Dutch painters

“ Seeing how closely nature and landscape-painting are bound up with the very existence of Dutch art, it can be no matter for surprise that, at a time of a decline such as that into which official painting in general had fallen in our country, there were painters at the beginning of the eighteenth century who had succeeded in keeping their art untouched by foreign influences and who, refusing to deny their kind or the traditions of the great centuries, looked at nature through their own eyes, through their own masters. ”

“ In reality a defect rather than an excellence, since the office of painting is to represent not what is, but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see every thing; but a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one admires, and does not find fault. In this respect the most famous prodigies of patience were Don, Mieris, Potter, Van der Heist, and, more or less, all the Dutch painters.
But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp, and such admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ordinary story is that on settling down to a period of independence and comparative peace and prosperity after the cessation of the Spanish war, the Dutch people called for good art, and good art came. But that is too simple. That a poet, a statesman or a novelist should be produced in response to a national desire is not inconceivable; for poets, statesmen and novelists find their material in the air, as we say, in the ideas of the moment. They are for the most part products of their time. But the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were expressing no real idea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of Holland. As long as the northern and southern provinces of the Low Countries remained under the Spanish rule and in the Catholic faith, Dutch painters painted like Belgian painters; they studied in Belgium, Germany, and Italy ”

“ They began to spread themselves as cosmopolitans, aping the fashions of the rest of the world; and, as the fashion of the period was to be Italianate, so the artists of Holland, lacking at home the momentum of a common and collective need, ceased to be a school of great original painters, and became instead clumsy imitators of the splendors and elevation of the Italian masters of the Renaissance. ”

“ 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 painters, unlike the Belgians, have almost always been true to their own traditions and their own country. Even in decadence the most of them feebly followed their own painters rather than those of Italy and France, and in the early nineteenth century they were not affected by the French classicism of David. Later on there came into vogue an art that had some affinity with that of Millet and Courbet in France. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And since I have mentioned the wife of one artist, it may be here noted, en passant, that a pleasant book might be written upon the wives of the Dutch painters, as well for the variety of their adventures as for the important part which they take in the history of art. Many of them we know by sight from their portraits, made in company with their husbands, their children, their cats, and their hens; and biographers speak of them, denying or confirming reports concerning their conduct. Some even venture to hint that the greater part of these ladies did great wrongs to painting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a great contrast between his sturdy children of the sea and Israëls' frail, pensive creations. Like most painters, he began by producing powerfully-drawn small figures, like that strong picture, Maternal Joys, at the Municipal Museum in Amsterdam: a cabinet-piece which possesses every quality save that of atmosphere. It belongs to the time when our painters felt more strongly bound to the old masters and to their model, the time when the trend towards wider harmonies, subtler analyses of colour, quicker solutions of light was still slumbering. ”

“ For not only had the best of these decoration-painters learnt their art as real painters and merely altered the character of their productions in obedience to the whims of the day: most of them did paint or draw landscapes or portraits and prove that they had it in their power to satisfy a demand for real painting, should it ever arise. For instance, in the Fodor Museum in Amsterdam, certain drawings by the tapestry-painter and manufacturer, Jacob Cats, display a strength, an old-Dutch quality, an originality which we should hardly have expected to find in those days. ”

“ Rubens, Snyders, Paul de Vos, and many other Belgian artists had painted animals with wonderful ability, but they are surpassed by the Dutch painters, Van de Velde, Berchem, Karel du Jardin, and Paul Potter, the prince of animal painters, whose famous "Bull" in the gallery at the Hague deserves to be hung in the Louvre opposite Raphael's "Transfiguration."
The Dutch have become pre-eminent in another branch of art also—marine painting. ”

“ While foreign painters, in portraiture especially, have been disposed to follow the direct example of Frans Hals, the Hollanders themselves, both in landscape and genre, have been influenced by the so-called “little masters,” and, in the case of Josef Israels, by Rembrandt himself. And the result of this influence has been to make modern Dutch painters, as a group, the best brushmen of their age.{107}
CHAPTER VII
DUTCH GENRE THE tendency toward genre painting began before the separation of the Holland Free State from the Spanish Netherlands. ”

“ When all is said, did not all the romanticism of that time, with one or two great exceptions, consist rather in the painting of deeds provoked by passions than in the portrayal of passion itself? And did not the Dutchmen of that time lack just the inspiring vigour with which a Delacroix translated romanticism into the purely pictorial, while, on the other hand, they lacked the expressive line with which the German painters conveyed the emotional side of romanticism? ”

“ In other cases, the deceptive power of the art is really felt to be a source of interest and amusement. This is the case with a large number of the collectors of Dutch pictures. They enjoy seeing what is flat made to look round, exactly as a child enjoys a trick of legerdemain; they rejoice in flies which the spectator vainly attempts to brush away, and in dew which he endeavors to dry by putting the picture in the sun. They take it for the greatest compliment to their treasures that they should be mistaken for windows ”

“ There are echoes of many departed glories, of Rembrandt, of Hals, and even of the French Barbizon men, and a few typical beautifully lighted Dutch interiors. But there is none of the work of the men whom the art magazines have taught us to consider the representative Dutch painters of today: Israels, the Maris brothers, and Mauve. ”

“ The Different Kinds of Painting represented in the Modern Schools.—The fact that the Dutch painters have left us masterpieces in so many different walks of painting, makes it convenient that we should add here some brief notes on characteristic modern phases of the art on which they stamped the impress of their genius. The normal subject for the artist, as we have seen, up to the 17th century, was the figure-subject, generally in some connexion with religion. ”

“ The Dutch are not only a nation of painters, but a nation of picture-lovers, though in Holland, as in other countries, one not seldom sees upon walls from which better would be expected tawdry art, about which all that can be said is that it was bought cheap. The country possesses a number of good public galleries, and much is done in this way and by the frequent exhibition of paintings to foster the love of the artistic. The principal exhibitions are those of the Pulchri Studio and the Kunst-kring (Art Circle) at The Hague, and the 'Arti et Amicitia' at Rotterdam. ”

“ Envelopment is unmistakably represented by the out of door Dutch painters, for in the low countries atmosphere is seen in its density, and at very short range. Holland is therefore an ideal sketching ground for the painter and the best in the world for the student, since the ideas of values and envelopment are ever present. In this saturated air the minute particles of moisture which, in the case of rain or fog can affect the obliteration of objects, partially accomplishes it at all times, with the result that objects seem to swim in atmosphere. ”

“ I never heard of a Dutch collector who patronized modern painters. His rooms are always filled with Ostades, Wouvermans, Vanderveldes, etc., or more{140} frequently with wretched copies of these masters; but in these private collections, which are scattered all over Holland, one never meets with a good picture by a modern artist. Under these circumstances I think it very creditable to Dutch artists that painting should not have declined more than it has in Holland. ”

“ Probably this is the place once more to show how these so-called Barbizon painters, who were so entirely un-French in all their being, could be developed in France, in Paris; how an accumulation of foreign methods in England kindled the spark which ignited, in that country, a flourishing renascence of Italian and Dutch painting and, in so doing, transferred the art of absolute painting to modern times.
The English people are characterized in opposition to the foreigner mainly by their practical sense. ”

“ This portrait, while serving as a record of a woman who actually lived, is more than that: it is a type of the race to which she belonged. It is a type, too, of the whole school of Dutch painting—and, moreover, such a marvel of painting!
The Dutchmen of the seventeenth century, having abandoned the large field of decorative composition, settled down in the small space of their canvases to a perfection of craftsmanship that has never been surpassed in modern art. From the standpoint of pure painting, they formed a school of great painters ”

“ Still, if only for the reason that the eighteenth century contains the predecessors or, at any rate, the teachers of the painters of the nineteenth century, it is well worth while to consider these decoration-painters from another point of view than that of the applied art which owed its prosperity to the luxury of the merchant-princes of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Middelburg. ”

“ It is now a picture gallery, and contains some good historical pictures, and many fine small ones, of the best artists of Holland. I think the boys forgot to tell you that, at the Hague, we found the annual exhibition of paintings by the living artists of Holland, just opened, and the treat was very great. It is quite clear that the art is not lost here, and that rare excellence is still to be found among the Dutch painters. ”

“ From that time all the views of their painters were necessarily turned to the other classes of art, more susceptible of a small form, and therefore more suitable to the private houses of the Dutch, which, though neat and commodious, are not sufficiently large for pictures of great size. ”

“ 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. ”