1643, she returned and, landing at Burlington Quay, placed herself at
the head of a band of Loyalists and marched through England to join
the King near Oxford. After little more than a residence there of a
year, on the 3d of April, 1644, she parted from her husband to see his
face no more; but as long as Charles I was alive she never ceased to
encourage him to resistance. Henrietta Maria found refuge in France,
for Richelieu was then dead and Anne of Austria proved compassionate,
yet she had much to suffer in her exile. The execution of her
husband was a terrible distress. There is a story with some truth
that she married her equerry, Lord Jermyn, which may account for the
estrangement of her children.
When Henrietta Maria returned to England after the Restoration, she
found that she had no place in the new Court. Parliament gave her a
grant of £30,000 a year in compensation for the loss of her dower-lands
and her son, Charles II, added a similar sum as a pension from himself.
In January, 1661, Henrietta returned to France to be present at the
marriage of her daughter, Henrietta, to the Duc d’Orléans, but in July,
1662, she was back in England, taking up her residence at Somerset
House. Three years later she returned to France and died at Colombes,
near Paris, in 1666.
The other personage in this double portrait, Jeffrey Hudson, was born
at Oakham, Rutland, in 1619. His father was a butcher, who kept and
baited bulls for George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham. Neither
of his parents was undersized. When he was nine years old his father
carried Jeffrey to Burleigh-on-the-Hill and offered him to the Duchess
of Buckingham, who took him into her service. At that time he was
scarcely eighteen inches in height and, if we may believe Fuller,
“without any deformity, wholly proportioned.”
Shortly afterwards Charles I and Henrietta Maria passed through Rutland
and the Duke of Buckingham gave a dinner in their honor. During one of
the courses an enormous pie[22] was served; and when it was cut, out
jumped Jeffrey Hudson! The Queen was so delighted with the sprightly
little dwarf that she appropriated him at once and he became a Court
favorite.
Jeffrey had a number of adventures. On one occasion, when he was sent
to France to procure a nurse for the Queen, the ship was captured on
the return voyage by a Flemish pirate and Jeffrey, the nurse, and the
Queen’s dancing-master were all taken to Dunkirk. Then Jeffrey also
saw some military service. When the Prince of Orange besieged Breda in
1637, “Strenuous Jeffrey” was in the Prince’s camp in company with the
Earl of Warwick (see page 187) and the Earl of Northampton, who were
volunteers in the Dutch Service.
During the Civil Wars Jeffrey Hudson is said to have been a Captain of
the Horse. It is certain that he followed the Queen, for he was with
her in the flight to Pendennis Castle, in June, 1644, and he went with
her to Paris. “He was,” says Fuller, “though a dwarf, no dastard”; and,
accordingly, when insulted by Crofts at Paris in 1649, he shot him dead
with a pistol in a duel. Crofts had rashly armed himself only with a
squirt. In consequence of this, Jeffrey had to leave Paris, although
Henrietta Maria saved him from imprisonment, which, however, he had
frequently experienced. At sea Jeffrey was captured by a Turkish rover,
carried to Barbary, and sold as a slave. His miseries, according to
his own account, made him grow taller. Jeffrey managed to get back to
England about 1658, at which time Heath addressed some lines to him in
his _Clarastella_.
After the Restoration, Jeffrey Hudson lived quietly in the country for
some time on a pension subscribed by the Duke of Buckingham and others;
but, on coming up to London to push his fortunes at Court, he, being a
Roman Catholic, was suspected of complicity in the Popish Plot (1679)
and was confined in the Gatehouse at Westminster.
In June, 1680, and April, 1681, “Captain Jeffrey Hudson” received
respectively £50 and £20 from Charles II’s secret service fund. Jeffrey
Hudson died in 1682.
Accounts of his height vary, but, according to his own statement (as
made to Wright, the historian of Rutland), after reaching the age of
seven, when he was eighteen inches high, he did not grow at all until
he was thirty, when he shot up three feet, six or nine. Hudson’s
waistcoat, breeches, and stockings are preserved in the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford.
DUTCH PAINTING
_DUTCH PAINTING_
It is not until we come to the Seventeenth Century that Painting in
that part of the Spanish and Austrian Netherlands now known as Holland
took on the national character of the Dutch race. The new political
and economic views inculcated by the States-General, and even more
particularly through the bias of the Protestant faith, produced an
entirely new kind of painting. The sacred subjects inspired by the
Roman Catholic religion, as well as the mythological and historical
subjects (made so popular by Rubens) were rejected for more prosaic
and literal interpretations of Biblical stories; for representations
of popular heroes in the late wars that overthrew Spanish tyranny; for
portrait groups of civic dignitaries, such as Regents and Presidents
of guild-halls, shooting-galleries, hospitals and other charitable
institutions (known as “_Regent_” and “_Doelen_” pictures); and
for those domestic scenes and social parties called “_Conversation
Pieces_,” in which are mirrored the Dutch home and its simple
pleasures with detailed representation of furniture, rugs, china,
glass, brass-ware, musical instruments, birds, animals, food, fruit,
and flowers. Landscapes and marines were also in harmony with the new
choice of subject, and, of course, portraiture of the most realistic
kind.
This matter-of-fact art was given a somewhat “romantic” quality
by the extraordinary treatment of dark masses of shadow and of
sunlight effects and also by a fine use of color. Artists have always
appreciated these characteristics, agreeing with Sir Joshua Reynolds,
who wrote after his visit to the Netherlands:
“A market-woman with a hare in her hand, a man blowing a trumpet, or
a boy blowing bubbles, a view of the inside or outside of a church,
are the subjects of some of their most valuable pictures; but there
is still entertainment, even in such pictures--however uninteresting
their subjects, there is some pleasure in the contemplation of the
imitation. But to a painter they afford likewise instruction in his
profession; here he may learn the art of coloring and composition, a
skillful management of light and shade and indeed all the mechanical
parts of the art as well as in any other School whatever.
“The same skill which is practised by Rubens and Titian in their large
works is here exhibited, though on a smaller scale. Painters should go
to the Dutch School to learn the art of painting as they would go to a
grammar-school to learn languages. They must go to Italy to learn the
higher branches of knowledge.”
In the long list of great and noteworthy Dutch painters the two
greatest names are Rembrandt and Frans Hals. Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606–1669), a powerful giant, excelling in painting, etching, and
drawing, producing masterpiece after masterpiece and standing alone as
an interpreter of Bible stories, profound searcher for character in
portraiture, and dramatist in light and shade (see page 204).
Frans Hals (1580?–1666), painter of portraits, corporations and
military companies, and characters of low life, with an uncanny
analysis of the eye and an uncanny technique to register surely and
rapidly what his eye saw, whose pictures, long neglected, are of high
value to-day (see page 220).
Not far below Frans Hals and Rembrandt as a painter of great civic
group pictures comes Bartholomew van der Helst (1612–1670), whose
enormous _Civic Guard Banquet_, painted in 1648 in celebration of
the Peace of Münster, with its twenty-four life-size portraits, ranks
as one of the great pictures of the world. Van der Helst’s _Company
of Captain Roelof Bicker_, in the same gallery, with its thirty-two
portraits, is its equal although not quite so renowned.
Dutch Painting, however, did not leap into being with Rembrandt, Frans
Hals, and Bartholomew van der Helst. There were Dutch Primitives,
as there were Flemish Primitives, and they are not always to be
distinguished from one another. The famous Hubert and Jan van Eyck, for
instance, are thought to have been natives of Maaseyck on the Maas and
Hans Memling is supposed to have been born in Memelynck, near Alkmaar.
The greatest of the Dutch painters was Lucas van Leiden (1494-1533),
who knew Italian Art well and who was a follower of Albrecht
Dürer. Some of his paintings are very decorative and his chess and
card-players may almost be said to begin Dutch _genre_ painting,
brought to such perfection by the Little Dutch Masters. By the end of
the Fifteenth Century a great many Dutch painters had visited Italy;
some of them had studied there; and some of them had worked there. Jan
van Scorel (1495–1562), for instance, was kept in Rome for five years
by Pope Adrian VI, who was, himself, a native of Utrecht.
Jan van Scorel was the master of Antonio Moro, or Antonis Mor
(1512–1577), who went to Rome, was admitted to the Guild of Painters
in Utrecht in 1547, and leaped into fame with a portrait of Cardinal
Granvella, who took Moro in his train to Brussels. Moro soon became
Court-Painter to the House of Hapsburg and travelled about to various
courts, painting portraits of Royalty. Michiel Jansz Mierevelt
(1567–1641), was portrait-painter to the House of Orange and Nassau and
his pupil, Paulus Moreelse (1571–1638), a native of Utrecht, was hardly
less popular. The greatest painter of Corporation Pictures before Frans
Hals was Jan van Ravensteyn (1572–1657).
The early Dutch landscape-painters travelled to Italy, Switzerland,
and even Norway; but none of them acquired the reputation of two
Dutchmen who found inspiration at home. Jan van Goyen (1596–1656),
and Jan Wynants (1620?–1682), were the first to take pleasure in
their own country. Van Goyen loved the water, the boats, the clouds,
the mist, and distant towns silhouetted against the sky. Wynants
showed the charm of the lonely walk that led through the dunes to the
sea. Wynants formed Adriaen van de Velde (1635–1672), who carried
landscape-painting so far that he comes very close to the Barbizon
School of the Nineteenth Century. Then there are two Dutch artists
who are doubly famous for their landscapes and animals: Aelbert Cuyp
(1620–1691), “the King of Dutch landscape-painters,” noted for his
golden light and elegant cavaliers riding fine horses; and Paul Potter
(1625–1654), known far and wide for his _Bull_, in the Hague Gallery,
painted when the artist was only twenty-two; but not so fine a work
as _La Vache qui se mire_ (_The Mirrored Cow_) in the same gallery.
Of these two pictures the French critic, Burger, wittily remarked:
“_La Vache qui se mire_ is a _chef-d’œuvre_ and not a _hors d’œuvre_,
like the _Bull_!” Supreme as landscape-painters stand Jacob Ruisdael
(1628–9–1682), who used as a rule a very dark green and who was able
to suggest immense perspectives in very small compass, also for his
harmonious relation of earth and sky, and Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709),
supposed to have been his pupil, and whose long neglected pictures of
long, straight roads beneath tall trees now bring high prices.
Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), a pupil of Frans Hals, wandered about
the country finding material along the roads. Ostade often caught the
poetic side of a rustic scene and he had a commanding knowledge of
light.
The Dutch, with their love of home and their simple pleasures, excelled
in depicting scenes of intimate life, “_Conversation Pieces_,” and
_genre_. The list of these worthy painters is long. A few, however,
stand out prominently,--Gerard Dou, Gerard Terborch, Jan Steen, Pieter
de Hoogh, Jan Vermeer of Delft, Gabriel Metsu, Nicholas Maes, and
Frans van Mieris--all painters of the Seventeenth Century, portraying
life as they saw it around them, according to the class in which they
moved. Terborch, Metsu, and van Mieris showed ladies and gentlemen,
beautifully dressed, enjoying music, or playing cards, or having
a light afternoon repast, or writing letters, or making love, or
talking in the garden, or sitting quietly in a comfortably furnished
room; Jan Steen depicted feasts, merry-making, weddings, St. Nicholas
celebrations, tavern-scenes, drunken brawls and quack doctors; and
Gerard Dou produced simple scenes in the home where servants are
at work and mothers sit by the cradle, and sometimes scenes by
candle-light with strange reflections, for Gerard Dou was a pupil of
Rembrandt and liked to play tricks with _chiaroscuro_. Another painter,
who was a magician with light, is Jan Vermeer of Delft (1632–1675), who
was a pupil of Rembrandt’s pupil, Carel Fabritius, and whose pictures
are rare and famous (see page 228). Still another artist, remarkable
for his knowledge of the complex problems of light, is Pieter de
Hoogh or Hooch (1629–1677?), hardly less remarkable for his solid and
splendid rendering of architecture, exterior as well as interior (see
page 226).
Moreover, the Dutch excelled in two other _genres_,--birds and flowers.
Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636–1695), caught all the beauties of the
feathered world and had an insight into its society. _The Floating
Feather_, in the Rijk’s Museum, is very celebrated. Burger delightfully
wrote of it:
“No one has painted better than Hondecoeter the cocks and hens,
ducks and drakes, and particularly little chicks and ducklings. He
has understood such families as the Italians have the mystical Holy
Family; he has expressed the motherhood of the hen as Raphael has the
motherhood of the Madonna. In fact, the subject is more naturally
treated because it has less sublimity. Hondecoeter gives us here a
mother-hen who could face the _Madonna of the Chair_. She bends
over with solicitude with outspread wings, beneath which peep the
excited heads of the little chickens; while on her back is perched the
privileged _bambino_--she does not dare move,--the good mother!”
Melchior d’Hondecoeter was taught by Jan Baptiste Weenix (1621?–1660),
painter of dead game, and teacher of his son, Jan Weenix (1640–1719),
who often arranged his dead game around the base of a large urn in a
private park.
Of fruits and flowers--important subjects in Holland--come the two
de Heems, father and son, Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606–1684), the first
Dutchman to excel with fruit; Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), painter of
flowers, fruits, bouquets with butterflies and moths fluttering about,
old logs and tree stumps in the forest, and deserted birds’ nests.
Jan van Huysum (1682–1749) “the Correggio of fruits and flowers,” was
famed for his skill in depicting a transparent dewdrop trickling down a
satiny petal; and Abraham Mignon (1640–1679), pupil of Jan Davidsz de
Heem was a brilliant painter of flowers, fruits, butterflies, insects,
and dewdrops.
With Cornelis Troost (1697–1750), called “the Dutch Hogarth,” because
of his familiar scenes of comedy, the Decadence begins; and Dutch
Painting ceased to be interesting until the middle of the Nineteenth
Century.
THE STANDARD BEARER.
_Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606–1669)._
_Collection of
Mr. Jules S. Bache._
This picture, oils on canvas (55 × 45½ inches), has the distinction
of having belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds and, after him, to the
Earl of Warwick at Warwick Castle. It is signed on the left at the
bottom, “Rembrandt fe 1654.” Consequently it was painted the same
year as the famous _Burgomaster Jan Six_. The person has never
been identified; but it is supposed that he was the standard-bearer
of one of the Amsterdam Shooting Companies. The man is life-size,
three-quarter length, with full light falling from the left foreground
upon the whole figure. A grey wall with a rusticated pillar at the
right forms the background from which the elderly Standard Bearer
stands out boldly. He wears a dark-brown coat with gold buttons, a dark
bluish green sash, and a rich gold-embroidered sword-belt crossing the
chest from the right shoulder. A black hat with a large white plume
covers his grey hair, but does not hide his face. In his gloved left
hand he carries a red and yellow banner bearing the Arms of the City
of Amsterdam and he holds a glove in his right hand. The picture is
rich in color and fine in its illumination. From the Earl of Warwick it
passed through the Collections of Mr. Charles Sedelmeyer of Paris, Mr.
Charles J. Wertheimer of London, and Mr. George J. Gould of New York
into that of its present owner.
Rembrandt van Rijn was born in Leiden in 1606, the son of a miller, who
sent him to the Leiden University. Young Rembrandt, however, preferred
painting and for three years studied under Jacob van Swanenburch,
a Leiden painter, who had studied in Italy. Rembrandt had painted
a good many pictures before he removed to Amsterdam at the age of
twenty-three. He soon became famous in Amsterdam. From the year 1633
the face of a good-natured, buxom young woman, Saskia van Ulenburgh,
daughter of a Friesland lawyer, appears on his canvases. In 1634
Rembrandt married Saskia; and Fortune smiled thereafter on everything
he did. His orders made him rich and he had a splendid home, filled
with collections of many kinds, including antique busts, costumes,
curios, and paintings. At this period Rembrandt loved to dress Saskia
and himself in fantastic array and paint gay and somewhat theatrical
portraits of themselves.
[Illustration:
Collection of Mr. Jules S. Bache
THE STANDARD BEARER
--_Rembrandt van Rijn_]
Who does not know the famous picture of Saskia seated on Rembrandt’s
knee in the Dresden Gallery, the artist clasping his wife’s waist
with his left hand and brandishing in his right hand a long glass of
sparkling wine, before them a table covered with an Oriental rug on
which is a pastry surmounted by a peacock?
Not so familiar but more beautiful is the portrait in the Hermitage of
_Saskia_ dressed as a fanciful shepherdess with a mantle of pale
green thrown over her white brocaded gown, in her hand a flower-twined
crook, and on her head a heavy, thick wreath of ranunculus, anemones,
iris, columbine, and striped red and white tulips. “Innocent and
engaging in her brilliant draperies and gaily tinted flowers,” says
Emile Michel, “she stands a graceful apparition, the light falling full
upon her. Spring itself seems to be singing a paean of love and poetry
from the master’s palette, at the dawn of that year which was to bring
about the propitious union.”
Rembrandt’s life changed entirely after Saskia’s death in 1642, which,
by the way, was the year he painted his most famous picture, _The Night
Watch_ (in the Rijks Museum), more properly called _The Sortie of the
Company of Captain Banning Cock_.
Rembrandt became bankrupt in 1656 and his collections of antiques
and paintings were sold for a mere 5000 florins! In the following
year his house and collection of engravings came also to the hammer.
Thenceforward Rembrandt lived with his son, Titus, in a modest dwelling
in the Rozengracht, attended by his servant, Hendrickje Stoffels
(his reputed wife) until the latter’s death in 1664. The close of
Rembrandt’s life in 1669 found him poor, but as industrious as ever.
Rembrandt is said to have painted about 550 pictures and to have made
more than 250 etchings and 1500 drawings.
The Hague is the place to see the great works of Rembrandt’s early
period, such as _The Anatomy Lesson_, the _Presentation in the Temple_
or _Simeon in the Temple_, and several portraits of himself and
others; and the Rijks Museum has the great productions of his middle
and last period, including _The Syndics_ and _The Night Watch_.
Apart from his individual and amazing portrayal of shadows and light
effects, Rembrandt stands alone as the interpreter of the Bible story.
In portraiture he is profoundly searching; and no one ever painted more
forcible self-portraits than Rembrandt van Rijn.
Of all the qualities that Rembrandt possesses the most striking one is
understanding of light and shadow. Fromentin very aptly defines this
Rembrandtesque _chiaroscuro_ in his _Maîtres d’autrefois_ (Paris, 1876):
“To envelop and immerse everything in a bath of shadow; to plunge
light itself into it only to withdraw it afterwards in order to make
it appear more distant and radiant; to make dark waves revolve around
illuminated centres, grading them, sounding them, thickening them; to
make the obscurity nevertheless transparent, the half gloom easy to
pierce, and, finally, to give a kind of permeability to the strongest
colors that prevents their becoming blackness,--this is the prime
condition and the difficulties of this very special art. It goes
without saying that if any one ever excelled in this it was Rembrandt.”
PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG OFFICER.
_Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606–1669)._
_Collection of
Mr. A. W. Erickson._
This picture signed lower right, “Rembrandt f. 1636” is painted on
a panel, 20 × 25⅞ inches. It is one of Rembrandt’s finest and most
pleasing portraits. With masterly skill the artist has painted the
light in the eyes and the fine lines and texture of the lips.
The subject is supposed to be François Copal, the brother-in-law of
Saskia van Ulenburgh, Rembrandt’s wife, and there is abundant evidence
in support of the theory. Dr. Bode in his _Rembrandt_ notes:
“There is a pair of portraits in the Liechtenstein Gallery at Vienna,
dated 1636, of a _Young Officer with Thick Black Hair and His Wife_, in
costumes like those in which Rembrandt painted Saskia and himself. The
young couple here represented was probably closely connected with the
artist and his bride. The husband, whose features are regular, almost
handsome, and who has a slight moustache wears a steel gorget and a
small gaily-colored neck cloth over his finely plaited silk shirt, a
greenish blue cloak hangs from his right shoulder, and his gloved hand
rests on the hilt of his sword.
“Portraits of the artist himself and of his relations and friends,
are nearly all executed with as much care as the numerous portraits
of other persons painted to order at this time. Some few may have
been presents to friends and relations; but the majority produced at
this period (1633–1635), and that immediately following it were very
probably commissions from friends and patrons of the master, the most
renowned artist in Holland whose name was soon to be associated with
those of the greatest painters in Europe. These pictures had a special
attraction over and above their interest as portraits, by virtue of the
highly individual costume and conception which add so much to their
picturesque effect.”
Dr. W. R. Valentiner, also believing this to be a likeness of Saskia’s
brother-in-law, says:
“The portrait of a cavalier, possibly François Copal, is one of the
most imposing and impressive of the portraits which Rembrandt painted
in the middle of the thirties, at the time when he was approaching
the height of his fame as a portrait-painter at Amsterdam. Among
the considerable number of portraits which the artist painted to
order during these years, the present one (and a companion piece
in the Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna) stand out through the vivid,
passionate expression and the personal touch which undoubtedly reflects
the artist’s own mood. At no time Rembrandt expresses so much of a
youthful, almost wild, temperament in his compositions, at no time
he endeavors to give to them such an overpowering force and such an
intense, almost sensuous feeling of life, as in these stormy years of
his first successes at Amsterdam, which were accompanied by a happy
marriage, by social connections, by acquiring riches and almost luxury.
[Illustration:
_Collection of Mr. A. W. Erickson_
PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG OFFICER
--_Rembrandt van Rijn_]