GERARD TERBORCH, JAN VERMEER, AND JAN STEEN
Terborch is the aristocrat among Dutch painters, Rembrandt excepted. But
Rembrandt’s is an aristocracy of genius, while Terborch’s is an
aristocracy of talent and temperament. He owed something of this to his
father, who, besides being a painter, held an official post in his
native town, Zwolle, where Gerard was born in 1617. The father had
enlarged the horizon of his life, by travel and the study of foreign
languages, and the son followed his example. He was already a good
draftsman, when he moved to Haarlem to study with the landscape-painter,
Pieter Molyn. After three years spent in Haarlem, during which he
experienced the influence of Frans Hals, he spent some time in England
and later in Italy. Then followed some five years in Amsterdam, where he
profited by the example of Rembrandt. In 1646 he went to Münster, in
Westphalia, being present there during the negotiations of the peace,
mingling with the delegates and painting portraits, which he afterward
embodied in the famous group-picture, _The Peace of Münster_, now in the
National Gallery, to which it was presented by the late Sir Richard
Wallace. On the completion of this picture in 1648 he visited Spain and
made the acquaintance of Velasquez and his work. Returning to Holland,
he spent four years in Zwolle, and then, in 1654, the year in which he
married Gertrude Matthyssen, settled in Deventer. Here he continued to
reside until his death in 1681.
All these details of his career are pertinent, for they point not only
to the various influences, successively of Hals, Rembrandt, and
Velasquez, under which he came, but also to the scarcely less important
fact that he had mixed with a variety of men of parts and consequence
and become acquainted with various kinds of civilizations. His
experiences enabled him to form a very distinguished technique of his
own, and at the same time cultivated in him an extraordinarily refined
taste and a very high regard for the dignity of human nature. In
technique, taste, and point of view he became essentially a true
aristocrat.
His portraits eminently epitomize these qualities. Usually very small in
size, they suggest Velasquez in miniature; exhibiting the same
discretion in avoiding unnecessary accessories, the same eloquent use of
blacks and grays, occasionally relieved with old rose or blue, and,
despite their minuteness, a corresponding breadth and distinction of
fluency and simplicity. All these traits of technique are the expression
of his attitude toward his subject, which is essentially one of respect
for its humanity. This attitude is a rarer one in portrait-painting than
might be expected. Certainly in the Dutch School one is not impressed
with its prevalence. There is characterization, good, bad, and
indifferent, and the suggestion of the subject’s position in his or her
social
[Illustration: OFFICER WRITING A LETTER GERARD TERBORCH
DRESDEN GALLERY]
environment, but of the reverence for humanity as such, very little.
Indeed, outside of the portraits by Rembrandt, Terborch, and
occasionally Maes, I question if you will often find it.
A similar reverence for humanity and its environment--the product, I
take it, of the artist’s high-bred respect for himself and his
art--distinguishes also Terborch’s genre pictures. He began by painting
guardroom scenes and continued to be fond of subjects in which officers
and soldiers figured. Sometimes the circumstances are equivocal, but
their salience is not enforced; indeed, as Bode points out, the models
for the ladies appear to have been his sisters, while his brothers posed
for the military. The scene and the occasion are but an excuse for a
picture. In fact, the subject counts with him for very little; it is the
pretext that it offers for pictorial representation in which he is
interested first and last. And to this he brings an extraordinary degree
of refined sensibility and of virile and at the same time exquisite
realization.
The virility appears in the drawing and construction of his figures, to
which Fromentin has paid so high a tribute in his analysis of _The
Gallant Soldier_, in the Louvre. And, as the French critic points out,
in discussing the representation of the man’s shoulder and arm, it is a
virility tempered with extreme sensibility. It has nothing of the
improvisation of Hals in the following of surfaces, but rather
Velasquez’s mastery of plane-construction; only here, in the case of
this small figure, it is not with the open palm but with most sensitive
touch of finger-tips that we imagine ourselves discovering the reality
of the form. Or, again, examine the wonderful example of drawing in _The
Concert_ of the Berlin Gallery, where the foreground is occupied by a
seated figure of a lady, whose back is toward us, as she plays the
violoncello. Even more remarkable than the fine structural reality of
the figure is its play of expression, as it bends over the instrument
and seems to be vibrating to the touch of the strings. Again, what
extraordinary realization of action, at once broadly and subtly
characterized, appears in the two figures of _Officer Writing a Letter_,
in the Dresden Gallery; or, in the same museum, in the figures of the
mistress and her maid in _Lady Washing Her Hands_; or in the action of
the hands followed so absolutely by the gesture of the head in the _Old
Woman Peeling Apples_ of the Art-History Museum, Vienna! These are but
examples, taken more or less at random, of Terborch’s gift of drawing,
which in its mingling of virility and exquisite sensibility is
unsurpassed in Holland painting.
Nor less admirable is the marvelous unity that he imparts to the whole
scene. Tonality has much to do with it, yet that is but a means. The
cause is in himself, in the reverence that he has even for the
accessories in his pictures; and the result is a harmony that is at once
esthetic and intellectual. Mind, as well as taste, has ordered
everything. All the artists of Dutch genre had more or less the faculty
of heightening the value of beauty in the accessories they used; but
none, not even Vermeer, to so extraordinary a pitch of artistic
propriety as Terborch.
His discretion in the selection is so choice, and his feeling for
arrangement at once so big and simple and so concentrated, that the
presence of his own high-bred feeling pervades almost every interior he
has painted and makes its privacy a thing of exquisite aloofness and, if
I may say so, of consecrated self-possession.
Equally distinguished is Terborch’s use of color. His gamut of local hue
is larger than Vermeer’s, and his treatment of values scarcely less
subtle; while his feeling for color is, I believe, superior. He has the
faculty of raising a local color to its highest power of esthetic
suggestion; witness the lady’s jacket in _The Concert_ of the Berlin
Gallery, a gallery, by the way, exceptionally rich in examples of this
artist’s work. To specify its color we may call it salmon, but this only
vaguely suggests its place on the palette; the precise register of its
hue and, still more, its quality are indescribable. Similarly evasive
and yet profoundly suggestive is his treatment of blue, yellow, red,
black, and the hues of gray from drab to pearly white. These are
enveloped in tonality. For in this respect particularly Terborch differs
from Vermeer. The latter in his most characteristic pictures shows
himself a student of daylight. But in Terborch’s pictures, so far as I
recall them, there appears no window; the interior is dim, and the light
has no pretensions to being natural. It is a studio invention,
distributed or concentrated to suit the imagined scheme of harmony,
Vermeer is, in the modern phrase, a _plein-airist_, while Terborch, true
to the traditions of the Dutch School, is a tonalist. It is in the
invention and realization of his tonal scheme that he is the superior
of the other genre tonalists, and the reason in the final analysis is
that to taste and technique he brought the refining discretion of a
superior quality of mind.
JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER OF DELFT
JOHANNES or JAN VERMEER, who is also called Johannes van der Meer of
Delft, was born at Delft in 1632. His life was spent continuously in
this city until his death in 1675. There are records to show that he
studied with one of Rembrandt’s pupils, Carel Fabritius, and that he was
not only a high official in the local Guild of St. Luke, but highly
esteemed in his community. After his death, however, his very existence
as a painter of the Dutch School was forgotten, and his pictures, very
few of which bear signatures, were attributed to a Vermeer of Haarlem
and to another painter of the same name in Utrecht, and to De Hooch and
others. The reason for this seems to have been the unaccountable
omission of the artist’s name in Houbraken’s book of Dutch painters.
Anyhow, the silence of more than a century and a half was not broken,
until the French connoisseur Thoré, who wrote under the _nom de plume_
of “W. Bürger,” attracted by the beauty of some of the signed pictures,
set on foot an investigation which resulted in the rehabilitation of
Vermeer. Since then criticism has disproved some of Bürger’s
ascriptions, but included other pictures, until now there are thirty
assigned with certainty to Vermeer’s brush. A few others, shown
[Illustration: GIRL AT THE WINDOW JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK]
by the records to have existed, are as yet unidentified; but it is
assumed that the total output of his twenty years of activity did not
much exceed the number already discovered. It falls far short of the
productivity of most of the Dutch painters--a fact which has been
explained by the scrupulous care with which Vermeer painted, and the
degree of perfection to which he wrought each canvas.
The appreciation of Vermeer’s art has increased rapidly during the last
twenty-five years, until to-day he is generally ranked as the finest of
the artists of genre, and, as a painter, without rival in the Dutch
School, while some are disposed to consider him the most accomplished
painter in the history of art. These extreme admirers are, as a rule,
painters, who find in Vermeer’s technique and point of view precisely
what they value most highly in painting. For this artist is a modern
among moderns. He is not so in the sense that Rembrandt’s influence is
now being felt. The latter is indirect in its suggestion of a conception
of beauty other than the classical, and in its equally indirect
suggestion of the expressional value of light and of the symbolic use of
form and color. Rembrandt’s appeal is rather to the mind; Vermeer’s to
the eye. He saw the world as the modern painter sees it, enveloped in
natural light, and rendered it, as the modern painter tries to render
it, by a close discrimination of delicately different values. To produce
a harmony he did not introduce an arbitrary tonality, but, following
nature’s plan, drew all the local colors into a balanced relation by the
unifying effects of diffused light. In this respect Vermeer was unique
in the Dutch School, and it is because the artist of to-day, if he is
alive to the modern spirit, works with the same motive and in the same
way, that he prizes Vermeer so highly. If, as one enthusiast remarked to
me, “the whole art of painting consists in the right relation of values,
and there can be no doubt that it does, then Vermeer is the greatest
painter that ever lived.”
The value of the criticism, of course, depends upon the acceptance of
the major premise, respecting which this individual had no doubt. On the
other hand, one may beg to doubt it, without depreciating Vermeer. For
it comes dangerously near the position that the whole art of painting
consists in its technique; it is an echo, in fact, of that old
shibboleth of our youth, “art for art’s sake.” It lays undue stress on
the purely sensuous appeal of painting, upon the “mint and cummin,” and
neglects the “weightier matter” of possible appeal to the higher
faculties of the imagination. Moreover, it overlooks the fact that the
method which Vermeer brought to such perfection, and which because of
its perfection is so justly admired, is essentially one for small
canvases. And it was not until Vermeer settled down to these that he
developed his characteristic style.
The earliest of his dated pictures is _The Proposal_, in the Dresden
Gallery, which belongs to the year 1656. The figures are of life size,
and the treatment is proportionately broad, almost “rough” as Bode says,
who adds: “It does not yet show us Vermeer in his developed
individuality.” Yet some elements of the latter are already established:
the superb plasticity in the modeling of the forms and the frank
enjoyment in local colors, the lemon yellow of the girl’s jacket forming
a splendid spot
[Illustration: HEAD OF A GIRL JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
HAGUE GALLERY]
against the equally brilliant scarlet of the young man’s coat. Again, a
minor point, an Oriental rug of crimson and yellow and blue design
appears here as in later pictures, such as the _Girl with Water-Jug_ of
the Metropolitan Museum. But the Dresden masterpiece of the artist’s
youth--he was only twenty-four--differs from his later work not only in
the size of the figures and breadth of brushwork, but also in the
treatment of the chiaroscuro. The scene is not illumined with diffused
light, but with a stroke of light which gives brilliance to the two
principal figures and leaves the subordinate ones in shadow. It is an
arrangement, suggestive of the example of Rembrandt, and hints at the
fact that the picture was produced while Vermeer was still close to the
influence of his teacher, Carel Fabritius.
Another early example, betraying the same influence, is _Diana at Her
Toilet_ of the Hague Gallery, which in the 1905 edition of the Catalogue
is still assigned to Vermeer of Utrecht, though later criticism accepts
it as by the artist of Delft. Closely following in subject a _Diana and
Her Nymphs_, painted by Jacob van Loo in 1648, which is now in the
Berlin Gallery, this picture is in the freer, looser method of _The
Proposal_, and even repeats the same colors of red and yellow, though
subtilized here to a delicate rose and a kind of snuff color. The light
is still partially distributed so as to dapple the figures, and these
are painted with a flickering brushstroke that helps to increase the
fluttering effect of the light.
Two other examples have been acquired in recent years by the Hague
Gallery: an allegorical picture, _The New Testament_, and _Head of a
Girl_. In both are introduced the cool blue and white that characterize
many of Vermeer’s later pictures. The subject of the former, which is
owned by Dr. Bredius of The Hague, is curiously affected, representing a
lady in blue and white silk costume, resting her foot on a globe, as she
sits beside a table on which are a crucifix, chalice, and book. On the
wall behind her hangs a large picture of Christ upon the cross, attended
by Mary and John; and on the left of it is a superb tapestry of orange,
blue, and mellow green, while a crystal ball is suspended from the
ceiling. In contrast with the glowing warmth of the curtain and the
shadowed warmth of the picture on the wall, the lady’s figure presents a
cool, white-lighted spot. The plastic feeling is strongly pronounced,
the brushwork wonderfully limpid and firm, and the tonality
extraordinarily fine. For the picture is still a study of tone, in which
it differs from the _Head of a Girl_. For the latter is represented in a
clearly diffused light, which is brightest around the head, and
illumines in a subtle way the tender flesh-tints of the face, the
bluish-white linen head-dress, and the bright full blue of a portion of
the gown. The face wears a charming expression of concentration. This
picture, indeed, very decidedly forecasts Vermeer’s developed
individuality, yet Bode places it among his earlier pieces, about 1656.
To this period also probably belongs the beautiful _Sleeping Girl_,
recently acquired from the Rudolph Kann Collection by Mr. B. Altman.
To a somewhat later date following close on 1656 Bode assigns the _View
of Delft_, one of the greatest treasures of the Hague Gallery. There is
a record of its sale in 1696, together with two other landscapes, one
of which has disappeared, while the other is in the Six Collection in
Amsterdam. The Hague picture is an unusual example of the artist, not
only because it is a landscape, but also because of the warm light that
pervades it. From a triangle of rosy yellowish foreground one looks
across the quiet sheet of grayish-blue water to the line of houses of
reddish-drab and brown bricks, and red and blue and yellow roofs, above
which shows a high expanse of sky. The coloring, which again, it is to
be observed, includes red and yellow, is brilliantly variegated, yet
held in control by the stretches of sky and water. The ensemble is
superbly artistic, while as a presentation of a late afternoon scene it
could not be surpassed in naturalness. The picture, in fact, stands out
among all the landscapes of the seventeenth century as being
extraordinarily modern in feeling and manner, and its influence has been
very great in the modern development of landscape-painting in Holland.
Another picture of the period immediately following 1656 is _The Cook_,
in the Rijks Museum. She is standing in front of a whitish wall, lighted
from a window on the left, pouring milk into a red earthenware pitcher
that stands upon the table. The latter hides the lower part of her
figure, which is clad in a lemon-colored body, reddish-brown skirt, and
deep-blue apron, while a white cap covers her head. Here in these
details--cap against light wall, prominent note of blue, the
three-quarter length of figure, the cool lighting from a window on the
left, lastly, the plasticity of the form--we find the ingredients of
Vermeer’s later manner; but as yet the brushwork has not the limpid
exquisiteness, compressed yet fluent, of his full development. On the
contrary, it is broad, inclined to roughness, loose and free,
magnificent in the gusto with which it has been applied, and vigorously
stimulating in its appeal to sense imagination.
Also in the Rijks Museum is a picture which recalls the fact that De
Hooch was a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Delft from 1655 to 1657,
and that, while he benefited most by contact with Vermeer, the latter
was also somewhat influenced by him. For in this picture, _The Letter_,
Vermeer seems to have experimented, not over-successfully, with De
Hooch’s device of showing one room beyond another. For an anteroom opens
into two others, side by side, in one of which on the black and white
marble floor a lady is seated in an amber dress trimmed with ermine. She
pauses in her playing of a lute to take a letter from a servant. The
picture is exceedingly choice in color and technique, but the
composition is a little awkward in its division into two parts--a
device, by the way, that recalls De Hooch’s _The Visit_, owned by Mrs.
Henry O. Havemeyer, the composition of which is open to a similar
criticism.
Again, in the Rijks Museum is _Young Woman Reading a Letter_. Here in
the delicate modeling of the face one observes the exquisite gray tones
that distinguish so many of the examples of Vermeer’s fully developed
style. Also notable is the arrangement of the composition, the girl
facing left, her feet hidden by a chair and table, the latter forming a
dark spot so as to increase the luminosity on the figure and the wall.
It is repeated very closely in _The Lady with a Pearl Necklace_ of the
Berlin Gallery, where chair and table occupy the same
[Illustration: THE COOK JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
SIX COLLECTION NOW IN RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM]
position, and the girl stands between them with her hands similarly
raised, only as she holds the necklace she looks up, instead of down to
the table as in the other picture. She wears a canary-colored jacket
edged with ermine, that appears again in Mrs. Collis P. Huntington’s
_Lady with Lute_. In the Berlin picture it sounds a note of liveliness
that is exquisitely sustained in the silvery resonance of the lighted
room; the effect of which is induced by the tones of olive in her skirt
and the table-cloth, by a deep almost colorless blue drapery over the
latter, and a shaft of dull yellow, formed by the velour of the
window-curtain. The ensemble, in fact, is one of piquant decision and
indescribable delicacy, illustrating Vermeer’s faculty of sight
imagination, so that he not only renders what he sees, but actually
creates.
Between Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’s _Lady Writing_ and _The Lace-Maker_ of
the Louvre there is a remarkable companionship of arrangement and
feeling. In each case the figure is seated, bending over a table; the
jacket is canary-colored, and blue is introduced in the table-cloth of
the former picture and in a cushion in the other, while in both the
sensitive expression of the head and hands is echoed in the delicate
precision of the objects on the table. In both cases the luminosity of
the scene is enhanced by a shadowed mass on the left of the foreground.
Mr. Morgan’s picture in loveliness of color, exquisiteness of handling,
and inexpressibly subtle feeling rivals its sister piece of the Louvre.
It is in this element of feeling alone that these two pictures possibly
excel the _Girl with Water-Jug_ of the Metropolitan Museum. For the
latter’s beauty of color, with its deep bell-like note of blue and the
resonance of blue, more or less faintly hovering over the cap and
kerchief and permeating the atmosphere, is unsurpassable. Perfect also
is the handling of this picture, both as to its suggestion of the
plastic reality of everything represented and its consummate delicacy of
manipulation; while in one particular it surpasses both the others and
is in Vermeer’s finest possible manner. This is the extraordinary
propriety with which each detail of the composition is introduced.
Everything has been selected and placed with the choicest discretion;
nothing is confused or unexplained, everything is a triumph of
incomparable simplicity and exquisite adjustment. Only, I repeat, in
feeling; in the expression of the head, arms, and hands is there lacking
something of the exquisite _finesse_ of the above two pictures and of
certain other examples.
Occasionally, as in _The Coquette_ of the Brunswick Gallery, _A Lady at
a Spinet_, in the National Gallery, and _The Music Lesson_, owned by Mr.
Henry C. Frick, the figures display a consciousness of themselves or of
the onlooker; their personality looks out from its own surroundings. On
the other hand, it is rather a characteristic of Vermeer as of Terborch,
that the people in his pictures seem immersed in themselves. The scene
is wrapped in privacy, undisturbed by the suggestion of an outsider. But
the most signal instance of a scene, actually arranged, and posed as if
to be viewed by others, is the example of _The Artist in His Studio_, in
the Czernin Gallery, Vienna. In color and mingled breadth and delicacy
of treatment it is superb; but in place of the artist’s usual sincerity
of feeling, it is possible to detect a suspicion of affectation.
[Illustration: THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
CZERNIN GALLERY, VIENNA]
A signal example of Vermeer’s sincerity and, inasmuch as it is a
portrait, unique, hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. It is
the _Portrait of a Lady_. She is heavy-featured and of homely type,
rather resembling the woman in the Rijks Museum picture, _The Cook_. A
white cap tightly grasps her head; a broad white collar, fastened with a
tuft of gold braid, falls over her black dress, the cuffs of which are
of white lawn. She folds her hands at the waist, one of them in a cream
kid glove, trimmed with gold braid, the other suspending its fellow,
while she holds a black fan. The face is relieved on one side by
greenish-black transparent shadows and wears an expression of dull
self-oblivion that is almost poignant and gives to the portrait a grave
distinction.
In conclusion, it is worthy of note that Vermeer’s painting-career of
scarcely more than twenty years passed from its experimental stage to a
full development from which there was no decline. He did not toward the
finish lapse from his finest ideals, like Maes and De Hooch, nor mingle
pot-boilers with masterpieces in the manner of Jan Steen. He maintained
consistently the artistic integrity of a scrupulously exacting
conscience.
JAN STEEN
JAN STEEN was the chameleon of Dutch painting. Besides genre he essayed
portraiture and Biblical subjects; alternated between small and large
canvases; at one time suggests a recollection of some other artist, by
turns Van Ostade, Terborch, Maes, Metsu, Van Mieris, or even Vermeer;
at other times is incomparably himself, and still again not infrequently
falls below his own standard. He has left more examples than any other
genre artist; for dozens mentioned in old catalogues have disappeared,
yet still some five hundred survive. He is numerously represented in
public and private collections, yet in so many styles and varieties of
quality that his artistic personality is apt to seem evasive, while the
impression he arouses is by turns one of enthusiasm, indifference, and
resentment.
By degrees, however, his personality emerges, as one becomes conscious
of a trait that is shared by all his pictures. It is their liveliness of
characterization, exhibited not only in the individual figures, but also
in the inventiveness of grouping and in the peculiar vivacity with which
the spirit of the scene has been rendered. He is of all the genre
artists the supreme delineator of Dutch life among the lower middle
classes in the Leyden and Haarlem of his day; depicting it, by turns,
with something of the large-heartedness of a Shakspere, the wit and
satire of a Molière, and the coarseness of a Rabelais. But in every
vein, whether of broad survey or trenchant scrutiny, he is human; for
the most part genial in his outlook, and always fresh in observation. It
is probably because of this that Waagen characterizes him as “next to
Rembrandt certainly the greatest genius among the painters of the Dutch
School,” an opinion which is shared by W. Bürger (Thoré), while Dr.
Bredius styles him “the greatest genre painter of the seventeenth
century, one of the wittiest delineators of human folly, the character
painter _par excellence_.”
The standard, in fact, by which these and other admirers test him, and
which must be applied by every one who would reach a just estimate of
this many-sided artist, is bigger than that of technique. Steen drew
well, but could be slipshod and incorrect in drawing; exhibited an
extraordinary gift of improvised and occasionally studied composition,
yet could huddle his canvases with a superabundance of material; in one
picture would display a fine sense of color, to lose it in another; now
would work with a juicy and limpid brushstroke, now in a thin method as
dry as brick-dust, and could be indifferent to tonality, while at other
times a tonalist of choice distinction. Therefore you cannot measure him
as you do a Terborch or a Vermeer, or, indeed, range him for comparison
alongside of any of the other genre artists. With them, at their best,
the pictorial representation is the chief concern, and they invite you
to judge them by their technique. But it is otherwise with Steen. You
cannot hold him to so narrow a test, any more than you can Shakspere.
Both are technicians who at times throw technique to the winds. You may
regret it or resent it; but, to be just, must condone the fact in face
of the bigness that looms behind.
The jovial humanity of Steen and the joy that he took in humorous
characterization were responsible for the deficiencies he often
exhibited as a painter. He would frequently be more interested in the
subject than in the technicalities of an artistic problem; which, as we
have seen, is precisely the reverse of the attitude that most of the
great genre painters came to adopt. They were concerned primarily with
the making of a picture; Steen was quite frequently engrossed with the
delineation of a phase of life. He was so interested in the
story-telling element of the subject that under some circumstances he
permitted himself to supersede the pictorial quality of the
presentation. This should be frankly recognized in approaching the study
of Jan Steen, otherwise by coming upon one or two of his inferior
examples we may be led into a hasty depreciation of this great artist.
He belonged to an old respected family of Leyden, where he was born
about 1626, his father being a brewer in prosperous circumstances. The
son’s name is inscribed in the records of the University of Leyden, as
having been one of its students in 1646; then we hear of him as a pupil
of Nicolaes Knupfer, the painter of genre and of Biblical and
mythological subjects. Afterward Steen studied with Jan van Goyen, whose
daughter Margaret he married. He was one of the first members of the
local Guild of St. Luke, established in 1648. From 1649 to 1654 he lived
at The Hague; then returned to Leyden for seven years, during which time
he owned a brewery near Delft. From 1661 to 1669 he resided at Haarlem,
but in the last year lost his wife and returned to Leyden, where he
remained until his death in 1679. In 1672 he had obtained permission
from the magistrate of Leyden to maintain a café at his house, and the
following year took a second wife, Maria van Egmont, the widow of a
local bookseller. Houbraken states that they lived happily together,
though their larder was often ill-stocked; but he is not so charitable
toward Steen’s connection with the liquor trade. This fact, coupled with
the jovial character of the artist’s pictures and enlivened
[Illustration: THE INN JAN STEEN
HAGUE MUSEUM]
by hearsay information from a painter, Carel de Moor, led this
story-monger into much tittle-tattle about the artist’s reckless habits.
To-day, by the best authorities, this view of Steen is discredited. It
is, however, quite clear that he was often in desperate states; for
example, in the February after his first wife’s death an apothecary
seized his goods and sold his pictures to satisfy a debt of ten florins!
But the reason was not idleness, for he was the most prolific painter of
his day; it is to be found in the miserable price for which he had to
sell his work. No wonder he tried to eke out his finances by keeping a
brewery, which, by the way, was a privilege specially granted at that
time only to a few families of particular respectability. As to the
café, since he had to turn to trade, he naturally adopted the one with
which his family had been connected; the disgrace, if there were any,
not being his, but the public’s, who paid him better for drinks than for
his pictures.
So far as the dates on his pictures show, his period of production
lasted for twenty-five years, from 1653 to 1678, so that his output
averaged more than twenty pictures a year. The best period may probably
be reckoned during the years from 1654 to 1669, which covered his second
sojourn in Leyden and his visit to Haarlem. His family was growing up
around him, and the children from year to year figure in his pictures,
and his handsome wife, Margaret, appears as a center of kindliness and
comfort, while his own person often adds the note of jollity. To these
pleasant times belong the incomparable “family scenes”--_A Homely
Scene_, _The Feast of St. Nicholas_, and _The Happy Family_ of the Rijks
Museum; _The Christening Party_ of the Berlin Gallery; _While the Old
Ones Sing the Young Ones Pipe_ of the Hague Gallery; and the Cassel
Gallery’s _Twelfth Night_, where Margaret appears for the last time,
since the picture was painted in the year of her death.
These and other group-pictures, such as _The Prince’s Birthday_ of the
Rijks Museum, are works of genius, unique in painting. For they are not
constructed according to the methods of the schools, but are the
products of a natural gift of seeing and rendering naturally a glimpse
of busy life. Yet with a tact that avoids confusion; places everything
in its own plane of space with admirable precision and propriety; leaves
no intervals of uncertainty or obscurity; but secures to the whole an
artistic reasonableness and completeness; and all this with an art that
conceals art, and makes the scene appear to be one of complete
naturalness. No other artist has ever reconciled nature and art quite so
happily; and when one passes from the technical appreciation to a study
of the varieties of character, depicted in the personages of all ages
from the baby to the grandparents, and notes the mingling of humor and
tenderness in the sentiment and the embracing large-heartedness that has
inspired the whole, it is to marvel at and rejoice in the uniqueness of
Steen’s genius.
Then, by way of contrast, mark his treatment of a subject in which only
a few persons figure. To myself his series of medical visits presents
perhaps the most charming example of this concentrated phase of his art.
Witness _The Sick Lady_ of the Rijks Museum, where the young woman sits
with her head supported by a pillow, its whiteness against the pallor
of her face, while the doctor stands counting her pulse. It is a
masterpiece of tender characterization, for here the physician also is
gentle and solicitous. However, he is not so in _A Doctor Visiting a
Sick Young Woman_ (No. 166) of the Hague Gallery. There he is boorish in
appearance and suggests ignorance; in rough contrast to the pathetically
fragile little lady, lying in bed and so ruefully gazing at the
medicine-glass in the maid’s hand. The picture is not dated, but I
wonder if it was painted after the artist’s rude experience with the
apothecary who sold him up for ten florins! Again, in _The Doctor’s
Visit_ of the National Gallery, the man presents a different trait of
behavior. It is not tenderness toward a delicate young thing as in the
Amsterdam picture, but respectful solicitude toward an older woman, who,
by the way, reminds one of Steen’s wife, Margaret. She is dressed in a
jacket of old rose, edged with fur, and a silvery-blue skirt, while the
doctor wears a suit of black with olive velvet sleeves. In the Amsterdam
picture his black costume is relieved by a silk cloak of ashy brown,
while the young woman is in pearly-gray satin, trimmed with white fur, a
peep of blue slipper appearing from beneath the skirt. In fact, the
color of these pictures is exceedingly choice; differing from the
richness and liveliness of the family groups; corresponding in its
subtle delicacy to the delicate pointedness of the characterization that
is not without a certain dry flavor of wit.
It is between these two extremes of generous freedom and highly wrought
restraint that the pendulum of Steen’s art swings, with such wealth of
variety that it is impossible to specialize further. However, a word or
two must be said in conclusion about his treatment of Biblical subjects,
of which _The Marriage at Cana_ and _The Expulsion of Hagar_, both in
the Dresden Gallery, may be cited as typical examples.
Steen’s treatment of Biblical, as of occasional mythological, subjects
was purely in the vein of genre; not, however, with any resort to
emotional or dramatic appeal, as in the case of Rembrandt. In
translating the old scene into the vernacular of Dutch middle-class or
low-class life, Steen preserves nothing of its religious significance,
or even of its epic dignity. The theme with him becomes simply a vehicle
for characterization and possible humor. Thus, in _The Marriage at
Cana_, Christ is standing at the table in the act of blessing a Dutch
wedding-party, but all this is in the background. The salient features
of the scene are occurring in the foreground, where a fat cellarer hands
a glass of wine to a fiddler, and a slattern woman leans against a cask,
giving a drink to a boy. In _The Expulsion of Hagar_, Sarah sits inside
the door, “examining” the little Isaac’s head; Hagar weeps as Abraham
sadly dismisses her: while Ishmael strings his bow, two spaniels are
catching fleas, and sheep, cows, and poultry are scattered through the
yard. Meanwhile, though the pictures make no appeal to the spiritual
imagination, the sensuous imagination may be stimulated by the
choiceness of their charm of color. Perhaps, however, if one wishes to
epitomize Steen’s attitude toward the subjects he took from the Bible
and the classics, one may best compare his rendering of _The Disciples
at Emmaus_ (Rijks Museum) with Rembrandt’s treatment of the same
subject in the Louvre. Instead of Christ being the pathetic center of
divine illumination, as in the latter picture, Steen has placed Him in
the shadow of the background, leaving the room, while the disciples,
attended by a serving-woman, are gazing disconsolately at the table,
which is garnished with--of all imaginably incongruous things--a lemon.