist, Watteau, who, however, it is to be
noted, was a foreigner. What he himself was he owed to Flanders. To him
the glamour of the French court was but a pageant, a spectacle passing
before his eyes, leaving his heart and conscience untouched. When,
however, artists of French birth, reared in the home environment,
followed in his steps, they revealed nothing of Watteau’s idealistic
detachment from the grossness of the theme, but became purveyors to the
shallow profligacy of their patrons. And to this day Van Loo, Boucher,
and Fragonard have no place with other old masters in the hearts of the
people; they are still the favorites of fashion. Nor was it until the
upheaval of the Revolution had precipitated the gathering consciousness
of a common and collective need on the part of the people, that French
art in the nineteenth century began to develop a vital response.
Moreover, what was characteristic of French art during the eighteenth
century was generally symptomatic of the art of the whole of Europe. The
latter had little or no creative force, was essentially an art of more
or less feeble and perfunctory imitation. For the age itself was
non-creative; a period of exhaustion after the strenuousness of the
seventeenth century, or of the slow forming of new alinements after the
shattering of the old ones; of speculation and doubts rather than of
convictions.
So the artists, feeling no spur in the needs of the moment, fell to
imitating the Renaissance artists of Italy. Among them, if we may
anticipate the end of our present story, were the Dutch. They, too, had
exhausted the immediate impulse of their own environment. War had made
them a world-power, and peace brought them the foreign entanglements
that maintenance of such a position entailed. They were no longer under
the compulsion of an immense centripetal energy, a nation concentrated
upon its own self-reliance. They began to spread themselves as
cosmopolitans, aping the fashions of the rest of the world; and, as the
fashion of the period was to be Italianate, so the artists of Holland,
lacking at home the momentum of a common and collective need, ceased to
be a school of great original painters, and became instead clumsy
imitators of the splendors and elevation of the Italian masters of the
Renaissance.
After this glance at the nature and cause of decline of Dutch art in the
eighteenth century, we may return with a better appreciation of what is
ahead of us in our study--the establishment in Holland in the
seventeenth century of a new art, the product of a new nation; of a
group of original and distinguished painters who formed, as Fromentin
says, “the last of the great schools, perhaps the most original,
certainly the most local.”
The course of our story, therefore, spreads before us. It is to discover
in what respect the Dutch School of the seventeenth century was great,
how it was original, and in what way its genius grew out of and
responded to the common and collective need of the Dutch people of the
period. Meanwhile there are the previous fifty years of the sixteenth
century to be accounted for, which brings us back to the prologue of the
drama, the abdication of Charles V.
That monarch, born in Ghent and educated in Flanders, had a special
feeling of regard for his “dear Netherlanders.” Incidentally, they were
the richest jewel in the imperial crown, and he had drawn from them
annually two fifths of the enormous revenue that he squandered in wars
of ambition elsewhere. He had, moreover, proved his love for them by
systematic slaughtering of dissenters, that the remnant might be
preserved within the fold of the Catholic Church. It was Brussels,
therefore, that he selected as the scene of his abdication. Formerly the
capital of the Dukes of Burgundy, it had been under imperial rule the
seat of government of the vice-regents of the Netherlands; a city of
royal and princely palaces, immediately surrounded by parks and
game-forests, and fields and gardens, teeming with opulence; the royal
center of a group of cities. Of these Antwerp was the commercial chief,
the greatest emporium of trade in Europe, with an exchange in which five
thousand merchants daily congregated, and a port where five hundred
vessels daily made their entrance or departure. It was the
distributing-point for the imports from the East and for the products of
the Netherlands: textiles of most sumptuous fabrics as well as of plain
cloths and linens, works of gold and silver craftsmanship, agricultural
and dairy produce from the rich polders of the northern provinces, and
fish from a hundred thriving towns and villages along the coast.
So when the emperor, enfeebled by excesses of action and appetite, felt
his grip of power slackening, and determined to transfer this people of
three million souls, the most industrious, versatile, and liberty-loving
in the world, from his own pocket to that of his son, he saw to it that
the proceeding should be conducted with a pageantry of ceremonial worthy
of the occasion.
It was enacted in the hall of the renowned Order of the Knights of the
Golden Fleece, the walls of which were hung with superb tapestries from
the looms of Arras, representing the Biblical story of Gideon. The floor
was occupied by official representatives of the provinces, clad in the
sumptuous bravery of costume that distinguished this country and the
times. Upon the dais at one end, beneath a splendid canopy, three chairs
awaited the principals in the drama. Precisely at the stroke of three,
the emperor entered from the adjoining chapel. Strange whim of Fate, he
supported his gout-ridden body by leaning on the arm of the man who was
eventually to be chief in undoing the policy that this day
inaugurated--William, Count of Orange. Behind the emperor came Philip,
and the regent, Queen Mary of Hungary, the “Christian widow” admired by
Erasmus, who on one occasion had written to her brother, the emperor,
that “in her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be
prosecuted with such severity as that error might be at once
extinguished, care being only taken that the provinces were not entirely
depopulated.” Following the principals, appeared the Knights of the
Fleece in full regalia, and a retinue of nobles, many of them, Egmont,
Brederode, Berlaymont, Aerschot, and others, destined to figure in the
subsequent drama of the Netherlands.
After a long oration by a member of the Privy Council, depicting the
bodily infirmities of the emperor, his great zeal for his people’s
welfare, and the particulars of the cession he was about to make,
Charles himself read a long recapitulation of his wars and triumphs,
dwelt upon his failing strength, and commended his successor to the good
will and allegiance of his “dear Netherlanders.” At the conclusion of
the speech the whole audience was melted to tears and the emperor
himself wept like a child. Philip knelt in reverence, as his father made
the sign of the cross above his head and blessed him in the name of the
Holy Trinity. Then, while the assembled host applauded he rose to his
feet, ruler by the grace of God, vice the emperor, of the Netherlands,
Spain, and her American possessions. But he could not speak the language
of the Netherlands; his acceptance of their allegiance and his own
promises of regard for their interests had to be made through an
interpreter.
Philip, as he assumed possession of the lives of millions, is
characterized by Motley[A] as “a small meager man, much below middle
height, with thin legs, a narrow chest, and the shrinking, timid air of
an habitual invalid. In face, he was the living image of his father,
having the same broad forehead and blue eye, with the same aquiline,
but better-proportioned, nose. He had the same heavy hanging lip, with a
vast mouth and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was
fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He
had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His
demeanor in public was still, silent, almost sepulchral. He looked
habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech,
embarrassed and even suffering in manner. This was ascribed partly to a
natural haughtiness which he had occasionally endeavored to overcome,
and partly to habitual pains in the stomach, occasioned by his
inordinate fondness for pastry. Such,” adds Motley, “was the personal
appearance of the man who was to receive into his single hand the
destinies of half the world; whose single will was, for the future, to
shape the fortunes of every individual then present, of many more in
Europe, America, and at the ends of the earth, and of countless millions
yet unborn.”
Yet it may be doubted whether in the assembly present on that memorable
occasion there was a single person who even dimly perceived the enormity
of this idea. That a nation, without being consulted, should be
transferred like a herd of cattle from one owner to another, for his own
use and emolument and even to be slaughtered at his will, probably
seemed a natural and right proceeding. The fact emphasizes the immense
and profound change that during the ensuing fifty years was to take
possession of men’s imagination. The seventeenth century was to see a
new idea of the rights of nations and of the relations that should
govern a people and its rulers; the commencement, in fact, of a new era
of thought in its bearing on life. But as yet the minds of all engaged
in the ceremony were possessed with the old thought, the brute survival
of Roman imperialism and of the medieval conflict of rival autocrats;
the claim of a pope to exercise supreme sway over the consciences of
innumerable millions, and the contention of temporal potentates for
absolute control over the souls and bodies of their subjects. Thought
and life had been, and still were, based upon the supremacy of the
favored individual.
Let us note the effect which this idea had had upon the art of painting,
that we may better appreciate the change which is to come over the
latter, as the new idea begins to penetrate life and thought. How did
painting, notably the fullest expression of it in Italian art, respond
to the common and collective need of men’s lives and thoughts? In what
way did it embody the idea of the propriety and desirableness of the
subordination of all to the will of one individual?
In the first place, the idea was fostered by the Church. This is no
place to attempt to discuss, on the one hand, how far the Church in
upholding this doctrine was actuated by the desire of saving souls or,
on the other hand, to what degree it benefited the world. It is
sufficient to recall what an immense hold the Church had over the lives
and thoughts of men, and that to establish and maintain it she employed
painting as a handmaiden. Thus, in response to the common and collective
need of the people, the favored subjects of painting were the doctrines
and story of the Christian faith. The interiors of churches were
converted into vast picture-books for the edification of the people, as
well as into sumptuous shrines for the celebration of the mystic drama
of the Mass. And, corresponding to the stately ceremonial of the latter,
its superb accompaniments of lights and vestments, and its imposing
spectacle of ordered ritual, the altarpieces grew to be miracles of
stately composition; arrangements of form and color, light and shade,
built up with an artifice as imposing and moving in its effects as that
which had elaborated the Mass itself. So closely is the genius of these
paintings a product of the Catholic Church’s particular mode of
emphasizing its faith that it is evident, when men shall separate
themselves from such exposition of the faith, their common and
collective need will not demand pictures of this character. This will be
exemplified in the case of the Dutch. They will need religious pictures,
but neither of a ceremonial character, nor, in view of their idea of
worshiping in spirit and in temples not made with hands, for the
purposes of decorating their houses of God. Their religious pictures
will be of a kind to affect the thoughts and lives of the people in a
simpler and more unpretentious way, perhaps more intimately and
personally.
But, while the splendor and dignity of the Italian religious pictures
were inspired by the religious fervor that had continued from medieval
times, they also reflected the new impulse which had made possible the
Renaissance: the New Learning, the study of the classics, particularly
of Hellenic culture, preëminently of Plato. From the latter, scholars
and artists alike had learned to think in terms of the abstract. To the
artists had been revealed the abstract idea of beauty--of beauty as at
once the symbol and the expression of the highest good in life and
thought. They were no longer satisfied simply to represent the sacred
story and doctrines; they would have their pictures beautiful,
independently of the subject; they would give the subject itself a
higher significance through the abstract beauty of the compositions in
which it was embodied. Hence the principles of technical distinction
that began to sublimate their pictures, until they reached a degree of
abstract as well as material elevation that has never been, and, one
imagines, will never be surpassed. For it was the offspring of two
motives that may never again be found in wedlock--the religious need and
the need of expressing the enthusiasm for the cult of the classics. The
former may still be operative, but the latter has been dissipated in the
spread of the democratic idea.
And what was the principle upon which was based the classic ideal of
abstract beauty, as it expressed itself in Italian painting? It was the
supreme motive of the human form, as being, in its harmony of
proportions and its rhythm of movement, the symbol and expression of
abstract beauty. Again it happened that the teaching of the Church
conjoined with the speculations of scholars. This world was thought to
be the center of the universe; man was the axis of the world. Even God
was interpreted as concerned chiefly in the rewarding or punishment of
man, while to man all other created things were subordinate. To the
imagination of the Renaissance, as of the Middle Ages, man towered up
supreme against the mere background of the universe. Small wonder if
some men, seizing the logic of this, aspired to be the owners of the
bodies and souls of their fellows, and scarcely less that the others
acquiesced! It was a rôle not only for popes, emperors, and kings to
play upon the stage of the world, but for every princeling and duke to
strut through on some smaller platform of a municipality. It justified
the Medici in their own eyes, and made them almost of necessity the
patrons of artists who had accepted the supremacy of such as they for
the leading motive of their art. The painters, in fact, accepting the
exclusive aristocracy of the human figure, adopting as their prime
motive its ideal perfection, and building up compositions in which the
figures were arranged in conformity with the rhythms and proportions
derived from such ideal perfection, necessarily achieved an art that was
essentially aristocratic, fitted for the temples of an aristocratic
church and the palaces of the lay aristocracy. Yet, to repeat, it was
also inspired by a great religious need, so that it was fitted for the
masses as well as for their rulers.
Such was the great art of the world at the period when Charles V
abdicated. Yet even by 1555 the tide has begun to ebb. Of all the great
Florentines Michelangelo alone remains, and he has ceased from painting
and sculpture. The giant brood survives only in the persons of Titian,
Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto. The last named will live out nearly the
remainder of the century, after which the art of Italy will be in the
hands of “mannerists” and “eclectics,” groups whose very names suggest
that they are but fanning a flame already dead. Only the “naturalists”
will have something in them of the modern spirit.
Meanwhile among the painters of the Netherlands there is as yet little
or nothing of the distinction that will grow between Hollander and
Flemish. The principal seat of painting is Antwerp, and its school has
already been Italianized. Even Lucas van Leyden, the personal friend of
Dürer, and at first an original genius inclined toward Gothic feeling,
had before his death in 1533 gone over to Italian influence. Admirably
representative of this influence is the large triptych by Barend van
Orley, now in the Antwerp Museum. Its central panel shows _The Day of
Judgment_. In the vault of the sky Christ appears, enthroned upon a
rainbow, his feet resting on a globe. He is encircled by clouds, below
which a ring of angels supports a cross, while to the right and left are
seraphs sounding their trumps, and all the distant air is aquiver with
angelic forms. Hovering midway between earth and sky is St. Michael, the
archangel. Down on the earth are the myriads of the risen: the good on
one side, in orderly bands, lifting hands and heads toward heaven, and
on the other the lost souls in a tumult of flames and smoke. In the side
panels the works of mercy are represented; grave personages ministering
to the sick and the halt and the blind and the dying, in a spot
dignified by monumental architecture, above which, seated on clouds, are
ranged the Madonna and the saints. The superb composition,
unquestionably suggested by that of the _Disputá_, is one which Raphael
himself need not have been ashamed to design. But the figures that
appear large in the foreground exhibit a realism of nudity and an
individuality of separate characterization that bespeak the artist’s
Flemish origin. Notwithstanding his Italian training he had still
retained his racial instincts for naturalism. But this fine work was
finished in 1525, and the artist died in 1542.
At the date we have selected as our starting-point, the leading artists
were Jan van Scovel, Antonio Moro, and Pieter Pourbus; the last of
Flemish birth, the others born in the northern provinces. Though Pourbus
essayed religious subjects, the finest examples of which are in Bruges,
he is best known as a portrait-painter, in which branch Moro also
excelled. The latter, after studying under Scovel, visited Italy, and
upon his return was recommended to Charles V, who despatched him to
Madrid and Portugal, and later to England to make a portrait of Queen
Mary, the wife of Philip II. Subsequently he was in the latter’s service
in Spain, but returned to Brussels, where he found a patron in the Duke
of Alva. His portraits are distinguished by evidence of truth to life as
well as by their masterly, if somewhat careful, handling. But it was
Scovel himself whose life best illustrated the tendencies of the time.
Born in Alkmaar in 1495, he studied in Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht;
then in Cologne, Speyer, Strasburg, Carinthia, and Venice, from which
last he went to Jerusalem. Returning to Europe, he lived for a while in
Rome, where he was appointed superintendent of the Vatican Gallery by
his countryman, Pope Adrian IV. On the latter’s death he returned to the
Netherlands, living by turns in Utrecht and Haarlem, in one of which
cities he died in 1562. Greatly influenced by his sojourn in Rome, he
was the first of the strictly Dutch painters to absorb the Italian
influence. Among several examples of his style in the Municipal Museum
of Haarlem the most remarkable is a portrait group of twelve Knights
Templars, with palm branches in their hands, indicating that they have
made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It is noteworthy both for its
characterization and as an early instance of what was to be a special
feature of Dutch art--the portrait group. His subject pictures, mostly
on religious themes, have the elegant, non-committal character of work
that was inspired by outside impulse, though possibly in the landscape
backgrounds one may find a foretaste of the Dutch regard for truth of
natural surroundings. His work, indeed, like his life, exemplifies the
lack of originality and conviction in the temper of the times. It was a
period of suspense, succeeding to the vigorous realities of old ideals,
scarcely ready for the development of the new. It was a prologue to a
new era.
The new art, when it arrives, will be in response to a new common and
collective need of a people, the product, in fact, of a new attitude of
thought toward life. In place of the aristocratic it will be democratic,
concerned with the rights of all instead of the privileges of the few.
It will no longer set man in a pose of artificial supremacy against the
background of the universe, but will begin to take account of his
environment and to discover his true relation to it. It will be an era,
not of magnificent mendacity and superb hypotheses, but of patient
inquiry into the facts of life and of resolute adjustment of life to the
facts. It will, indeed, be the dawning of the scientific era. And so
firmly will it have taken hold of the thought and life of the then
separated provinces of the north, that, even as they have parted
absolutely from the old religion and politics, still adhered to by the
southern states, so they will be impervious to the influence of the art
by which the latter continue to be represented. When, fifty years from
our opening date, Rubens shall return from Italy to give a brief lease
of lustier life to the Italian motive by the vigor of his Flemish
genius, the Hollanders of the seventeenth century will be absolutely
unaffected by his influence. Their art will be as closed to the invasion
of his masterful genius as their country is to the inroads of the German
Ocean. Theirs will be an art not only new and original, but certainly
most local.