Dutch art

“ The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music. ”

“ The Van Eycks led the way, and painters like Bouts and others, though Dutch by birth, became Flemish by adoption in their art at least. When the Flemish painters fell to copying Italy some of the Dutch followed them, but with no great enthusiasm. Suddenly, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Holland had gained political independence, Dutch art struck off by itself, became original, became famous. It pictured native life with verve, skill, keenness of insight, and fine pictorial view. Limited it was; it never soared like Italian art, never became universal or world-embracing. ”

“ He, too, with his vividly-coloured existence, with this picturesque and sensuous world of Dutch art and Dutch reality all around that would fain have made him the prisoner of its colours, its genial warmth, its struggle for life, its selfish and crafty love, was but a transient perturbation of the one absolute mind; of which, indeed, all finite things whatever, time itself, the most durable achievements of nature and man, and all that seems most like independent energy, are no more than petty accidents or affections. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Recently Dutch art has revived in the portraying of Dutch landscapes, windmills, canals and such, and to my mind it is the pleasantest and most effective art now alive in Europe, away ahead of the Italians, who persist in imitating the old masters and tackling subjects which have been thoroughly covered so much that there is hardly a chance for a new impression.
Every town of any size in Belgium and Holland has a public art gallery, and the people ought to be artists merely from association. ”

“ The Dutch school is indeed an epitome of the art in its modern phase, and all that has been said of this applies with special force to the painting of Holland. Democratic in choice of subject, subtle in observation of tone and atmosphere, refined in colour, free and yet precise in execution, sensitive to every charm of texture and handling, the Dutch painter of the first half of the 17th century represents the most varied and the most finished accomplishment in paint that any school can show. ”

“ A picturesque shadow will redeem the squalor of the meanest garret, and the subdued light of the little kitchen where the red-petticoated housewife is sweeping must contrast so delicately with the white glare of the brick yard where the neighbour stands in parley, leaning against the doorpost, that the humble life of the place is transformed and poetised. This was the ABC of Dutch art; it was the Dutchmen who first found out that with the poetising aid of light and shade the meanest and most commonplace incidents of every-day life could be made the subjects of pictures. ”

“ And it was this art which was as a revelation to the French landscape-painters, whose works, exhibited in Brussels and Paris, in their turn gave the Dutchmen an understanding of their own being and a clearer insight, which, at first, perhaps, with a suggestion of borrowed riches, led them back at length into their own domain.
It is easy to overestimate an influence. For, although the art of painting, colour and the sense of a powerful movement can be taught and learned, it is not often that a foreign tradition leads to great display of strength. ”

“ Within the next fifty years nearly all the great Dutch painters were born—Berchem, Bol, Cuyp, Frans Hals, Van der Helst, De Keyser, Rembrandt, Ruysdael. In characteristics, as well as in chronology, Dutch art was the direct outcome of Dutch history. This art has come to be identified in common parlance, owing to its chief and distinguishing characteristic, with what is known as "genre painting,"—the painting, that is, which takes its subject from small incidents of everyday life. ”

“ Maes painted old Dutch housewives, and Metsu young Dutch housewives, to the life; Vermeer and Terburg immortalised Dutch ladies at their spinets; Albert Cuyp toiled to suffuse Dutch meadows and Dutch cows with a golden glow; Jan Steen glorified the humblest Dutch family scenes; Gerard Dou spent whole weeks upon the fingers of a common Dutch hand. In short, art that so long had been at the service only of the Church and the proud, became suddenly, without losing any of its divinity, a fireside friend. That is what Holland did for painting. ”

“ He is one of those painters who dare to be themselves, who place strength above feeble sentimentality, who do not consider our Dutch art of landscape-painting to be bound to any one formula and who do not object if they are called cold because of their cool expression of a fact, for the reason that they are convinced that strength and not weakness is their motive power. ”

“ Here as with us, the renewal of the moral world is the renewal of the ideal world; the Flemish and Dutch art of the seventeenth century, like the French art and literature of the nineteenth century, is the reaction of a vast tragedy performed for thirty years at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. ”

“ During the War of Independence the Dutch had learnt to love their fatherland, and they were the first, as artists, fully to grasp the poetry of landscape. Art now no longer shines only upon the eyes of Mary and the Hosts of Heaven: it settles upon arid country hills, streams upon the sea waves, is at home in peasants’ houses and the dark woods, wanders through the streets and alleys, makes a temple of every market. ”

“ The same Southern influence pervades the landscapes of Jan Both; they are very pleasing, technically fine, but the evil which creeps into Dutch art is quite evident here. The ideal landscape of Titian, Poussin, and Claude Lorrain gradually warps the former frank realistic rendering of nature; elegance, hollow display gradually take the place of the good, wholesome naturalness of Dutch art.
With the advent of the eighteenth century, painting and the graphic arts decline to levels which we may pass by in this rapid survey. ”

“ The very spirit of Dutch art and the instinctive preferences of the future school of the seventeenth century are to be found in embryo in his works, which tend less to initiate us into the mysteries of the invisible, than to place before us the faithful image of what really exists. ”

“ After this glance at the nature and cause of decline of Dutch art in the eighteenth century, we may return with a better appreciation of what is ahead of us in our study—the establishment in Holland in the seventeenth century of a new art, the product of a new nation ”

“ No one need go to Holland to know the country, and if you do find yourself there you may follow out your study of its social history without going farther than its picture galleries. You may rely with absolute confidence on the realism of Dutch art, and, strange to say, the most capable artists have been as faithful as their less gifted fellows. ”

“ The mechanical excellence of the Dutch painters in colouring and handling is that which comes the nearest in fine art to the perfection of certain manual exhibitions of skill. The truth of the effect and the facility with which it is produced are equally admirable. Up to a certain point everything is faultless. The hand and eye have done their part. There is only a want of taste and genius. ”

“ Dutch art in the palmy days—The Renaissance—A miracle—What Holland did for painting—The “Night Watch”—Rembrandt’s isolation—Captain Franz Banning Cocq—Elizabeth Bas—The Staalmeesters—If one might choose one picture—Vermeer of Delft again—Whistler—“Paternal Advice”—Terburg—The romantic Frenchmen again—The Dutch painter’s ideal—The two Maris—Old Dutch rooms—The Six Collection—“Six’s Bridge” and the wager—The Fodor Museum.
The superlative excellence of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century has never been explained, and probably never will be. ”

“ Their realism, then, inciting them to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted that Dutch art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country. ”

“ Until quite recently a courtly, aristocratic art had shed its light upon the whole of Europe. In the seventeenth century the Dutch alone had maintained their isolation. They who entered fresh into art, and had to break with no tradition, gave at that time the first expression to the new spirit, in that they resolutely recalled art from its courtly surroundings to the humbler dwellings of the middle classes. ”

“ And yet, notwithstanding his deficiency in that pictorial quality which we Dutch regard as the one and only essential of good painting, notwithstanding the feeble sentiment and often somewhat barren lines of his pictures, this painter of mixed Dutch and German origin, brought up from his childhood under the great French masters of romanticism, has always represented to us an important talent. It is a talent that stands, for the most part, outside the Dutch tradition, even though foreigners are inclined to see a certain striving after Rembrandt effects in the arrangement of the light. ”

“ But there is one great hiatus in Dutch art, the reason for which can scarcely be found in the pacific and modest disposition of the people. This art, so profoundly national in all other respects, has, with the exception of a few naval battles, completely neglected all the great events of the war of independence, among which the sieges of Leyden and of Harlem alone would have been enough to have inspired a whole legion of painters. ”

“ For though it is often urged in older books on the history of art that modern genre painting far outstripped the old Dutch genre in incisiveness of characterisation, depth of psychological conception, and opulence of invention, these merits are bought at the expense of all pictorial harmony. In the days of Rembrandt the Dutch were painters to their fingers’ ends, and they were able to be so because they appealed to a public whose taste was adequately trained to take a refined pleasure in the contemplation of works of art which had sterling merits of colour. ”

“ The Dutch have selected the subject-matter of their artistic production out of their own substance, out of the actual presence of their daily life. To have once for all realized that presence even in art is no matter of reproach to them. ”

“ The combination of excellent seaports, a powerful navy, and strong mercantile interests made Holland a flourishing economic center. Dutch patrons, predominantly Calvinist and middle class, demanded not religious or mythological pictures, but landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and genres, or scenes of daily life. Their demands were met by an ever-increasing number of Dutch artists who, perhaps in response to a burgeoning and competitive market, specialized in a single type of subject. ”

“ It, too, has produced a great, though perhaps a less narrowly national Art. Willem Witsen, Bloomers, Artz, Bles, Bisschop, Therese Schwartze, J. Toorop, Voerman, Verster, van Googh, Bauer, and Camerlingh Onnes all hold a high position in the annals of Dutch Art.
Holland has not produced any sculptors who are to be mentioned with the great sculptors of the Continent. Painters and sculptors require models, and these are to be found in abundance, many of the most noted ones of the day being constantly “commandeered” by foreign as well as native artists. ”

“ His style is Oriental rather than Dutch, and his topics for the most part are mystical in character. He is famous also for his decorative art. This many-sided man is probably the greatest artist soul in Holland. He is expert in almost every domain of art. Etching, pastel and water-colour drawing, oil-painting, wood-cutting, lithography, working in silver, copper, and brass, and modelling in clay, belong equally to his accomplishments, though as a painter he is, of course, best known. ”

“ Another reason to prove that landscape-painting is of Dutch origin lies in the fact that no country was so independent of both religious influences and princely patronage as the northern portion of the Netherlands; and, even though this does not apply to the fifteenth and a part of the sixteenth century, the fact that artists were free to paint what found favour in their eyes must have had its influence. ”

“ The jolly burghers who fèted the peace of Munster will live on in their every lineament till the colours and the canvas perish by age or accident. For, like truth, Dutch art is eternal, and must always win admiration although it may find few enthusiastic worshippers. ”

“ Nay, not only the fate of a single picture, but of a whole school of painting, depends upon the caprice of some one of the self-elected dictators. The King, or the Duke of ——, has but to love the Dutch school and ridicule the Italian, and behold a Raphael will not sell, and a Teniers rises into infinite value! Dutch representations of candlesticks and boors are sought after with the most rapturous delight; the most disagreeable objects of nature become the most worshipped treasures of art ”