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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2006 : Seventeenth-Century Artistic Identity and Modes of Self- Referentiality in Self-Portraiture and Scenes of Everyday Life Denise Giannino

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE AND DANCE

Gerrit Dou: Seventeenth-Century Artistic Identity and Modes of Self-

Referentiality in Self-Portraiture and Scenes of Everyday Life

By Denise Giannino

A Thesis submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Denise Giannino defended on June 12, 2006.

______James J. Bloom Professor Directing Thesis

______Paula Gerson Committee Member

______Robert Neuman Committee Member

Approved:

______Paula Gerson, Chair, Department of Art History

______Sallie E. McRorie, Dean, College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my committee members: Dr. Bloom, Dr. Neuman and Dr.Gerson for their time and generosity. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to Dr.Bloom for his willingness to work with me long distance. I would also like my friends and family for their continued support.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………………………v Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………...viii

INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………………….1

1. DOU AND THE CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF : GUILDS, THE MARKET FOR PAINTINGS AND ARTISTIC TRENDS ………………………………………………...11

2. SELF-PORTRAITURE, THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO AND GENRE SCENES: MODES OF SELF-REFERENTIALITY ………………………………………………………………...24

3. PERSONA AND IDENTITY ACROSS GENRES: , JAN STEEN AND SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN ………………………………………………………….....47

CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………………………………52

APPENDIX: FIGURES ………………………………………………………………………...54

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...………………………………………………………………69

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………………...79

iv LIST OF FIGURES

1. Gerrit Dou. The Hermit. 1670. oil on panel. 46 x 34.5cm. Washington, Timken Collection….……………………………………………………………………………54

2. Gerrit Dou. The Grocery Shop. 1672. oil on panel. 48.8 x 35cm., ..54

3. Gerrit Dou. The Night School. c.1623-65. oil on panel. 53 x 40.3cm. , ….……………………………………………………………………………………55

4. Gerrit Dou. Woman at a Clavicord. c.1665. oil on panel. 37.7 x 29.8cm. Trustees of , London….………………………………………………………………………55

5. Gerrit Dou. Man with a Pipe at a Window. c.1645. oil on panel. 48 x 37cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam……………………………………………………………………………………….56

6. Gerrit Dou. The Violin Player. 1653. oil on panel. 31.7 x 20.3cm. Princely Collections, Vaduz Castle, Liechtenstein..……………………………………………………………………………56

7. Gerrit Dou. The Quack. 1652. oil on panel. 112 x 83cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, ..……………………………………………………………………………………….57

8. Gerrit Dou. Self-Portrait. c.1645. oil on panel. 12.4 x 8.3cm. private collection, Spain……..57

9. Gerrit Dou. Self-Portrait. 1635-38. oil on panel. 18.3 x 14cm. Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums…………………………………………………………………………………………58

10. Gerrit Dou. Artist in His Studio (Self-Portrait). 1647. oil on panel. 43 x 34.5 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.…………………………………….58

11. Gerrit Dou. Self-Portrait. 1663. oil on panel. 54.7 x 39.4cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Purchase: Nelson Trust)……………………………………………59

12. Gerrit Dou. Self-Portrait. c.1665. oil on panel. 59 x 43.5cm. private collection, ...... 59

13. Gerrit Dou. The Violin Player (Detail). 1653. oil on panel. 31.7 x 20.3cm. Princely Collections, Vaduz Castle, Liechtenstein………………………………………………………..60

14. Gerrit Dou. Man with a Pipe at a Window (Detail). c.1645. oil on panel. 48 x 37cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam……………………………………………………………………….60

15. Gerrit Dou. The Poultry Shop. 1670. oil on panel. 58 x 46cm. The National Gallery, London…………………………………………………………………………………………...61

16. Gerrit Dou. The Poultry Shop (Detail). 1670. oil on panel. 58 x 46cm. The National Gallery, London…………………………………………………………………………………………...61

v

17. Jan Steen. The Drawing Lesson (Detail). 1665. oil on panel. 49.2 x 41.3cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, …………………………………………………………………………...61

18. Rembrandt van Rijn. Self-Portrait (Detail). 1640. oil on canvas. 102 x 80 cm. The National Gallery, London………………………………………………………………………………….62

19. Gerrit Dou. Artist in His Studio. c.1630-32. oil on panel. 59 x 43.5cm. Colnaghi, London...62

20. Rembrandt van Rijn. Artist in His Studio. c.1627-28. oil on panel. 25 x 32cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Zoe Oliver Collection. Given in Memory of Lillie Oliver Poor)……………63

21. . The Art of Painting. c.1662-68. oil on canvas. 120 x 100cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, ……………………………………………………………...63

22. Gerrit Dou. Artist in His Studio. 1649. 68.5 x 54cm. Ehemals Wien, Galerie St. Lucas……64

23. Gerrit Dou. The Grocer’s Shop. 1647. oil on panel. 38.5 x 29cm. Musée du , Paris...64

24. Gerrit Dou. The Doctor. c.1660-65. c.1660-65. oil on panel. 38 x 30cm. Statens Musuem for Kunst, Copenhagen………………………………………………………………………………65

25. Gerrit Dou. Astronomer by Candlelight. c.1665. oil on panel. 32 x 21.2cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles…………………………………………………………………………...65

26. Gerrit Dou. The Violin Player. 1665. oil on panel. 40 x 29 cm., Staatliche Russian Museum, Moscow…………………………………………………………………………………………..66

27. Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt and Saskia in the Scene of the Prodigal Son in the Tavern. c. 1635. oil on canvas. 161 x 131 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden………………….66

28. Jan Steen. Self-Portrait as a Lutenist. c.1660-63. oil on panel. 55.3 x 43.8cm. Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, ……………………………………………………...…67

29. Jan Steen. The Doctor’s Visit. c.1660-65. oil on panel. 46 x 36.8cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art…………………………………………………………………………………………..…67

30. Samuel van Hoogstraten. Trompe l’oeil Still-life. 1664. 45.5 x 57.5cm. Dordrechts Museum…………………………………………………………………………………………..68

31. Samuel van Hoogstraten. Still-life. c.1666-68. oil on canvas. 63 x 79 cm. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe……………………………………………………………………………68

vi

ABSTRACT

Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) is among the many artists in the Dutch Republic whose paintings, as well as professional activities, display a preoccupation with the status of painting as a liberal art and the status of the painter as a learned, esteemed individual. This is especially apparent in his self-portraits and the contemporary texts that extolled his skill as a painter. His paintings gained international fame for their minutely detailed, meticulously crafted, and finely wrought surfaces. At the beginning of his long career, he was praised by individuals like Philips Angel and Jan Orlers as someone to be imitated artistically and emulated professionally and personally. Despite his fame in the seventeenth-century, Dou is not nearly the household name that Rembrandt is at present; however, his art and life have received a fair amount of scholarly attention over the course of the past century. The overwhelming majority of previous studies conclude that much of Dou’s oeuvre is concerned with the art of painting. While scholars are correct in identifying this theme as central to Dou’s images, they have yet to connect this theme as it relates to the projection of self, apparent in his self-portraits and scenes of the artist in his studio and his representations of individual genre figures. I contend that there is an extension of self-reflection and self-projection from Dou’s self-portraits to his studio scenes and genre paintings, and that studying these sets of images in relation to one another reveals a more complete understanding of identity. His scenes of an artist in his studio and individual genre figures set in niches act as an extension of his self-portraits, whereby Dou’s self-consciously constructed identity as an ideal or exemplary artist without superior is reflected in both his genre paintings and self-portraits. He shows himself in a variety of roles, complementary to the theme of the art of painting. Dou is pictor doctus, alter deus, one who paints amoris causa, a painter whose virtuosity and skill has no equal - in imitating nature his paintings surpasses nature itself in their ability to deceive animals as well as people (including other artists). He is a painter whose invention is motivated by inspiration and imagination as much as knowledge and learning. Dou constructs and presents himself allegorically in the self-portraits and employs a similar mode of construction in the genre paintings. Dou plays specific elements off each other within his compositions, such that their juxtaposition provides a commentary not only on the theme of the art of painting, but also more specifically on the identity of the artist. Genre

vii paintings like Man with a Pipe at a Window (c.1645), the Violin Player (1653), The Doctor (1660-65), and the Girl Peeling Carrots (1646) fashion meaning and reference the artist in ways similar to the self-portraits. However, the more playful motifs and tropes seen in Man with a Pipe at a Window and the Violin Player act as a complement to the serious and intellectual artist seen in his earlier self-portraits and the wealthy gentleman projected in his later self-portraits. These paintings can also be seen as kinds of self-portraits because they not only assert the presence of the artist, most obviously in the prominence of his signature and his trademark niche format, but also augment his projected artistic persona as it first appears in his self-portraits and scenes of the artist in his studio. Juxtaposing and pairing several kinds of images in this way will offer a more complete picture of Dou and his lifelong concerns with the status and perception of the art of painting – concerns that were more self-interested and self-motivated than scholars are usually willing to acknowledge, especially when framed within the social and historical fabric of Leiden in the seventeenth century. By extension, a comparison to other notable figures like Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Samuel van Hoogstraten will show the cultivation of an identity and reputation that was as deliberately crafted and intentionally strategic as some of his contemporaries. In conclusion, this paper proposes a reading of Dou’s nisstuk paintings in relation to his self-portraits with the aim of better understanding the image of the artist and of self that Dou projected across the range of his oeuvre. The visual mechanics of self-fashioning through the combining and blurring of boundaries between genres have been ascribed to other artists like Rembrandt, Steen and van Hoogstraten, but Dou has largely been left out of this discourse. The growing number of artists that scholars link to this pictorial trend of stepping outside the conventional limits of self-portraiture suggests that the last word on how artistic identity was visually constructed and communicated by Dutch artists of the seventeenth-century has not been written.

viii INTRODUCTION

Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) is among the many artists in the Dutch Republic whose paintings, as well as professional activities, display a preoccupation with the status of painting as a liberal art and the status of the painter as a learned, esteemed individual. This is especially apparent in his self-portraits and the contemporary texts that extolled his skill as a painter.1 In fact, Dou acquired the kind of renown and reputation during his lifetime equaled only by Rembrandt.2 Both artists rose above their peers on many levels; they commanded unequalled prices for their paintings and earned praise for their art on local, national and international levels.3 It is difficult to avoid comparison of these two Leiden natives, partly because Dou trained for three years in Rembrandt’s studio, before Rembrandt left Leiden for Amsterdam in 1631.4 Additionally, both artists were renowned (both then and now) for a specific style of painting upon which their reputation was based. Almost from the moment Dou left Rembrandt’s studio, he became known for a style of painting as distinctive and identifiable as that of his master. His paintings gained international fame for their minutely detailed, meticulously crafted, and finely wrought surfaces.5 Scholars often relate the richness and luminosity of his paintings to his initial training as a glasschrijver (glass painter).6 In addition to being known for a certain mode of depicting, Dou was distinguished for his inclusion of the compositional device of the arched, stone niche. For example, The Hermit (1670), The Grocery Shop (1672), The Night School (1623-65) and Woman at a Clavicord (1665) are images typical of the idiom, format and subjects Dou was known for painting (Figs. 1-4). His oeuvre also contains scenes of an artist in his studio, tronien (tronies), portraits and (as stated above) self-portraits. At the beginning of his long career, he was praised

1 Ronni Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” in Gerrit Dou 1613-1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 28.

2 Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., “Dou’s Reputation,” in Gerrit Dou 1613-1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 12.

3 Wheelock, 12 and Eric Jan Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting: On Paintings by Gerrit Dou and a Treatise by Philips Angel of 1642,” in Seductress of Sight: Studies in of the Golden Age, ed. Eric Jan Sluijter (: Waanders Publishers, 2000), 199.

4 Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” 30.

5 See Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting” and Wheelock, “Dou’s Reputation.”

6 Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” 29.

1 by individuals like Philips Angel (1641) and Jan Orlers (1641) as someone to be imitated artistically and emulated professionally and personally.7 Angel and Orlers’ call for their contemporaries to take up Dou as their model did come to fruition. He trained, and was imitated by, a group of artists now known as the Leiden (fine painters), among them , Gabriel Metsu, Quirijn van Brekelenkam, Pieter Slingelandt, and Frans van Mieris the Elder.8 Despite his fame in the seventeenth century, Dou is not nearly the household name that Rembrandt is at present; however, his art and life have received a fair amount of scholarly attention over the course of the past century.9 The overwhelming majority of previous studies conclude that much of Dou’s oeuvre is concerned with the art of painting.10 While scholars are correct in identifying this theme as central to Dou’s images, they have yet to connect this theme as it relates to the projection of self, apparent in his self-portraits and scenes of the artist in his studio and his representations of individual genre figures.11 I propose that the self-reflection and self-projection in Dou’s self-portraits extends to his studio scenes and genre paintings, and that studying these sets of images in relation to one another reveals a more complete understanding of the identity of the artist. His scenes of an artist in his studio and individual genre figures set in niches act as an extension of his self-portraits, whereby Dou’s self-consciously constructed

7 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 199. See also, Philips Angel, “Praise of Painting, translated by Michael Hoyle, with an Introduction and Commentary by Hessel Miedema,” Simiolus 24 (1996): 227-58 and Jan Orlers, Beschrijvinge der stadt Leyden, Leiden, 1641.

8 Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,”30.

9 Wilhem Martin’s publication Het leven en de werken van Gerrit Dou beschouwd in verband met het schildersleven van zijn tijd (Leiden, 1901) was the first to direct serious scholarly attention to Dou in the twentieth century after his decline in favor among collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dou’s life and art started to receive more consistent attention beginning in the 1960s and later with scholars like Jan Emmens, Peter Hecht, Ivan Gaskell, Werner Sumowski, Richard Hunnewell, Ronni Baer, Arthur K. Wheelock and Martha Hollander, to name a notable few.

10 Many of these scholars appear in footnote 9. See especially the scholarship of Hecht, Gaskell and Baer for this interpretation of Dou’s paintings.

11 Richard Hunnewell does relate Dou’s self-portraits and his scenes of the artist in his studio, which is appropriate since studio scenes were a kind of sub-genre of self-portraiture beginning in the fifteenth-century. Hunnewell even discusses The Quack and Man with a Pipe at a Window to some extent. However, his iconological approach focuses on tracing pictorial precedents for theme, motif and composition. See Richard Hunnewell, Gerrit Dou’s Self Portraits and Depictions of the Artist. (Volumes I and II) (Holland), PhD (Boston University, 1983). See Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, “Origins of the Studio,” Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism, eds. Michael Cole and Mary Pardo (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) for a general discussion of the connection between self-portraiture and scenes of the artist in his studio.

2 identity as an ideal or exemplary artist is reflected in both his genre paintings and self-portraits. He shows himself in a variety of roles, complementary to the theme of the art of painting. Dou is pictor doctus (learned painter), alter deus (the artist as creator), one who paints amoris causa (for the love of art), a painter whose virtuosity and skill has no equal - in imitating nature his paintings surpasses nature itself in their ability to deceive animals as well as people (including other artists).12 He is a painter whose invention is motivated by inspiration and imagination as much as knowledge and learning. Dou’s self-portraits, when studied, have been understood biographically and iconographically as expressing a consistent preoccupation with the virtuous, serious and intellectual aspects of the art of painting.13 Richard Hunnewell’s study of Dou’s self-portraits and scenes of the artist in his studio draws out the links between these two kinds of images. He shows that the iconographic and compositional elements in many of Dou’s self-portraits, especially those dating from the beginning of his career, combine earlier conventions of self- portraiture and scenes of the artist’s studio. Building upon these arguments, I argue that this tendency on Dou’s part to shift and manipulate conventional boundaries is not isolated to his self-portraits, but extends to his other images as well. Martha Hollander also posited that the Man with a Pipe at a Window (1645) and the Violin Player (1653) are allegorical self-portraits -

12 Pictor doctus, amoris causa, and alter deus are all terms used by scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to characterize or define painters, however the ideas they encapsulate also circulated in the seventeenth century. Pictor doctus, or learned painter, is one who has studied the texts of history. Hunnewell supposes that Dou and Rembrandt would have been aware of the tradition of pictor doctus, of the association cultivated between the craftsmanship of the artist and the intellectual pursuits of scholars in the effort of artists to raise painting to the noble status of a liberal art; especially since they both honed their craft within the shadow of Leiden’s prestigious university. Hunnewell, 36. Amoris causa is the ideal motivating an artist to paint; he should paint for the love of art, above all else. Evidence of the use of amoris causa in the seventeenth-century can be seen in the London perspective box and Inleyding of Samuel van Hoogstraten. On the exterior panels of the London perspective box Hoogstraten depicts gloriae causa, the desire for fame, lucri causa, the desire for money and amoris causa, the love of art. These images link the classical benefits of good life as described by Seneca to motivating factors that drive artists to make paintings. Hoogstraten reiterates these ideas in his Inleyding, “Three urges there are which spur men to learn the arts./The love of art, the desire for gain, and to be admired by one and all.” Brusati, 213. Alter deus defines the nature of what an artist does – much like God they create/replicate the universe albeit in paint. Dou may not have used this particular term, nonetheless, he would have been familiar with the general concept. Evidence of this can be seen in Philips Angel’s comments on why painting is better than sculpture, “[Painting] is capable of imitating nature much more copiously, for in addition to depicting every kind of creature, like birds, fishes, worms, flies, spiders and caterpillars it can render every kind of metal and can distinguish between them, such as gold, silver bronze, copper, pewter, lead and all the rest. It can be used to depict a rainbow, rain, thunder, lightning, clouds, vapor, light, reflections and more of such things, like the rising of the sun, early morning, the decline of the sun, evening, the moon illuminating the night, with her attendant companions, the stars, reflections in the water, human hair, horses foaming at the mouth and so forth, none of which the sculptors can imitate.” Angel, 239.

13 See Hunnewell.

3 that through these figures, Dou enacted different roles (Figs. 5-6).14 However, since Hollander is more interested in spatial construction and how this conveys meaning in pictures, she does not fully explore the implications of such notions, especially as they relate to ideas about self- fashioning and identity construction. This is the task of this thesis, and the fact remains that Dou’s self-portraits, studio scenes and individual genre figures are rarely discussed in conjunction. Juxtaposing and pairing several kinds of images in this way will offer a more complete picture of Dou and his lifelong concerns with the status and perception of the art of painting – concerns that were more self-interested and self-motivated than scholars are usually willing to acknowledge, especially when framed within the social and historical fabric of Leiden in the seventeenth century. By extension, a comparison to other notable figures like Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Samuel van Hoogstraten will show the cultivation of an identity and reputation that was as deliberately crafted and intentionally strategic as some of his contemporaries. When, in the 1960s, scholars like Jan Emmens and Eddy de Jongh started looking for deeper meaning in, and offering programmatic interpretations of, images of ‘daily life’ comparable to Dou’s it was also supposed that his paintings might be read in a similar fashion.15 Interpretations by Peter Hecht and Eric Jan Sluijter posit that the subject of paintings like Man with a Pipe at a Window, The Quack (1652), and Violin Player is the art of painting (Figs. 5, 6, 7). According to these scholars, these paintings celebrate painting’s superiority and excellence over sculpture, its ability to not only imitate but surpass nature, and perhaps most importantly its ability to deceive nature.16 This is seen in figures like the quack, that signal a preoccupation with the notion of painting as a pleasing deception, a concept that is further supported by contemporary statements that spoke of this effect of painting in general as well as specifically in reference to Dou’s paintings.17 Hecht and Sluijter also note the inclusion of vanitas symbols and

14 Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), especially Chapter 2, “Gerard Dou: The Reconfigured Emblem.”

15 Jan Emmens offered interpretations of many of Dou’s paintings, which are collected in Kunsthistorische Opstellen II (Amsterdam: G.A. van Oorschot, 1981). Eddy de Jongh’s seminal and groundbreaking essay in Tot Lering en Vermaak posits hitherto un-attempted iconological readings of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings with the use of emblem books and other contemporary literature. See Tot Lering en Vermaak: Betekenissen van Hollandse genrevoorstellingen uit de zeventiende eeuw. Exh.cat. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1976).

16 Peter Hecht, “Art Beats Nature, and Painting Does So Best of All: The Paragone Competition in Duquesnoy, Dou and Schalcken.” Simiolus 29 (2002): 196, Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 211.

4 allusions to the transience of life and material objects, and interpret this as reflecting the dictum ars longa vita brevis (life is short, art is eternal).18 Hecht’s first assertion of the idea that the central figure of the Man with a Pipe at a Window, The Quack and Violin Player are the clavis interpretandi, that they are the key to understanding the overall subject or message of these paintings, marked a change in scholarly interpretations of Dou’s paintings. He offered a reading of these images where individual elements all converged upon a single theme, which was embodied in the central figure of the composition.19 Hecht’s idea prompted scholars like Sluijter, Ivan Gaskell and Ronni Baer to ask and explore, what does a quack have to do with a painter, and how is playing a violin or a man smoking related to the proposed notion that the subject of these paintings is the art of painting?20 It is generally supposed by these scholars that the central figure highlights different facets of the art of painting that deserve to be held up for contemplation and praise. These figures serve to highlight painting’s ability to trick and deceive, as well as its ability to exist beyond the temporal boundaries of human life. Art and the reputation attainable through mastery of it offer a kind of permanence that directly contrasts with the fleeting nature of music and smoke. Thus, the figures of deception and vanitas motifs are ultimately given a positive interpretation for Dou’s paintings and his lifelong concern with the art of painting. I do not disagree in essence with these conclusions, but propose that there is a lacuna in the historical approach to Dou in Hecht, Sluijter and Gaskell’s interpretations. They focus exclusively on Dou’s genre paintings and fail to include his self-portraits as foils in their discussion of his other paintings. Dou purposefully blurred the boundaries between genre and self-portraiture in ways not acknowledged by these scholars. This is not a radical idea for many Dutch artists during the seventeenth century. It builds on the convergence of genre and self- portraiture in paintings by Jan Steen and Rembrandt, genre and marriage portraits in Eglon van

17 See Angel, “Praise of Painting.” and Sluijter’s in depth discussion of this idea in Angel and other contemporary texts, “In Praise of the Art of Painting.”

18 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 221.

19 Hecht, “Art Beats Nature, and Painting Does So Best of All,”186 and 191.

20 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” and Sluijter, “On Fijnschilders and Meaning,” in Seductress of Sight Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age, ed. Eric Jan Sluijter (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2000); Ivan Gaskell, “Gerrit Dou, His Patrons and the Art of Painting,” Oxford Art Journal 5/1 (1982): 15-23; Ronni Baer, “The Paintings of Gerrit Dou (1613-1675),” PhD ( University, 1990) and Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou.”

5 der Neer and still-life and self-portraiture in Samuel van Hoogstraten, as explored by Mariët Westermann, H.Perry Chapman, David Smith and Celeste Brusati, respectively.21 This group of scholars argue that these artists display a degree of flexibility in their willingness to collapse or even ignore boundaries between genres; that choices to purposefully transcend the conventional limits between self-portraiture and other pictorial genres signal a projection of self across genres. In other words, “Dutch artists tended to absorb themselves into their art.”22 They also argue in conjunction with this notion that the boundaries between genres are more fluid than academic hierarchies set out later in the seventeenth century suggest.23 The idea that Dou’s genre paintings are allegorical self-portraits is a somewhat difficult concept to grasp. Allegory is generally thought of as a separate category of painting, however, the scholarship of Emmens and de Jongh has shown that genre paintings could be moral, didactic and even allegorical in meaning.24 By definition, allegory is, “The representation of an abstract quality or idea through a series of symbols or persons given symbolic meaning,” and to a certain extent both Dou’s self-portraits and genre scenes are allegorical in that they symbolically illustrate different facets of the art of painting.25 His self-portraits comment on and present an

21 See Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, especially chapter 6 “The Edges of Portraiture.” H. Perry Chapman has discussed the overlapping of genre scene and self-portraiture in the work of both Jan Steen and Rembrandt. See Chapman, “Persona and Myth in Houbracken's Life of Jan Steen;” Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self- Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth Century Identity, and Chapman, “Jan Steen, Player in His Own Paintings.” See David R. Smith, “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” The Art Bulletin 69/3 (1987): 407-30 for a more general discussion of the trend of blurring the boundaries between genres in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, especially marriage portraits. For a discussion of Samuel van Hoogstraten see Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel Van Hoogstraten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

22 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 156.

23 Samuel van Hoogstraten writing in the late seventeenth century and Gérard de Lairesse and Arnold Houbracken writing in the early eighteenth century discuss a hierarchy of painting’s subjects with still-life and portraiture as the lowest kind of painting, and history and biblical subjects as the highest of painting’s subjects. Those paintings that fall under the subject of ‘genre’ or scenes from daily life fell in between still-life and history. There is a kind of valuation implicit in this ranking and categorization of painting, however, artists continued to paint and collectors continued to buy those paintings deemed lower than histories. See Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkunst (Rotterdam, 1678); Gérard de Lairesse, Het groot schilderboek (Amsterdam, 1707); , De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (Amsterdam, 1718- 1721).

24 See Emmens and de Jongh as cited in note 15.

25 See The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, ed. Michael Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2001) for the definition of allegory. This will be explained more fully in Chapter 2. See Hunnewell for Dou’s self-portraits as allegorical.

6 allegory of the art of painting through the figure of the artist and his surrounding accoutrements. The central figure and contextual elements in his genre paintings function in a similar manner. Hollander supports this notion when she supposes that Dou’s nisstuk compositions and the overall message of his paintings are related to emblems in that they represent a single idea with multiple elements. She writes, “Dou’s overall approach to subject matter is also related to the function of the emblem, which is to illustrate a single concept with multiple elements. Whether the niche pictures are allegorical self-portraits or kitchen scenes, their essential theme is always painting itself. He exploits the organization of space, along with the properties of trompe l’oeil and the restrictions of the niche format, to explore and celebrate the painter’s craft.”26 Elements like the Duquesnoy relief, revealing curtain, nisstuk composition and his signature are repeated in many of his self-portraits and genre scenes. They take on symbolic significance and thematically they share a preoccupation with the status of the painter and the deceptive nature of the art of painting.27 The confluence of these elements within the pictorial plane help construct an allegory of painting, and thereby transform his genre paintings into allegorical self-portraits. The notion that Dou’s signature, nisstuk composition, Duquesnoy relief and revealing curtain serve to change genre paintings into allegorical self-portraits, and by using these elements in this way he blurred the boundary between genre and self-portraiture in his paintings is not as farfetched or absurd as it first might seem. David Smith has argued for the convergence of genre and portraiture in Dutch paintings, especially from the 1650s onward.28 He argues that genre scenes like Eglon van der Neer’s Couple in an Interior (1678) incorporate tropes and conventions of marriage and family portraiture, and conversely portraits like Jan Steen’s Portrait of Baker Arend Oostwaert and His Wife Catharina Keyzerswaert (1658) adopt conventions of genre scenes.29 Slippage between genre and portraiture was possible and even permissible,

26 Hollander, 50.

27 The Duquesnoy relief symbolizes superiority of painting over sculpture, revealing curtain refers to story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius and the deceptive power of painting, nisstuk format mimics the shape of a triumphal arch and ennobles the subject. See Hunnewell’s chapter on Dou’s Cheltenham Self-portrait.

28 See Smith, “Irony and Civility.” Eddy de Jongh also notes the phenomenon of the genre-like portrait in Jan Miense Molenaer’s Musical Company (1630s) and “other borderline cases as well: genre combined with landscape, with still life and with allegory, and it is sometimes difficult to decide which has the greater weight.” Eddy de Jongh, “To Instruct and Delight,” Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, translated and edited by Michael Hoyle (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2000), 85.

29 Smith, “Irony and Civility,” 411.

7 despite a growing sensitivity to boundaries and hierarchies between genres, because they both ostensibly depict everyday appearance and life.30 Smith writes, “[B]ecause genres are rooted in subjects rather than rules and conventions alone, their boundaries are never as tight as the rules might decree. They often overlap and mix together, though they nevertheless remain intact and recognizable to one degree or another. And for this reason they can sometimes work together in a dialectical fashion, sharpening and deepening one another’s meaning by contrast.”31 This is essentially what I am proposed in my approach to Dou’s work, with the intended goal of coming to terms with his professional identity. Dou uses the visual permeability between genre, studio scene and self-portraiture to extol the virtues of the art of painting, while simultaneously presenting himself and his art as an exemplar of these virtues. However, for Dou, the dialectical relationship between his paintings is a complementary rather than polemical one. My effort to explore the notion that Dou reveals himself, his identity, in his genre paintings as well as his self-portraits is also comparable to ideas Joseph Koerner claims for Albrecht Dürer in his book The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art. Koerner explains his project on Dürer as one that is interpretative, that is, he explores what Dürer’s self-portraits are and what they communicate. He comes to the conclusion that “these images are a means by which art symbolizes its tasks; and what they say is that art is an image of its maker.”32 Much of Dürer’s art is an image of the artist himself, and even in those images that do not strictly fall within the category of self-portraiture proper he conceptualizes the relation between the work of art and the artist. It is a conception of art “as the spectacle of the producer’s body and talent,” as in the example of Melancholia, which depends on “a unique and personal inflection of a code, and therefore on the phantasm of a self (the artist’s self) behind the work, and even of the work as an allegory of selfhood.”33 Koerner concludes that most of Dürer’s oeuvre needs to be understood within the context of his self-portraits because all of these images “at bottom are displays of the artist.”34 Dou’s paintings are similarly ‘displays of the artist’ and

30 Smith, “Irony and Civility,” 408.

31 Smith, “Irony and Civility,” 408.

32 Jospeh Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 55.

33 Koerner, 56.

34 Koerner, 56.

8 as such his genre and studio scenes need to be understood within the context of his self-portraits, or rather understood as self-portraits. In his ontological discussion of portraiture throughout the span of art history, Richard Brilliant proposes similar notions for Matisse and his The Painter and his Model (1917) when he writes, “One image of the artist is surely to be found in all his work, recognizably manifesting his identity in the telltale signature of his personal style, in the choice of subject matter, and in its characteristic treatment.”35 And, contemporaries like Philips Angel implicitly confirm the notion that seventeenth-century artists understood the painted surface of a panel as somehow encompassing part of its maker when he admonishes artists against having too distinctive a style because “then the master is putting too much of himself into it [his paintings].”36 Oddly, Angel both praises and indirectly criticizes Dou for his individual style. It is impossible to know how Angel might have reconciled this contradiction, but, regardless, this and earlier comments cited by Orlers and Houbracken, suggest that Dou’s peers had little difficulty in reading style as an extension of the artist. Similarly, I posit that Gerrit Dou did in fact paint himself into many images in ways that are not as easily recognized as perhaps they once were. I concur with Brilliant’s supposition that specific choices of style, subject and composition, can meaningfully convey information about an artist to his audience.37 In this sense, Brilliant’s statement encapsulates the underlying premise of my exploration of Dou’s paintings in tandem with Smith’s notion of the convergence between portraiture and genre. In chapter 1, called “Dou and the Cultural Environment of Leiden: Guilds, the Market for Paintings and Artistic Trends,” I will set the historical stage for this argument with a discussion of social, cultural, intellectual and economic milieu. This chapter presents contextual or

35 Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 142. This is based on Renaissance concepts and related to the fifteenth-century adage ogni pittore dipigne sé. Volker Manuth, “Rembrandt and the Artist’s Self-Portrait: Tradition and Reception,” in Rembrandt by Himself, eds. Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot (National Gallery Publications Limited, London and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, , 1999), 40.

36 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting, 244. Chapman also states, “Jan Steen’s culture believed in the topos ‘every painter paints himself’…” Chapman, “Jan Steen, Player in His Paintings,” 11.

37 To be clear, I do not mean to imply that because he painted in a meticulous and refined manner that he was therefore fastidious and exacting as a person. Nor would I assert that because he painted ostensibly ‘everyday’ or banal subjects that he was then necessarily an ordinary or insipid man. I do not want to cross that border into romanticizing the construct of the artist and artistic identity that is just on the edge of these ideas. Intentionality is a slippery notion to argue, and if it appears at all, I mean to suggest it indirectly rather than assert directly. Instead, this is an effort to establish the significance of images for their maker in terms of biography and professional identity, which is the primary frame of reference I consider as informing their production.

9 historical circumstances that motivated Dou to represent himself and his profession in specific ways. Economic and social realities affected image making, and representational and stylistic choices were often connected to self-conscious marketing strategies. In Leiden and elsewhere, artists needed to distinguish themselves and their art from the staggering quantity of painters and volume of paintings produced during the golden age of the Dutch Republic. Chapter 2, titled “Self-Portraiture, the Artist in His Studio and Genre Scenes: Modes of Self-Referentiality,” will explore the way Dou constructed identity and the various roles of the artist he played out in these images. In linking these three categories of images together under the premise that they all construct and communicate identity, I will explore similar modes of self-referentiality in these images to show that Dou blurred the boundaries between them. This interpretation of Dou’s mode of self-fashioning and self-promotion is grounded in and framed by specific biographical and historical contexts. Chapter 3, “Persona and Identity Across Genres: Rembrandt, Jan Steen and Samuel van Hoogstraten,” contrasts Dou’s self-referential and allegorical mode of representing himself in both self-portraiture, studio image and genre scenes, with the figures of Rembrandt, Steen and van Hoogstraten. I look to Chapman and Westermann’s interpretation of Rembrandt and Steen, and Brusati’s interpretation of van Hoogstraten as comparable models for interpreting Dou’s construction of identity and the blurring of boundaries between genres. This thesis proposes a reading of Dou’s nisstuk (niche) paintings in relation to his self- portraits with the aim of better understanding the image of the artist that Dou projected across the range of his oeuvre. The visual mechanics of self-fashioning through the combining and blurring of boundaries between genres have been ascribed to other artists like Rembrandt, Steen and van Hoogstraten, but Dou has largely been left out of this discourse. The growing number of artists that scholars link to this pictorial trend of stepping outside the conventional limits of self- portraiture suggests that the last word on how artistic identity was visually constructed and communicated by Dutch artists of the seventeenth-century has not been written. Although outside the scope of this thesis, it remains to be explored for many other artists in Dou’s circle of Leiden fijnschilders.

10 CHAPTER 1

DOU AND THE CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF LEIDEN: GUILDES, THE MARKET FOR PAITNINGS AND ARTISTIC TRENDS

In the Introduction, I briefly presented aspects of Gerrit Dou’s life and art. As suggested by the title, this chapter presents the known details of Dou’s life and artistic training, and describes the cultural, economic and intellectual milieu of Leiden. These factors construct a ‘web of social history,’ to borrow a phrase from John Michael Montias, and encompass the contextual or historical circumstances that motivated Dou to represent himself and his profession in specific ways.38 Biographic, social and geographic factors provided the impetus for Dou’s visible construction and projection of identity. The more in-depth historical background contained in this chapter provides a necessary backdrop for the larger claims of my argument that Dou’s projection of self can be observed across the range of subjects he depicted, from self- portraits and the artist in his studio, to genre scenes. Jan Orlers’ Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden (Description of the City of Leiden), published in 1641, provides much of the known biographical information on Gerrit Dou.39 This text functioned as a glorification of the city and included individuals from a number of professions who were seen as a source of civic pride. In the chapter titled, “All the Illustrious, Learned and Renowned Men” he includes the biography of Dou among other notable artists and scholars of Leiden.40 Noteworthy for a discussion of Dou is that within the entire text, there are more pages devoted to painters than scholars, which is significant for a city known internationally for its university. In this history or description of the city of Leiden, Orlers relates that Dou was born in Leiden on April 7, 1613, the son of Douwe Jansz. de Vries van Arentsvelt (1584-1656), a

38 Taken from the title of Montias’ book on Vermeer, John Michael Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

39 This edition of Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden was a reprint of the first edition, published in 1614. Both editions take their place in a larger trend in the in the seventeenth century of written city histories, like those of and Amsterdam, for example. Leiden’s first town description appeared in Jan van Hout’s The Town of Leiden’s Service Book of 1602, which was in fact, the first town description published in the province of Holland. In such texts, painters often featured as sources of civic pride, but before Orlers, no one had written as extensive biographies of living artists in this literary genre. Initially Orlers relied on Karel van Mander for information about exemplary artists, but in the 1641 edition, he had to rely on his own observations and information regarding contemporary artists. This was a job, it would seem, he was well equipped to perform since his own collection of paintings numbered 142, as listed in an inventory of 1640. Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 199-203. See also Elisabeth de Bievre, “The Urban Subconcsious: The Art of Delft and Leiden.” Art History 18/2 (1995): 224.

40 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 201.

11 glazier, and Marijten Jandsdr. van Rosenburg (c.1585-1649). Dou and his family, which also included his brother Jan (d.1649), and half brother Vechter and half sister Catharina, lived on the Cort Rapenburg.41 This prestigious and wealthy section of Leiden placed Dou in close proximity to the university, and those associated with it.42 The Cort Rapenburg, in essence, encompassed the cultural center of Leiden, as it was the preferred area of residence for city officials, wealthy merchants, and university professors.43 In 1622, Dou commenced studying the principles of draftsmanship with engraver Bartholomeus Dolendo for one and one-half years, and then went on to study with the glasschrijver (glass painter) Pieter Couwenhorn for two and one-half years.44 Couwenhorn and Dou’s father owned the two most important workshops for the production of church glass in Leiden, although it is not known why Dou did not train with his father and instead went to work for his competitor. Pieter Couwenhorn was an important early contact for Dou, as he was a noted figure in Leiden with important connections to learned and powerful figures in the city. Not only was Couwenhorn a glasschrijver for Leiden and the States General, he was also a friend of Pieter Scriverius (a scholar at the university of Leiden) and Constantijn Huygens (a politician and scholar).45 Although Dou was registered with the glazenmakers’ (glass maker’s) guild from 1625 to 1627, he did not continue his career as glasschrijver.46 Orlers relates an anecdote in which he

41 Sluijter, “Painter’s Pride: Capturing the Art of Transience in Self-Portraits,” in Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance. With a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity, ed. Karel Enenkel, Betsy de Jong-Crane and Peter Liebregts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 190 note 154; Hunnewell, 248; and Baer, “The Paintings of Gerrit Dou (1613-1675),” 5 and 7.

42 J.L. Price, Dutch Society, 1588-1713 (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000), 100. Dou seems to have been aware of the importance and fortuitousness of this location because he later included the Blauwepoort, one of Leiden’s distinctive city gates, in The Quack and Self-Portrait (1663). The Blauwepoort, in addition to being a well- recognized landmark in the topography of the city, was also the seat of the Leiden rederijkers (retoricians). Hunnewell, 150, note 81.

43 Pamela H. Smith, “Science and Taste: Painting, Passions, and the New Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Leiden,” Isis 90/3 (1999): 424.

44 The appellation glasschrijver distinguishes Couwenhorn as head of a workshop, with duties more diverse than that of a glassmaker. He was responsible for receiving commissions and fulfilling the client’s demands. Although he could design and manufacture glass himself, he usually subcontracted these tasks to other craftsmen. Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” 28 and 43, note 17. Again, as noted earlier, the detailed, luminous, small-scaled paintings Dou produced during the maturity of his artistic career is often considered reflective of his early training with Dolendo and Couwenhorn.

45 Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (NY: Viking Penguin Inc.), 1985, 53.

46 Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” 28.

12 states Dou’s father sent him to study painting around this time because Dou displayed a certain recklessness in installing and making glass and his father was concerned for his safety.47 Whether this is truth, fiction or some combination of the two, on February 14, 1628 Dou was apprenticed to Rembrandt for three years, until Rembrandt left Leiden in 1631.48 He must have become a master shortly thereafter, but as there was no painter’s guild in Leiden at this time, there are no guild records to confirm a precise date. Shortly before Philips Angel praised Dou as one of the leading artists in Leiden, Dou bought a house on the Galgewater on May 1, 1640.49 Philips Angel’s Lof der Schilder-konst (In Praise of the Art of Painting) rounds out the biographical details presented in Orlers’ Beschrijvinge in his recording of aspects of Dou’s professional life and qualities as a painter.50 Angel presented his encomium to an audience of regents, burghers and artists on St. Luke’s Day, October 18, 1641 and it was published the following year. In Angel’s text, Dou is noted as having contracted with Pieter Spiering Silvercroon, son of the Delft tapestry master François Spiering and the ambassador to Queen Christina of Sweden, for the right of first refusal. Spiering did not specifically commission paintings, but paid Dou an annual fee of 1000 fl. to have the first choice of Dou’s artistic production.51 The amount of this fee was almost exorbitant; to put it into perspective, 1000 fl. could also buy a house.52 This was a rare and advantageous arrangement for Dou, offering him

47 Baer proposes that Douwe Jansz.’s decision to send Gerrit to study painting with Rembrandt may have been the result of several factors. It is possible that the business of Douwe Jansz.’s workshop could not accommodate both his sons, or that Gerrit’s desire to become a painter was the motivating factor. She also notes that “Dou’s purported recklessness…seems at odds with the quiet and patient personality that emerges from the archival evidence, from the reports of contemporaries (in particular, Von Sandrart’s description of Dou’s working method) and from the meticulous type of work Dou produced.” Baer, “The Life of Gerrit Dou,” 44, note 23. I hope to show in Chapter 2 that there is more humor in Dou’s professional identity than the quiet and patient personality Baer sees and as such perhaps his supposed recklessness is not so discordant as it might seem.

48 Baer notes that it quite possible that Orlers compiled biographical information on Dou directly from the artist and his family. Baer, “The Paintings of Gerrit Dou (1613-1675),” 3, note 8. Also of note is that Dou was Rembrandt’s first pupil. Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 560.

49 Baer, “The Paintings of Gerrit Dou (1613-1675),” 6.

50 Joachim von Sandrart, Cornelis de Bie, and Arnold Houbracken publishing later in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century repeat many of the details found first in Orlers and Angel.

51 Angel states that Dou was paid 500 Carolus guilders by Spiering and this converts to 1000 fl. according to Gaskell. See Angel, 238 and Gaskell, “Dou and His Patrons,” 15.

52 Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” 31. Dou’s own house on the Galgewater cost 2000 fl. Baer, “The Paintings of Gerrit Dou,” 6.

13 both financial security and minimal constraints on the production of his paintings. In 1648, he was one of the founding members of the St. Luke’s guild in Leiden and in the guild records was listed as vaendrager or flag bearer for the Leiden civic militia, a prestigious position held only by bachelors.53 At the age of thirty-five Dou was a confirmed bachelor, and never married. If he took mistresses or entered into amorous liaisons, he must have been more discreet than his scandalous teacher Rembrandt, because there is no evidence to suggest that he was romantically linked to anyone his entire life. During the 1650s and 1660s, his artistic and financial success continued to escalate. In his studio, he trained the artists Frans van Mieris, Godfried Schalcken, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter van Slingelandt, Domenicus van Tol, Jan van Staveren, Abraham de Pape, and Adriaen van Gaesbeeck.54 Many of these painters would continue to work in his manner of fine painting and achieve their own artistic renown.55 Dou’s property assets increased dramatically in 1656, when he inherited three houses on the Cort Rapenburg after his father died. In the 1660s, several events seemed to cement his artistic achievements both locally and internationally. Two of his paintings, one of them The Young Mother, were included in the gift from the States-General to Charles II of England in 1660 and Charles was apparently so pleased with Dou’s paintings that he invited him to paint for his court, although this was an honor Dou refused.56 In 1665 Johan de Bye, one of Dou’s local collectors, exhibited twenty-seven of his paintings at the home of Johannes Hannot on the Breestraat, which was directly across from the town hall.57 From these

53 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 215.

54 Eric Jan Sluijter, Marlies Enklaar and Paul Nieuwehuizen, Leidse Fijnschilders. Van Gerrit Dou tot Frans van Mieris de Jonge, 1630-1760 (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1988), 282.

55 See Sluijter, Leidse Fijnschilders.

56 Baer, “The Life of Gerrit Dou,” 32. Houbracken explains Dou’s refusal of Charles II invitation in his Life of , “It is not recorded in the life description of Gerard Dou that he had the honour that Charles the second King of England, taking great pleasure in his brushwork, summoned him to his Court; but he found reason to refuse this, because the turbulent court life was not commensurate with his quiet nature, or because his friends advised him against it, as it appears in verse below: How now, Dou! Is Stewart to drag you,/The crucible of brushes/To Whitehall? Nay! Go not to Charles’ Court/Sell not thy freedom for smoke, for wind, for dust./He who would seek the favor of Princes,/Must play the part of slave and sycophant.” Horn, 270.

57 The of 1660-61 was organized by the Amsterdam regents Cornelis and Andries , who were friends of Grovaert Flinck. Among those paintings chosen by Cornelis and Andries, with the help of Gerrit Uylenburgh, a well-known Amsterdam art dealer, were one painting by and Pieter Saenredam, and two paintings by Dou. Uylenburgh himself, had paintings by local artists like Dou, Rembrandt, Gabriel Metsu and Frans van Mieris, as well as international artists like Rubens, and Tintoretto in his possession when he went

14 biographical details, it becomes evident that when he died in 1675 he was honored, esteemed and wealthy.58 From the above biographical sketch it becomes clear that Dou had close, professional relationships with important and powerful figures in Leiden, that he garnered praise and acquired artistic or professional success from an early age, and that he continued to be professionally successful and financial solvent until his death in 1675. The apparent swiftness and ease with which he achieved professional and financial success belie the complexities and difficulties inherent in attaining this kind of long lasting, international success. Contemporary texts like Angel’s and Orlers’, and later those of Cornelis de Bie (1663), Joachim von Sandrart (1675), and Arnold Houbracken (1718-1722) give the impression that Dou owed a large part of his lifelong success to their promotional efforts, however this mode of thinking denies the agency or power of the artist in actively creating and manipulating his professional success and image. Dou established himself as “an excellent master in small, subtle and curious things,” because his refined manner of illusionistic painting was popular with collectors and art lovers, despite the fact that he may have had a predilection for painting in this manner from his early training as a glasschrijver.59 His cultivation of an identifiable style was partly a marketing strategy, since it helped secure financial success with those individuals who valued this mode of representation. Yet, this idiom was not preferred exclusively over all others by collectors. The nobility and aristocratic circles continued to favor large, grandiose Italianate history paintings over Dou’s small, encased genre scenes.60 He was subject to the vagaries of fortune and taste, as were so

bankrupt in 1672. One of the paintings by Dou was The Young Mother (1662). Also included in the gift were paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Graeco-Roman antiquities from the collection of Gerard Reynst. The States General also gifted a yacht called the Mary. Israel, 881. Johan de Bye exhibited Dou’s paintings beginning September 18, 1665 in a room rented from Johannes Hannot, a portraitist and still life painter. Viewing times were advertised in the Haarlemsche Courant the next week as 11am-12pm on every day except Sunday. Gaskell, “Dou and His Patrons,” 21. The importance of this exhibition will be explored in chapter 2.

58 Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou” 28-33 and Baer, “The Paintings of Gerrit Dou (1613-1675),” 1-11. See Israel for Johan de Bye, 877.

59 de Bievre, 236, original Dutch cited 377, note 81, “Een uytnemend Meester, insonderheydt in cleyne, subtile, ende curieuse dingen.” See Eric Jan Sluijter, “Introduction: ‘With the Power of the Seemingly Real We Must Conquer and Capture the Eyes of Art Lovers,” in Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age, ed. Eric Jan Sluijter (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2000) and Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou.”

60 Dou’s paintings were often covered with painted shutters or encased in boxes. Of the twenty-seven paintings displayed by de Bye in his 1665 exhibition, twenty-two were listed as having cases. Gaskell, “Dou and His Patrons,” 21.

15 many other artists at this time. Although he benefited from his relationship with Spiering, their arrangement only lasted from 1637 to 1652, at which point Spiering was called back to Sweden. To add insult to injury, shortly before Spiering’s departure from The Hague, Queen Christina returned ten of Dou’s paintings purchased on her behalf.61 Dou was not indiscriminately awarded with professional and financial success; it was something he had to actively pursue throughout his career. In the end, his accomplishments were no small feat for any artist living and working in Leiden in the mid-seventeenth century. The social, intellectual and artistic milieu of Leiden throws the weight of these issues into shaper relief. Leiden was an important industrial and artistic center during the seventeenth century and was the second largest city in Holland after Amsterdam. There was a large influx of immigrants after 1585 from many cities in the southern Netherlands, including Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent. Most significantly for the city as a whole, many were expert craftsmen who brought with them a variety of skills and traditions in cloth manufacturing, established new techniques and opened up additional markets with the production of lighter cloths. This had the result of establishing Leiden as the main manufacturing base of the textile or woolen industry in Europe. Leiden retained its status as an important manufacturing center until the eighteenth century when foreign competition from France superceded the production capabilities of local industry.62 The immigrant population also had a significant impact on the size and layout of the city. Leiden’s population steadily and swiftly expanded from 1580 up until the last decades of the seventeenth century. From 1582 to 1675, the city’s population grew from 11,000 to approximately 65,000.63 Leiden was not only a major industrial center; it was also home to an internationally renowned university and owed much of its cultural life to the presence of this university. The University of Leiden was founded in 1575, quickly became a center for humanist learning in the sixteenth century and retained this reputation until the eighteenth century.64 Regents and university administrators directed educational funds towards higher salaries to lure notable

61 Gaskell, “Dou and His Patrons,” 15. The ramifications these events may have had on the manner in which Dou presented himself in his paintings will be explored further in Chapter 2.

62 Price, 45.

63 Price, 89. de Bievre, 229. Statistics for the population of Leiden vary but these figures represent what most scholars agree on.

64 Price, 97.

16 scholars and thus enhance the university’s standing. This strategy was effective in tempting such distinguished figures as Justus Lipsius, professor of history and law from 1578 to 1591, as well as Joseph Scaliger, a research scholar at the university from 1593 to 1609; and Franciscus le Böe Sylvius, professor of practical medicine from 1658 to 1672.65 Replete with a botanical garden, anatomy theatre, observatory, and laboratories the university also attracted students from throughout Europe. In fact, its student body was mostly international in character with over half of the student body hailing from outside the Republic.66 The diverse and international character of the university had a direct impact on the city’s demographics since the students and faculty were required to lodge in town. University life was not sealed off from urban life, and in fact, many of the intellectual figures the university drew to Leiden lived close to Dou on the Cort Rapenburg and would come to make up the audience and market for Dou’s paintings.67 The market for paintings has been a popular topic of discussion among historians of Dutch art in the past thirty years partly due to the fact that individuals, rather than civic and aristocratic institutions, provided the major outlet for artistic endeavors in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century.68 The nobility and the church were not major patrons; their

65 Grafton, 64 and 67, and Smith, “Science and Taste,” 422.

66 Israel, 548 and 572. Marten Jan Bok, “The Artist's Life,” in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, H.Perry Chapman, W. Th Kloek, Arthur K. Wheelock and Guido M.C. Jansen (National Gallery Washington and the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 1996), 25.

67 Franciscus le Böe Sylvius, who lived on the Cort Rapenburg owned eleven of Dou’s paintings, including Woman at her Toilette (1667), The Dropsical Woman (1663) and a Self-Portrait (1663). Grafton, 64, and Smith, “Science and Taste,” 424. See also Sluijter, “‘All striving to adorne their houses with costly peeces.’ Two Case Studies of Paintings in Wealthy Interiors” in Art and Home. Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Mariët Westermann (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2001), 107.

68 For example, see John Michael Montias, “Cost and Value in Seventeenth Century Dutch Art,” Art History 10 (1987): 455-466; Alan Chong, “The Market for Landscape Painting in Seventeenth-Century Holland,” In Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, ed. Peter C. Sutton (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Boston 1987); Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (University of Chicago Press, 1988); John Michael Montias, “The Influence of Economic Factors on Style,” De zeventiende eeuw 6 (1990): 49-57; John Michael Montias, “Socio-Economic Aspects of Netherlandish Art from the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century: A Survey,” Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 358-373; Jan de Vries, “Art History,” In Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth- Century Dutch Culture, Issues & Debates, eds. David Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991); Neil De Marchi and Hans J. van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Netherlands in the 17th century,” The Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 451-464; Michael North and David Ormrod, Art Markets in Europe: 1400-1800 (Aldershot, 1998); Reindert Falkenburg, Jan de Jong, Bart Ramakers, Mariët Westermann, et al., eds., Kunst voor de Markt/Art for the Market, Nederlands Junsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (Zwolle: 1999); Marten Jan Bok, “The Painter and His World. The Socioeconomic Approach to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,” In The Golden Age of Dutch Painting in Historical Perspective, ed. Frans Grijzenhout and Henk van Veen, Translated by Michael Hoyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);

17 scope of artistic patronage did not compare to the magnitude of similar institutions elsewhere in Europe. There were sporadic commissions from the Princes of Orange under Frederick Hendrick and his building and decorating of the Mauritshuis in The Hague. There were also municipal building projects, like the Amsterdam town hall, that provided some demand for the services of painters, sculptors and architects, but these kinds of civic building projects were not undertaken with the same regularity and grandeur as those in other important cities outside the Dutch Republic.69 Instead, middle and upper class burghers, and the regent elite dominated cultural life. Painters who wished to increase and enhance their wealth and social standing targeted and catered to individuals rather than institutions. It was such figures as regents, wealthy burghers and even foreign rulers that Gerrit Dou sought as his primary audience because they were the few who could afford his expensive jewel- like paintings. Prices for Dou’s paintings ranged from 600-1,000 fl., which he calculated according to the amount of time spent on their production.70 Although regents and nobles could be on equal financial planes, regents were a more viable target market or audience for artists like Dou, since the number of noble families in the Dutch Republic steadily decreased, while the circle of upper bourgeoisie increased throughout the course of the seventeenth century. In 1650, there were twenty-one noble families, and by 1730 this had dwindled to a mere six.71 The influx of immigrants to both academic and industrial institutions and the changing social dynamic within Leiden also created a new kind of market reality for painters during the seventeenth century. Jan de Vries has shown that in the 1590’s there were not more than 100 master painters in northern Netherlands at any one time, however this number continued to increase until it peaked at numbers ranging from 700-800 painters in 1650.72 This increase in the

Maarten Prak, “Guilds and the Development of the Art Market during the .” Simiolus 30 (2003): 236-251 and Hans J. Van Miegroet and Neil de Marchi, Mapping Markets for Paintings in Early Modern Europe 1450-1750 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2006).

69 Price, 75.

70 According to Joachim von Sandrart Dou calculated his prices based on a rate of 6fl. per hour. Baer, “The Life of Gerrit Dou,” 31.

71 Price, 174.

72 This number is supposedly representative of the number of active master painters and does not include apprentices, copyists and non-guild painters. They are at best an educated estimate and these numbers should be tempered with the caveat that Leiden provides an obvious hole in the calculating of figures, especially considering the Leiden St. Luke’s guild was not established until 1648, which would mean these numbers could hardly be

18 number of active masters had an impact on economic realities for artists, as well as issues surrounding the status of artists and professional identity. Painters in Leiden would seem to have been in a more precarious financial situation than painters in other cities since they did not have the support, protection and regulation of a painter’s guild until 1648, yet this deficiency did not have a significant impact on the art market.73 Artistic production and consumption did not fall apart or even really flounder without the institutional support of a guild, which is perhaps one reason why civic leaders repeatedly denied requests for the establishment of a painter’s guild.74 In fact, Leiden had not had a St. Luke’s guild since the Spanish wreaked havoc on the town in the sixteenth century. The St. Luke’s guild of many other cities suffered the same fate, but in places like Amsterdam and Haarlem the St. Luke’s guild did not disappear altogether for the length of time it did in Leiden.75 Even the smaller cities of Delft, Rotterdam and Gouda formed or reformed their St. Luke’s guild during the first decades of the seventeenth century and some other cities incorporated painters into the goldsmith or apothecary’s guild. While painters in many cities were often absorbed into these other related craft guilds, it seems that painters in Leiden did not belong to any guild from about the time of the revolt (1572) until the re-founding of the St. Luke’s guild in 1648.76 To make matters worse, there were no special regulations preventing out-of-town merchants from holding public sales of paintings until 1609, when they did receive some

reflective of all the painters working in the northern Netherlands. Jan de Vries, “Art History,” in Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, Issues & Debates, ed. David Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991): 264.

73 Dou was not among those painters most impacted by the guild situation in Leiden. He had already established his artistic reputation by 1641and mainly worked outside the guild, even after it was instituted in 1648. He did not greatly benefit from the protective measures generally offered by guilds, since he managed to prosper artistically and financially without them. However, he did participate in guild activities and, as one of its founding members, acknowledged its importance to his lesser skilled colleagues who received direct competition in local markets from outside traders and dealers.

74 See Prak, 250.

75 Ed Romein and Gerbrand Korevaar, “Dutch Guilds and the Threat of Public Sales,” In Mapping Markets for Paintings in Early Modern Europe 1450-1750, eds. Hans J. Van Miegroet and Neil de Marchi. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2006), 178.

76 Romein and Korevaar give the later date of 1657 for when the city magistrates officially granted a guild statue to painters, but painters seemed to have organized themselves by 1648 since Dou was listed as guild vaendrager at this date, 179.

19 protective measures in the form of statues banning public sales of paintings beyond the annual fairs.77 However, these statues were not renewed after 1617 and they did not benefit those operating in a market that was shifting from a “production orientated market to a transaction orientated market.”78 In 1642 painters again issued a formal complaint about the increasing number of out-of-towners either peddling or selling their paintings by public auction outside the annual fair. The magistrate issued stipulations that attempted to regulate the sale of paintings, but this seems to have been less than successful since the painters were still complaining in 1648 about the illicit sale and import of paintings.79 Many of the guilds in the cities of Holland experienced difficulties regulating the sale of paintings and protecting the interests of their members, but any such difficulties were even more exigent for those painters of Leiden who did not have the support of an institutionalized civic body protecting their professional interests.80 These economic concerns, stemming from environmental considerations, frame many of Angel’s claims for artists in his Lof der Schilder-konst, which was in part a plea for, and a justification of, the need for a St. Luke’s guild within Leiden. Angel, a painter and notable figure in Leiden, spoke to an audience of painters and other important city members with the intent of making a case for the establishment of a painter’s guild in the city. Ultimately his appeal was unsuccessful since it would take eight more years for Leiden’s regents, specifically the veertigraad (council of forty) to grant painters guild status.81

77 Romein and Korevaar, 171, 178-179.

78 Romein and Korevaar argue that according to the additions and changes to guild rules and regulations, the retail (as opposed to production) of paintings became a major concern throughout the course of the seventeenth century, 178.

79 Romein and Korevaar, 179.

80 Romein and Korevaar, 179-180. Guilds provided important support for their members in other ways as well. They could have the charitable function of supporting members who were injured or ill, and they also could have a more social function, 7. “The guilds, however, were not just organizations for the collective protection of economic self-interest; they also had some of the character of friendly societies, providing help for the sick and proper funerals for the deceased. Perhaps most importantly for their members, they went some way to satisfying the need for a sense of belonging and identity in a world which was changing with unsettling rapidity, especially in the larger and more dynamic towns,” Price, 106. On occasion, individuals could register as a liefhebber with the guild and participate in social activities. This is noteworthy as only one of the ways painters were able to target an individual or group of individuals in the marketing of their paintings. Prak, 249.

81 Regents were members of the vroeschap, the municipal council that created and enforced laws and regulations within each city. The number of regents in any given city was generally small, ranging from fourteen to forty; however, the Leiden veertigraad (council of forty) was one of the largest vroeschapen in the Dutch Republic. Some of the other larger vroeschap were Gouda (forty), Amsterdam (thirty-six), Haarlem (thirty-two) and Rotterdam

20 In this text, Angel places emphasis on painting as a distinguished and respectable craft that brought wealth, financial stability and prestige to painters, and by extension their city of residence. He demonstrates this with a retelling and reinterpretation of the story of Rodophe from Jacob Cats’ Trouw-ringh (Wedding Ring).82 In this poem, the painter claims that he would make a better husband to the beautiful Rodophe than a poet or even a merchant because unlike poets he can earn money from his craft and unlike merchants he can capture her beauty for eternity. Angel is especially intent on highlighting the superiority of painting over poetry: “The honored art of painting deserves far greater praise, For more than just delight, it brings profit in its train. I earn money in abundance, I paint majestic pictures, And also limn great princes upon the copper plate. It is with this I trade, and make a handsome profit, And that is useful work, for hearth and for children.”83

Here, and elsewhere in the text, Angel does not highlight the intellectual aspirations of the painter; he is more concerned with manual skill and the painter as pictor economicus.84 Angel’s treatise is the only document written in Dou’s own lifetime that speaks directly to the concerns of (Leiden) artists at the time.85 Angel, a painter himself, was eminently qualified to comment on

(twenty-four). As magistrates, it was their duty and primary responsibility to promote and preserve the prosperity of the town. These duties involved protecting the interests of the city’s burghers and most importantly for painters was their role in the regulation of guilds. Guilds were governed externally by regents. Regents had the power to grant or revoke guild status, and were a source of aid in the enforcement of protective economic measures, including guild rules and regulations. In other words, “By the seventeenth-century, guilds in the towns of Holland were firmly under the control of the local magistracy, and they had no political force and precious little independence; they did, however, represent important economic interests and their representatives were often listened to, even consulted, on economic matters.” Price, 106, 171, 179-181.

82 Angel, 234.

83 Angel, 240.

84 Eric Jan Sluijter, “Didactic and Disguised Meanings? Several Seventeenth-Century Texts on Painting and the Iconological Approach to Northern Dutch Paintings of This Period,” in Art in History, History in Art. Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, ed. David Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1991), 184.

85 There were other texts that written in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that are more art theoretical in nature and include biographies of past and contemporary artists. Many of them are by practicing painters. For example: Franciscus Junius’ De pictura Veterum (published in 1637 in Latin, 1638 in English and 1641 in Dutch), Willem Goeree’s Inleydingh tot de practice der al-gemeene Schilderkonst of 1670, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleydingh tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst: anders de Aichtbaere Werelt of 1678, Gerard de Lairesse’s Het Groot Schilderboek of 1707, and Arnold Houbracken’s De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen of 1718. According to 280 inventories of artist’s possessions, these texts were not widely distributed among artists. Van Mander is represented in twelve, Junius in four, Lairesse in two and Hoogstraten in one. Beatrijs Brenninkmeyer-de Rooij, “Theories of Art,” in The Golden Age. Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Bob Haak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), 61-62.

21 the artistic and more mundane economic concerns of painters living in Leiden. Angel culled other sources, both ancient and contemporary, for support of his proposition that painters brought fame, honor and income to themselves, and by extension, the city, through the noble art of painting.86 The unwillingness of Leiden’s veertigraad to grant guild status to painters until almost mid-century can be interpreted partly as a reflection of their attitude toward painters and paintings; a sign of how this group of individuals perceived the value, status, and importance of these craftsmen and their products within the economic and social fabric of the city. This is partially due to the nature of the social hierarchy at the time. At the top tier of the social ladder were the nobility, and just below them were the upper bourgeoisie – a group made up of rich merchants and manufacturers, regents and leading figures in the administration of the province and States General, and judges of provincial courts. Below this were the traders and manufacturers. Still further down were the craftsmen who sold their product themselves and on par with these small businessmen were bakers, innkeepers, and shopkeepers. Included in this last group were painters, although an increasing number of painters, including Dou, sought to become part of the upper bourgeoisie.87 While Angel and Orlers’ texts suggest that painters did bring fame, wealth and prestige to a city, the lack of government or official support seems to contradict this somewhat, and this contradiction speaks directly to the changing status of the artist. Price states: The painter in Holland during the seventeenth-century was still regarded in the main as a craftsman, an artisan, and lacked the prestige of the poet or playwright. He was looked upon as such by the rest of society and usually looked upon himself in the same light. There was, it is true, a growing tendency among a small number of painters, under the influence of Italian and French developments, to regard themselves as artists. These men made demands for prestige and status, and the styles of their painting reflected those of their peers in the rest of Europe….To say that the painter was primarily a craftsman is not to suggest that he saw no aesthetic value in his own work but to emphasize that his main object was to produce works that would sell and give him an income from which he could live. Moreover, he did not produce for a small, highly cultivated elite: his work was aimed at his social equals or immediate superiors – artisans, shopkeepers, small tradesmen, modest merchants.88

86 Maarten Prak suggests that Philips Angel’s encomium served the additional function of teaching his audience, which included collectors and other business men, how to recognize a good painting. In other words, Angel was attempting to stimulate the taste for a certain kind of painting, 248.

87 Price, Dutch Society, 171.

88 Price, Dutch Society, 120-121.

22 Price notes that the numbers of painters who regarded themselves as ‘artists’ and ‘made demands for prestige and status’ were small and that a painter’s products were aimed at those occupying the same social sphere. According to this general definition, Dou was not the average painter: he was highly paid for his products, owned several properties and amassed considerable wealth. In the end, he was both an artist and a wealthy gentleman in appearance and in fact. His numerous accolades and windfall inheritance of three houses may have helped catapult him to a higher social level, however, these assets by no means assured that his peers and superiors would perceive him as an artist and gentleman, and not merely a small businessman who makes his living selling products crafted by his own hands. Yet, there existed a vacillation between these two social poles; there was no clear dichotomy between ‘artist’ and craftsman, gentleman and businessman, or at least these divisions had not yet become codified into the familiar categories as they are defined from the nineteenth century onward. There is evidence of this in Dou’s life and work, where there is both an affirmation and denial of the artist’s hand in the crafting of his paintings.89 There is a complexity to the nature of how he chose to convey identity and artistic concerns not only in his self-portraits, but also through his representations of the artist in his studio and his many nisstuk genre scenes. This is the area of investigation undertaken in the next chapter: Dou’s concern with the status of the artist and his projection of artistic identity as manifest in the subjects, motifs, and style of his paintings.

89 I believe that Dou did think of himself as an ‘artist’ rather than strictly as a craftsman, therefore I will use the term artist, as well as painter and craftsman, in reference to Dou. This will become apparent throughout the discussion of chapter 2.

23 CHAPTER 2

SELF-PORTRAITURE, THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO AND GENRE SCENES: MODES OF SELF-REFERENTIALITY

Earlier I noted that the majority of Dou’s paintings concern themselves with the status of the artist and the art of painting and that these concerns stem from the social and economic realities of Leiden painters in the seventeenth century. This coincides with much of the literature on Dou, which states that the meaning of his paintings, including his self-portraits, still-lifes, and genre and studio scenes, center on the theme of the art of painting, even when the precise subject of a painting is ambiguous.90 For example, in An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, Martha Hollander wrote, “Underlying the subject itself, whatever its precise meaning, is a display of dazzling skill and, ultimately, a celebration of art making.”91 In his survey of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting Wayne Franits makes a similar pronouncement stating, “Many of Dou’s niche paintings, regardless of subject matter, primarily articulate the lofty aims and dazzling effects of the art of painting.”92 I agree that Dou explores different facets of the theme of the art of painting in his images, but offer the notion that a subject can be identified in these paintings and that it should not continue to be ignored or dismissed, however notoriously difficult and debatable the subject of these determinedly ambiguous images is to grasp.93 Dou’s paintings have the artist and his professional identity at their center, and as such, Gerrit Dou becomes the subject of his paintings. Dou’s pronouncements about the art of painting are personal and very much grounded in what he presents as his own virtues and qualities as an artist. Therefore, in as much as these paintings are framed by the more general trope or theme of the art of painting, they are also about Gerrit Dou himself. This interpretive possibility has not yet been explored with Dou’s

90 See the introduction for a condensed summary of the literature on Dou.

91 Hollander, 65.

92 Wayne E. Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004),119.

93 The often acrimonious debate over methodology and meaning that has characterized the field of Dutch art history will not be addressed in this thesis. See Mariët Westermann, “After Iconography and Iconoclasm: Current Research in Netherlandish Art, 1566-1700,” The Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 351-372 and Wayne E. Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth Century Dutch Art: Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

24 paintings, I believe, because scholars most often restrict themselves to searching for meaning within the confines of traditional categories and hierarchies of painting, like self-portrait, genre, still-life and history. This chapter explores a variety of paintings by Dou to offer an interpretation of identity that transgresses the usual boundaries of painting’s categories and hierarchies, a heuristic approach that I pursue in imitation of Dou’s own mode of communicating through images. In this chapter, I investigate the way Dou constructed identity and the various roles he played out through his self-portraits, studio and genre scenes. In linking these three categories of images together under the premise that they all construct and communicate identity genre scenes can thus be read as self-portraits. I propose that Dou uses specific self-referential elements (style, nisstuk composition, Duquesnoy relief, revealing curtain and signature) in these images, which highlight his practice of blurring the boundaries between them. In the Introduction I suggested that Dou’s scenes of an artist in his studio and individual genre figures set in niches act as an aside to his self-portraits, whereby Dou’s self-consciously constructed identity as an artist par excellence is reflected in both his genre paintings and self- portraits. In doing so, he shows himself in a variety of roles, complementary to the theme of the art of painting. Dou is pictor doctus, alter deus, and one who paints amoris causa. Although his self-portraits are, by definition, mimetic, he presents himself allegorically, as the embodiment of the ideals of his craft. Within his allegorical mode of self-representation, Dou plays specific elements off each other within his compositions, such that their juxtaposition provides a commentary on the theme of the art of painting, and more specifically on his identity as an artist. Dou’s genre and studio scenes can also be seen as kinds of self-portraits because they not only assert the presence of the artist, most obviously in the prominence of his signature and his nisstuk format, but also augment his projected artistic persona as it first appears in his self-portraits and scenes of the artist in his studio. These motifs, through which the viewer identifies Dou as the primary focus, or rather the subject, of these paintings are essentially non-figural, however, they help to fashion meaning and reference the artist for the viewer in ways that are comparable to his self-portraits. Artistic concerns and motivations, within the framework of projected identity, are important issues to consider in the production of images because this thesis considers the maker of a painting as the foremost mediating agent or presence between subject and object. The artist as a mediating agent is nowhere more apparent in the work of Gerrit Dou than in his style,

25 compositional devices and signature. I interpret the elements of style, nisstuk composition, Duquesnoy relief, revealing curtain and signature as signs or the specific vocabulary that he used to articulate his presence and place himself within the pictorial space of his panels, both when his mimetic likeness is present, as in his self-portraits, and when it is absent, as in his studio and genre scenes. These motifs function in ways similar to the inclusion of his mimetic or physiognomic likeness in his ‘true’ self-portraits, in that they assert the presence of the artist within the pictorial frame and indicate that the artist is essentially the subject of the image. They have connotative connections and relate to his roles as pictor doctus, alter deus and painter amoris causa, thereby allowing him to assert his identity as artist par excellence. Style: Fine Painting as Self-Reflexive Artifice In art historical parlance, Dou is often referred to as a and this term has come to denote his style of painting. Although this appellation was coined in the nineteenth century, the literal translation of fijnschilder, or ‘fine painter’, appropriately describes his visual mode of representation. 94 In his small format panel paintings, Dou’s images display an emphasis on minute (still-life) detail and the material qualities of depicted objects, often with an absence of discernable brushwork. These efforts aimed at a kind of subtle illusionism but usually stopped short of true trompe l’oeil. Dou’s illusionism or manner of fine painting is self-reflexive in that it calls attention to its artifice and status as a painting. His manner of self-reflexive artifice was one of the ways he absorbed himself into his art, especially since his mode of depiction was consistent across a range of subjects, from self-portraits, studio scenes, grocery scenes, and candle-light night scenes, to doctors performing uroscopy, hermits, astronomers and scholars absorbed in their studies, and young mothers and young women performing rituals of toilette or playing music.95 Orlers confidently proclaimed Dou, “an excellent master, especially as regards

94 Sluijter, Leidse Fijnschilders, 281.

95 Ironically, there is also an inherent contradiction between the seductive illusionism of paintings which ostensibly posit represented objects as existing in reality before the viewer and the mode of facture which calls attention to the crafted, artificial and fictional status of the picture. The smooth surface of Dou’s paintings seems to indicate a desire to hide any traces of the object’s manual fabrication and to disavow the mediating presence of the artist, yet this illusionism often causes viewers to examine the execution of a painting and wonder at its artifice. Christopher Wood states, “Indeed, the masking of technique usually brings about just the opposite effect, namely, it calls attention to technique and therefore to the distinction between the representation and reality.,” 333. Similarly, Ivan Gaskell has argued that the tantalizing tactility of the painted curtain in an image like Man with a Pipe at a Window signals Dou’s desire to have viewers examine the image at close range, where they would be able to see the brushstrokes and other marks of manual labor that went into the production of the object. Gaskell, “Rembrandt Van Rijn and Gerrit Dou: An Evolving Relationship?,” 112.

26 small, subtle and curious things, be it figures painted from life, animals, insects, or other subjects,” and concluded that, “everyone seeing these same [paintings] must be amazed at their highly finished neatness (netheyt) and curiousness.”96 It was these qualities of neatness and curiosity that set Dou apart and caused collectors and fellow painters to marvel at his skill. Among those who waxed poetic about the visual splendor of Dou’s painted marvels was Arnold Houbracken, who wrote, “But this is certain: that through his way of proceeding he is a marvel to the World, and must be praised by all practitioners of art, above all [those] who in his time have applied themselves to detailed painting; because he has drawn, and stroked, more with the brush than others who tried to reach their goal with softening and fading. Which is why his brushwork has great power, and even from far away; where, to the contrary [,] the brushwork handled in the other way disappears as in a mist.”97 In fact, Houbracken attributed a large role to Dou’s manner of fine painting in paving the way for the artist’s success, when he stated: It is almost inconceivable, when we consider the detail of his brushworks that a man could work out so much in his lifetime, which assures us that he must have made very good use of his time. And as far as his art is concerned, it does itself celebrate the intellect of its maker. Nor is there any art which is so generally approved; which is why [it] is bought up at high prices for all the famous art cabinets; 98

although he lamented the fact that Dou restricted himself to “the depiction of lesser matter” and not “more worthy and valuable subjects” like those of history paintings.99 Orlers and Houbracken suggest not only that Dou’s style was distinctive and identified specifically with the artist throughout his career, but also that Dou was a source of emulation for those who also wished to paint in this manner.100 Angel also reiterates this notion, “If, then, someone chooses

96 Sluijter, “In Praise of Art the of Painting,” 204 and 209.

97 Hendrick J. Horn, The Golden Age Revisited: Arnold Houbracken's Great Theatre of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses.Volumes I and II (Doornspijk, The Netherlands: Davaco, 2000), vol.I, 456.

98 Horn, 456.

99 Horn, 456. Orlers remarks more generally about Leiden painters, “…this art, I say, which is an art and a science renowned, adored, and pleasing among all nations and peoples throughout the works, and therefore has earned overwhelming praise from persons of high and low rank alike, has not only flowered, grown and increased within this city, but has also reached near perfection with some artists.” Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 202.

100 In texts like those of Orlers, Angel, von Sandrart and Houbracken the terms netheyt (neatness), nette (neat) and gladde (smooth) appear repeatedly in their descriptions of the Dou’s paintings. In these texts, the neatness of Dou’s paintings is contrasted with the rauw and losse manner of Rembrandt and Venetian artists. Before Dou, the smooth and finished manner was associated with the tasks of description necessary for flower, animal and comestible still-

27 neatness for his study, let him practice that which is perseveringly observed by Gerrit Dou, for whom no praise is sufficient, namely a meticulous looseness that he guides with a sure and certain drawing hand.”101 Self-Portraits: Gerrit Dou’s Professional Identity Style, subject and composition are the building blocks of images, and through these fundamental constituents, Gerrit Dou thematized his professional concerns and created allegorical images of himself. He did this first in his self-portraits before setting his brush to depict studio and genre scenes within a similar framework. Dou painted approximately twelve self-portraits that concomitantly display an interest in presenting a mimetic likeness of the artist, and are also allegorical. Despite their illusionistic claims to presenting reality, they are never neutral or unmediated re-presentations.102 They are about the virtues Dou embodies as an artist and consummate craftsman. Dou was supremely aware of the various positive and negative perceptions of his profession, and how they affected the changing status of artists and the art of painting within current social hierarchies. His self-conscious mode of painting suggests that he was intent on twisting negative preconceptions into positive attributes and providing a model for other painters to work toward in raising the status of the art of painting, as partly evidenced by the writings of Angel and Orlers. Dou’s Self-Portrait of 1645 shows the artist in gentlemanly attire sitting with his body at the very edge of the picture plane (Fig. 8). His gloved hands do not hold the tools of his trade, but there is no mistaking that Dou presents himself as an artist, and more specifically as a history painter. He appears to be in a studio setting with a painting of the rest on the flight into Egypt on an easel in the background. The nearby still-life elements of a shield, armor and drum support an identification of Dou as a history painter, as they were necessary studio props for such subjects. Although he was quickly becoming well-known as an ‘excellent master of small, curious things’ at this date, these elements indicate that he was able to conceive of and represent more elevated

lifes. Karel van Mander linked fine painting to artists like Jan van Eyck. Christopher S. Wood, “Curious Pictures and the Art of Description,” Word and Image 11/4 (1995): 332.

101 Angel, 248.

102 Marieke de Winkel, “Costume in Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits,” in Rembrandt by Himself, ed. Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot (National Gallery Publications Limited, London and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1999): 237.

28 subjects.103 This image and his earlier Self-Portrait of 1635-38 mark Dou’s tendency to present himself allegorically (Fig. 9). Hunnewell argues that in the 1635-38 Self-Portrait Dou paints himself as Pictura, with the attributes of a palette, brushes and maulstick. “[T]he Cheltenham panel is to be read primarily as Dou’s self-portrait as Pictura elaborated by the mask of imitation,” or, he is the embodiment of the art of painting.104 The confluence of elements, such as the mask, beret and artist’s accoutrements transforms the image into an all encompassing allegory of painting, where Dou becomes Pictura. Between these two self-portraits Dou shows both the tools and end product of his craft. I suggest that through the inclusion of a history painting in the 1645 Self-Portrait and his donning of a beret, with its scholarly associations, in the 1635-38 Self-Portrait, Dou encourages audiences to view him not only as the more generic Pictura, but specifically as pictor doctus, or that artist who has the learning and intellectual prowess required of a great artist.105 Dou’s Self-Portrait of 1647 presents the artist in a similar vein (Fig.10). The artist sits at a desk with his pen halted in the act of drawing, in a studio cluttered with objects. He shows himself interrupted at work and this is, in fact, the only image in which he is engaged in the activity of his craft. Drawing (tekenkonst) was long considered the basis of painting, and in this image he presents himself as having mastered the essentials of his craft.106 The cast of Hercules conquering Cacus that lies in the path of the artist’s shadow asserts the allegorical tenor of this self-portrait. The mythological subject of the sculpture illustrated the triumph of industry over laziness or deceit and other objects like the mask, statue and globe reference his scholarly

103 Ronni Baer, “Self-Portrait,” in Gerrit Dou 1613-1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 90. Hunnewell notes that it was somewhat unusual for Dou to depict himself in front of an easel in such clearly defined studio setting outside the conventional pictorial context of images of St. Luke painting the Virgin. This self-portrait is often compared to the late sixteenth-century self-portrait of Antonis Mor, who shows himself in front of an easel, but unlike Dou’s Self-Portrait (1645), the background or setting is not a clearly defined studio space. Hunnewell, 27-29.

104 Hunnewell, 32, 50

105 Hunnewell does suggest the notion that Dou draws on the tradition of painter as pictor doctus in the 1635-38 Self-Portrait, however, I think Dou highlights the pictor doctus aspect of himself in this “comprehensive image of a painter personifying his art.” Hunnewell, 32-36, 54. Dou’s beret in the 1635-38 Self-Portrait appears frequently in his later self-portraits and also in his depictions of doctors, astronomers and teachers. This outmoded accessory was not fashionable in the mid seventeenth century, but it retained its scholarly association since it was worn by doctors of law, theology, medicine and masters of arts since the sixteenth-century.

106 For tekenkonst as the foundation of painting, see Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-boeck (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).

29 interests and erudition and reinforce his intellectual and artisanal prowess.107 In the 1647 Self- Portrait, he is usus, or practice and industry and he is again pictor doctus, capped with a beret. Hunnewell notes, “He depicts himself at work as the ideal painter versed in history, art theory, and other learned disciplines.” 108 The image of the scholarly painter was conventional in self- portraiture, but this notion perhaps had a greater significance for Dou, who lived in the university atmosphere of Leiden, in the neighborhood of the university’s scholars, at a time when Leiden painters were still petitioning the veertigraad for the right to establish their own guild. In his Self-Portrait of 1663, Dou gazes pensively out toward but does not engage the viewer with direct eye contact (Fig.11).109 He leans against a pedestal and grasps his waistcoat between two fingers, drawing attention to his stylish clothing and ornate fur-lined coat. He is framed by an arcaded enclosure overlooking the Blauwepoort of Leiden’s skyline in the background. These features call attention to his wealth and status as a gentleman. Franits notes that artists of Dou’s generation tended to portray themselves more frequently as gentlemen, in part a reflection of their changing social status and fluctuating economic milieu.110 There are few clues that he is an artist, but viewers familiar with his visage from earlier self-portraits would have recognized him as that acclaimed Leiden painter. Dou wanted his audience and viewers to identify him as an artist, as a painter of pictures, but in making pictures, he amassed the kind of wealth that enabled him to claim the status of a wealthy gentleman. By this time, his wealth and professional accolades had cemented his status as a respected gentleman within Leiden and the inclusion of the Blauwepoort suggests that he was just as much a landmark of civic pride as the architecture.

107 Hollander, 55.

108 Hunnewell, 160-169.

109 Frisco Lammertse notes that Dou probably kept this portrait in his studio for several years, based on evidence of reworking in the background with its view of the Blauwepoort. Lammertse also suggests that Dou may have included this self-portrait in the in the background of Lady at Her Toilette (1667). He claims the picture hanging over the mantel echoes his 1663 Self-Portrait in the pose of the figure and drape of rug. I have only seen reproductions of this image, so I am not in a position to confirm or deny this. See Frisco Lammertse, “Veranderen na verloop van jaren: over Gerard Dou's Kwakzalver in Rotterdam en het Zelfportret in Kansas City,” Album discipulorum J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer (1997): 116-117.

110 He states, “Although several early seventeenth-century genre painters accrued tremendous wealth and status through their work it is only with Dou’s generation that such artists begin to portray themselves frequently as gentleman, a reflection no doubt of the changing economic and cultural milieu in which they labored.” Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 124.

30 The Blauwepoort first appears ten years earlier in his painting of The Quack (1652) (Fig.7). The Quack is a much-discussed painting from Dou’s oeuvre because it is his only genre scene that also includes his mimetic self-portrait.111 This large, multi-figure composition is unusual for Dou, but there is no mistaking that the author of this panel is Dou since he signed the panel three times (on the stone step, on the mortar and on the parchment).112 This scene is often interpreted as having personal significance for the artist, in that the presence of the Blauwepoort in the background implies that Dou is actually leaning out of his studio on the Galgewater.113 Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this painting is the relationship between Dou and the figure of the quack. This image focuses on the deceptive nature of quackery and emblematic interpretations of this painting usually focus on the negative perceptions of quacks in the seventeenth century.114 Visual representations of quacks typically presented the comical and often negative perceptions of these medical practitioners in the tradition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but Carol Jean Fresia has argued that some artists, like Dou, acknowledged a parallel endeavor by both artists, physicians and quacks to raise their professional status.115 Quacks were often itinerant individuals, on the margins of society and the medical profession, partly due to the fact that they were forbidden from practicing legally throughout the year and only allowed to take part in festivities associated with the annual open market. They were excluded from the rigid medical hierarchy, yet despite persistent stereotypes, they could be well educated and highly experienced. Frequently they performed essential and specialized services, including cataract and hernia operations, and the removal of bladder stones. As such, quacks gained genuine respect from public and medical professionals.116 Essential to the understanding of Dou’s Quack, is the idea that many were on a quest for inclusion and upward mobility through

111 His likeness was not originally part of the composition, but added at a later stage. Lammertse, 115.

112 Ronni Baer, “The Quack,” in Gerrit Dou 1613-1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 100-102.

113 Lammertse, 114.

114 See Jan Emmens, “De kwalzalver van Gerard Dou,” Kunsthistorische Opstellen II (Amsterdam: G.A. van Oorschot, 1981) and Eddy de Jongh, Tot Lering en Vermaak: Betekenissen van Hollandse genrevoorstellingen uit de zeventiende eeuw (Exh.cat. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1976).

115 Carol Jean Fresia, “Quacksalvers and Barber-surgeons: Images of Medical Practitioners in Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting,” (Phd. Yale University, 1991): 106.

116 Fresia, 180.

31 social and professional hierarchies.117 In this sense, their professional plight mirrors that of painters, especially in Leiden where painters had received municipal affirmation of their professional worth through the granting of guild status five years before Dou painted this image. The Quack does more than highlight professional parallels between artists and quacks. It makes a statement about illusionism and the deceptive nature of art. In emphasizing painting as artificial and constructed fictions that appear to be real, Dou sets out to show that deception is in fact a desirable quality and the hallmark of a praiseworthy painting. With the inclusion of his self-portrait Dou claims responsibility for, and pride in, deception.118 The illusionism of Parrhasius was not a skill every artist could master, yet Dou suggests that it was the ultimate goal of his craft. Van Hoogstraten supports this notion when he later claims that painting “is a science for representing all the ideas or concepts that the visible world can offer, and of fooling the eye with contours and colors…A perfect painting is like a mirror of nature that makes things that do not exist appear to exist and deceives in a pleasurable, permissible, and praiseworthy manner.”119 In this instance, Dou attempts to reverse negative connotations about the deceptive nature of painting. The Quack does not reveal moral anxiety on the part of the artist about the deceptive nature of painting, as Gaskell argues, but a celebration in the festive spirit of a kermis (annual fair) of the powers of painting and therefore of the painter as deceiver.120 The Quack thematizes the positive and even virtuous aspects of visual deception, but Dou’s tour de force of illusionism appears in his Man with a Pipe at a Window (1645) (Fig. 5).121 In this painting of a painting, a curtain is drawn to one side to reveal a man leaning on a book and smoking a pipe. Within the dark interior of the niche space the man leans out of is an artist’s

117 Fresia, 106.

118 Fresia, 259-260.

119 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 11.

120 Gaskell, “Dou and His Patrons,” 18-19.

121 This painting is given various titles. The painting is currently in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the curators at this institution label it as a self-portrait. In the exhibition catalogue Gerrit Dou 1613-1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt, Ronni Baer titles it “Painter with Pipe and Book, ” 94. I have chosen to refer to it as “Man with a Pipe at a Window,” because I do not think it is a self-portrait (which I will argue shortly) and I am not convinced that the figure has to be a painter. The interior of the niche is an artist’s studio and there are two figures next to an easel, only one of whom performs an apprentice’s task of grinding pigments. However, if Dou can be Pictura in the 1635-38 and 1645 Self-Portraits, then I think it equally possible that the central figure could be an allegory of the painter’s inspiration rather than the painter himself (who could just as well be one of the background figures).

32 studio with two figures in front of an easel, one of whom is grinding pigments. This image is Dou’s ultimate statement about the self-reflexive nature of his art. For many scholars, like Hunnewell, Baer and Hollander, one of the primary points of discussion of this image is whether or not the main figure is a self-portrait. Hollander believes the features of the figure to be the same mimetic likeness as in the 1635-38 Self-Portrait, but Hunnewell and Baer conclude that the features of the central figure are a generalized version of those in his true self-portraits.122 In his self-portraits, Dou was more apt to foreground the tools and objects of his craft and in these paintings he is the lone figure in the composition. This is not the case with Man with a Pipe at a Window. To be sure, the easel and figures in the background of Man with a Pipe at a Window imply the context of a studio and these elements have often led scholars to infer that the smoking figure is a painter, and more specifically Dou himself, a notion supported by the resemblance of the central figure to Dou’s own features in representations more clearly identifiable as self- portraits. Ultimately, I agree with Hunnewell and Baer’s assessment and identification of the central figure as one whose features suggest those of Dou’s, but do not depict him specifically. Hunnewell and Baer’s discussions of Dou are respectively iconographical and connoisseurial, therefore, it is important for these scholars to resolve the identity of the central figure of Man with a Pipe at a Window. Since the argument of this thesis is that Dou constructed and projected his professional identity across the genres that both include (self-portraiture) and omit (scenes from daily life and the artist in his studio) his physical features, it is not strictly necessary to determine whether the man smoking a pipe is in fact a mimetic likeness of the artist. Neither a positive or negative identification ultimately impacts the subject of the painting, which, is Dou regardless. Whether or not this is a true self-portrait, it references the artist and places him in the image specifically through the cartellino upon which he has placed his signature and the revealing curtain that appears to be a direct quotation of the Zeuxis and Parrhasius story.123 Man

122 Hollander, 50. Hunnewell described Dou’s features as follows,” a round chubby face with large, rather close set eyes; a long nose which widens considerably towards the nostrils; a highly individual small mouth with fleshy yet narrow lips; the suggestion of a thin, well maintained moustache and a short growth of hair directly below his lips; and a slightly receding, neatly cleft chin forming two lobes which are echoed in the curves of his soft, pudgy checks and double chin,” 10. He emphatically states that, “Although [the smoker] has been identified as Gerrit Dou by authors from Martin to the present, the figure demonstrates none of the characteristic Dou features, and, therefore, should not be regarded as a self-portrait,” 99. Baer, “Man with a Pipe at a Window,” 94.

123 Dou was even dubbed den Hollandeschen Parrhasius by the poet Dirck Tradenius. The importance of this will be noted later in this chapter.

33 with a Pipe at a Window is a fascinating image that vacillates between self-portrait and genre scene and this very quality indicates that in various kinds of images Dou presented himself as subject and object, as a representation’s beginning and end.124 Emblems of the Artist: Nisstuk, Duquesnoy Relief, Revealing Curtain and Signature Despite contemporary objections, like those articulated by Houbracken, Dou very clearly and consciously linked his name to particular subjects executed in a certain style. His paintings are also distinctive in their nisstuk format constructed within a stone niche, the inclusion of a relief based on Françios Duquesnoy’s Children with a Goat (1626) as part of this stone niche, and a revealing curtain that echoed the classical story of Parrhasius’ trompe l’oeil trickery. These repeated elements appear in both his self-portraits and genre scenes, and are the signposts of the artist’s presence within the composition (Figs. 2, 5, 6, 12). In contemporary terms, these elements are parergon (pictorial supplement). In his De pictura Veterum (The Painting of the Ancients) (1641), Junius repeats the ancient writers Pliny and Quintilian, who define parergon as marginal and superfluous embellishments.125 Wood elaborates on this stating, “The parergon can also serve as a sort of personal emblem or signature…They were appended to the work precisely to make room for non-functional, unsupervised play and for self-advertisement.”126 Wood’s broader understanding of parergon as functioning as personal emblem, signature and self-advertisement highlights how Dou used the elements of nisstuk format, revealing curtain, Duquesnoy relief in his genre paintings; they are self-advertisement, self-reflexive, and through the repetitive appearance and specific combination in many of his images they effectively become Dou’s personal emblems. They also append remarks by Angel, von Sandrart and Houbracken in their implication that perhaps Dou was not as serious and staid as their comments suggest. He did not toil laboriously at his craft without at least some pleasure and enjoyment.

124 I paraphrase Koerner here, “In the specular moment of fashioning one’s own likeness, one installs oneself at once as viewing subject and as thing viewed, as representation’s origin as well as end,” 9. Dou seems to make this statement more literally in his Self-Portrait with his Family (1649-50), which supports the notion that the artist conceives of paintings as explicitly self-referential objects. This is most clearly indicated in the way he holds or presents the painting of his family to the viewer. His gesture implies not only authorship of the image, but more importantly for the interpretation of subsequent paintings, it provides a direct and intimate link between artist and painting; the painting is literally an extension of the artist. Brilliant also notes that the distinction between subject and object is collapsed in self-portraiture. I am proposing that this conflation of subject and object occurs in Dou’s genre and studio scenes as well. Brilliant, 141-144.

125 Wood, 344.

126 Wood, 344.

34 The nisstuk format proved ideal for an artist interested in illusionism because it provided shallow space from which objects could project.127 Although Dou varied his use of the nisstuk format, he most often used it as a means to project objects and figures from within this framing device to create a sense of immediacy rather than as a way to convincingly recreate recessional space.128 Hunnewell has noted that Dou probably chose this niche format for his images of doctors, grocers and musicians for its association with the depiction of trades (as in Hans Sach’s book of trades illustrated by Joost Amman in 1568) and as the favored format for depicting allegorical figures (as in the example of Jacob Matham’s engraving of virtues and vices after drawings by Hendrick Goltzius from 1592-1593).129 Although the niche as a framing device appeared earlier in prints and paintings, it is a significant and notable feature of Dou’s paintings; he popularized this format through his repeated use of this compositional design. The inclusion of a trompe l’oeil curtain connected Dou to Parrhasius, the famous classical painter became a personal sign of the artist. This was a familiar trope and the illusionistic revealing curtain was employed by many artists during the seventeenth century to both assert the nobility and superiority of painting in its classical origins and invoke a sense of play with the viewer.130 This is seen in Angel, who writes, “The excellent Zeuxis…contrived to impart great glory to our art, such that he lured the birds out of the sky with his painted fruit, his imitation of it being so natural that it aroused a desire to taste them, and the birds flying down to them were deceived. But Parrhasius, who excelled him as the sun outdoes the moon in radiance and brightness, deceived him with a painted bedsheet, which he tried to remove in order to see Parrhasius’s art, not knowing that he was already seeing it, and he a painter himself. It was thus that our art ascended, step by step, and was held in greater esteem than other arts by many of the great and wise men of the world.”131 The revealing curtain that appears in many of Dou’s paintings and references the trick or joke Zeuxis played on Parrhasius in their contest to paint the most realistic picture most likely

127 Hunnewell, 99.

128 Hollander, 50.

129 Hunnewell, 90-91,96.

130 See Gaskell, “Rembrandt Van Rijn and Gerrit Dou: An Evolving Relationship?,” for a discussion of how Dou’s depiction of the revealing curtain fostered a specific kind of visual engagement with viewers.

131 Angel, 235.

35 had a personal significance for Dou. In 1662, the Leiden poet Dirck Tradenius wrote a poem praising Dou as den Hollandeschen Parrhasius: if Zeuxis saw this banquet, he would be deceived again: Here lies no paint, but life and spirit on the panel. Dou does not paint, oh no, he performs magic with the brush.132 It seems improbable that Dou was not aware of the comparison between himself and Parrhasius and his consistent use of a revealing curtain suggests that he may have cultivated this connection himself. 133 Dou’s appropriation of Duquesnoy’s relief Children with a Goat of cavorting and mischievous children tricking a goat being fooled by a mask adds a decorative element to the otherwise plain stone niche (Fig. 13). This relief is a statement about how painting is superior to sculpture and a commentary on the how art can even fool nature.134 Much like the tongue in cheek sentiment behind Parrhasius’s bedsheet, this is a jocular scene that inserts a sense of humor and wit into Dou’s paintings. Hecht notes that, “it is decidedly funny that sculpture can do no better than child’s play with a mask, whereas painting can…represent all things.”135 This kind of joking and quick wit on the part of the artist is a familiar trope from artists’ biographies. When jokes and pranks appear in artists biographies, they also serve to highlight the artist’s superiority over his peers and this visual quotation of a joke both justifies the deception inherent in Dou’s manner of illusionistic fine painting and asserts his superiority over other artists.136 In themselves the stone niche, Duquesnoy relief and revealing curtain are elements that appear in the paintings of other generations of artists and have a place within the conventions of pictorial representations from the fifteenth century onward. However, the distinctive combination of these motifs in Dou’s paintings allows them to collectively function as an emblem or impresa of the artist. 137 These foreground elements are deployed in the service of

132 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting, “ 209.

133 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 209.

134 Hecht, “Art Beats Nature,” 191.

135 Hecht, “Art Beats Nature,” 191.

136 Ernst Kris and Otto Kurtz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 99-100.

137 The idea that these elements are referents, signs or emblems of the artist is supported by Hollander, who specifically understands the Duquesnoy relief as his pictorial signature or impresa. Hollander, 101.

36 constructing and creating an illusionistic space, but also act as signposts of the artist’s presence as the viewer observes various elements of the picture. These descriptive details can be interpreted as themselves allegorical in nature; although they represent material objects, they are also an extension of, and allusion to, their maker. As Christopher Wood states, “The descriptive detail [of illusionism] is almost allegorical; it points away from its obvious referent towards some absent significance.”138 In other words, they are allegorical and emblematic in that they reference some absent significance. The absent significance these elements reference is the artist, Dou, whose ‘sure and certain drawing hand’ renders the astonishing detail of these increasingly self-reflexive, illusionistic pictures that call attention to their representational status.139 Dou very clearly created a name for himself in the novelty and identifiability of his style and compositional format, yet his signature even more clearly performs the dual role of signaling the artist within the pictorial frame, and as such asserts his presence. His signature is an indexical referent of the artist, it is a sign not only that the painting is an extension of the artist, but also implies that the artist is the subject of the painting. Dou’s earliest extant signed and dated painting is The Young Violinist of 1637.140 From at least this date onward, his signature was a regular feature of his paintings. This is Dou’s most conspicuous and most important referent because he consistently signed his paintings in the same manner throughout his career. In Man with a Pipe at a Window, his signature is prominently placed and clearly visible in the cartellino directly beneath the central figure (Figs. 5, 14). In compositions organized within the nisstuk format, his signature is most often on the protruding ledge of the stone niche, as is the case in The Poultry Shop (1670) (Figs.15, 16). These examples demonstrate that he most often placed his name either on ledge of the stone niche or on pages of book next to, or in close proximity to, the main figure of the composition.

138 Wood, 350.

139 This will be taken up again in Chapter 3 in the comparison between the way Dou and Samuel van Hoogstraten’s paintings display self-referentiality and construction of identity across genres. Brusati points out that this trend is not isolated to these two artists when she writes, “It is true that van Hoogstraten’s illusionistic pictures of these years (1650s) reflect a more general trend in mid-century painting toward increasingly self-reflexive artifice – evident in the frequent inclusion of feigned curtains, frames, and similar devices which call attention to the representational status of pictures.” Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 63.

140 Baer, “The Young Violinist,” 78.

37 Dou’s habitual use of personal symbol or monogram to mark authorship was an established practice by the seventeenth century. In northern Europe, it became standard for artists working in print media in the early fifteenth century. The use of a monogram or identifying mark of the artist was a recognizable sign of authorship and served the purpose of advertising the print’s origin and asserting its value.141 Albrecht Dürer is a famous early example of this historical development, especially in the context of copyright and intellectual property issues.142 Dou, like Dürer often dated and signed a painting in the center of the composition. Dou’s signature (GDov) is more of a monogram in fact, especially in comparison to how Rembrandt and Steen signed their works (Figs. 17, 18). Dou’s sign of authorship has a printed look, as if it were stamped onto the panel, whether it appears on the surface of stone, wood, or some nebulous background surface.143 This printed monogram authenticates authorship and declares that the value of the painting is connected to its maker as well as the meticulously wrought objects that seduce and entice the observer’s eye. Yet, it also goes beyond merely documenting authorship. For Dou, his signature announces the image as fictional, as a construct and as representation, whether placed within the middle-ground of the pictorial space or on the marginal space of the stone ledge – a space that clearly mediates between the space of the viewer and the pictorial space. It also signals a self-consciousness on the part of the artist and asserts that the image functions as a symbolic extension of himself. Louisa Matthews proposes a similar notion for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian artists, stating, “The placing of a signature on a painting is a conscious act by the painter that establishes his or her presence. That presence communicates outward to the viewer, but also communicates information about the painter’s relationship inward, to the painting itself: its form, subject, and even the process of its creation.”144 She goes on to state, “As signatures became more illusionistically engaged with the pictorial image and accordingly

141 Koerner, 203.

142 Koerner, 208-209.

143 Interestingly, Baer notes that Dou also signed legal documents with his ‘GDov’ signature as seen in paintings. Baer, “The Paintings of Gerrit Dou,” 7, note 20.

144 Louisa C. Matthews, “The Painter’s Presence: Signatures in Venetian Renaissance Pictures.” The Art Bulletin 80/4 (1998): 616.

38 more subject to the invention of the painter, they functioned as a vivid, if often overlooked, indicator of the increasingly complex and self-conscious status of their creators.”145 Genre Paintings as Self-Portraits While Dou does make the distinction between true self-portraits and self-referential genre and studio images, he is not averse to projecting his identity across these genres.146 The impetus for thinking of images in this way stems from the exhibition Johan de Bye held in 1665, where twenty-seven of Dou’s paintings could be seen in one room. Among the paintings shown were: The Night School, Woman Playing a Clavicord, Couple in a Wine Cellar, Dropsical Woman, Three People Playing Cards, and three self-portraits (Figs. 3, 4). Within one space, individuals had the opportunity to compare his self-portraits and genre paintings and to ruminate on the artist both within and behind all the paintings. Viewers could see Dou as both the beginning and end of both self-portraits and genre scenes through the elements of his signature, nisstuk composition and Duquesnoy relief.147 The inclusion of these elements in many of his paintings suggests there is a parallel signification across a range of painting genres and as such these motifs brought Dou, the artist, to mind for viewers. Similar to the self-portraits, the main figure or action of the figure in the genre scenes is important because there is a personal significance of that action or figure for Dou; they encapsulate his professional aspirations and artistic concerns. His genre pictures are reflections on the perceptions of artists and the craft of painting, while also thematizing his professional and artistic concerns; they are not just about ‘the art of painting’ in some generalized sense. This notion becomes clear in his scenes of the artist in his studio. One of the earliest of these, The Artist in His Studio (1630-32), Dou painted while he was still training in Rembrandt’s

145 Matthews, 616. Joseph Koerner makes a similar connection between Dürer, the body of the artist, and his signature. In discussing Dürer’s drawing of a nude woman from 1501 he states, “Dürer’s idealized nude, isolated from any landscape or narrative and rendered as pure, self-enclosed contour, is linked through inscription, date, and monogram to another monolithic presence: the artist himself as economic man, defining his intellectual property and protecting it from usurpation or disfiguration by lesser talents.” Koerner, 218.

146 This is suggested by an image like The Quack, which is the only instance where he placed his true self-portrait in a genre scene. He usually preferred to separate genre and self-portraiture and even here he seems hesitant to literally inhabit the pictorial world of the quack, since he painted himself into the composition at a later stage of painting and he has not left the space of his studio, only leans out the window. Lammertse, 114.

147 Dou also had several visitors to his studio during his career, especially during the 1660s, who also would have had the opportunity to make comparisons between his self-portraits and genre paintings and draw similar conclusions. For example, Ole Borch (a Danish scholar) visited in 1662, Balthasar de Monconys (French traveler) in 1663, and Cosimo III de’Medici (grand duke of Tuscany) in 1669. Joachim von Sandrart visited Dou’s studio at the beginning of his career in 1639. See Baer, “The Life of Gerrit Dou,” 31-33

39 studio (Fig. 19). In this image an artist, holding a palette and brushes, sits before a table filled with still-life elements: a book, lute, skull, pen and ink, a globe and mask lie on the floor in the foreground. The artist sits adjacent to an easel, with a large painting whose subject is not shown to the viewer. The arrangement of the composition highlights the importance of study and learning, as well as the importance of making or creating paintings. The still-life elements, which refer to the painter’s learning, implies an intellectualized workspace, where Dou is again pictor doctus; he is an educated, poetically inspired painter/creator of noble subjects. 148 Gaskell argues that Dou’s scenes of the artist in his studio “shows Dou’s self-conscious concern with the nature of his art” and that this self-consciousness possibly stemmed from the influence of Rembrandt.149 Although the message of the painting is allegorical because it is both about the art of painting and the identity of the artist, the studio space appears more realistic, in the manner of Rembrandt’s slightly earlier Artist in His Studio (1627-28), as opposed to the imagined and ideal space of Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (1662-68) (Figs. 20, 21).150 In this early Artist in His Studio, Dou has not yet adopted his distinctive nisstuk format and revealing curtain, but it is as self-reflective of the artist as later scenes like Artist in His Studio (1649), which is constructed in his trademark manner (Fig. 22). This later image presents a similar allegorical image of the artist, yet it is the more imagined and ideal kind of studio space of Vermeer than the sparse realistic space of Rembrandt.151 One of the reason for these variations is that “By the

148 H. Perry Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer,” in Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Michael Cole and Mary Pardo (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 131.

149 Gaskell, “Gerrit Dou and Trompe L’oeil,” The Burlington Magazine 123/936 (1981): 164.

150 notes that Rembrandt’s studio scene depicts a relatively bare workspace, and that the painters position at a remove from his easel indicates that the painter is not working but thinking. Van de Wetering argues that this act of thinking is key to the picture’s meaning; a painter first makes a picture in his mind before he paints it, he is not slavish copyist of nature, ideas, imagination and thought are important. Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 87-88. Chapman also interprets the painter in Rembrandt’s picture as a solitary, introspective individual. The viewer is not given access to the picture being painted or the artist’s working method; emphasis is on the sense of interior process by which he chooses what to paint. Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer,” 119.

151 Vermeer’s The Art of Painting depicts the artist’s studio as an ideal space where his profession and craft are put on display. This painting is a much more overt statement through the positioning of the central elements. There is triangular relationship between artist, canvas and model, placing manual labor and inspiration on view in same space. The elements of the map and model indicate that the painter paints naer het leven and uyt gheest, from life and imagination. The inclusion of Clio, the muse of history whose trumpet and laurel are related to honor and glory, suggest that Vermeer practices the art of painting in the service of honor and glory. Sluijter propose that Vermeer’s painting is a statement that illusionistic painting which captures visible world and renders immune from the passage

40 seventeenth century, the studio was not just a subject of painting, but one through which artists could make their most ambitious statements about the nature of their vocation.”152 The space of the artist’s studio could be conceptualized in many ways: it was moralizing, allegorical, didactic, realistic, commercial, inspirational, and emblematic. There were many variations on the studio scene in the work of Dou and other seventeenth-century artists since social and economic realities were forcing painters to visually and practically reconceptualize their profession. The pictorial tradition of scenes of the artist in his studio stemmed from depictions of St. Luke drawing the Virgin and from Apelles, the classical court painter. However, the visual conventions and connotations of these scenes were no longer pertinent to many artists in the Dutch Republic. Artists did not necessarily identify with St. Luke because they were not primarily painting altarpieces and devotional images, nor did they specifically identify with Apelles as the model court painter due to the relative paucity of noble patrons in the Dutch Republic.153 Dou chose to conceptualize the space and craft of the artist in a way that is both realistic and allegorical. Similar to his 1645 Self-Portrait and 1647 Self-Portrait, Dou conflates the painter and scholar and presents both intellectual and manual aspects of his craft within the same pictorial space. He does not seem to value one over the other since both are needed to become the ideal painter. There were, in fact, competing and ostensibly incongruous conceptions of the ideal artist proposed by individuals like Philips Angel and Franciscus Junius. In Lof der Schilder-konst, Angel emphasized the civic importance of artists, in that they bring wealth and fame to a city. In De pictura Veterum also published in Dutch in 1641, Junius attacks artists who conduct themselves as craftsmen and practice art solely to earn a living. 154 He reiterates the humanist notion that painters should seek honor above gold, or “eer boven Golt,” to quote Hendrick

of time; ars longa vita brevis. See Eric Jan Sluijter, “Vermeer, Fame, and Female Beauty: The Art of Painting,” in Vermeer Studies. Studies in the History of Art v.55. Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XXXIII, ed. Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker (, Washington. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 266-267, Sluijter, “Vermeer, Fame and Female Beauty,” 271, Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer,” 108-109 and 143.

152 Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, “Origins of the Studio.” in Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Michael Cole and Mary Pardo (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 25.

153 Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer,” 127.

154 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 215.

41 Goltzius. 155 Painters should be motivated by amoris causa, the love of art, and not the pursuit of money and fame. Whether or not Dou charted his career according to the suggestions of individuals like Angel and Junius, his paintings display an accommodation of both these ideas. In his scenes of the artist in his studio, grocery scenes and self-portraits, Dou forwards the notion that he does indeed paint amoris causa, but in practicing his skill, he is also able to amass great wealth and prestige from his art. These various paintings complement each other to show that Dou does not disavow one conception of the artist at the expense of the other. Perhaps the message is that the best artist is he who can be all things to all people and that Dou was in fact such a figure. Dou’s scenes of grocery shops complement his scenes of the artist in his studio and self- portraits. He began to paint grocery scenes in the 1640s and would continue to depict them until the end of his life (Figs. 2, 15, 23). A prime example is The Grocer Shop (1647), which is his earliest known grocery scene and nisstuk painting (Fig. 23).156 In this image, a young maid is purchasing goods and a saleswoman is weighing or calculating the cost of goods, while an older woman counts money. The role of the boy in the background is not entirely clear; perhaps he is another customer or an attendant to the saleswoman. It is not necessarily important what the girl is buying, but that emphasis of the action is on transaction and sales. This comenij, or general store, was a place where both local and exotic goods were sold.157 This and the other grocery shops like The Poultry Shop (1670) refer to the importance of selling, of transaction and exchange (Fig. 15). In the later Poultry Shop, Dou has included the three elements that identify him with the picture: nisstuk format, Duquesnoy relief and prominently placed signature. These representative comenij scenes are a novel and personal statement by Dou not only in his emblematic reference to himself, but also in terms of pictorial innovation. Sluijter notes that there were no immediate precursors to these paintings in the 1620s and1630s. They were a new type of genre scene, which only vaguely echo the kitchen scenes by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Bueckelaer, making these images all the more individual to Dou.158

155 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 214, note 63 and 215.

156 Sutton, “Introduction,” in Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984), xli.

157 Ronni Baer, “The Grocery Shop,” in Gerrit Dou 1613-1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 134.

42 In both images of controlled economic exchange, Dou is pictor economicus, whose reward for superior and unrivaled products/paintings is fame and fortune, on both local and international levels. The Grocer Shop, in particular, with its emphasis on market and exchange in relation to painting, is an interesting foil to the 1647 Self-Portrait, with its emphasis on the erudition and intellectual pursuits that form the foundation of great paintings, since both date from 1647. The pairing of these two paintings allows for a glimpse of Dou as pictor doctus and pictor economicus and indicates that these aspects of Pictura need not be exclusive of each other. Considering the intellectual atmosphere of Leiden it is not surprising that in proposing himself as an exemplary artist of unrivaled skill Dou painted many genre scenes that highlight his learning and intellect and emphasize his artistic superiority. Dou’s genre scenes of doctors, astronomers, writers, as well as his night school pictures highlight the importance of this theme for self-identification and capitalize on its appeal for local audiences. The Doctor (1660-65) and The Astronomer (1665) both show a central figure absorbed in the task of his profession and, as such, these images display an emphasis on observation of the visible world (Figs. 24, 25). In The Doctor, there is the added suggestion of a narrative component in the figure of the woman who appears to be waiting on the doctor’s diagnosis. Didactic interpretations are often proposed for these kinds of images, however that kind of interpretation is not of prime importance here. In both paintings, the somber atmosphere and concentrated expression of the central figure imply a seriousness of pursuit and diligence on the part of these actors. Both the astronomer and the doctor are not on a street or an open public area, but are in a more private interior space that suggests a kind of professionalization and regulation. In The Doctor, the placement of a large, almost oversized document sanctioning his practice suggests the struggle of doctors, as well as artists, against negative perceptions and preconceptions.159 In The Doctor and The Astronomer Dou employed his typical nisstuk format, revealing curtain and prominently placed signature, identifying the artist as key in understanding this image. And, similar to his grocery scenes, he was instrumental in popularizing these kinds of images among later artists.160 These images profess that as an artist, Dou was not only equal but

158 Sluijter, “On Fijnschilders and Meaning,” 273.

159 Fresia, 55-56.

160 Sutton notes that Dou’s Doctor’s Visit of 1653 was one of the earliest representations of a doctor’s visit among seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Sutton, 299.

43 superior to university-trained professionals. Doctors and astronomers can know the visible world through the use of their university acquired skills, but artists can not only comprehend the natural world, they can replicate it; Dou is alter deus. His art embraces and recreates the entire visible world, or again in the words of van Hoogstraten , “the Art of Painting is a science for representing all the ideas or notions that visible nature in its entirety can produce, and for deceiving the eye with outline and color.”161 Dou again asserts that painting’s ability to encompass the visible world and deceive viewers is a positive aspect of his craft. This is perhaps a direct challenge to those, like the poet Dirck Raphaelsz Camphuyzen, who disliked painting as a “Seductress of sight, spellbound by all that is transient” since it is nothing more than “eye temptation” or worse yet “venom for the eye” and “the food of evil lust and villainous idiocy.”162 In his genre scene of The Violin Player (1665), Dou again confronts negative conceptions of the artist and specifically criticisms related to his genre subjects and style of fine painting (Fig. 26). In this image, a man, playing a violin leans on the ledge of a stone niche. The Violin Player depicts the Duquesnoy relief below this ledge and both show the artist’s signature in the foreground, just below the central figure. The background of The Violin Player presents the setting as that of an artist’s studio, although the violin player is alone in the studio and the space behind him is more clearly articulated with objects like the painting hanging on the back wall and the globe next to the easel and chair. Music is not out of place in an artist’s studio, as they were thought to be inspirational to painters in the seventeenth century.163 Dou’s style allows him to render various objects in minute detail, but the conception of his paintings is also indebted to various sources of imagination and inspiration. In these images he pairs the technical and intellectual aspects of painting and claims to work both naer het leven (from life) and uyt den gheest (from imagination); these dual aspects are required for the conception and production of paintings.164

161 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 158.

162 Sluijter, “Introduction,” 12. Camphuyzen also calls painting “an enticing deceit of the eye openly showing us the real disposition of those who make and possess them,” again underscoring the notion that individuals did indeed perceive a direct and personal connection between a painter and his paintings, 12.

163 See Hans-Joachim Raupp, “Musik im Atelier.” Oud Holland 92 (1978): 106-129 and Georg A. Brongers, Nicotiana Tabacum: The History of Tobacco and Tobacco Smoking in the Netherlands (Amsterdam: H.J.W. Becht's Uitgeversmaatsc, 1965).

44 In these images, Dou confronts those who disapproved of his subjects and style. For example, Houbracken lamented, It is to be regretted that the man’s intellect was not applied to more important considerations, and his brush set to the depiction of more worthy and valuable subjects: but it is lamented, or wished for, in vain, seeing that it is not so and [that] no change can take place in this respect, because, having moved to the dark grave with all his contemporaries, he is no more. There are two considerations that people suppose may have been the reason why he always stuck to the depiction of lesser matters; the first that he had developed so strict a routine in life that he could not and would not do otherwise […] or that his spirit was not able to push through to those heights [of philosophy] and therefore (with respect to the choice of subjects) kept himself down,” or more simply, Dou rendered “nothing more than elevated than a splendid accumulation of nature morte.165

Houbracken contradicts himself somewhat here. Earlier I cited a passage where he marveled at the detail and brushwork of Dou’s paintings and even stated that, “as far as his art is concerned, it does itself celebrate the intellect of its maker.”166 Apparently, this is a backhanded compliment, because Houbracken also suggests that Dou does not possess the intellectual prowess to fully grasp complex history subjects. Dou seems to have faced this perception of himself and his art in 1652, if not earlier, when Queen Christina of Sweden returned several of his paintings that did not suit her taste. Perhaps this is why he specifically shows himself as a painter of histories in his 1635-38 Self-Portrait, although that would not prove to be an accurate claim for the subject of most of his paintings. Ultimately, Dou’s professional and artistic concerns are thematized within images that are explicitly self-referential, and as such they suggest the formation and projection of identity through such paintings. In all of these genre scenes of musicians, smokers, doctors, grocers and artists, Dou collapsed and conflated ideas from self-portraits into these images to create a more complete picture of the artist’s public, professional identity. The confluence of referents (nisstuk format, Duquesnoy relief, revealing curtain and fijnschilder style) in both self-portraiture and genre scenes construct a portrait of the artist across these categories of painting because these referents come from the artist’s hand and refer to the artist himself. Dou’s genre scenes attempt to complement, amplify and amend established topoi and perceptions of the artist as deceiver and charlatan, as slavish imitator of nature, as marginal outsider, as mercenary, as Rhyparographi or

164 Claudia Swan, “Ad Vivum, naer het leven, from the life: Defining a mode of representation.” Word and Image 11/4 (1995): 354 and Hollander, 49.

165 Horn, 456.

166 Horn, 456.

45 schildes van kleyne beuzelingen (painter of little trifles) who is unable or unwilling to take on the more worthy and elevated subjects of history.167 Dou’s paintings are a celebration of versatility and virtuosity of his artistic skills, and through them he was intent on establishing himself as a leading artistic and civic figure in Leiden. Dou wanted audiences to perceive him as an artist without rival because in the end, ars longa vita brevis, or as Angel eloquently states, “we will wrest free of the devouring maw of mortality through our art and vanquish it, despite the breaker of all necks [death].”168

167 Phrase from van Hoogstraten, Sutton, xv. This is later echoed in Houbracken when he laments that Dou did not paint ‘more worthy and valuable subjects’ but restricted himself to ‘the depiction of lesser matters,’ Horn, 456.

168 Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting,” 220.

46 CHAPTER 3

PERSONA AND IDENTITY ACROSS GENRES: REMBRANDT, JAN STEEN AND SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN

The previous chapter argued that Dou’s self-referential genre and studio scenes and self- portraits provided the means through which he projected his professional artistic identity. I also suggested that in not relegating the construction of identity solely to self-portraits, Dou effectively blurred the boundaries between these genres of painting. This chapter compares Dou’s self-referential and allegorical mode of representing himself in both self-portraiture, studio image and genre scenes, with the figures of Rembrandt (1606-1669), Steen (1626-1679) and van Hoogstraten (1627-1678). In the genesis of this thesis, I looked to Chapman and Westermann’s interpretation of Rembrandt and Steen, and Brusati’s interpretation of Samuel van Hoogstraten as comparable models for interpreting the construction of identity and the intersection of genre and self-portraiture in Dou’s oeuvre. As suggested in the Introduction, Dou was not alone in projecting identity in pictures other than those of self-portraits and as such these three artists also manipulated and distorted the boundaries between genre and self-portrait. There is a more direct and obvious convergence of genre and self-portraiture in the paintings of Rembrandt and Jan Steen than in Dou’s images. They insert their mimetic likeness into genre scenes and history paintings so that they become essential characters in the depicted narrative. A notable example by Rembrandt is his Self-Portrait with Saskia in a Scene of the Prodigal Son in a Tavern (1635) (Fig. 27). There is a sense of performance and re-enactment, an emphasis on imagined identities, in Rembrandt’s self-portraits so it is perhaps not surprising to note his presence in history scenes like that of the prodigal son. Brusati contends that, “For Rembrandt, self-portraiture involved fashioning a virtual theatre of the self, a world made in his own image in the studio. What Rembrandt reveals in these images is not so much who he is or how he wanted to be seen, but rather his ability to imagine his way into the roles he enacts – from the disheveled beggar in the early etched self-portrait, to the watchful warrior in Kassel and the stern ruler of the 1634 etched self portrait, to the dashing courtier of 1640, the contemplative Saint Paul of 1661, and the ironically laughing old painter of the Cologne self-portrait.”169 With Rembrandt it is difficult to decipher his purpose in adopting roles such as that of the prodigal son, unlike Dou, who does reveal how he wants to be seen in his paintings. Rembrandt

169 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 142-143.

47 does not seem to encourage the viewer to define him as a prodigal son, particularly since he does not adopt this role consistently throughout his paintings. Similar to illusionistic paintings where the viewer cannot be deceived and acknowledge the object as a painting simultaneously, audiences cannot literally understand Rembrandt as the prodigal son and as the artist at the same time, although perhaps they can perceive the artist as playing the role of prodigal son. The multiplicity of Rembrandt’s roles tends to obscure rather than reveal the artist. However, this does not discount the notion that Rembrandt was attempting to negotiate and construct his professional identity through his self-portraits and pictures like Self-Portrait with Saskia in a Scene from the Prodigal Son in a Tavern. Chapman argues that: Rembrandt’s self portraits…represent a lifelong process of negotiating his professional identity that was necessitated in part by discrepancies between the old humanist ideal and the realities of being a painter in Holland. Far from being random, assorted theatrical guises, his extraordinarily varied self-images distanced him from the traditional humanist ideal: by portraying himself as beggar or prodigal Rembrandt allied himself with an artistic antitype; by donning imaginary chains of honor and alluding to portraits he crafted an entirely fictional version of the courtly ideal; and, later in his life, by representing himself in a painterly manner as the painter in the studio, in working attire, holding the tools of his craft, he affirmed an alternative notion of the artist whose esteem derives from his art alone.170

Rembrandt’s representation of himself in self-portraits, and history and genre scenes were a meditation on his art and craft, and this visual meditation reflected the complexities of negotiating his status as painter within various social, economic and pictorial traditions at work in the seventeenth-century. Jan Steen’s projected identity and goal in transgressing and blurring the categorical distinctions between genre and self-portraiture in images such as The Doctor’s Visit (1660-65) and Self-Portrait as a Lutenist (1660-63) is somewhat more opaque than Rembrandt (Figs. 28, 29). In these images, Steen subverts pictorial convention and pushes the limits of self- portraiture.171 He consistently portrays himself in comedic and farcical roles, thereby constructing his identity as a comic painter and person. However, he was more than just a consummate joker. Chapman argues that Steen set out to merge pictorial types and to fabricate a completely fictionalized comic persona for several reasons. He conflated real and pictorial

170 H. Perry Chapman, “Review of Kwesties van betekenis: Thema en motief in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw, by E. de Jongh, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine, by Laurinda S. Dixon, Dutch Flower Painting 1600-1720, by Paul Taylor, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten, by Celeste Brusati.” The Art Bulletin (1997): 10.

171 Chapman, “Jan Steen as Family Man,” 372.

48 characters as a strategy for selling his work and differentiating himself from other artists and as means to claim special insight into the weakness and folly of human nature.172 Although Dou painted his first self-portraits and scenes of the artist in his studio during the time he was in Rembrandt’s studio, he did not follow the model set by his master. Dou literally inhabits the fictionalized pictorial world of his representations only in The Quack, and even in this image he retains his role and identity as painter. The discovery of Dou in his works is different from Steen and Rembrandt, yet it is important to all three that the viewer identifies the artist in their paintings. As stated earlier, in genre scenes like The Poultry Shop, The Astronomer, The Doctor and The Violin Player, the motifs through which the viewer identifies Dou as the primary focus (if not subject) of the painting are essentially non-figural. This is also the case with Samuel van Hoogstraten. He is noteworthy as another seventeenth-century artist who constructed and projected identity in ways that are similar to Dou. In images like Trompe L’oeil Still-Life of 1664 and Trompe L’oeil Still-Life from 1666-68, van Hoogstraten uses emblems, impresa, and texts as substitutes for the artist (Figs. 30, 31). Dou and van Hoogstraten display a concomitant interest in elevating the status of painting through their efforts and achievements as practitioners of this art. The gentlemanly accoutrements, documents, and insignia of these still-lifes testify to van Hoogstraten’s elevated social status through his achievement as painter and poet.173 The most important of these seems to have been the medal of honor awarded to him by Ferdinand III, since van Hoogstraten regularly included it in his compositions as an emblem for the artist himself. For all his preoccupation with the status of the artist and art of painting, Dou did not value this kind of traditional symbolic accolade as did van Hoogstraten. In 1669, the Leiden burgomasters requested a painting from Dou in exchange for a chain of honor as well as the honor of a commission. Apparently, this form of compensation did not appeal to Dou since he refused the offer. It is difficult to know whether there is a deeper meaning or significance to this action - if perhaps Dou was spurning the regents for their continued trend of not offering the artists of the city financial support in attempting to pay him with a more abstract rather than monetary recompense. Indeed, there may have been some lingering tension between painters

172 Chapman, “Steen as Player in His Own Paintings,” 12, 16, 21.

173 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 96.

49 and regents, for Frans van Mieris the Elder also refused a similar offer by the Leiden burgomasters in this same year.174 Dou’s response to the request may have been different had the Leiden regents approached him thirty years earlier, at a time when these honors could have been important in establishing his reputation within the city. There are several factors that may have led him to refuse their request. At this late date, at the age of fifty-six, he had started to curtail his production and after 1670 there are few extant paintings by the artist.175 Furthermore, he had been receiving praise and accolades both locally and internationally for almost thirty years. By this point in Dou’s career the added honor of a commission and chain of honor may not have been equal to the value of a painting conceivably worth up to 1000 fl. Similar to Dou’s genre scenes, van Hoosgstraten’s Trompe L’oeil Still-Life of 1664 and Trompe L’oeil Still-Life of 1666-68 are self-reflective in facture, allowing the artist to be absorbed into these images and thus become self-portraits. As Brusati argues, “van Hoogstraten literally identifies himself with this pictorial artifice…which equate self-representation with the crafting of a pictorial deception.”176 Brusati posits that van Hoogstraten wished to be recognized in his art and artifice of crafting images and not just in the few self-portraits that present his mimetic likeness.177 He aspired to be a universal master who could vie with competitors in all pictorial specialties, and strove to raise his social status through his successes as a painter. Both van Both Hoogstraten and Dou measured pictorial achievement in terms of universal competence, in variety or verscheydenheyt and in imitative virtuosity rather than inventions of histories or figural narratives.178 This idea is familiar from Dou’s paintings of astronomers, quacks and doctors as discussed earlier. Unlike Rembrandt, van Hoogstraten’s self representation remained tied to a single identity and unlike Steen he did not try to claim insight into the follies of human nature.179 He never portrayed himself as beggar, prodigal son, or any other character with whom he did not identify. This was a product of his quest for royal patronage and

174 Gaskell, “Dou and His Patrons,” 21.

175 The Poultry Shop is one of the few paintings Baer dates to 1670. See Baer, “The Paintings of Gerrit Dou.”

176 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 62.

177 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 138.

178 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 5.

179 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 42.

50 recognition and desire to attain patrician status “as if he first created in pictures what he sought to become in life.”180 Admittedly, this notion of blurring boundaries is more speculative for Dou than for van Hoogstraten, Steen and Rembrandt. Although they paint in a similar self-reflexive manner, the elements within van Hoogstraten’s compositions are more directly personal and refer more specifically to biographical events. And, Rembrandt and Steen’s insertion of their self-portrait into genre and history scenes more directly transgress the pictorial boundaries between categories of painting. However, they all, “exemplif[y] the predilection of Dutch artists for representing themselves in complex images that meditate on the relationship of craft and pictorial artistry to other forms of deception, both licit and illicit.”181

180 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 144-45.

181 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 153.

51 CONCLUSION

Throughout the argument of this thesis, I have retained a certain amount of skepticism about the notion that ‘every painter paints himself.’ This topos should by no means be taken as a given for every artist and the succinctness of this phrase belies the complexities of coming to terms with this idea in the paintings of an artist like Gerrit Dou. Did Gerrit Dou in fact paint himself in his genre and studio scenes as well as his self-portraits? How did he paint himself in his self-portraits, and how does this compare to how he painted himself in his genre scenes? What is the self that he presented and what are the motivations behind displaying this identity to his audiences? In this thesis, I argued that artists like Gerrit Dou, Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Samuel van Hoogstraten did perceive an important relationship between self-portraiture and other kinds of images. Even as far back as ‘the moment of self-portraiture’ in the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century works of Albrecht Dürer, Koerner observes a transference of self between the poses of his self-portraits and those of his other images, stating “The artist has observed and represented himself only so that, once his pose is subtracted from the specificity and implied subjectivity of a self-portrait, it can enter into more impersonal works of art. Yet once invested with his likeness – once linked, however obliquely, to the moment of self- portraiture – that pose will carry with it the face of its maker. Thus it is that, without any recognizable likeness of Dürer himself, the Melancholia engraving can be called a self- portrait.”182 Artists used paintings that claimed a relation between the body and mind of its maker to make concerted and self-conscious statements about themselves within a changing social and economic environment.183 There is an additional level of complexity to this idea with several of the artists in this thesis, especially Dou and Rembrandt. Both artists had various pupils and followers who imitated their well-known and popular paintings, but unlike Rembrandt, Dou does not have a team of scholars researching the authorship and authenticity of his paintings.184 Issues of

182 Koerner, 27.

183 Koerner, 33.

184 The Rembrandt Research Project, founded in 1958, has examined the body of paintings connected to Rembrandt’s name, with the aim of identifying and distinguishing those by Rembrandt’s hand, by his named and anonymous students and followers. See A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings: 1625-1631, Volume I, (Rembrandt Research Project Foundation), (: Springer, 1982); A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings: 1631-1634, Volume II, (Rembrandt Research Project Foundation), (Dordrecht: Springer, 1986; A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings: 1635-

52 connoisseurship problematize notions of identity for both these artists, and although Ronnie Baer made it her project to authenticate Dou’s oeuvre in her dissertation on the artist, Frans van Mieris, Godfried Schalcken, and Dominicus Tol so successfully copied and imitated many of Dou’s nisstuk genre scenes, and at times even included his signature, that debates over attribution of some of the paintings persist.185 Confusion as to authorship may complicate my suggestion that identity is distinguishable in a painting where the artist has not inserted himself by means of a true self-portrait, yet this does not invalidate my proposition that Dou’s projection of identity transgressed the boundaries of painting’s genres as they are traditionally understood. A fruitful extension to the ideas of this thesis would be an exploration of artistic identity for other painters in the school of Leiden fijnschilders within a similar framework. These artists, like Dou, are usually left out of the discourse on artistic identity that surrounds Rembrandt, Steen and van Hoogstraten. Despite the move toward more thematically based studies on seventeenth-century Dutch art, the idea of artistic identity and how it is both constructed and communicated is still approached rather piecemeal and atomistically for artists of the Dutch Republic, and this study of Gerrit Dou is a elementary but well-intentioned attempt to broaden the scope of scholar’s understanding of artistic identity for artists of the Dutch Republic in general.

1642, Volume III, (Rembrandt Research Project Foundation), (Dordrecht: Springer, 1990; A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings: 1643-1669, Volume IV, (Rembrandt Research Project Foundation), (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005.

185 His early (history) paintings are especially prone to questions of attribution. Anna and the Blind Tobit is a well- known example of this.

53 APPENDIX: FIGURES

Figure 1 Gerrit Dou, The Hermit, 1670, Oil on panel, 46 x 34.5cm, National Gallery Washington, Timken Collection (Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan, 2004)

Figure 2 Gerrit Dou, The Grocery Shop, 1672, Oil on panel, 48.8 x 35cm, Royal Collection, London (Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” 2000)

54

Figure 3 Gerrit Dou, The Night School, c.1623-65, Oil on panel, 53 x 40.3cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Franits, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, 2004)

Figure 4 Gerrit Dou, Woman at a Clavicord, c.1665, Oil on panel, 37.7 x 29.8cm, Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (Hecht, De Hollandse Fijnschilders, 1989)

55

Figure 5 Gerrit Dou, Man with a Pipe at a Window, c.1645, Oil on panel, 48 x 37cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Hecht, De Hollandse Fijnschilders, 1989)

Figure 6 Gerrit Dou, The Violin Player, 1653, Oil on panel, 31.7 x 20.3cm, Princely Collections, Vaduz Castle, Liechtenstein (Hecht, “Art Beats Nature,” 2002)

56

Figure 7 Gerrit Dou, The Quack, 1652, Oil on panel, 112 x 83cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1983)

Figure 8 Gerrit Dou, Self-Portrait, c.1645, Oil on panel, 12.4 x 8.3cm, private collection, Spain (Martin, Gerard Dou: des meisters gemälde in 247 abbildungen, 1913)

57

Figure 9 Gerrit Dou, Self-Portrait, 1635-38, Oil on panel, 18.3 x 14cm, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums (Blankert, The Impact of a Genius, 1983)

Figure 10 Gerrit Dou, Artist in His Studio (Self-Portrait), 1647, 43 x 34.5cm. oil on panel. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden (Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, 1983)

58

Figure 11 Gerrit Dou, Self-Portrait, 1663, Oil on panel, 54.7 x 39.4cm, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Purchase: Nelson Trust) (Sluijter, “Striving to Adorne their houses,” 2001)

Figure 12 Gerrit Dou, Self-Portrait, c.1665, Oil on panel, 59 x 43.5cm, private collection, Boston (Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” 2000)

59

Figure 13 Gerrit Dou, The Violin Player (Detail), 1653, Oil on panel, 31.7 x 20.3cm, Princely Collections, Vaduz Castle, Liechtenstein (Hecht, “Art Beats Nature,” 2002)

Figure 14 Gerrit Dou, Man with a Pipe at a Window (Detail), c.1645, Oil on panel, 48 x 37cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Hecht, De Hollandse Fijnschilders, 1989)

60

Figure 15 Gerrit Dou, The Poultry Shop, 1670, Oil on panel, 58 x 46cm, The National Gallery, London (Sluijter, Leidse Fijnschilders, 1988)

Figure 16 Gerrit Dou, The Poultry Shop (Detail), 1670, Oil on panel, 58 x 46cm, The National Gallery, London (Sluijter, Leidse Fijnschilders, 1988)

Figure 17 Jan Steen, The Drawing Lesson (Detail), 1665, Oil on panel, 49.2 x 41.3cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Chapman, Jan Steen Painter and Storyteller, 1996)

61

Figure 18 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait (Detail), 1640, Oil on canvas, 102 x 80 cm, The National Gallery, London (Blankert, “Rembrandt, Zeuxis and Ideal Beauty,” 2004)

Figure 19 Gerrit Dou, Artist in His Studio, c.1630-32, Oil on panel, 59 x 43.5cm, Colnaghi, London (Martin, Gerard Dou: des meisters gemälde in 247 abbildungen, 1913)

62

Figure 20 Rembrandt van Rijn, Artist in His Studio, c.1627-28, Oil on panel, 25 x 32cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Zoe Oliver Collection. Given in Memory of Lillie Oliver Poor) (Chapman, “Imagined Studios,” 2005)

Figure 21 Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting, c.1662-68, Oil on canvas, 120 x 100cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1983)

63

Figure 22 Gerrit Dou, Artist in His Studio, 1649, Oil on panel, 68.5 x 54cm, Ehemals Wien, Galerie St. Lucas (Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, 1983)

Figure 23 Gerrit Dou, The Grocer’s Shop, 1647, Oil on panel, 38.5 x 29cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes, 2002)

64

Figure 24 Gerrit Dou, The Doctor, c.1660-65, Oil on panel, 38 x 30cm, Statens Musuem for Kunst, Copenhagen (Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan, 2004)

Figure 25 Gerrit Dou, Astronomer by Candlelight, c.1665, Oil on panel, 32 x 21.2cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, 1984)

65

Figure 26 Gerrit Dou, The Violin Player, 1665, Oil on panel, 40 x 29cm, Staatliche Russian Museum, Moscow (Raupp, “Musik im Atelier,” 1978)

Figure 27 Rembrandt van Rijn, Rembrandt and Saskia in the Scene of the Prodigal Son in the Tavern, c. 1635, Oil on canvas, 161 x 131 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden (http://www.wga.hu/index1.html)

66

Figure 28 Jan Steen, Self-Portrait as a Lutenist, c.1660-63, Oil on panel, 55.3 x 43.8cm, Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (http://www.wga.hu/index1.html)

Figure 29 Jan Steen, The Doctor’s Visit, c.1660-65, Oil on panel, 46 x 36.8cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Chapman, Jan Steen Painter and Storyteller, 1996)

67

Figure 30 Samuel van Hoogstraten, Trompe l’oeil Still-life, 1664, 45.5 x 57.5cm, Dordrechts Museum (Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 1995)

Figure 31 Samuel van Hoogstraten, Trompe l’oeil Still-life, c.1666-68, Oil on canvas, 63 x 79 cm, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, 1995)

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78 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Denise Giannino is a master’s candidate in Art History, studying Renaissance and Baroque Art. She received her B.A in English Literature and Art History from Providence College in 1999.

79