Art
Dutch art
John McEwen
Art historical exhibitions tend to be more critical, more analytical than of old in these days of Phd's, scepticism and broader education. The problem now is how to achieve the balance, how not to efface the pictures with words. 'Art in Seventeenth Century Holland' (National Gallery till December 12), despite the impracticalities of the new extension, shows the way. As with previous exhibitions in this warren of bays and rooms, a group of paintings from the permanent collection has been enhanced by loans and bolstered by a scattering of relevant applied art. This time however, the analysis is less exhaustive and more personal, the bric-a-brac is a great deal more than an environmental sop to the educationalist lobby and the catalogue is a complement. The object is to reveal the best in Dutch painting at the expense of the less good, and to concentrate on pictures as pictures and not as just one other aspect of Dutch history. In both the priorities prevail.
The selection has been made to convey a broader, more seventeenth-century view of the subject without foregoing the wisdom of our hindsight. Today we know Rembrandt. Cuyp and Vermeer are the ultimate masters of Dutch painting, but in their own lifetimes it was very different. In fact in almost every case the painters best known and most rewarded in their day were the genre artists so beloved even into Victorian times: the likes of Dou, Post, Netscher and Nicolaes Maes in the present show, while a snobbish reverence of anything Italian made van Meiris and der Werff the most successful Dutch painters of their age. The ones we admire fared less well. Rembrandt and Franz Halsfellout of favour and died in penury, as everyone knows. Cuyp gave up when he married his rich and disapproving wife. Vermaer and Jan Steen both supplemented their incomes by inn-keeping and picture dealing. Seghers died in a ditch. The autobiographies of these artists and many more show the brutal competitiveness of the time. Not even in our own day has art been so coveted. The commonest farmer, as John Evelyn reported in his journal, was prepared to put down f2-3000 on this commodity', and speculation was feverish. Artists had to be businessmen to survive as their frequent bankruptcies attest. Loopholes in the law were exploited whenever possible. Rembrandt turned his son and mistress into a Company so that by being their employee he could avoid paying his debtors. It is salutory, not least for a critic, to be reminded of these things. Better still is to be told of the difficulties Dutch painters had in obtaining supplies of certain pigments, of the different grounds they used, of the ways in which these pigments and grounds have stood the test of time, and much more essential data. All this is given its proper due in the catalogue. And there is some dash too. Certain schools are left out altogether.
Flower painting is one of them, and stilllives do not fare much better. Such genre work by highly trained hack painters flour ished in Holland to glut the tastes of the new rich. Calvinist prurience was endlessly satisfied by guild after guild of artists and craftsmen who devoted their skills to the exploration of succulence. Every texture, from the sheen of satin to the knife marks left on the face of an unyielding cheese, is turned into a visual feast. It is easy to be satiated with this sort of Dutch painting and its importance is not over-estimated here. Very sensibly and much more originally such preference is largely confined in the exhibition to objects, notably the auricular designs of the silversmiths. Auriculars (designs based on the shape of the ear) were a Dutch invention and anticipate the most tortuous forms of art nouveau by almost three centuries. Christiaen van Vianen's dish (No.140, Room D) is a particularly extravagant example. In the main, however, Dutch art is quiet, and at its best at its quietest : as in the paintings by Cuyp of the softest times of day, the monochrome late portraits of Rembrandt, the ethereal interiors of Vermeer. The exhibition is hung to contrast these masters with their less gifted contemporaries, and where possible to introduce the better at the expense of the better known.
Rerhbrandt, of course, is given first place, but on the basis of his portraiture, not the overwhelming theatrical masterpieces. The Gallery's examples, which now include the recent acquisition 'Portrait of Henrickje Stoffels' (the mistress Rembrandt turned into a Company), being most notably strengthened by the loan of a masterly painting of an old man dating from the artist's freest and final phase. These sombre works are shown off much better by dark walls, and the porridge shades of most of the new extension do not improve them at all. As a result they are seen to best advantage against the darker blue of Room D, where any growing doubts about Rembrandes limitations as a colourist are quickly dispelled by the jewel-like 'Woman Taken in Adultery'. A notice-board elsewhere inthe exhibition shows a reproduction of 'An Artist in His Studio', which would have shown his compositional brilliance to an equal degree. No doubt it was impossible to get Boston to lend it. It would also have been more of a spectacle if the Gallery's two Vermeers had been shown with those from Windsor and Kenwood. As it is they make ter Borch, whose only great painting is also in Boston, look vulgar, and devastatingly reveal the looseness of Pieter de Hoogh's designs and the dullness of his light. The perfection of Vermeer's composition, the clarity of his light and the deceptive freedom and mastery of his handling, as always can only be marvelled at. Cuyp has the finest loan picture in the show, a long, narrow canvas ideally suited to its peaceful view of Dordrecht, once brutally cut in half to make two pictures but now happily, though discernibly, in one piece again.
These, with Franz HaIs and Jan Steen (like ter Borch, rather too favoured by the selection), are singled out for the greatest representation. Elsewhere reputations have been trimmed. There are more van Ostades, ter Brugghens and Jan Poths than Hobbemas (why was he not represented by his poplars?), Willem van de Veldes and van Cappelles, and even that great English favourite Ruisdael is only allowed two paintings. This tosses up quite a few surprises but not wilfully at the expense of convention : two little landscapes by Jan van Goyen and the rarely seen Hercules Seghers in Room C2, the wonderfully superstitious Pursuit of the Armada in a Storm' by Hendrick Vroom, Everdingen's oddly coloured and composed 'Allegory of Winter', Jan Steen's 'The Poultry Yard'. All but one of these are loans and all broaden our view of Dutch painting and, because of the pervasive influence of that painting on subsequent ai fists, not least of the twentieth century, of our understanding of painting in general. That ought to be the ambition of every historical exhibition but it is rarely achieved with greater aplomb than is shown here.
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