fiddler plays with a wild fantastic energy; one peasant accompanies him
with crashing tankard and roaring chorus; another sits bent and sullen
with his head on his hands. The landlord, with huge frame and round
paunch, looks on with twinkling eyes. A woman by the great chimney, on
which hangs the notice of a sale of tulips and hyacinths, “Tulpaan en
Hyacinthen,” calls a child to her. The roomy background with its beams
and rafters, is drawn and lighted with extraordinary skill. As a page of
daily life, fresh and vivid, this etching deserves the fullest praise.
Dusart in his later years devoted himself to mezzotint, and produced a
great deal in this manner. These engravings, some of which represent in
Dusart’s extravagant way, the joy in Holland at the taking of Namur in
1695 by William III., are more interesting historically than
artistically. It was not till the middle of next century that mezzotint,
the invention of which does not date from much earlier than Dusart’s
birth, reached its perfection in the hands of the English engravers.
THE ETCHERS OF LANDSCAPE
I
The seventeenth century, which inaugurated so much that is
characteristic in modern art, permitted for the first time the
recognition of landscape as a subject worthy for its own sake of
painting. And feeling for landscape seems to be almost entirely a modern
thing.
Drawings of landscape by Titian and Campagnola among the Italians, and
by Dürer among the Germans, had indicated the first beginnings of a
preference; and there are a certain number of landscape subjects among
the engraved work of the Little Masters. But these are occasional
efforts by men whose chief work lay in other lines. In painting no one
ventured as yet to concentrate his interest on the landscape, and though
men like the Flemish Joachim Patinir evidently cared more for their
backgrounds of mountain and river than for the human incidents which
relieve them, they had not the courage to cast away compromise and brave
authority by omitting the traditional foreground.
Rubens is the first great Northern master who paints landscape with
entire and frank abandonment to the subject. The broad prospects and
swelling undulations of Flemish country are painted by him with a kind
of glory that reflects his large and joyous mind. Lodowyck de Vadder and
Lucas van Uden, his contemporaries, etched landscape for the first time
in Flanders. But it was in Holland that this line was most abundantly
developed. To tranquil, observant natures, such as seem typical of the
nation, there was in landscape a strong appeal, a permanent delight. The
majority of the Dutch etchers found here their chief material.
II
Earliest, perhaps, of all Dutch landscape painters, and almost certainly
earliest among Dutch landscape etchers, is a little known artist,
Hercules Seghers. A mystery hangs over him; for though there is
documentary evidence in an inventory of 1625 or thereabouts, that he
painted a considerable number of landscapes, these pictures have nearly
all disappeared. Some, doubtless, may be lurking under other names; one,
called a Rembrandt, was discovered some time ago at Florence; one is at
Berlin; but this can hardly account for all. We can only guess what they
were like from the etchings, which are usually either views
[Illustration: _Fig. 12.--Tobias and the Angel. By H. Seghers. M. 236._]
of Holland with vast horizons, or strange visions of wild and
mountainous country. Seghers was born in 1589,[3] and died in 1650. A
scholar of Gillis van Connincxloo, he was producing work as early as
1607, and from that date to 1630 seems to have been his chief period of
activity.[4] His life, like that of several of the Dutch masters, was a
long and hopeless struggle against poverty. He is said to have become a
drunkard, and to have died from the effects of a fall. Dr. Bredius,
judging apparently from his work, thinks that he must have visited the
Alps, travelled into Italy, and found a stimulus in the art of Adam
Elsheimer. Certainly the rocky landscapes which appear in the etchings
could have no archetypes in Holland. But there is so strong a vein of
the fantastic in them, that it is difficult to believe they were done
from nature, especially when one observes how precise a pencil Seghers
uses when he sketches his native country. However, truth to mountain
formation is anything but an easy thing to seize; only by incessant
training and close observation does the eye acquire it; and to draw
rocks imaginatively, that is, with vivid realisation of their essential
forms, is scarcely possible to one who has not the work of predecessors
to learn from and to surpass, and whose eye has not dwelt upon them from
childhood. One may imagine, therefore, that the efforts of a lowlander,
to whom mountains must have had something visionary and strange in their
aspect, would be halting, laborious, and confused in grappling with such
unfamiliar material. The rocks painted by Patinir are a case in point.
This may well explain the singular shortcomings of Seghers’ rendering of
rocks and mountains. In his attempts to represent floating clouds on the
mountain sides he is simply grotesque.
If, then, it was actual scenery that Seghers etched, where is that
scenery to be found? It is certainly not the Alps, and though one or two
plates suggest the Tyrol, the landscape is most like in character to the
Karst district on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. One of the
etchings might almost stand for the rock-surrounded plain of Cettinjé,
in Montenegro, though to infer that Seghers travelled to so remote a
country would be a wild conjecture.
There can be no doubt, on the other hand, of the influence of Elsheimer
over Seghers, and through him, over Rembrandt.
In the National Gallery there is a picture by Elsheimer representing
_Tobias and the Angel_, in a wooded landscape. This was engraved by
Elsheimer’s friend, Count de Goudt, and either from the picture or the
engraving,[5] Seghers borrowed the main features of one of his etchings
(Fig. 12). The two chief figures have been retained almost unaltered;
but their being placed higher up in the picture makes a considerable
change in the composition, they have more dignity and significance. The
elimination, also, of some rather trivial details, such as the great
flowers in the foreground, and the passing figures in the middle
distance, make for the same effect. A kind of mystery and solemnity have
been added to the landscape, and in fact the impression of the whole is
deepened and enlarged. The subject has been fused in Seghers’ mind and
has become his own.
At his death, Seghers’ effects, including his etched plates, were sold.
Among the buyers of these latter were, apparently, Antoni Waterloo and
Rembrandt. Waterloo published some of Seghers’ landscapes with his own,
and it has been assumed by Dutuit that these impressions were from the
earlier artist’s plates, re-worked. Comparison of one of the original
etchings, however, with that published by Waterloo of the same subject,
leads the writer to doubt this. The work is entirely different.
Rembrandt, we know from the inventory of his effects taken in 1656,
bought six of Seghers’ landscapes, and he also bought the copper on
which had been etched the _Tobias and the Angel_. It was re-worked by
Rembrandt, and it now appears in Rembrandt’s work as a _Flight into
Egypt_.[6] (See Fig. 13.)
The dark wooded landscape remains unaltered, and though the Holy Family
and a group of trees now occupy the right hand of the scene, the great
wing of the angel is still distinctly to be seen above them, and
Tobias’s legs have not been perfectly erased.
Rembrandt, we may be sure, would never have taken another man’s work
unless he had found in it a strong appeal to his own nature. And Seghers
seems to have been his prototype in landscape. On the one hand, the
mysterious, darkly wooded, mountainous visions of Seghers suggest the
type of landscape in which Rembrandt set, for instance, his own _Tobias
and the Angel_,[7] a type which he was fond of reproducing. On the other
hand, Seghers’ love for the vast distances of Holland, crowded plains
with broad rivers winding into an infinite horizon, appears again in
some of Rembrandt’s etchings, and more notably still in those spacious
prospects, “escapes for the mind” as Mr. Pater has called them, of
Rembrandt’s pupil, the most truly Dutch and perhaps the greatest, of all
the landscape painters of Holland--Philip de Koninck.
To return to Seghers’ etchings. There is something about them which
arrests the eye at once, and this is partly due to their peculiar
printing. Seghers was a born maker of experiments, and in nearly all his
plates sought to get an effect of colour. In fact, it is usually
asserted
[Illustration: _Fig. 13.--The Flight into Egypt. By Rembrandt. M. 236._]
that he anticipated, by a hundred years, the coloured engravings of
Leblond.
Printing in colour from two or more blocks had been practised by
wood-engravers long before this time. Burgkmair and Cranach in Germany,
Ugo da Carpi and Andrea Andreani in Italy, had produced a number of
these “chiaroscuros,” as they are called, with charming effect. This was
about the beginning of the sixteenth century. And almost in Seghers’ own
time, Hendrik Goltzius, of Haarlem, published some of his best work from
coloured wood-blocks.
But in all of these cases, at least two, and often three separate blocks
were used, and the colours superimposed on each other. This was also the
procedure of Leblond, though he used metal plates and mezzotint.
Seghers, however, employed a single plate only, and his effects are not
due to what is usually understood as colour printing. He first prepared
his paper with a coat of paint, which formed the ground; in some cases
this was a greenish tint. He then etched his subject and printed it in
an indigo ink; and in order to procure shading of the same colour, he
lightly scratched the parts to be shaded with the dry-point, so that the
copper held the ink on its surface. By this simple means he produced an
apparently complex effect.[8]
The green tint and dark-blue ink are, of course, only taken as a
specimen, for Seghers used various colours. Sometimes the impressions
are printed on linen. In one case the etching is printed in white on a
brown ground.
Besides views of Dutch plains and of mountain scenery, Seghers also
etched trees; not with great success, but with a striving after truth of
foliage very rare in his day. Now and then, too, he attempted buildings,
and with a real feeling for the romantic, for picturesque beauty, in
architecture.
On the whole, we must allow an important place in the history of Dutch
landscape to Hercules Seghers. But that must not prevent us from
perceiving that it is an historical importance only. Seghers opened up
the road, but he achieved no eminent triumph himself. Nor, in spite of
his suggestiveness for Rembrandt and De Koninck, does he seem to have
exercised any great influence on the landscape etchers who immediately
succeeded him.
He has no affinity with the men whose work we must now consider.
III
The two diverging tendencies of Dutch art, that which fed on the Italian
tradition and that which clung to the native soil, are both to some
extent represented in Seghers.
Leaving for a time the Italianised masters, let us follow the main
development of Dutch landscape art, the painters and etchers whom
Holland alone inspired.
The first names of note are those of Esaias and Jan van de Velde. Jan
was born in 1596, Esaias a few years earlier. Of the former we shall say
something later on. He produced a great deal of work, the most
remarkable part of which is a number of plates engraved and etched in
the manner of Elsheimer. It is by these plates that he is best known,
and through them he ranks as one of the Italianised school. As, however,
he etched a certain number of purely Dutch landscapes, after the designs
probably of his brother, he must also be mentioned here. These
landscapes are mostly sets of traditional subjects, such as the
sixteenth century loved: _The Four Elements_, _The Four Seasons_, _The
Twelve Months_. Always strongly overworked with the burin, these
etchings have a somewhat harsh and dry effect. The harshness is
especially noticeable in the treatment of foliage. It is as if the
artist were striving to reproduce with the etching-needle the manner of
line-engraving as employed by the Goltzius school. Failing to secure
this he has recourse to the burin to supplement his incomplete success
in etching.
Esaias uses the acid in a much franker fashion. A plate of his, which we
may take as representative, depicts a whale cast on the shores of
Holland, perhaps at Scheveningen, in 1614. A great crowd has assembled
on the beach staring at the stranded monster, examining and measuring
its vast proportions. The dunes recede in the distance; boats are at
anchor in the surf.
The scene is treated with the plainness and sincerity characteristic of
Dutch art. And the etching, with its firmly and rather coarsely bitten
lines, unsophisticated by the burin, has a solidity and simplicity not
without attraction.
Regarded as etching, this is primitive work. Still it is genuine
etching, and by one who has perceived that needle and acid demand an
employment and an aim different in kind from that of the graver. It is
interesting, therefore, to compare this plate with the line-engraving of
a similar subject, representing another whale stranded, a few years
before, in 1598, by Jacob Matham, the pupil of Goltzius.
With the Van de Veldes it is natural to associate two contemporaries,
who with them helped to inaugurate the great age of Dutch art; Pieter
[Illustration: _Fig. 14.--Three Men under a Tree. By Everdingen. B. 5._]
Molyn, the elder, and Jan van Goyen, the latter born in the same year
with Jan van de Velde.
Molyn, who was born in London, but was working in Haarlem before 1616,
is an artist of real independence. A set of etchings, published in 1626,
shows the same qualities that appear in his drawings--firm
draughtsmanship, openness and freedom of design, and a fine economy of
means. Heaths and moors, a climbing country road with plodding waggon, a
wayside inn, such were the simple elements which he translated into
always distinguished work. Doubtless to Molyn’s teaching must be
attributed something of that fine manner which imparts so much charm to
the pictures of Gerard Ter Borch, his pupil.
Dying in 1656, Molyn survived by a few years one who, though not a
pupil, came certainly under his influence; Van Goyen. Till lately Van
Goyen, perhaps because his works are better known, was supposed to have
been Molyn’s teacher, or at least to have given a stimulus to his art.
Van Goyen shows more power in his drawings than in his paintings, which
are sometimes but little removed from sepia monochromes; and it is a
surprise to come, here and there, upon a picture of his which is bright
and fresh. The few etchings which he published are undated, but belong,
according to Dr. Lippman, to his middle life, 1625-30. They
[Illustration: _Fig. 15.--Landscape in Norway. By Everdingen. B. 75._]
have not the character of Molyn’s plates, and are far less good as
etchings.
Simon de Vlieger, who ranks in date as a younger contemporary of the Van
de Veldes and of Molyn, is more successful as an etcher in the few
plates which he produced, than any of the early landscape artists.
Unhampered by the traditions of the line-engraver, he aims at an effect
at once delicate and free. As a painter, he is known almost entirely by
sea-pieces, silvery in tone, from which Jan van de Cappelle drew
something of his mastery over still effects at sea, mornings of sleepy
mist through which the sun breaks palely on the sails of anchored
vessels. Like most of the Dutch painters, de Vlieger changed his home
several times. Born at Rotterdam in 1600, he was at Delft from 1634 to
1640, and from then till his death, nineteen years later, at Amsterdam.
It seems probable that here he gave lessons to the young Willem van de
Velde, who was afterwards to be famous as the greatest of Dutch
sea-painters, and who died at Greenwich, a Court painter to Charles II.
In his etchings, which are undated, de Vlieger does not attempt the sea;
though one (B. 10), a fine piece in its way, is a scene on the
sea-beach, with fishermen and their haul. The best of the plates are two
Sylvan pieces, _The Wood by the Canal_ (B. 6), and the _Grassy Hill_ (B.
7). The foliage is more sensitively treated than it commonly is by Dutch
etchers, and with more approach to delicate truth. There is also a set
of animals and poultry; possibly one of the earliest sets of subjects of
this kind, which the middle of the century found so popular.
IV
With Allardt van Everdingen (1621-1675) we reach a new element in Dutch
landscape. Working under Pieter Molyn at Haarlem, he began by painting
marine subjects; and with a view to increasing his knowledge of the sea,
took ship on the Baltic. But a storm drove him to Norway; and there for
some time, taking advantage of misfortune, he lingered travelling and
sketching.
Before 1645, however--that is before he was twenty-five, Everdingen was
back in Haarlem. He now began to paint pictures from his Norwegian
sketches: and to the Dutch public this northern scenery disclosed a
novel charm. Used to wide pastures and ample skies, they found a
romantic strangeness in tumbling streams among rocks and pine-forests,
where the sky was shut off by mountain slopes.
In 1652 Everdingen removed to Amsterdam, where he remained till his
death. Probably his fame had preceded him: at any rate his popularity
soon grew great there also, and his canvases were much sought after.
Besides numerous pictures, the Norwegian sketches provided the artist
with material for a long series of etchings. Fig. 15 is a very
characteristic specimen of them. Without any extraordinary qualities,
they have often a genuine charm. The Norwegian landscape is treated
with insight into its peculiar features, and though Everdingen fails
entirely to suggest the rush and foam of torrents, he makes fine use of
the log cabins, rafts, and palings, and etches pines with truth and
spirit.
Of a probably later date are the four views of a watering-place,
possibly Spa, one of which is here reproduced (Fig. 16). The subject is
[Illustration: _Fig. 16.--Drinking the Waters at Spa. By Everdingen. B.
96._]
interesting, and the handling of the buildings and the groups of people
is excellent.
Everdingen was not without humour, which is shown in the long series of
illustrations to _Reynard the Fox_. But most readers will probably find
the chief interest of the artist to lie in his relations with a greater
man, Ruisdael.
V
Though a native of Haarlem, Jacob van Ruisdael produced most of his
life’s work at Amsterdam. He is conjectured to have been born about
1625; the precise year has not been discovered. His father Isaak, a
frame-maker, had him trained as a surgeon; and it was not till after he
had passed a course of surgery that he abandoned the profession for
painting, in which he had early shown his gift.
Ruisdael’s first pictures are dated 1646, and his works from that year
to 1655, his “early period,” are nearly all views of Haarlem and its
neighbourhood. Thoroughly Dutch in character, they have little of that
gloomy tone so frequent in the artist’s later time. The beautiful _View
of Haarlem_ at the Hague, with its massed clouds and ray of sunshine
gliding over the plain, is a perfect example of this early manner.
With Ruisdael’s removal from Haarlem, a great change comes over his art.
There seems no doubt that his early Dutch landscapes were not popular.
They were perhaps too original. He came to Amsterdam poor and without
much reputation, and he found there, established in fame and popularity,
Allardt van Everdingen, returned from Norway and now attracting the
world of buyers by his pictures of that wild and romantic country. It
was in 1652, as we have seen, that Everdingen settled in the city, and
three or four years later Ruisdael arrived. He did not become a burgess
till 1659, but had probably been already some years in residence before
the formal inscription of his name.
From this period dates the lamentable change in Ruisdael’s art. The
master, whose native independence is so marked that one is at a loss to
name his probable teacher, of his own will and in sheer mortification of
spirit at his want of success, forces himself from the meadows and dunes
of his delight, and invents, to win the patronage of the rich men of
Amsterdam, a Norway of his own. A visit to North Germany, of which there
is some evidence, helped his invention. Now begins the long series of
waterfalls and pines and torrents so familiar in the picture galleries.
It is not on these that Ruisdael’s fame rests; on this ground
Everdingen, in spite of his inferior merits as a painter, remains his
master. But as the pictures of this period are the most common, the
public is apt to identify him with this acquired style in which the
true Ruisdael is obscured. For this reason it was a fortunate choice
which secured for the National Gallery, two years ago, so exquisite a
specimen of the painter at his best as the _Shore at Scheveningen_, No.
1390. The chilly ending of an afternoon, with clouds blowing up and the
rain beginning, the vexed movement of shallow water as the rising wind
breaks it into short waves, the wetness of the spray-laden atmosphere,
are painted with a sensitive subtlety that more modern landscape, with
all its triumphs, has not excelled. The mood of feeling here expressed
is intimately Ruisdael’s own. Without the brooding melancholy which
became oppressively habitual later, which found such grandiose
expression in pictures like the famous _Jews’ Burying-place_ at Dresden,
there is here a latent sadness that seems to have been bred in the fibre
of the man. It seems a kind of expectation of sorrow; the mood that
poetry with greater intensity has expressed in some lines of Browning
which suggest themselves:
The rain set early in to-night;
The sullen wind was soon awake:
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake.
I listened, with heart fit to break....
For such a nature who would predict happiness? Fortune satisfied that
inborn melancholy to the full. The years brought increasing poverty, and
the cares of providing for himself and for his father wore the artist
down. The autumn of 1681 found him ill and helpless; so helpless that
the religious community to which he belonged, the sect of Mennonites,
procured admission for him to their almshouse at Haarlem. There he
lingered till the next spring. In March he was buried in St. Bavon’s.
VI
Ruisdael’s etchings are but twelve, or perhaps thirteen, in number; only
seven being catalogued by Bartsch. Their fewness shows, what their
technical qualities confirm, that the artist neither had great aptitude
for this method of expression nor cared to pursue his experiments in it
far. They all belong to his earliest period. One, the _Three Oaks_ (B.
6), is dated 1649, and it is difficult to assign any of the others,
except possibly the _Cornfield_, to a later date.