The drawings, the studies, of the Italian Schools, and of all Schools
besides, have these sources of interest, always admitted--they reveal
to us, as studies must, the personal thought of the master in his
theme, and they may often be identified as preparations for some long
recognised picture with whose history we are henceforth to be the
better acquainted. But some among the drawings of the Dutch School,
though coming late indeed in the procession of the world’s Art, are
still the earliest to possess for us that different and self-contained
interest which belongs to work done for its proper sake, itself
realising the intention with which it was begun, and so, in the first
form in which it comes down to us, at once final and complete.
The School of Holland--that northern School to which at last, in the
great Seventeenth Century, supremacy in Art had moved--was perhaps the
first to adequately feel the value of those immediate impressions
which the Italians and the early Flemish had recognised chiefly to
control, to alter, to enlarge. And in the many methods of their Art,
the masters of Holland sought to perpetuate for the beholders of their
work the impressions which to themselves who recorded them had perhaps
been as fleeting as vivid. Sketches in oil, sketches in water-colour,
sketches in chalk, in bistre, and with the reed pen, and sketches with
the etching needle--these all, in the hands of the great Dutchmen,
were not merely studies for themselves, but possessions for their
public, just as expressive and interesting as work more prolonged and
elaborate. Therefore the amount of finish which each of such finished
sketches received was not the important matter: with the greatest
artists the amount was often but small: they knew that the important
matter was the sufficiency of finish--its capacity for conveying to one
mind the impression received by another.
And it is characteristic of Dutch Art, and especially of Dutch
Landscape Art, that it had no period of painful and tentative labour,
like that during which the art of earlier schools had had to struggle
slowly towards freedom of expression. Profiting no doubt by the
experience of the Past, and the recent Past especially of Bruges
and of Leyden, it gained almost at once the power of finish always
expressive, always economical, yet often very swift and summary.
The work of its earliest masters--Roghman say, and Van Goyen--has
neither pettiness of manipulation when it is most delicate, nor
uncertainty when it is most rapid. The signs of an art mature and
masculine--economy of means, decision of hand--are promptly upon it.
Roghman, it appears, made few pictures, but many drawings. There are
five-and-twenty in the Museum of Rotterdam alone. His drawings must
have been acceptable to the public of his day, and they show that a
public then existed capable of the intelligent interpretation of the
work of an artist who left much to be interpreted. Van Goyen, if he
did not make many drawings, painted many pictures with at least as
marked an economy of means as he has used in the few drawings we know.
His science of large design and the expressive completeness of his
gradations of tone, enabled him--often in picture and drawing alike--to
dispense with the easier attraction of various colour, so that even a
modern master of colour, Théodore Rousseau, was wont to hold him up as
a model to his own pupils.
Van Goyen travelled, and Roghman travelled, but their art, like that
of Rembrandt--their younger and greater contemporary, who remained at
home--continued to be not an imported art, but an art of the soil;
and it was only at a later period that the experience of travel, and
the contact with an art very different from their own, were to bring
to the Dutchmen a new method with a false ideal. There was first the
true Dutch time, rich and fertile--a time in which Van Goyen painted,
with a seeming monotony always delicately varied, the long river banks,
the low-lying towns, and the great high skies of Holland; in which
Cuyp fixed interest on the common aspects of the afternoon fields,
steaming in moist sunshine; in which Adrian van Ostade passed from
the vulgarities of the alehouse to the skilfully rendered charm of
the cottage door and the bench in the sunlight; in which Jan Steen
perfected himself in as keen and comprehensive a knowledge of the world
of men as Art has ever displayed; and in which Rembrandt contentedly
imaged Dutch life and landscape, always with nearly equal vigour,
nearly equal artistic precision, though at one time in a style that
formed the style of Gerard Dow and at another in one that was inherited
by Philip de Koningh or by Nicholas Maas.
There were various local centres for these various workers and their
works. Leyden itself was a centre--the birthplace of Rembrandt, the
birthplace of Van Goyen. The Hague became a centre, and Van Goyen
removed to it; Amsterdam a centre, and Rembrandt was a leader there.
But Haarlem was the favourite, and probably because of the privileges
that belonged to the Guild of St. Luke--St. Luke, the painters’
patron saint--which was established in that town. The Guild of St.
Luke at Haarlem has left us valuable records--not indeed the raciest,
but certainly among the most trustworthy we can hope to have access
to--upon Dutch Art, which has wanted always, and wants to-day, a
trustworthy general historian. Laurens Van der Winne (as the Dutch
writer, M. van der Willigen, tells us, in his _Artistes d’Harlem_),
towards the end of the seventeenth century, made a list of one hundred
and seventy-four men who in his time were all reputed as good painters,
and whom he had personally known. His son, in 1702, after the father’s
death, noted that of these only sixteen were then living; and the
grandson, possessing himself of manuscript books and account-books of
the period, was able to enlarge the list of early members of the Guild,
and to add to our knowledge of its laws. ‘No one without the pale of
the Society could sell or introduce his pictures. Many painters thus
found themselves obliged to join the brotherhood in order to enjoy its
advantages. Every year two sales were announced by the officer of
the Society; each member could bring to the sale whatever he desired
to sell.’ ‘Many painters were attracted to the town,’ for lesser or
longer periods; but, though many painters contributed to the Guild,
‘it appears,’ writes the Haarlem citizen, ‘that they did not all live
here.’ Notwithstanding the advantages of the Guild, the profession of
painting was not lucrative for the many. Even the busiest and most
prolific artists, like Wouvermans, were debtors sometimes to men who
befriended them. Others were so indigent that they must needs be
excused their payment of the yearly moneys to the brotherhood. In 1661,
Frans Hals, the greatest of the Haarlem masters, found himself in this
circumstance. Haarlem, since his death, has happily delighted to honour
him.
The art of Holland, like the national life, saw many vicissitudes
during that eventful Seventeenth Century; and the second half of the
century brought changes of taste and fashion, which cast for a while
into the shade even such supreme art as the art of Rembrandt. Leaders
of social opinion were not proof against the attractions of the work of
Both and Berghem, which sacrificed so much that it might gain, as it
did gain, the outland charm of southern colour and southern light; and
the friend of Rembrandt, Jan Six, as one of many, showed himself in the
later years of the century a convert to that newer and brilliant but
bastard art. By the time that Cuyp and Wynants had died old and Adrian
Van de Velde had died young--when the seventeenth century was entering
its fourth quarter--there remained among the home-bred landscape
painters hardly one to hold his own against the newer fashion. Hobbema,
it is true, worked on, with great and patient fidelity, but he worked
unregarded and died poor.
And in other branches of Art, after this time, the school declined.
William Van de Velde and Backhuysen--the two great painters of the sea
and the fleet--had had a worthy precursor in Renier Zeeman, but they
had no worthy successors. The best painters of gentle life and of the
life of the tavern were falling away. In the comparatively humble but
yet delightful field of ‘still life,’ only, could the early years of
the Eighteenth Century surpass the achievements of fifty years before.
The admired painter of flowers, Jan Van Huysum--whose drawings are
seen in large numbers at the British Museum, and whose work is known,
perhaps, at its best and boldest in his drawings--then arose. He was
one of a whole family of flower and fruit painters; and not the only
one who gave some excuse for the ecstasy of a French novelist who was
also a connoisseur. Balzac declared of him that his work would hardly
be paid for if it were covered with diamonds. But Michael, his kinsman,
was perhaps almost as worthy of that praise. To their work succeeded,
far on in the Eighteenth Century, the vulgar mimicry of Van Os, with
the colours of the chromo-lithograph. And as to Landscape Art--that,
free once more from Italian influence, was indeed natural and Dutch
again in its aim, with Van Stry especially; but in its practice it
insisted rather upon the importance of detail than upon the value of
effect. Jacob Cats carried to its last length the trivial elaboration
which had become the fashion of his day. The virtue had gone out of
Dutch Art, and Dutch Art faded imperceptibly into modern painting.
It was one of the characteristics of the great men of the Renaissance,
that they tried many arts and were masters of many. It was one of the
characteristics of the Seventeenth Century Dutchmen, that they tried
many branches of Art, and were masters of all that they tried. Supreme
in technicalities of painting and in technicalities of etching, they
were the first to use with any large effect the medium of water-colour,
and their use of that, in a manner not tentative and occasional, like
Dürer’s, but often familiar and accomplished as our own (of our great
last generation), is shown by many drawings. Coloured sketches assigned
to Rembrandt, doubtless on good foundation, are in the collections
of the British Museum and of M. J. De Vos, a veteran collector at
Amsterdam; and on our Burlington Club walls--not to speak of the
wonderful pen drawings, so decisive at once and free--is a sketch of
a city gate, from the collection of Seymour Haden, a sketch in which
line counts for little, and the effect is sought and gained by tender
gradations of tinting in monochrome. Probably of the same period are
the two drawings in which Philip De Koningh, who in landscape came
nearest to Rembrandt, has used his orange-browns with subtle variation,
to portray his wonted effects of infinite distance.
Colour, or it may be a wash of sepia, used by Rembrandt and by De
Koningh chiefly to suggest distance or tone, is used by Berghem more
often to suggest the pleasantness and warmth of sunlight, which were
so precious to him, and were the charm of his art. His artificial but
agreeable landscape of ordered valley and well-disposed mountain and
happy peasant of the opera, is represented notably by one of the many
splendid drawings belonging to Malcolm of Poltalloch--a delicately
coloured design, airy and sunny almost as De Koningh’s best paintings,
and to be noticed, not only for the extreme rarity of such work
in water-colour at that time and by that master, but also for its
foretaste of the subtlety with which our own great art of water-colour
learned, so many generations afterwards, to reach atmospheric effects.
But it was in the painting of interiors that the resources of the
art of water-colour were used most fully by the Dutchmen, and they
were used only most fully in the old age of Berghem, and after the
death of Rembrandt, when Adrian van Ostade, himself now old, had come
from Haarlem to Amsterdam, and they were used best by that master of
ignoble conception and often repulsive work. The special virtues of
Ostade--accomplished management of light and shade, and faultless
composition of mean subjects--an instinct, that is, for the spacing
out, the perfectly balanced filling, the never crowding, of his given
area of paper or canvas--have long ago been acknowledged; and his
sense of beauty in colour and beauty in grouping, and beauty indeed
sometimes in line, in inanimate things, has gone far to atone for that
vulgar indifference to charm of figure and face, common indeed to many
of the Dutchmen, but Ostade’s to an exceptional degree. Drawings of
Mr. Malcolm’s and Mr. Cook’s show him, once for all, the consummate
practitioner of a branch of art, the precedence in which--the invention
of which, almost--our own country has liked to claim. Rich and mellow,
tender and luminous, beyond all that has thus far been acknowledged,
was the best work of Ostade in his old age, in the English art of
water-colour. Dusart followed him in elaboration of work, but not at
all in felicitous adaptation of the means to the end.
There are naturally certain masters rightly famed for their work in
oil painting, who are seen at a disadvantage in drawings, whether by
pen or chalk or washes of colour. It is not all who gave to their
smaller designs, with whatever purpose of immediate sale, completion
so brilliant and expressive as that which we see, for instance, in a
little red chalk drawing of Wouvermans--a group of figures, horses
and dogs--a sharply finished work, exquisite in its possession of
every quality for which the master may be praised. Again, some men
dependent on glow of colour or gradations of tone beyond the art of
limited material, or at least beyond their command of it--Cuyp, for
instance--might be judged hardly by drawings. The pleasantness of Cuyp
is not in his drawings.
And then there are the great masters of one generation, who have not
been great masters at all in another: their excellence, seen late,
escaped the appreciation of their contemporaries or of their immediate
successors. Fashions in art change, and Van der Heist, exalted by Sir
Joshua above Rembrandt, drops later to his proper place. Each age, we
may be sure, has something right in its criticism: the great Sir Joshua
himself, who thought that ‘Bruges afforded but scanty entertainment
to a painter,’--Bruges, with its masterpieces of the sacred art of
Memling--had the keenness to see the style and the beauty under the
orgies of Jan Steen. But to this inevitable variation and inconstancy
of taste is due, alas! much permanent loss--things that were treasures
once being now not to be guarded, or things of no account until now,
being treasures for to-day. And the loss is felt most surely in the
case of drawings--so short a period of neglect being enough to destroy
them. It may be that certain artists unrepresented in collections,
or represented inadequately, drew very little. All did not multiply
studies with the fertility of William Van de Velde; but all must have
drawn, and the work of some is missing to us. The flying sheets of
long unvalued artists, on which Hobbema pencilled the forms of many
trees, with a patient precision which in modern art only Crome has
equalled--on which Wynants drew his narrow path, wandering over the
sandhills or by the side of the farm--on which Jan Steen caught the
rare girl’s prettiness and the last subtleties of vivacious gesture--on
which De Hooch or Metsu drew tenderly faces of grave quietude, absorbed
in daily and common occupation--these flying sheets, one fears, were
dust and refuse two hundred years ago.
(_Introduction to Burlington Club Catalogue_, April 1878.)