Exhibitions
Two Golden Ages (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, till 16 September)
Take two
Nicholas Powell
Golden age' is such a perfect PR ticket that any exhibition claiming to represent not just one but a pair should be approached with additional caution. Two Golden Ages examines the ways 17th-century Dutch painting influenced painting in Denmark two centuries later. Containing just 74 works and thus relatively modest in size, it may be seen without fear.
A 200-year gap separating one artistic school and another is a long time indeed, and the argument advanced by the curators of Two Golden Ages is simply that Dutch influence took longer to get through to artists in Denmark than to those in the rest of Europe. The lag was further aggravated because trainee artists at the all-important Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts were subjected to French-inspired neoclassicism to the exclusion of virtually everything else. For the more adventurous, Dutch painting could be seen either in major Danish collections or via engravings. So much for the scholarship: the evidence for the thesis is both convincing and agreeable to look at.
A Danish fondness for reproducing Dutch paintings is evident in one of the most beautiful pictures in the show, Ditlev Blunck's 'The Copperplate Engraver C.E. Sonne' (about 1826). The portrait of a handsome, broody young man, depicted with studied informality sitting stoop-shouldered over his easel, it owes nothing in particular to any Dutch model. But it does feature in the background a black-andwhite engraving of Gerard ter Borch's 'Seated Girl in Peasant Costume' (about 1650), a sample, one assumes, of C.E. Sonne's work.
While the Dutch were the first in Europe to perfect landscape painting, the Danes, for reasons which remain obscure, were about the last to latch onto the genre. By the 1810s. however, the Norwegian-born Johan Christian Dahl was copying, more or less faithfully, mid-17th-century landscapes by Dutch artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Al[art van Everdingen. One, by the latter, copied by Dahl, represents wild Norwegian countryside which the later artist, a city boy, had ironically never seen in reality. But try as he might, Dahl, for all his precision. never captured the energy of his models, which interested him far more than painting landscapes from nature.
Austere inside views of churches, both Holland and Denmark being predominantly Protestant, was a genre which passed easily from one culture to another, although both examples shown at the Rijskmuseum — Pieter Jansz Saenredam's 'Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem' (1636) and Christen Kobke's The Transept of Arhus Cathedral' (1830) — rely for much of their compositional effect, as it happens, on the remains of pre-Reformation statues and paintings.
The Danish fleet was captured by the British in 1807 leaving the Danes, as one panel on the walls explains, 'little reason to celebrate their ships in art'. One quite understands, but what a pity the organisers could not have found anything more exciting to illustrate the genre than five becalmed and uninspiring seascapes. The Dutch (who had every reason to celebrate, having burnt the British fleet at Chatham in 1667) were so good at such things.
The Danes were inspired by a range of favourite Dutch subjects, such as the doctor's visit to a sickbed, for example, in which water samples normally loom large; or the bringing home of game to rapturously approving spouses and offspring. But at times the 200-year gap thesis underpinning this exhibition creaks at the seams.
Regarding portraiture, for example, the catalogue argues that both 17th-century Holland and 19th-century Denmark had prosperous middle classes hankering to have their portraits painted. Perhaps. But the results are mightily different. Fashions and interiors had changed, for one. And the two portraits by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg of the Nathanson family, for instance, are glacial in their technical and compositional perfection — the very respectability of the family apparently precluding any of the familiarity which pervades many Dutch portrayals of more laid-back bourgeois. Another major difference between the two schools is the light, thinner and more brilliant, and the object of more attention, in the Danish works.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in Martinus Rorbye's 'View from the Artist's Window' (1825), the carefully composed clutter of which is thrown into shadow by a cutting, icy light. One of the most beautiful and unusual pictures in the exhibition, it shows the Danes were best in the end when doing their own thing.
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