(B. 4), is decidedly the most interesting. It is a forest scene, wild
and intricate, with water running or standing in pools among the great
roots of the oak which occupies the centre and of the beech which fills
the left. The two figures are passing in the middle distance, where the
wood is clearer. It is a remnant, perhaps, of that vast forest which at
one time covered the whole of Holland. Ruisdael’s strong feeling for old
trees, for the solitude of forests, densely branching and mysterious,
inspires him here; and one has only to turn to the facile etchers of
sylvan scenery, Waterloo or Swanevelt, or Van der Cabel, to realise the
difference between the man who feels what he cannot perfectly master and
the man who has perfect mastery of a facile formula. Ruisdael never
succeeded in finding a quite satisfactory convention for foliage in
etched line; but his continual feeling after truth of rendering, his
sensitiveness, to which the forms of branch and leaf are always fresh
and wonderful, make his work always interesting.
The three other large plates (B. 1-3) are less successful handlings of
the same kind of subject. Though the first, _The Little Bridge_, is not
a forest scene, and represents a decayed old farm-building, it is
penetrated with the same feeling for picturesque, moss-grown antiquity
and neglected solitude. The _Three Oaks_ are etched with truth and
strength, but they do not rival the grandeur of the oak in the larger
plate. The _Cornfield_ (Fig. 17) is sunny and pleasant.
There are two states of the four large plates, and many of the _Three
Oaks_ and the _Cornfield_. As the later states are by far the more
common, it is well to be warned that the plates have been retouched,
and, in the writer’s opinion, certainly not by Ruisdael. In the first
three a pudding-shaped cloud, with hard, bulging edges (what a satire on
this consummate master of clouds!) has been inserted, and in all there
is fresh work, sometimes adding to the effect of the plate, but still
suggesting an alien hand.
Ruisdael’s etching is little more than an illustration of his painting;
criticism, therefore, of the one must deal to a certain extent with the
other.
Ruisdael’s great fame rests, perhaps, as much on his historical
importance as on his actual merit. With Hobbema he prepared the way for
Crome and Constable, and through them for Rousseau and the landscape of
modern France. But, taken on his own merits, he is a considerable
figure. Were it not for the fatiguing series of unpersuasive waterfalls,
which too often represent him, his real qualities would have more chance
of making themselves felt. When on his own ground he is
[Illustration: _Fig. 17.--The Cornfield. By J. Ruisdael. B. 5._]
more various, more subtle, altogether finer than Hobbema, except when
Hobbema is at his very best, as in the severely charming _Avenue of
Middleharnis_. Hobbema often fails to convince, because he has not
sufficiently felt his subject; and so he will paint a grand sky with the
wind moving great clouds across it, but when he comes to the trees of
his foreground he forgets his sky, and paints the branches in a
breathlessly stiff atmosphere, without the suggestion of a wind. The
resulting effect is a perplexing heaviness. Ruisdael betrays the same
defect in his later pictures; what else could one expect from one
condemned to produce unrealities for a market? But in his good period he
always shows an impressible imagination, and his materials are fused by
the feeling in which he steeps them. His sense for the beauty of trees
is profound, though rather limited in its range. He was lacking in the
consummate style of Crome, and would never have achieved the largeness
and reticent power of a picture like the English master’s _Avenue at
Chapel Fields_. But for skies, for clouds, he has an eye more true, a
love more comprehensive, than those of any who had gone before him, than
those of many who were to follow him. He piles his clouds in mountainous
glory, “trailing” their shadows over the wide country, till the level
pastures of Holland grow in “visionary majesties” like the grandest
mountains of Norway. This gives us all the more reason to deplore the
absence of any attempt to deal with clouds in the etchings, still more
the presence of those inflated shapes inserted by a stupid publisher.
VII
Though an important figure in the history of landscape painting,
Ruisdael did not strongly influence the contemporary etchers of
landscape. Hobbema, his famous scholar, did not, so far as we know, etch
at all. A few etchers, however, felt Ruisdael’s stimulus more or less:
Van Beresteyn, who was working at Haarlem in 1644, and produced some
etchings somewhat in the manner of Ruisdael’s _Cornfield_, but with a
mannered treatment of trees: H. Naiwincx, who handled a delicate point,
and etched a set of graceful plates of woodland and river: and Adriaen
Verboom, who in his two or three etchings is perhaps more successful in
treatment of trees than any of the Dutchmen.
But more celebrated than any of these is Antoni Waterloo.
His etchings, to which alone he owes his reputation, are considerably
over a hundred in number; and as the subjects are monotonous, they soon
become tedious. Groups of trees by a roadside, or a fringe of wood alone
occupy Waterloo’s needle. Now and then, as in B. 28, the touch is light
and the effect pleasant: but having once found a formula, Waterloo is
content to repeat it. His foliage is hard and heavy.
[Illustration: _Fig. 18.--The Burnt House on the Canal. By Van der
Heyden._]
Roelant Roghman (1597-1686), though most of his plates are nominally
topographical, shows more feeling, if less skill. One set of plates by
him illustrates the Dutch postal system between the mother country and
the East Indies, and has therefore an historical interest.
But Roghman’s chief claim on our concern is that he was the faithful and
beloved friend of Rembrandt. His etchings, however, show no trace of
Rembrandt’s influence; and he was by ten years the elder man.
Like Seghers and like Ruisdael, Roghman was neglected and miserable in
his life, and died in an almshouse. One of his landscapes is in the
National Gallery.
VIII
The illustration on page 51 (Fig. 18) is from an etching which
represents a certain province of Dutch art, handled by several of the
painters with much success, but scarcely touched by the etchers.
Of this group, to whom architecture, whether in the spacious and austere
interiors of the Dutch churches, or the squares and ruddy brick
house-fronts of the towns, was the chief preoccupation, Jan van der
Heyden is the most famous and the best. He is also the one among them
who has etched. The illustration, though much reduced, gives a fairly
good idea of his work. Master of a precise and patient pencil, Van der
Heyden is not content till he has drawn in every brick, every stone. And
the marvel is, that in spite of his method, he contrives to convey a
certain spirit of largeness into his design. In fact, though so minute
in detail, he seems always to have kept his eye on the whole. A pleasant
temperate warmth of colour pervades his pictures, the kind of light
which on certain days suffuses old brick walls, as if dyed in the
sunshine of many summers: and that exquisite order, the almost
extravagant cleanliness of Dutch households, makes itself felt in these
glimpses of tree-bordered canals, and of trim house-fronts with their
well-proportioned windows.
Much of this colour persists even in the black and white of an etching
like that reproduced. It is the day after a fire, and a little crowd of
neighbours is gathered to look on the burnt remnant of the house. How
[Illustration: _Sea Piece. From an etching by L. Backhuysen._]
excellently are the groups and figures depicted! This is not true
etcher’s work; but it is very skilful work, very good work, of its kind.
Neither Van der Heyden, nor any of the Dutch painters of architecture,
realised the capacity of outlines in stone or brick, attended by their
circumstance of light and shadow, to impress the imagination, to stir
emotion, as Méryon was to do later. But their work, by its soberness and
firm simplicity, wins us. In its own way, and in its own degree, it will
always give pleasure.
IX
From Holland, the first naval power in Europe of the seventeenth
century, a love of the sea and an expression of it in art were naturally
to be expected: and among the several fine painters who now for the
first time made the sea their subject, two at least, Reynier Zeeman and
Ludolph Backhuysen, have left some admirable etchings. Simon de Vlieger
painted, but did not etch marine subjects; of Jan van de Capelle only
three indifferent plates are known; and Willem van de Velde did not etch
at all.
Zeeman’s real name was Nooms; but his love of the sea procured him early
the name which he adopts on all his plates. He travelled much, but
worked chiefly at Amsterdam, where probably he was born in 1623.
Zeeman’s etchings are nearly all in sets, representing views of
Amsterdam, different kinds of Dutch shipping, and naval battles. They
passed through the hands of several publishers, who, we may conjecture,
commissioned him to do them: and they were evidently popular. Such work,
nominally and primarily intended to serve a literary rather than a
pictorial purpose, suffers in consequence. The artist has had to choose
his subjects with a view to those whose interest was not in the etcher
as etcher, but in his knowledge of ships and skill in depicting them.
Yet Zeeman has managed to serve art as well as history. Ships, with
their ordered intricacy of rigging and their mysterious beauty, have an
endless fascination for him: for it is shipping, rather than the sea
itself, which he loves. And his ships are etched with an admirable
feeling, a simple and effective handling of the bitten lines. His men of
war move with royal stateliness; and the battle-pieces have something
of the magnificence one imagines in the old sea-fights. Equally good in
their way are plates like the fishing boats (Fig. 19) setting out at
morning over the still sea, bathed in a wash of limpid air and sunshine.
Only in his clouds does Zeeman completely fail. Historically, too, these
prints are interesting. Here, with patriotic pride, Zeeman is fond of
showing the English ship of the line or frigate, with her sails riddled,
conquered at last, and with the Dutch tricolour hoisted over the St.
George’s Cross. Nothing could more
[Illustration: _Fig. 19.--Fishing Boats. By R. Zeeman. B. 38._]
vividly bring home to Englishmen the powerful position of Holland at the
time.
Backhuysen’s etchings are later than Zeeman’s, being all produced in
1701, when the artist was seventy years old,[9] and seven years before
his death at Amsterdam. A pupil of Everdingen, he had soon risen to fame
and was employed or sought after by many foreign princes, including the
Tsar Peter the Great; and from over much production his work suffered.
The etchings, however, though produced so late in life, are neither
languid nor feeble. In freshness and vivacity they excel Backhuysen’s
drawings. It is the same with Zeeman: probably because the
etching-needle has so much more capacity for giving the crispness of
foam and the sharp lights of running waves, than pencil and sepia. No
one, till Turner came, succeeded at all in painting the mass and weight
of water as the tides move it in deep seas; but the easily agitated,
breezy motion of the shallow Dutch waters is often suggested with a
pleasant freshness by Backhuysen. The best of the etchings is that of
the ship under sail, crushing the water under her bows into foam.
X
So far, we have considered only the native school of landscape artists,
who took their subjects from Holland and its borders. But towards the
end of the sixteenth century there was established in Rome a group of
painters from the Netherlands, to which each succeeding generation added
new members, whether they settled there for life or stayed only for a
few years.
Belonging to this group are a certain number of etchers, deriving
originally, in more or less degree, from Elsheimer, and receiving a
second and more powerful stimulus from the art of Claude.
Jan van de Velde,[10] it seems probable, spent some years of his manhood
in Italy, and perhaps worked under Elsheimer himself. At any rate, a
number of his plates are entirely in Elsheimer’s manner. These are so
heavily overworked with the burin that they must count rather as
line-engravings than as etchings. The burin plays, indeed, a more or
less important part in all Jan van de Velde’s prints.
One set, illustrating the story of Tobias, was etched from designs by
Moses van Uytenbroeck, an artist who also published a number of plates
of his own. Here again is an instance of the traditional chronology
being at fault. Uytenbroeck’s birth is usually given as 1600. But Bode
has pointed out that there are engravings after his work by an artist
who died in 1612. The date must therefore be put back several years.
Uytenbroeck is perhaps the nearest to Elsheimer of all his followers.
The relation of the figures to the landscape, the curious human types,
with their rather stolid, plain faces and heavy gestures, the treatment
of Italian landscape, all are intimately akin to the German master’s
art.
Elsheimer’s influence still persists strongly in Cornelis Poelenburg,
one of the most popular of the Dutch artists in Rome, whose small,
smoothly glowing pictures of grottoes and bathing nymphs are familiar in
every
[Illustration: _Fig. 20.--Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh.
B. 17._]
gallery. Poelenburg did not etch himself, but his friend Jan Gerritz
Bronchorst etched from his paintings and in his style, though with less
grace and elegance. We find here the beginnings of that school of
landscape, “Arcadian” as Bode calls it, which so soon received its
fullest and most perfect expression in the large and tranquil art of
Claude.
[Illustration: _Fig. 21.--Landscape. By Both. B. 3._]
Pieter de Laer, of whose etchings of animals we shall say something in
the next chapter, etched one landscape at least in the delicate soft
manner of that master. And with him maybe associated Bartolomeus
Breenbergh, who lived in Rome from his twenty-first to his twenty-eighth
year, 1620-1627. He was married at Amsterdam in 1633 and died there in
1659 or earlier; but was at Rome again in the interval, during which he
published (1640) a set of very attractive little prints. Fig. 20 is an
example of his work.
The same delicate, fine needle, and the same preference for the
picturesque, characterise the earlier etchings of Thomas Wyck. Later he
adopted a freer, broader style, and worked on a larger scale, but with
less success.
But the most conspicuous and important of this group is Jan Both. Like
Poelenburg, he was a man of Utrecht, where he was born in 1610 and where
he died in 1652. His portrait, taken in his later days at home, is that
of a stout, grave burgher. Quite young he left the studio of his master
Bloemart and travelled through France to Rome. There the soft sunshine
of Claude fascinated him and he began to follow in the footsteps of that
famous painter.
Every one knows the landscapes of Both, their smooth, rather insipid
grace, their premeditated balance of composition, their elegant
monotony. It is certain that they were popular in Holland, whither they
were brought in ships from Italy to adorn the walls of wealthy buyers.
Probably in that day such painting of placid sunshine was a new thing;
what we perceive to be a surface acquaintance with Nature savoured
almost of intimacy; and doubtless Both’s pretty and monotonous
conventions had then a permanent charm.
In his etchings, Both’s weaknesses do not appear so strongly. And,
wisely, he did not produce many. Had there been more they would, beyond
doubt, have been precisely similar to what we have; and from mere
fatigue at their monotony one would have rated them below their worth.
As it is, the ten landscapes after his own designs are more than enough
to reveal Both’s great limitations. Yet they are few enough for us to
enjoy them. For, after all, they are attractive and accomplished
etchings. From Claude, Both had learned how to produce, with a nice
management of the acid, an exquisite softness in his distances. The
atmosphere is limpid and bathed in sunshine, and the foregrounds are
suggested with that light touch and selection of detail which are first
requisites in an etching.
Here, again, it is only fair to the artist to judge him by the early
states of his work. The ruled lines defacing the sky which they are
meant to constitute, were added in the second state by the publisher. Of
that there can be little doubt. Unfortunately, Both’s first states are
extremely rare.
Both’s pupil, Willem de Heusch, approaches if he does not rival his
master. He is not independent enough, however, to merit special notice.
Herman van Swanevelt, another artist whose birth-date must be put
further back than the traditional 1620,[11] lived on to 1690, when he
died at Rome. His etchings are more considerable in number than in
merit. He began the school of reminiscences from Claude and Titian’s
landscapes which lingered on through paler and paler repetitions into
the eighteenth century, in the sad facility of Genoels and Van der Cabel
and Glauber. Never was art more bloodless and apathetic than in these
degenerate spoilers of a fine tradition.
THE ETCHERS OF PASTORAL
I
While landscape thus occupied the talent of so many Dutch painters, a
certain number struck out a branch apart, choosing subjects that may
briefly be called pastoral. For these men the foreground of cattle, the
goatherd or the shepherd with his flock, was of greater interest than
the background of often quite conventional scenery. Sometimes two or
more painters collaborated, and one painted the landscape while another
put in the animals.
And as in painting, so in etching. A certain group of men etched nothing
but animals, with now and then a landscape. Of these the chief are Paul
Potter, Claes Berchem, Adriaen van de Velde, Karel du Jardin.
This love of the domestic animals for their own sake in art seems native
and almost peculiar to Holland.
Many painters before this time had shown a remarkable love of animals.
From Benozzo Gozzoli to Bassano, individuals among the Italian masters
had introduced their favourites, wherever opportunity offered, into
sacred and historical compositions. And among the elder contemporaries
of the Dutchmen, Rubens, Snyders, and Velasquez had painted dogs and
horses as only they could paint them. But it is mainly in hunting
pieces, as servants or companions of man, that these painters introduce
animals; cattle and sheep do not interest them.
It is the same with the great engravers who preceded the
seventeenth-century etchers. Dürer was undoubtedly very fond of animals
and engraved them frequently. And that singular master of the fifteenth
century, whose name we do not know, but who is generally called the
Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet from the fact that by far the fullest
collection of his prints is at Amsterdam, engraved dogs and horses with
a freedom and a vivacity which Dürer never attained, and which were in
that period of Northern art unique. This master was long thought a
Dutchman, but the type of his faces, among other considerations, marks
him as a Swabian artist.
Yet in none of these men appears anything like the peculiar feeling
which in Potter, for instance, strikes so strong a note. The glory and
[Illustration: _Fig. 22.--A Ram. By Berchem. B. 51._]
excitement of the chase, so magnificently put on canvas by Rubens, the
relish of the boar’s savage fury as the hounds hurl themselves at him,
are absolutely alien to that brooding intentness, as alert to catch
every curve in the attitude of cattle rising or lying down, as subtle to
penetrate to their mysterious non-human existence, so distant and aloof,
pervading the Dutchman’s art. It is a mood which fuses the mind into the
life it watches, till the delight of cool running water to the cattle,
as they plunge in from the hot fields, is as intimately felt as the joy
of battle in their charging hounds, which is merely reflected human
feeling, is felt by the painters of the hunt.
Thus, while in Flanders painters and etchers like Jan Fyt carried on in
their animal pieces the tradition of Rubens and Snyders, a totally
different mode of animal painting and etching was springing up in
Holland.
“Pastoral,” it is most convenient to call it; but it is not pastoral in
the same sense that the word has come to have, as applied to certain
types of poetry, whether the _Idylls_ of Theocritus or the _Eclogues_ of
Virgil. There, as with the early painters of animals, the human interest
is the preoccupying interest; and the poet sings of the peasant’s life
in the fields, his industries, his pleasures, his loves and quarrels,
either from native love and knowledge of that life, or in a desire no
less genuine, if expressed through forms of more or less artificial
colouring and outline, for the real simplicity of the country. It is the
herdsman, not his herd, that is the pastoral poet’s theme.
Now, for the first time, the artist disengages himself from the point of
view of man, and effaces himself before the dumb life he contemplates.
Already, in the engravings of Lucas van Leyden, who, by his early
maturity and his early death, his gentle nature and his exquisite skill,
seems to stand as a prototype of Paul Potter--a kind of foreshadowing of
this attitude appears. But not till the seventeenth century does the
vein begin to be developed. Then, by rapid degrees, not through any
single influence, but communicated imperceptibly as if “in the air,” the
tradition grows.
II
Moses van Uytenbroeck and Claes Moeyart, whose etchings in the style of
Elsheimer were mentioned earlier, both produced a certain number of
purely pastoral plates. Of Uytenbroeck, we have a set of groups of
animals with backgrounds of Campagna landscape, which seem to date from
early in the century. And in the later manner of Moeyart, dated 1638, is
a group of cattle, sheep, and goats, under shady trees, in a
conventional landscape but with an unidealised Dutch herdsman. Neither
of these men etched cattle with much knowledge or spirit, though
Moeyart was an artist of many-sided talent, and painted pictures that
are excellent in their way.
Considerably better is an etching by Jan Gerritz Bleecker, also dated
1638. It is a group of cattle with a cowherd piping, conceived in the
pastoral vein of Potter’s _Shepherd_. Here, already, the interest of the
artist begins to centre on the animals.
In Pieter de Laer this interest is still more frank. Born before 1613,
de Laer found early a home in Italy, where his pictures were widely
appreciated. In the same year that we have just mentioned, 1638, he,
too, published a set of etchings of animals, in which attitude and
action are caught with far more vivacity and truth than hitherto, while
the design--though coarsely bitten--is light and free, compared with
earlier work. Another set of horses, which probably followed this, is
the prototype of studies like those of Potter’s.
De Laer seems to have been one of the first Dutchmen to import Dutch
realism and the Dutch method of painting into Italy. The Italians found
in such art something fresh and vigorous. De Laer soon gained immense
vogue in the south, and had a corresponding influence on his countrymen
who came to work there.
Among these, probably, was Claes Pietersz Berchem. It is not known for
certain whether this artist visited Italy, but the internal evidence of
his pictures points strongly to the supposition that he did. At any
rate, Dr. Bredius is convinced of it, and for the present we may safely
accept the hypothesis on his authority.
Berchem was born at Haarlem in 1620, but was working at Amsterdam before
1642, in which year his name occurs as member of the Haarlem Guild of
St. Luke. We also know that he was painted by Rembrandt in 1647.[12] Was
this before or after his journey to Italy, asks Bredius, and leaves the
question open. The etchings, however, help us towards an answer. 1644 is
the date on a set of cattle, with a milkmaid for title; also on the
_Return from the Fields_ (_L’Homme Monté sur l’Âne_) (B. 5). These are
etched with fine, delicate short strokes, in a manner afterwards
abandoned by Berchem. His most celebrated print, however, the so-called
“Diamond,” or _Joueur de Cornemuse_ (B. 4), and the _Fluting Shepherd_
(B. 6), are in the delicate early manner, and must be assigned to the
same date. Now, these are all unmistakably Italian in character. If we
may assume from Berchem’s pictures that he had been to Italy, we can
assume it with equal safety from these etchings. We may infer, then,
that in 1647 he had already returned from Italy. Berchem had many
pupils, including Karel du Jardin, of whom we shall speak later. He was
evidently one of the popular artists of the day. It is curious to
compare the features of the man as they live in