Art
THE DUTCH EXHIBITION.
t the Anglo-Batavian Society and its assisting Committees have 'had a sound conception in compiling the Dutch Exhibition at Burlington House and unusual favouring opportunities for realizing it. Haarlem could not send its famous Hals pieces, which is a great loss ; still, Hals does not suffer in representation, but makes a demonstration in force here, especially as the Rijksmuseum Man and His Wife is present, recently cleaned and, looking its best. The Rijksmuseum has lent still rarer things. No one who knows the sentiment that in Holland attaches to The Little Street of Vermeer could doubt that, lending it, Amsterdam was to be " touched " for anything in reason, and we have, in fact, got the Young it Reading a Letter and The Cook by the same exquisite hand, Metsu's Sick Child, Rembrandt's Jewish Bride, so-called, Lucas van Leyden's Sermon, and much more. The Mauritshuis has been no less liberal with Rembrandt, Vermeer, Fabritius, and Ruisdael examples ; lloymans', at Rotterdam, has contributed the Carel Fabritius Self Portrait and The Young Scholar of Jan van Scorel, whose Jerusalem Pilgrims again comes from Utrecht. The State and the towns of Holland have, been remarkably generous.. Governments of nine other countries have assisted, as have scores of private collectors all over the world, including our own, to whom the King gave a distinguished lead. We also suggest that the organizers of the Exhibition have been fortunate in the matter of time. A point has been reached in the practice and theory of painting when it was well that a descriptive art like that of Holland should be put on trial, to see how far its formal elements really fall short. It happens, too, that in Vermeer was a Dutchman round' whose name a new distinction is gathering in respect of these very elements. These things were known. They are in the air. All unconsciously, while the Rembrandts in the earlier galleries at Burlington House were still engaging us, we were aware of a Vermeer room still to come ; and it is significant that a public left to itself will revolve between these two, Rembrandt and Vermeer, unable, we believe, to determine its favours. Both painters have ah irresistible popular appeal. Their rivalry is a fact the pressure of which on the organizers of the Exhibition is obvious, and it gives it a larger purpose. The Vermeer display, one may add, supplies it with a balance of interest equivalent to that of the Primitives in the Flemish show.
There are over fifty Rembrandts, which is almost too many —there are certainly too many in the large room for comfort- able seeing. It is an overwhelming display of his solitary genius. Rembrandt 'broods over the galleries in which he is hanging, the South Rooms with seventy drawings and as many finely selected impressions of his etchings, as well as Rooms III and IV into which his paintings are gathered, and the imposition of his presence is felt throughout all the .others. Instinctively we refer everything in them to him. He is a universal figure. The Bridal Couple, The Adoration of the Magi, Alexander the Great, Hendrickje in Bed, the Adriaan, Sir Herbert Cook's Titus—things like these must be mentioned, but at each visit something leaps out at one' as a fresh revelation. And there are two or three to which attention may specially be directed, since they will be new to most. One is the Jeremiah Mourning of 1630, in Swedish possession, an early work of the same quality as the St. Anastasius of a year later, of which Stockholm is the happy owner. Another is the little grisaille, The Entombment, lent by the University of Glasgow, a third the fine Joseph Relating his Dreams, also of the 'thirties. And the Hon. Andrew Mellon's Young Man, which went to him direct from Sweden, and the Hon. Alvan Fuller's Man, hanging with Mr. Boughton Knight's Saint Bartholomew, and The Briditl Couple, all fairly late, make a most distinguished wall. The rooms immediately following this amazing Rembrandt representation suffer from its weight, despite their array of Jan Steen, in all his eclecticism, and the several beautiful Terborchs,' the King's The Letter particularly. Two men's portraits by Maes, Mr. Ernest Innes's and the one from Brussels, deserve attention, and I should like to notice the dignified and charming little Ruisdael, -Vieth of Haarlem, from the Mauritshuis, to compare it with Miss Alexander's lovely little Landscape, by Philips Koninek. Interest is whetted afresh in Gallery VIII with its Vermeers, Pieter de Hooghs and Metsus—note Sir Otto Beit's The Letter Reader by the last—and is continued in Gallery IX for its de Hooghs and the Fabritius pieces especially.
The Vermeer Room is remarkable in its content, and is made to look more so by the introduction of a special wall- hanging. This is not a success. It is the one conspicuous blunder in an exhibition otherwise arranged with great discretion and taste. The effect of its surrounding colour is felt most by the famous A View in Delft, which somehow misses here that last touch of fascination it will, we are assured, recover in the Mauritshuis, but The Little Street also suffers. The others hold their own better, some of them superlatively ; and I must note that they number ten out of the forty (or is it thirty-nine ?) Vermeers known. They include the Amsterdam Young Woman and The Cook, as has been said, also Sir Otto Beit's Love-Letter and the King's Lady at the Virginals and a Gentleman. So full a representation of this magical Master is a triumph for the organizers of the Exhibition. We shall never again see so many Vermeers under one roof.
Nothing has been said so far of the national character of the Exhibition. It is not wearisomely obvious, thanks to the determined suppression of the Little Masters. There is a subtle sense, however, in which it is supreme, alike in the moody art of Rembrandt and in the preciosity of a Vermeer. In this sense we can link up the beginnings and the end of the painting now at Burlington House. The Souvenir of Amsterdam of Matthew Maris in the Architectural Room is as beautifully Dutch as anything ever painted, and it would not be difficult to analyse out a racial quality in the tortured soul of Vincent van Gogh. Turn to the Primitives so modestly displayed in the first gallery—the Flemish Exhibition stole some of their thunder—and in Lucas, and Jan van Score! (his Agatha van Schoonhoven, for example), and in Geertgen tot Sint Jans, especially if we carry into this Exhibition the memory of the lovely little Nativity recently acquired for Trafalgar Square, do we not find the seeds of Rembrandt's tender and intimate art itself ?D. S. M.
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