Louisa Wood Ruby

CHAPTER ONE DUTCH ART AND THE HUDSON VALLEY PATROON PAINTERS Louisa Wood Ruby One of the earliest "schools" of American painting, the Hudson Valley patroon painters, has often been considered to have derived from seventeenth-century English portraiture. Portraits of English aristo- crats appealed to Dutch patroons as displays of the kind of social status they aspired to in their new country. British mezzotints after original paintings by Sir Godfrey Kneller and others provided the patroon painters with readily available models on which to base their portraits of wealthy Dutch Americans. Unfortunately, this convincing analysis vastly underestimates the influence of Dutch art and taste on the development of these paintings. Frequently overlooked in the discussion of the appeal of British portraiture to Dutch patroons is the fact that English portraiture of the seventeenth century was, in fact, a direct descendant of the Netherlandish portrait tradition. Kneller, the main source for the mezzotints that flooded New York, was trained in Amsterdam. Sir Peter Lely was born in Holland, and of course Sir Anthony Van Dyck was from Antwerp. Wealthy Dutch families in New York would have been aware of the Netherlandish tradition through works of art they brought with them from their homeland. Indeed, the first paintings produced in New Amsterdam and early New York were essentially Dutch, since no other tradition existed here at the time. When British mezzotints finally arrived in 17 10, they did indeed appeal to the patroon families, most likely because they were works grounded in the Dutch tradition, then overlaid with elements of British culture and style. They were thus a perfect reflection of who these families had become-Dutchmen whose own culture and tastes were being slowly overwhelmed by their new British government. While the Hudson Valley patroon portraits are generally considered the first indigenous "school" of American portraiture, they were certainly not the earliest portraits produced in this country or even in 28 LOUISA WOOD RUBY New York.] The earliest painting to be considered a Hudson Valley patroon portrait is dated 17 18, nearly a full century after the first boat of Dutch settlers arrived on the island of Manhattes2 The first Dutch settlers were mostly not very wealthy and did not have theJeisure to have portraits made of themselves. Probably, in the beginning, very few Dutchmen actually brought over any pictures with them from their homeland either; in the 1620s and 30s, they were far more concerned with basic survival. Once things became more settled, in the 1640s and 50s, both things begin to occur. Not only are there existing portraits painted in New Amsterdam from this time, but ships now making the ocean voyage were laden with goods other than just the bare necessi- ties of life. This is not surprising, since inventories from seventeenth- century Dutch households have shown that an unusually large number of people in the Netherlands itself at this time possessed pictures3 The idea of owning pictures was clearly held in high esteem. What pictures came to New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century? Apparently there were quite a few, for there were not enough painters in this country at the time to produce the thirty-nine pictures listed in Nlayor Cornelis Steenwyck's fine house or the sixty-one in the barber- surgeon Jacob De Lange's inventory of 1685 or even the nineteen in Sara Webbers' of 1685 or the seventeen in Maria Van Varick's of 1696.' A landscape by Vincent Adraiaensen, known as Leckerbetien (1595-1675), is mentioned in the will of Hendrick Kip (arrived in ' James Thomas Flexncr first coined this term in his book First Flowers of our Wil- derness: American Painting (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947); 69. There are about one hundred of these portraits in existence. The first boats of Dutch settlers began coming over in 1624, although it is unclear whether any of them originally stayed in Manhattan or if they all traveled on to (pres- ent-day) Albany. Sce Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 37, See also Charles T Gehring, ed., Anna& of .New .Netherland: The Essays of A. 3 R uan Laer (Albany: New Netherland Institute, 1999). Thc notion of a "painting in every Dutch home" that was fueled by contempo- rary travelers' accounts of the Netherlands, such as John Evelyn or Peter Mundy is not quite accurate. As Julie Hochstrasser has pointed out, in "Imag(in)ing Prosperity: Painting and Material Culture in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Household," .Neder- lands Kunsthisto~chJaarboek 5 1 (2000):195-236, it was not every household that owned works of art, but rather the ones on the wealthier end of the scale. Houses with less tangible property were not inventoried as often and probably were not visited by wealthy seventeenth-century travelers. Kenneth Scott, Gwealog.ica1Datafrom Inuwtories of .New %rk Estates 16661825 (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1970), 39, 159, 160, 17 1. DUTCH ART AND THE HUDSON VALLEY PATROON PAINTERS 29 New Amsterdam in 1637, dies in 167 l), along with other paintings." A majority of the paintings in these inventories were marine views ("a small sea"), landscapes ("a small country"), battles, still life ("a flower pot") and genre, and most are lost to history, for the only extant pictures with long provenances that we know are portraits. A clue as to what happened to these pictures may be found in Pierre Eugene du Simitikre's offering for sale in 1779 "pictures chiefly painted in oils, on boards.. .of those kinds the Dutch settlers brought a great many with their other furniture." He had found them in New York City garrets where they had "been confined as unfashionable when that city was moderni~ed."~Apparently portraits remained fashionable, and may have been saved because they represented revered ancestors. They are also better documented than landscapes, genre pictures and still lives because the sitters have dates and so can be more easily connected to living artists. The portraits that we know were brought over include pendants of Peter Stuyvesant's in-laws, Reverend and Mrs. Lazare Bayard, by an unknown artist (Fig. 1). These were brought over either when Stuyvesant came to New Amsterdam in 1647, or in 1654, when his sister Anna Stuyvesant, who also married a Bayard, came over. She also brought with her a portrait of herself and her husband at their homestead in Alphen, Holland, from 1644, which is a landscape as well. All of these pictures are currently in the New-York Historical Society and are not attributed to any particular arti~t.~The portraits are in the style of early seventeenth-century Dutch portraitists such as Michiel van Mierevelt (1567-164 l), very simply dressed figures in three-quarter length with only minimal hand gestures, making them appear somewhat rigid and static. The landscape with the Bayards is quite similar in style and composition to works by Gerard Donck (fl. 1627-1640), such as his Jan van Hmsbeeck, and Farnib in the National Gallery of Lond~n.~Oloff ' Simon Hart, "How Hendrick Kip bequeathed his Estate," De Halve Maw 37, 3 (6 October 1929): 54. "lexner, 66. ' Unidentified artist, Reverend Lazare Bayard, oil on wood panel, 45 x 33 in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.5; Unidentified artist, Mrs. Lazare Bayard, oil on wood panel, 45 x 33 in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.6; Unidenti- fied artist, Bayard Homestead, Alph~n,Holland, oil on wood panel, 34 '12 x 48 in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.7. All paintings are illustrated on the Historical Society's website. Gerard Donck, Jan van Hensbeeck and Farnih National Gallery of London, oil on panel, 76 x 106.2 cm. inv. no. NG1305. 30 LOUISA WOOD RUBY Fig. 1. Unidentified Dutch artist, Reverend Lazare Bayard, 1636, oil on wood panel, 45 x 33 in., New-York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.5. DUTCH ART AND THE HUDSON VALLEY PATROON PAINTERS 3 1 Stevense van Cortlandt brought over a portrait of his mother, Katrien, by Mierevelt, in 1638,' and Domine Johannes Weeckstein of the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston brought over the portrait of himself by Mathijs Naiveu (1647-1726), a student of Gerard Dou, in 1683." While the lack of provenance for many landscapes, still lives and genre pictures makes it difficult to determine which picture in these genres may have been brought over to America from the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, based on the few portraits and landscapes that are documented, we could venture a guess as to what they were like. Simple, cheaper paintings are what came over at first, not grand pictures by Rembrandt, Ruysdael, or other well-known painters, which were owned by the people who were better situated in Holland and so were not the ones emigrating. Kiliaen van Rensselaer, one of the first and most successful of the Dutch patroons, for instance, never set foot on these shores." The number of painters and pictures produced in Holland in the seventeenth century was le,+on. It has been surmised that as many as 200,000 paintings were made for and sold in the mar- ketplace, and as can be imagined, not every painter was of the highest caliber. There were many, many, second- and even third-rate painters producing pictures, and it is most likely many of these that made their way over to New Amsterdam. In my research I have discovered examples of paintings other than portraits that might have been brought over to the New World from Holland, paintings that are now attributed to anonymous painters of either the Dutch or American school whose provenance goes no further back than the mid-twentieth century" It is quite possible that some of "ichiel van Mierevelt, Katrien van Coltlandt, oil on panel, 43 314 x 33 in., Museum of the City of New York, inv.

Load more