Dutch Paintings

THE METRO ART DUTCH PAINTINGS A PICTURE BOOK THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART UTGH W^AINTINGS A PICTURE BOOK NEW YORK, N. Y. 1944 COPYRIGHT BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART MAY, HJM in (On corci) Frans Hals (horn after 1580 - died 1666) Malic Babbe Purchase, 1871 C* [ DUTCH PAINTINGS UTCH art of the seventeenth century come an outcast. The burghers of the new is the achievement of a people that democracy welcomed her to their homes. Every asserted its Protestantism with mili Dutch home was a little museum, and there tant fervor. Yet it is not a protest were capitalists in the Republic who owned but an affirmation. Hatred of Spanish tyranny veritable art galleries. John Evelyn, the diarist, and Roman intolerance found no expression found to his surprise paintings by good mas in the works of the painters. Their art did not ters offered for sale at the annual fair held in care for negation. They did not proclaim on the open at Rotterdam. He was told that the canvas what manifestations of life they did not large output of pictures and their cheapness like, they spoke in color and line of those they were due to the lack of land available for in admired. They affirmed the worthwhileness of vestment, "so that it is an ordinary thing to existence, their love of beauty, their joy in the find a common farmer lay out two or three picturesque charm of town ancf country, the thousand pounds in this commodity." The people's pride in the well-ordered neatness of Frenchman Sorbiere knew a Dutch book- their homes. They demonstrated that anything dealer who had his room full of pictures rep in (iod's creation was worth painting, that resenting a value of six thousand francs. These even things which the layman calls ugly are Hollanders, he found, were all potential art in the artist's vision transformed into beauty dealers. They put their money in pictures in by the magic play of light upon their ugliness. the hope of selling them with profit. The Those who are insensitive to that magic will people themselves had become the chief pa avert their eyes from the disemboweled carcass trons of the painting craft. of an ox in a butcher shop, but Rembrandt Art, in other words, had become secularized. feasted his on the miracle that the fall of the Still, the artists' guilds remained dedicated to light worked on the mass of trembling flesh St. Luke, though the saint had no shrines in and recreated it into a work of art. the Republic where his aid could be invoked. That acquisitiveness of seventeenth-century The evangelist owed his patronage of the Dutch painting, its avid seizure of the fullness guilds to an early medieval legend of obscure of life in ail its aspects, implies a protest, origin according to which the Virgin Mary though, against the medieval past. In the fif once sat to him for her portrait. In every town teenth and sixteenth centuries the range of art a chapel was dedicated to St. Luke by the local Was restricted. Since the church and the court artists and adorned by one of them with a pic of the Dukes of Burgundy were its chief pa- ture of the saint on his knees before the Virarin D'ons, religious and historical scenes were the with a sketchbook in his hands or painting her painters' stock-in-trade. They had to be illus in front of his easel. The Reformation had no trators of episodes from the Scriptures, the use for such idolatry, but the traditional sub Lives of the Saints, and ancient history. But ject was as persistent as St. Luke's nominal the Reformers despoiled the churches of all patronage of the guilds. The Protestant artist Works of art, defied the ducal court, and ab divested it of its hagiographic intent, usurped jured their allegiance to the King of Spain, the evangelist's place, turned the Virgin into a the heir of the Dukes of Burgundy. They took burgher belle, and in this way a stereotyped his sovereign power into their own hands and theme of medieval iconography developed into established a Reformed Church in which God the self-portrait of the painter at work in his Was worshiped without the worldly allure studio, a genre that proved capable of endless ments of painting and sculpture. But art, variation. The art of St. Luke became diversi though banned from their houses of prayer fied when the evangelist shed his saintliness and deprived of court patronage, did not be and, contenting himself with being exclusively a painter, told a gospel of life in all its variety. artists among them discovering beauty even in It was not art alone that was thus democra the lowest layers and haunts of society, the tized. Science too expanded its range as soon scientists discovering the reign of law in the as the nation had freed itself from the shackles lowest, even the invisible, manifestations of of Roman Catholic doctrine. The rebels nature. against Spain, long before they had clinched The deathlike order into which public life their independence, founded a university at in the Netherlands was frozen under the chill Leyden which would be free from dictation by ing breath of despotism became an animated Rome. The plan of the new school implied as concord of free individuals acting spon clear a protest against the past as did the new taneously and in self-willed unison. The moral art of Holland's painters. It rejected the discipline that Calvin's church enforced pre medieval quadrangle and cloister, the chapel served the people from turning their new free and refectory, because they were reminders of dom into license. The laws these Dutch burgh an antiquated monasticism. The Dutch burgh ers obeyed were laws of their own making ers sent their sons to Leyden, not to live there and were, consequently, obeyed without like monks in herdlike uniformity, but to grudge or demur. They were framed, it is true, compete in the pursuit of knowledge, each by the ruling class, an oligarchy of the best searching it in his own way. The triumph of families. But the members of this class knew anti-Roman heresy bred heresy in other fields. the temper of the masses ancf had learnt by The artist asked himself, "Why should I not experience that the best safeguard of their paint what no one ever painted?" The scien authority was the approval of the multitude. tist asked, "Why should I not question what The historian Hooft, who was himself a mem no one ever questioned?" Simon Stevin chose ber of the ruling patriciate, wrote in the for his life motto an expression of his disbelief thirties of the seventeenth century, "In this in miracles. He searched for a reign of law in country the greatest changes were brought the bewildering diversity of nature, and re about through the instigation or, at any rate, jected the belief in miracles as a denial of the through the active compulsion of the common cosmic order. Christian Huygens, the physicist, man, and in these days not the least art of the reluctant to accept any theological dogma as a municipal government consists in managing revelation of divine truth, declared that prob and placating the multitude." The legislative ability was the nearest that man could come to power, to be sure, was not in the hands of the truth; and the sceptic in him would not con masses, but no laws were passed that the masses form to any religious creed beyond the nega would not tolerate. For the freedom of utter tive confession that he did not exclude the ance was granted to all and the murmur of Deity from the probable that he knew to be discontent was a danger signal that few magis attainable. Anthony Lceuwenhoek, peering at trates dared disregard. drops of water and specks of dust under the Foreign visitors expressed surprise at this microscope, observed the antics of a microbial strange, unaccountable spectacle of a many- fauna that no one had ever observed. And Jan headed state where every man behaved as if Swammerdam, refuting the popular supersti he were his own master and where, neverthe tion that insects were the creatures of spon less, civic order prevailed such as no foreign taneous generation from mud, manure, and despot could enforce. Where, stranger still, all putrid matter, proved insect life to be a circu sects were tolerated and yet religious strife lar course from egg to egg and classified in was less bitter than elsewhere. "It is hardly to sects on the basis of their various metamor be imagined," wrote Sir William Temple, who phoses. Freed from both the patronage and the was British ambassador in the sixties of the tutelage of the Church of Rome, the enfran seventeenth century, "how all the violence and chised Dutch extended the range of their in sharpness which accompanies the differences of terest and curiositv into all directions, the religion in other countries seems to be ap- peased or softened here by the general free laurel wreath the prince of poets. Vondel's dom which all men enjoy, either by allowance verse, indeed, was the verbal counterpart of or connivance; nor how faction and ambition the wealth that Rembrandt and his fellow are thereby disabled to colour their interested painters gathered for posterity on panel and and seditious designs with the pretences of re canvas. Portrait, landscape, marine piece, ligion, which has cost the Christian world so genre picture, still-life scene, allegory, baroque much blood for these last hundred and fifty mythology, pastoral idyll, coarse drollery, it is years." Where everyone is free to speak his all included in his work.

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