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Dutch Painting
A Personal View
In January 1993 I went to the Netherlands for three days in order to see two exhibitions in Dordrecht and Amsterdam. I flew to Schiphol and took the direct train to Dordrecht. It was a grey, overcast, wet day and as the train travelled the length of the Randstad I found myself, almost unconsciously, observing the landscape between the towns through the eyes of seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Rembrandt's etching of the Omval, Jan van Goyen's monochrome vistas, Philips Koninck's cloud-filled skies, Salomon van Ruysdael's river landscapes and even, although there was no sunlight, Cuyp's views of his home town of Dordrecht seen across the River Maas all came to mind as I glimpsed fields, rivers and distant churches. Even to someone like myself, who has been professionally concerned with Dutch art for twenty years, it is still possible to be surprised by its truthfulness, by the penetration with which Dutch artists observed and represented their surroundings and their contemporaries. This is hardly an original observation and there is of course much else to reflect upon and study in Dutch art, yet it remains the overwhelming impression of Dutch art for the novice and the specialist alike.
Efforts were made, especially in the 1970s, to lay stress upon the intellectual sophistication of Dutch art, a process which began with genre painting and moved on to still-life and landscape. Complex patterns of thought and allusion were identified in Dutch paintings and their elaborate construction and didactic intentions analysed. It was a movement which in books and articles I applauded, and indeed participated in. Much was discovered about the way in which paintings were viewed in the seventeenth century but, on the other hand, many overambitious claims were made. That interpretative tide has now turned and the search is on for a renewed critical language in which to describe and analyse the truthfulness of Dutch art, its prime characteristic and the quality which sets it apart from the art being produced elsewhere in Europe during the seventeenth century. It is a truthfulness which extends not just to the landscape, the townscape, and the settings of domestic life but also to human behaviour and the factors which control it.
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I took up the post of Curator of Dutch and Flemish Painting at the National Gallery in November 1971 at the age of twenty-three. Appointment to such a position at that age was in line with the Gallery's policy of appointing young curators - those with promise rather than achievement - who were then trained in the procedures, structures and mores of the institution. This is a policy which has since been abandoned - and I am one of those who has urged its abandonment - and new curators now bring both experience and academic achievement to the Gallery. My first degree at Oxford was in Modern History (which in Oxford means post-Classical) and I took specialist papers in Dante and fifteenth-century France. For the latter I attended classes on fifteenth-century French painting and manuscript illumination at All Souls College with the distinguished Belgian scholar of medieval manuscripts, L.M.J. Delaissé, who for many years had been on the staff of the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels. He was a remarkable teacher, an inspiration to many young English art historians during his all too few years in Oxford. It was Delaissé's teaching which inspired me to study the history of art. His enthusiastic exposition of the archaeology of the book, as we sat poring over the books of hours themselves in the gathering twilight in Duke Humphrey's Library in the Bodleian, was thrilling. As well as these few classes for undergraduates, Delaissé taught a postgraduate diploma in the History of Art which covered Early Netherlandish painting and manuscript
Philips Koninck, An Extensive Landscape with a Road by a Ruin. 1655. Canvas, 137.4 × 167.7 cm. The National Gallery, London.
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illumination as well as contemporary developments in France. This was a year's course and after its completion, I enrolled with him as a doctoral student to write a dissertation on the Master of the Rohan Hours, that remarkably expressive illuminator, probably from the Lower Rhine, who was working in Paris in the early fifteenth century. I had scarcely begun my work when the job at the National Gallery was advertised and I was fortunate enough to be appointed. I had never studied seventeenth-century Dutch art, had never visited the Netherlands and could not read Dutch (although I had studied German at school). Gregory Martin, who had been my predecessor at the National Gallery, had published his catalogue of the Flemish paintings in 1970. Neil MacLaren, his predecessor, had published the Dutch catalogue ten years before and so it was that catalogue which would be the first to require revision. (In the event, my revised edition of the Dutch catalogue did not appear until 1991). My first task, I was told, was to familiarise myself with the collection and I began with the Dutch paintings.
It is my belief that there is no greater collection of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings than that in the National Gallery in London. Since the seventeenth century the British have been enthusiastic and discerning collectors of Dutch paintings and their achievements can be judged in Trafalgar Square today. The heroic period of British collecting was from about 1780 until 1850, at a time when trade and the Industrial Revolution were enriching merchants, bankers, factory owners and landowning aristocrats alike and paintings from Continental Europe were pouring on to the market as a direct consequence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Many of the best of these paintings have found their way by bequest, gift and purchase on to the walls of the National Gallery. The Louvre and the Hermitage have important collections of Dutch paintings but only the Rijksmuseum rivals that of the National Gallery. In a sense the two collections are complementary: the Rijksmuseum has those paintings, notably group portraits, which the Dutch never sold to foreign buyers. It has greater portraits and still-lifes, and a finer holding of Vermeers. But for the great landscape painters - Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, Philips Koninck, Meindert Hobbema; marine painters - Jan van de Cappelle, Willem van de Velde, Simon de Vlieger; genre painters - Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Gerard ter Borch; and for Rembrandt himself (excepting The Night Watch and the Staalmeesters), London has, in my view, the edge. It was with this astonishingly rich and numerous collection that I was to familiarise myself. I began, quixotically, with the Dutch Caravaggisti, reading Nicolson on Terbrugghen, Judson on Honthorst and Slatkes on Baburen, all in English, which was a help, but as I persevered at my Dutch evening classes I was able to read the works of Hoogewerff, an art historian I especially admire, on the Bentveughels and Blankert on Pieter van Laer.
Two developments coincided to make these early years at the National Gallery an especially exciting time to be learning about Dutch painting. It was the moment when the iconological researches of Eddy de Jongh and his colleagues at Utrecht University were being published. His Openbaar Kunstbezit volume Moral Emblems and Amorous Scenes in 17th-Century Painting (Zinne- en minnebeelden in de schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw), in which he outlined ways in which emblem books and prints could be used in the interpretation of Dutch paintings, had appeared in 1969 and
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Jacob van Ruisdael, A Pool surrounded by Trees. c. 1665. Canvas, 107.5 × 143 cm. The National Gallery, London.
his ground-breaking essay on Realism and Apparent Realism was published in the catalogue of the 1971 Brussels exhibition. The fullest and most elaborately worked-out presentation of his approach was, however, the catalogue of the exhibition For Instruction and Pleasure (Tot Lering en Vermaak), held at the Rijksmuseum in 1976. Visiting the exhibition and reading the catalogue was an exhilarating experience: there was a sense of an entirely new analytical technique being applied to the study of Dutch painting, immensely rewarding and full of infinite possibilities. I reviewed the exhibition and its catalogue warmly in The Burlington Magazine. For Instruction and Pleasure spawned a number of other exhibitions which applied a more or less similar approach to the interpretation of Dutch painting. One of these was my exhibition The National Gallery lends Dutch Genre Painting, in which a group of paintings from Trafalgar Square were shown at four regional galleries in England with a catalogue which was heavily dependent on For Instruction and Pleasure for its general approach and, indeed, for particular examples. It had the small distinction of being the first publication in English to pioneer this new approach and for this reason the catalogue was found useful by students. Eddy de Jongh was immensely kind to this English follower (and, at times, plagiarist): he talked these problems over patiently and with great seriousness, as we sat in his library in Utrecht and he pulled down emblem books from the shelves to illustrate his arguments. This was an early example of the immense kindness and openness with which I have always been received by Dutch scholars. There
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is not in the study of Dutch art any of the xenophobia which is sometimes encountered in studying the art of some other European countries in which it is hard for foreigners to establish a foothold. The Dutch genuinely welcome foreign scholars who study their art. They can, however, be very fierce critics of what they take to be superficial accounts of their culture, as Svetlana Alpers and Simon Schama have recently discovered.
The other event of the mid-70s which added to the excitement of learning about Dutch painting was the invitation of Michael Levey, who had become Director of the National Gallery on the retirement of Sir Martin Davies in 1974, to organize an exhibition of Dutch art under the title Art in 17th-Century Holland. It was to be general in character, a celebration of the achievement of the Dutch in the Golden Age, and, although there were loans from the Netherlands, it was based on the public and private collections of Great Britain. The preparation of the exhibition provided an ideal opportunity to get to know these collections and to focus attention on little-known masterpieces like the Allegory of Winter by Cesar van Everdingen in the Southampton City Art Gallery and Jan de Bray's Banquet of Cleopatra in the Royal Collection. I am very pleased that a number of the best paintings from private collections have subsequently been acquired by the National Gallery through bequest and private treaty sale, an arrangement which gives substantial tax benefits to the vendor. Among these paintings are Willem Kalf's Still-life with the Hunting Horn of the Saint Sebastian's Archers' Guild, Ter Brugghen's The Concert, in my view his greatest secular work, Frans Hals' Boy with a Skull and Aelbert Cuyp's River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants. The exhibition included silver, sculpture and medals, furniture, ceramics, glass and tiles, and the catalogue included essays on these subjects and on Dutch architecture. It has always been central to my view of Dutch painting that it should not be seen in isolation from the other visual arts. It was an extraordinary privilege to prepare this exhibition, to travel in Britain and the Netherlands selecting paintings and other works of art and then remodelling a large section of the National Gallery to accommodate them.
The exhibition, which was on show in the autumn of 1976, attracted - unsurprisingly in view of the popularity of Dutch art and the high quality of the loans - a large number of visitors and I hope that those who came to see Rembrandt were also struck by Christiaen van Vianen's silver ewer, with its rippling basin and auricular rim, and Hendrick de Keyser's marble bust which may show Vincent Jacobsz. Coster.
Shortly after the exhibition I became fascinated by Rembrandt's greatest pupil Carel Fabritius, two of whose rare paintings are in the National Gallery, and wrote a catalogue raisonné of his work. I approached him initially not from his relationship with Rembrandt, as had been usual in the past, but rather from his association with the so-called ‘Delft School’ after his move to that town in about 1650. Did he serve as a catalyst in the transformation of Delft from a provincial backwater into one of the most original and innovative centres in the Netherlands? This proved to be a very difficult question to answer but I was able to strip away many of the incorrect attributions made to Fabritius, particularly in the early part of this century, and reduce his oeuvre to a solid core of just eight paintings. From that core it has been possible to add more paintings in recent years (although I am sceptical
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Jan van de Cappelle, A River Scene with a Large Ferry. 1665. Canvas, 122 × 154.4 cm. The National Gallery, London.
of the mass of new attributions proposed by the Rembrandt Research Project). It was also useful to reconsider the documents (in Delft and Amsterdam) concerning Fabritius which had been first published by Bredius and Wijnman and add a few new ones. The book was published in 1981 and I subsequently received my Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute for this book and a number of related articles. Fabritius' interest in perspective and trompe l'oeil effects brought me into contact with two young American scholars, Arthur Wheelock, Curator of Dutch and Flemish Painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and Walter Liedtke, who was shortly afterwards given the same responsibilities at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Despite their own disagreements about a number of points, they were both helpful and supportive of my project and have continued to be valued friends and colleagues. Fabritius also brought me into contact with two of the elder statesmen of my field of study, Jan van Gelder and Egbert Haverkamp-Begeman. Both gave me immense encouragement and showed me great kindness, reading the manuscript, preventing errors and suggesting avenues of new research. Jan van Gelder died in 1980 but Egbert Haverkamp-Begeman continues to give support not just to me but to countless younger scholars of Dutch art.
It was a great pleasure to be a member of the organizing committee of the exhibition of Dutch history painting, Gods, Saints and Heroes, which was shown in Washington, Detroit and Amsterdam in 1980-1. This was a
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Gerard ter Borch, A Woman playing a Theorbo to Two Men. c. 1668. Canvas, 67.7 × 57.8 cm. The National Gallery, London.
genuinely ground-breaking exhibition which not only made visitors aware of this distinct category of Dutch painting but also gave a clear idea of the achievements of Dutch history painters whose work, particularly that of the painters active in the second half of the century, is relatively little known to a broad public. It put Rembrandt's religious paintings, the best known of Dutch history paintings, into a contemporary context. The committee met under the enthusiastic chairmanship of Dewey Mosby of the Detroit Institute of Art who, with Beatrijs Brenninkmeyer-De Rooij of the Government Department of Visual Arts, had conceived the project. The meetings and the subsequent meals I remember as being particularly animated and enjoyable: it was at this time that I got to know Albert Blankert, who has written so well about Haarlem classicism, as we talked about the concept of the exhibition and the selection of paintings late into the night over many genevers.
In the early 1980s I was also working on Anthony van Dyck, an artist whose work and personality I find especially intriguing and sympathetic. Van Dyck is a remarkable example of the instinctual artist: he was a prodigy, who was already producing immensely accomplished work in his late teens and, although he was of course profoundly influenced by Rubens, he did not share his intellectual and antiquarian interests. Rather than adopt- | |
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ing Rubens' humanist Stoicism, Van Dyck was an untroubled, devout Catholic entirely committed both as man and artist to the ideals of the Counter-Reformation. My monograph on Van Dyck appeared in 1982 and a number of articles and conference papers were also published at around that time. My interest in the painter has continued: I was invited to contribute to the catalogue of the superb exhibition in Washington in the winter of 1990 and in 1991 organized an exhibition of his drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, and my edition of his Italian Sketchbook is currently being prepared for publication.
In response to a commission from the Dutch publisher J.H. de Bussy I expanded the text of the genre painting catalogue into a book which appeared in 1984 under the catchpenny title (insisted upon by the English publishers, Faber and Faber) Scenes of Everyday Life: the Dutch edition used a quote from the poet Roemer Visscher ‘Daer is niet ledighs of ydels in de dinghen’ (‘There is nothing vain or meaningless in things’) as a title which, although closer to the argument of the book, may have been more puzzling than illuminating for the majority of readers. It was also in 1984 that the exhibition Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Genre Painting was shown in Philadelphia, Berlin and London (Royal Academy). The project was directed with great drive and flair by Peter Sutton who was then at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I was a member of the exhibition committee as well as contributing to the catalogue. The exhibition and its bulky catalogue brought the discoveries of For Instruction and Pleasure (in a slightly modified form) to a wider, English-speaking audience as well as bringing to a mass public the achievement of Dutch genre painters. Vermeer and De Hooch were well represented - the exhibition had the title The Age of Vermeer and De Hooch in London - but so too were far less well-known painters: Jacob Duck and Isaac Koedijk were among the discoveries of this very successful and popular exhibition.
In my continuing cataloguing of the National Gallery's collection, my interests were shifting towards the landscapes and a byproduct of this new interest was the exhibition Dutch Landscape: The Early Years shown at the National Gallery in 1986. The exhibition traced the emergence and subsequent development of naturalistic landscape in Amsterdam and Haarlem between 1580 and 1650. It made the important point that drawing and printmaking were far more experimental than painting and that the new naturalism is first seen on paper and only later on panel and canvas. For this reason the exhibition contained many drawings and prints as well as paintings. Essays for the catalogue were commissioned from art historians and colleagues in other, related disciplines. Maria Schenkeveld-van der Dussen wrote about literary accounts of landscape and the economic historian Jan de Vries described the physical transformation of the landscape during these years. The catalogue also included an important essay by an old friend, Margarita Russell, in which she argued persuasively that marine painting was a precursor of landscape painting and that Haarlem was the cradle of both. One subject I deliberately omitted was the iconography of landscape - that is, whether elements within representations of landscape, or indeed the entire landscape painting, print or drawing, can be interpreted in a religious or moral sense. Just as I had been reconsidering my ideas on the interpretation of genre painting at this time, so I had come to the view that landscape
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painting was not susceptible to this type of interpretation - except in the general sense that the landscape is God's creation and, therefore, sacred. My point of view (expressed by omission rather than argument) was challenged in an essay by Josua Bruyn in the catalogue of a larger and more ambitious exhibition of Dutch landscape paintings (in which there were no prints or drawings) organized by Peter Sutton and held in 1987-8 in Amsterdam, Boston and Philadelphia under the title Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting. The crux of this disagreement is the extent to which there is a radical change in sensibility in the years around 1600; whether we should see the art of this period as a continuation (at least in an iconographic sense) of late medieval art or whether something quite new was happening, a new way of viewing the world and representing it. I feel strongly that a new art was being developed, in which the iconographic associations of late medieval images had been largely shed, and I argued this case in a review of the exhibition in the Dutch art historical journal Simiolus.
Rembrandt van Rijn, A Woman bathing in a Stream. 1654. Panel, 61.8 × 47 cm. The National Gallery, London.
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Pieter de Hooch, The Courtyard of a House in Delft. 1658. Canvas, 73.5 × 60 cm. The National Gallery, London.
Most recently, I have ventured into the much disputed field of Rembrandt studies. The literature is so immense and the problems so complex that I feel that a long apprenticeship in the other principal aspects of Dutch seventeenth-century painting is a good way of preparing for this work. The National Gallery's Rembrandts, one of the greatest collections of the artist's paintings, had to be catalogued and I undertook a detailed and lengthy study of them with the assistance of two colleagues in the Conservation and Scientific Departments, David Bomford and Ashok Roy. Our results were published in the catalogue of the exhibition Art in the Making: Rembrandt in 1988. No other single group of Rembrandts has ever been analysed in such detail: supports, grounds, pigments, binding media and the construction of the paint layers were all studied in detail and the results compared in order to establish patterns in the use of materials and in the artist's procedure. Once these were established, they pointed up anomalies such as those which were found in the smaller portrait of Margaretha Trip, of which we concluded that ‘we are therefore confronted with two possibilities: the small portrait of Margaretha Trip is either an extremely skilful imitation of the
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work of Rembrandt painted between 1660 and 1818, or an authentic painting whose function and execution have led to considerable physical differences from the larger portrait (of the same sitter, also in the Gallery's collection)’. The findings of this study were summarized in the entries for the Rembrandts in the catalogue of the Dutch School paintings in the National Gallery, a thorough revision and expansion of MacLaren's catalogue, which finally appeared in 1991.
In September 1991 the exhibition Rembrandt: The Master and his Workshop opened in the Altes Museum, Berlin, the first major exhibition to be shown in the East since the removal of the Wall. Subsequently it travelled to the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery, where it was the second exhibition to be shown in the new Sainsbury Wing. The paintings section of the exhibition, which also included drawings and etchings, was organized by a committee of three, on which I joined Pieter van Thiel of the Rijksmuseum and Jan Kelch of the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. We had two principal objectives: to give a wide public a clear and balanced idea of Rembrandt's achievement as a painter, showing paintings from all phases of his career and of all the subject matter he tackled; and to give an account of the debate about the attribution of paintings to Rembrandt in recent years, a debate principally fuelled by the activities of the Rembrandt Research Project. For the second part of the exhibition, we chose paintings which had until recently been attributed to Rembrandt and suggested a new attribution from amongst the pupils and followers of Rembrandt. This section included, for example, the Vision of Daniel from Berlin, which was attributed to Willem Drost and the Girl at a Half-Open Door from Chicago, which was said to be by Samuel van Hoogstraten. This section of the exhibition received some criticism and it is certainly true that other and better examples might in certain cases have been found. A number of requests for loans were, however, refused on the grounds that the new attributions were hypothetical and the institutions and individuals who owned the paintings preferred to continue to attribute them to Rembrandt. It is a bold museum director who agrees, as the Director of the Chicago Art Institute did, to lend a painting currently hanging on his walls as a Rembrandt to be exhibited as the work of Samuel van
Hoogstraten.
The Rembrandt exhibition was an immense undertaking: it was seen by more than a million visitors in three cities and boasted a large two-volume catalogue and massive sponsorship. By contrast, last year, I brought together Vermeer's Little Street from the Rijksmuseum and Pieter de Hooch's Courtyard of a House in Delft from the National Gallery's collection in a small one-room display which enabled visitors to explore the subtle relationships and differences between these two canvases, which were painted in Delft within a year or two of one another. It was a very rewarding comparison, which was also to be seen again, at the Rijksmuseum, in the spring of 1993. The Vermeer is a topographically accurate townscape while the De Hooch is an artificial construction of actual elements, but both are based on close observation and naturalistic description. In that sense, both are truthful.
The last twenty-one years have been particularly exciting and important ones for the study of Dutch art. There have been fundamental shifts in our understanding of the categories of Dutch art and profound reassessments of
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many of the principal artists. These developments have taken place in a series of major exhibitions and in important monographs, of which the single most ambitious is that produced by the Rembrandt Research Project. As a consequence much has become clearer but the debates continue to rage - debates about meaning, technique and attribution. However, what certainly remains constant is our sense that the essence of Dutch art - and the quality which sets it apart from the art of other times and places - resides in its truthfulness both about the world itself and the individuals who inhabit it.
christopher brown
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