Dutch painting

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Dutch school of painting has one quality which renders it particularly attractive to us Italians; it is above all others the most different from our own, the very antithesis or the opposite pole of art. The Dutch and Italian schools are the most original, or, as has been said, the only two to which the title rigorously belongs; the others being only daughters or younger sisters, more or less resembling them.
Thus even in painting Holland offers that which is most sought after in travel and in books of travel: the new.
Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of Holland. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Prominent in this field, among many others, were Gherard Dou, the painter of the famous picture of the four candles, and Rembrandt, the great wonder-working superhuman enlightener.
Another of the most striking characteristics of Dutch painting is naturally color. It is generally recognized that in a country where there are no distant mountains, no undulating views, no prominent features to strike the eye—in short, no general forms that lend themselves to design—the artist is strongly influenced by color. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Descending from the consideration of the various kinds of painting, to the special manner by means of which the artist excelled in treatment, one leads all the rest as the distinctive feature of Dutch painting--the light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The good and the bad qualities of the nation are all alike represented, and this, which is a merit in the literature of a country, is no less a merit in its art.
But there is one great void in Dutch painting, for which the peaceful and modest character of the people is not a sufficient reason. This school of painting, which is so essentially national, has, with the exception of some great naval battles, passed over all of the grand exploits of the war of independence, among which the sieges of Leyden and Haarlem would have been sufficient to inspire a legion of artists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is their liveliness of characterization, exhibited not only in the individual figures, but also in the inventiveness of grouping and in the peculiar vivacity with which the spirit of the scene has been rendered. He is of all the genre artists the supreme delineator of Dutch life among the lower middle classes in the Leyden and Haarlem of his day; depicting it, by turns, with something of the large-heartedness of a Shakspere, the wit and satire of a Molière, and the coarseness of a Rabelais. But in every vein, whether of broad survey or trenchant scrutiny, he is human ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are to be regarded as wonderful, nay, almost miraculous, efforts of native, unaided, unlearned talent—as an approach to truth almost in spite of nature and of science; but they do not hold with respect to legitimate sculpture—the high-souled, the noblest, the severest of all arts—the same rank as, in painting, the works of the Dutch masters do as compared with the lofty spirits of the Romans—precisely for this reason, that while similar subjects are not only fit, but often felicitous, subjects for the pencil, they are altogether improper objects of sculptural representation. ”

“ The paintings of the Dutch attracted him to art, not the impulse to give token to his own peculiar temperament. He thinks more of producing pictures which may equal those of his forerunners in their merits than of rendering the impression of nature which he has himself received. His intelligence quickens at the study of the rules and theories set up by the Dutch, and he seeks for spots in nature where he may exercise these principles, but remains chill at the sight of sky and water, trees 247 and mountains. ”

“ 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. ”