or citizen. The dominant note of the apartment is red. The floor
is paved with square blocks of marble. The primary interest of the
picture is in the group on the left, consisting of two fashionably
dressed gentlemen and an elegantly attired lady at a table over which
is spread an Oriental “table-carpet.” The lady, dressed in a scarlet
skirt, an old-gold overskirt and bodice and a deep white lace collar,
is looking at the spectator and singing from a piece of music which she
is holding in her left hand, her right being raised as if to beat time.
Standing near her and smilingly accompanying her in her song is a young
gentleman with long hair and wearing a white jacket and a broad-brimmed
hat. With his right hand he is holding a long funnel-shaped glass
partly filled with wine. Seated opposite and looking intently at the
lady is a middle-aged gentleman with long hair and yellow jacket,
holding a flageolet with both hands, and apparently waiting for the
note at which he may join in the accompaniment. On the table are the
flageolet player’s high-crowned hat with red feathers, an open book of
music and a glass. In the background are standing figures of a lady and
gentleman in conversation, and near-by is an attendant in brown dress
holding a wine-jar in his left hand and abstractedly looking out of the
window. In the background is a bed enclosed with curtains. Two windows
to left and right open on to a garden, a portion of which, adorned with
statues, is seen through an open doorway on the extreme right.
[Illustration:
_Collection of Mrs. John N. Willys_
A MUSIC PARTY
--_Pieter de Hoogh_]
The picture, oil on a panel (24 × 28 inches), was formerly in the
Collections of Edmund Higginson of Saltmarshe Castle, England, 1846;
George H. Morland, Esq., London, a well-known amateur, a descendant of
George Morland, the artist, 1863; and Albert Levy, London, 1874.
Pieter de Hoogh (or Hooch) is thought to have been born in Rotterdam.
Little is known of his life. He seems to have been a servant in his
early years employed by Justus de la Grange and to have lived in Delft,
in Leiden and in The Hague. In some way he learned to paint; some
authorities say he studied under Rembrandt’s pupil Carel Fabritius,
Houbraken says he was a fellow-student with Jacob Ochtevelt under
Nicholaes Berchem. In 1653 Pieter de Hoogh became a member of the
Guild of Painters in Delft and he married in that city and lived
there Until 1664. Next he is living in The Hague and after that in
Amsterdam. Pieter de Hoogh is ranked as one of the best of the “Little
Dutch Masters.” His pictures show a particularly fine mastery in the
action of light. He almost invariably opens a door in the background
leading into a garden or into an adjoining room. He groups his figures
interestingly and tells his simple story in paint graphically and
convincingly. His architecture is always remarkably fine and his
drawing is second to none.
Pieter de Hoogh was neglected for many years, but to-day he is deeply
appreciated. Burger says he never saw any picture by de Hoogh that
was not of the first rank: “Sometimes he paints interiors--people are
playing cards, or having a family concert, or reading, or drinking,
or conversing. Sometimes he paints exteriors; and then the painter
introduces us to domestic occupations and the innocent recreations of
private life, as, for instance, a servant washing linen in a backyard,
or cleaning fish, or plucking fowl, or perhaps there are ladies and
their cavaliers playing at bowls in a garden with trim gravelled walks.
“When he paints interiors this artist rarely neglects to show, on
the right or left, doors opening on a staircase or revealing a leafy
alley, or the trees along a quay, so that his pictures always seem to
be the antechamber of another picture. In this characteristic style of
de Hoogh when the interior of the apartment is moderately lighted the
sun shines outside. Pieter de Hoogh seems to have been in Rembrandt’s
secrets.”
THE LACE-MAKER.
_Jan Vermeer
(1632–1675)._
_Collection of the
Hon. Andrew W. Mellon._
This delightful picture on panel (17¾ × 15½ inches) was only discovered
in 1926. On its exhibition at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1926–1927
in Berlin, Dr. Wilhelm Bode wrote: “I consider it a genuine, perfect,
and very characteristic work of Jan Vermeer of Delft. Not only has it
the true Vermeer charm as to the lighting and coloring, but at the
same time there is an extraordinary fascination in the expression of
the face, still half that of a child.” Dr. Max J. Friedländer also
pronounced it “a genuine and highly characteristic work by Vermeer of
Delft.”
The young girl is seen at half-length with her head turned towards the
observer and her eyes looking straight out of the picture. She is busy
making lace on a pillow, or cushion, which is supported on a frame
with two upright posts. In her left hand she is holding a bobbin. Her
costume is a yellow jacket, or bodice, with broad white collar and
broad white cuffs. Her brown hair, arranged very simply, is adorned
with a tiny knot of blue ribbon. The handsome pear-shaped pearls in
her ears proclaim that she is in more than affluent circumstances and
that she is a young Dutch lady of some position, making lace for her
pleasure and not to earn a living. At her left elbow is a blue cushion
and a large pewter dish.
_The Lace-Maker_ is in every way a picture of charm and one of the
most thoroughly attractive that Vermeer ever produced.
[Illustration:
_Collection of the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon_
THE LACE-MAKER
--_Jan Vermeer_]
When it came to light in 1926 it was cordially welcomed. Seymour
de Ricci published a long article under the title of _Le
Quarante-et-Unième Vermeer_ in the _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_
(December, 1927), which says in part:
“Seated, with her work on her knees and her bobbins in her hand, she
stops in her occupation for a moment to look at the spectator. On the
right, upon the corner of a table, covered with an Oriental rug, a flat
dish of pewter and a blue cushion ornamented with three rows of gold
braid and two gold tassels--that is the entire subject of the picture!
“It needed the consummate art of a Vermeer to produce with this slender
material such a veritable _chef-d’œuvre_. Many painters would
doubtless have tried to place this fresh figure in a striking setting.
A Gerard Dou would have framed her in a window; a Metsu would have
surrounded her with furniture; and a Pieter de Hoogh would have felt
compelled to let us see through an open door into the next room, or
into a bright flower garden. The bolder and much greater painter,
Vermeer, places his model before a white wall, the plaster of which in
the course of two centuries has combined ivory reflections with the
pearly gray of clouds in springtime. Upon the clearness of this wall
this youthful figure stands out with striking clarity: the faint rosy
tints of the complexion, the whiteness of the broad flat collar and
cuffs and the bright yellow of the bodice form a scale of colors that
are juxtaposed with singular frankness and boldness. It is only in the
flesh tints that the painter allows himself to bring the model into
relief: in everything else he shows an affection for flat surfaces
and flat tints. His touch is so light that in places--noticeably in
the whites--each stroke of the brush has left its trace. The artist
has proceeded by circular blots juxtaposed, announcing therefore a
technique which certain French artists pretend to have discovered at
the end of the Nineteenth Century.
“In everything here Vermeer the colorist takes precedence of Vermeer
the draughtsman. There is not a line in the entire picture,--nothing
but the juxtaposition of color-tones. A magnifying glass is impotent
to make us discover the bridge of the nose, the profile of the cheek
or the fingers. The eyebrows are barely indicated, the brown hair is
treated in large luminous masses, and even the bobbins which to the
naked eye seem to be drawn with such punctilious exactitude are merely
indicated, but with such correctness and such prodigious skillfulness
of touch that the illusion of the detail is most complete, even for the
instructed spectator.
“In this charming composition, the greatest of Dutch colorists has
taken pleasure in playing the entire scale of his favorite colors. In
the brown masses of the hair he has placed a tiny blue ribbon, echoing
the large blue surface of the cushion. On the other hand, on this same
cushion three rows of dark yellow braid echo the bright ochre of the
bodice. In the very centre of the picture the cherry red of the little
smiling mouth throws a note more brilliant than the artist dared to
place on the rose cheeks of his model white with the reflections from
the large starched collar. All the lower part of the picture is in
deep half-light which is brightened by the red and blue tones of the
table-carpet and the luminous reflections of the pewter dish. The
curious observer will notice that the painter was not afraid to change
the centre of his composition towards the right, indifferent to the
traditions of its accepted place, just as he was to the methods of his
fore-runners with regard to the use of color.
“It has been attempted more than once to elucidate the mystery of
the technical methods to which is due the incredible luminosity of
Vermeer’s pictures. It has even been thought that he painted on a
groundwork of some very bright color; but it has been correctly
remarked that such a groundwork--if he had employed it--would at
the end of two centuries have become visible under the painting and
would have necessarily assimilated the colors. Others have suggested
a preliminary preparation of water colors or gum. But, in truth, we
are perfectly ignorant of how this amazing and incontestable result
has been attained. This newly discovered picture reveals nothing to
us relative to Vermeer’s technique, and although the painting is so
lightly done and of so thin a coating, it has taken on its surface
something of the hardness and brilliance of porcelain; and fine
crackles have broken all through this suggesting the paste of porcelain.
_The Lace-Maker_ was in the Collection of Harold R. Wright, Esq.,
of London, before it passed to the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon.
Jan Vermeer of Delft (1632–1675) was a pupil of Carel Fabritius, who
was a pupil of Rembrandt--consequently Vermeer had the best training.
Lemke’s eulogy is worth reading:
“Vermeer was a painter of the light and sun school; and this was his
chief study--to catch and hold fast the moment. What Frans Hals did for
the physiognomy, grasping the flying moment in an incomparable manner
with winks, smiles, leers, gesticulation, etc., and fixing it in paint,
Vermeer as a landscape painter, delighted to do for the sunshine. He
shows its rays streaming into a room, or the play of light and shadow
when the light with the moving air falls through heavy foliage against
a bright house and paints it with rays of light and shade. Unlike the
moment of Rembrandt and Ruisdael, which is fixed for all eternity, with
Vermeer the moment vibrates in the light. The shadows lose their sharp
outlines and the fine brush-work suggests the living change and play
of the light. Rembrandt paints light in darkness and lets it glow in
the dark or streaming into it, or in a broad flood of brilliance; but
Vermeer prefers to set darkness or twilight against the light.”
GERMAN PAINTING
_GERMAN PAINTING_
Painting reached its greatest development in Germany from the middle
of the Fifteenth to the middle of the Sixteenth Century during the
Renaissance and the Reformation. The dominating personalities were
Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger.
The early German painters devoted their talents almost exclusively to
altar-pieces. The chief centres of activity were Cologne, Colmar, Ulm,
Nuremberg, and Augsburg. Cologne was the most important and had much
influence upon the neighboring Flemings. As early as the Thirteenth
Century Wolfram van Eschenbach, describing his handsome Knight in
_Parsifal_, declares that
“From Koln nor from Maestricht
No limner could excel him.”
The first important Cologne painter is Meister Wilhelm, first half of
the Fourteenth Century, followed by Meister Stephan Lochner (active
1430–1451), possibly his pupil, painter of the great altar-piece in
the Cologne Cathedral, the “_Dom-bild_”, which every painter tried to
see. Albrecht Dürer, for instance, wrote in his _Journal_: “Item. I
have paid two silver pennies to have the picture opened, which Meister
Stephan painted at Cologne.”
Heine, many years later, sang of the wondrous eyes of the Madonna in
that picture in the Cologne Cathedral that reminded him of his beloved;
and the idea is most beautifully emphasized in the musical setting of
that little song by Robert Franz, who expresses in his accompaniment
all of the emotion aroused by the painting.
The Cologne painters were much influenced by Roger van der Weyden, who
seems to have visited Cologne in 1450. Certainly Martin Schöngauer
(about 1445–1491) was a follower of Roger, if not a personal pupil.
Schöngauer is remarkable among other things for the weird and fantastic
creatures he frequently introduced into his pictures. Martin
Schöngauer, regarded as the precursor of Dürer, was much admired by the
Italian painters, who called him “_Il bel Martino_.” Michelangelo
is said to have copied in oils his celebrated print of _Saint Anthony
tormented by Demons_ and he was a friend of Perugino and exchanged
drawings with him. The two Germans of next importance were Bartholomäus
Zeitblom of Ulm (1450?–1521), who, like Martin, belongs to the Swabian
School, and Michael Wohlgemut (1434?–1519?), the leading spirit of the
Franconian School, who worked especially in the Nuremberg churches.
In the picturesque town of Nuremberg, with its peaked gables,
overhanging balconies, and quaint façades, town of wood-carvers,
goldsmiths, and toy-makers, town of Hans Sachs and the Meistersinger,
the house of Dürer is still shown to tourists.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), one of the giants in art, was supreme
master in wood-cuts, etchings, and drawings as well as in paintings.
Dürer, too, is one of the greatest portrait-painters (see page 237).
In Augsburg, the leading commercial city of Southern Germany,
there were many wealthy art-lovers, such as the Fuggers, famous
merchant-princes of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. The leading
painter was Hans Holbein the Elder (1470?–1524), much influenced by
Martin Schöngauer and also by the Italians. He trained his gifted son,
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), who completely overshadowed him.
The latter went to Basle and eventually to London, where he became
Court-Painter to Henry VIII (see page 240).
Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), leader of the Saxon School, was a
contemporary of Dürer and Holbein, pupil of his father, and, in common
with most German artists, excelled as an engraver on wood and copper
and designer, as well as a painter. Cranach was Court-Painter to three
Saxon Electors (see page 251).
Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515–1586) was a pupil of his father, but
was far below him in talent and performance.
PORTRAIT OF A MAN.
_Albrecht Dürer
(1471–1528)._
_Collection of the
Hon. Andrew W. Mellon._
We should like to know--but we never shall--the name of the man who
looks so keenly from this picture (12¾ × 15⅝ inches). All that is
known of it is that it belonged to the Collection of Count Bonde, of
Stockholm, before it found its present home.
Albrecht Dürer was a great painter of portraits. He began early. Indeed
the first authentic drawing by him is a portrait of himself at the age
of thirteen, which is preserved in the Albertina, Vienna.
At all periods of his life, Dürer painted and drew portraits. To the
early Nuremberg period belongs _Frederic the Wise_, tempera on linen
(Berlin), and he painted a _Portrait of his Father_ in 1497 (of which
there are several versions). Then there is _Oswald Krell_ in the Munich
Gallery and a _Portrait of Himself_, a _Portrait of a Young Man_ at
Hampton Court Palace and the very famous _Hieronymus Holtzschuher_ in
Berlin.
Dürer’s one idea was to give as exact a representation of the sitter as
possible; and if he painted character as well as the features, it was
because his penetrating eye saw directly through the person. There was
no conscious analysis or deep ponderings of any kind. Dürer simply saw
the person and painted him; and he painted him so well that we see him,
too, just the man he was. Dürer was like a camera; he depicted every
wrinkle and every hair with an amazing effect of reality and he caught
the personality as well. Nothing seems to have been hidden from his
eyesight and nothing seems to have been beyond the power of his brush.
Albrecht Dürer was the son of a goldsmith of Hungarian origin who had
spent some time in the Netherlands. In 1455 he settled in Nuremberg,
where Albrecht was born in 1471, the third of eleven children.
His father intended him for a goldsmith, but, seeing his talent,
apprenticed him to Michael Wolgemuth to serve three years. Of this
period Dürer wrote: “God gave me diligence so that I learned well. And
when I had served my time, my father sent me away and I was absent four
years until my father needed me again; and I set out in 1490 after
Easter, so I returned in 1494 after Whitsuntide. And when I returned
home Hans Frey treated with my father and gave me his daughter, Agnes,
and he gave me with her two hundred florins; and the marriage was
celebrated on the Monday before St. Margaret’s Day in the year 1494.”
[Illustration:
_Collection of the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon_
PORTRAIT OF A MAN
--_Albrecht Dürer_]
The story that Dürer’s wife was a shrew who led him an unhappy life is
now exploded.
In 1505 Dürer went to Italy and spent some time in Venice, where
he painted for the Guild of German merchants and their Fondaco dei
Tedeschi, _The Feast of the Rosary_, which is now in the monastery of
Strahow near Prague.
Returning to Nuremberg in 1507 Dürer painted some of his finest
altar-pieces. In 1511 he began his fine sets of wood-cuts and
etchings--the _Apocalypse_, the _Great Passion_, the _Little Passion_,
the _Life of the Virgin_ and _St. Jerome in his Study_. To this period
belongs the large altar-piece _Adoration of the Trinity_, in the
Belvedere at Vienna. In 1518 Dürer was in Augsburg and in 1520–1521 he
travelled in the Low Countries. Once back in Nuremberg, he seems to
have worked quietly and industriously until his death in 1528.
In forming any estimate of Dürer it is essential to remember that
Dürer was a great expression and a great flowering of the German race.
Mrs. Heaton has well summed up his characteristics: “We do not find,”
she says, “in Dürer’s art the classic ideal of the perfection of
man’s physical nature, nor the spiritual ideal of the early religious
painters, nor the calm dignity and rich sensuous beauty of the
great masters of the Italian Renaissance, but in it we find a noble
expression of the German mind, with its high intellectual powers,
its daring speculative philosophy, its deep-seated reverence, its
patient laboriousness, and above all its strange love for the weird
and grotesque. Dürer was the companion of some of the most learned and
thoughtful men of his day. Luther and Melancthon were among the number
of his friends, and there is no doubt but the reforming spirit of the
age was powerfully at work within him, affecting his thought and art.
Melancthon bears testimony to his rare worth as a man by saying: ‘his
least merit was his art.’”
PRINCE EDWARD OF ENGLAND.
_Hans Holbein the Younger
(1497–1543)._
_Collection of the
Hon. Andrew W. Mellon._
This portrait is one of the finest that Holbein ever painted. The
artist had every reason to do his best, for the picture was intended
as a New Year’s Gift to Henry VIII of his little son, the Prince of
Wales, who was nearly two years old. The King was so delighted with the
picture that he presented Holbein with a magnificent gold standing-cup
with cover. Prince Edward (who became Edward VI) was the son of Jane
Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII, who only lived twelve days after
Prince Edward’s birth at Hampton Court Palace on October 12, 1537.
By the Peace Treaty of Scotland in 1543, it was arranged that Prince
Edward should marry Mary, Queen of Scots, at that time but a few months
old; but this came to nothing, owing to “the grasping greed” of Henry
VIII, whose ambition was to absorb the Crown of Scotland and whose
purpose was discovered by the patriotic Scotch. On the death of Henry
VIII in January 1547, the Prince of Wales succeeded to the throne and
was crowned on February 20, 1547, as Edward VI. Edward, on the point of
death, bequeathed the Crown in 1553 to Lady Jane Grey, daughter of his
cousin, Frances Grey, eldest daughter of Mary, the daughter of Henry
VII, and who was married to the son of the Duke of Northumberland. On
July 6, 1553, the young King Edward VI died and was buried the next day
in Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey.
The portrait in oil on a panel (21¾ × 17 inches) was painted in 1538.
The little prince is wearing a red and gold costume and red and gold
hat with white feather. The background is gold.
His hands are marvellously painted, particularly the right, which is a
triumph of foreshortening. The left hand holds a silver rattle.
[Illustration:
_Collection of the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon_
PRINCE EDWARD OF ENGLAND
--_Hans Holbein the Younger_]
The Latin inscription painted at the base was written by Sir Richard
Morysin (who became English Ambassador to the Hanse towns in 1646 and
to the Court of the Emperor Charles V in 1550). The eulogy is addressed
to Henry VIII, through the child; and it is well for Edward VI that
he did not live to learn the verdict that time has passed upon this
Bluebeard of History. Translated it reads:
“Little one, imitate thy father and be the heir of his virtue, the
world contains nothing greater. Heaven and Nature could scarcely give a
son whose glory should surpass that of such a father. Do thou but equal
the deeds of thy parent: the desires of man cannot go beyond this.
Surpass him and thou hast surpassed all the kings the world has ever
worshipped and none will ever surpass thee.”
Can flattery go beyond this?
For many years this portrait hung in the Royal Picture Gallery at
Hanover in Germany, probably taken there by one of the Georges, all of
whom preferred their Hanoverian Court to that of England. In late years
the picture belonged to the Duke of Cumberland, whose father was King
of Hanover until Prussia absorbed that kingdom in 1866.
Hans Holbein, born in Augsburg in 1497, was taught by his father,
Hans Holbein the Elder, as was also his elder brother, Ambrose. About
1515 these two young Holbeins went to Basle, where there was plenty
of work for artists, for Basle had long been a centre of intellectual
and artistic life. Holbein’s talents won recognition; and among other
kinds of work he drew designs for title-pages and various decorations
for books. Some marginal drawings for _The Praise of Folly_ by
Erasmus, led to a friendship with that distinguished personage, which
was destined eventually to change his entire life. Holbein also painted
in fresco the council chamber of the new Rathaus in Basle and also
the famous votive picture _The Meier Madonna_, representing the
Burgomaster, Jacob Meier of Basle, kneeling with his family before the
Virgin. He also painted several portraits of Erasmus. In 1526 Holbein
decided to visit England, taking a letter of introduction from Erasmus
to Sir Thomas More and stopping on the way at Antwerp to visit Quentin
Massys. Holbein remained in London two years, returned to his family
in Basle in 1528, bought a house, designed for goldsmiths, worked
again on his unfinished frescoes in the Rathaus, made another portrait
of Erasmus and painted the faces of clocks. In 1532 Holbein decided
to return to London, where, after a period of working in the German
colony, he became Court-Painter to Henry VIII with a salary of thirty
pounds a year and rooms in the Palace. From that time onward Holbein
painted everybody of importance in Tudor England. He also aided in
the street decorations for Anne Boleyn’s Coronation procession and
festivities. Holbein was also sent on various missions by Henry VIII to
paint portraits; also in 1538 to Brussels, to paint the portrait of the
young widow, Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan; and in 1539, to
Cleves, to paint Anne, sister of the Duke.