DUTCH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DRAWINGS
Thedrawings, the studies, of the Italian Schools, and of all Schools besides, have these sources of interest, always admitted—they reveal to us, as studies must, the personal thought of the master in his theme, and they may often be identified as preparations for some long recognised picture with whose history we are henceforth to be the better acquainted. But some among the drawings of the Dutch School, though coming late indeed in the procession of the world’s Art, are still the earliest to possess for us that different and self-contained interest which belongs to work done for its proper sake, itself realising the intention with which it was begun, and so, in the first form in which it comes down to us, at once final and complete.
The School of Holland—that northern School to which at last, in the great Seventeenth Century, supremacy in Art had moved—was perhaps the first to adequately feel the value of those immediateimpressions which the Italians and the early Flemish had recognised chiefly to control, to alter, to enlarge. And in the many methods of their Art, the masters of Holland sought to perpetuate for the beholders of their work the impressions which to themselves who recorded them had perhaps been as fleeting as vivid. Sketches in oil, sketches in water-colour, sketches in chalk, in bistre, and with the reed pen, and sketches with the etching needle—these all, in the hands of the great Dutchmen, were not merely studies for themselves, but possessions for their public, just as expressive and interesting as work more prolonged and elaborate. Therefore the amount of finish which each of such finished sketches received was not the important matter: with the greatest artists the amount was often but small: they knew that the important matter was the sufficiency of finish—its capacity for conveying to one mind the impression received by another.
And it is characteristic of Dutch Art, and especially of Dutch Landscape Art, that it had no period of painful and tentative labour, like that during which the art of earlier schools had had to struggle slowly towards freedom of expression. Profiting no doubt by the experience of the Past, and the recent Past especially of Bruges and of Leyden, it gained almostat once the power of finish always expressive, always economical, yet often very swift and summary. The work of its earliest masters—Roghman say, and Van Goyen—has neither pettiness of manipulation when it is most delicate, nor uncertainty when it is most rapid. The signs of an art mature and masculine—economy of means, decision of hand—are promptly upon it. Roghman, it appears, made few pictures, but many drawings. There are five-and-twenty in the Museum of Rotterdam alone. His drawings must have been acceptable to the public of his day, and they show that a public then existed capable of the intelligent interpretation of the work of an artist who left much to be interpreted. Van Goyen, if he did not make many drawings, painted many pictures with at least as marked an economy of means as he has used in the few drawings we know. His science of large design and the expressive completeness of his gradations of tone, enabled him—often in picture and drawing alike—to dispense with the easier attraction of various colour, so that even a modern master of colour, Théodore Rousseau, was wont to hold him up as a model to his own pupils.
Van Goyen travelled, and Roghman travelled, but their art, like that of Rembrandt—their younger and greater contemporary, who remained at home—continuedto be not an imported art, but an art of the soil; and it was only at a later period that the experience of travel, and the contact with an art very different from their own, were to bring to the Dutchmen a new method with a false ideal. There was first the true Dutch time, rich and fertile—a time in which Van Goyen painted, with a seeming monotony always delicately varied, the long river banks, the low-lying towns, and the great high skies of Holland; in which Cuyp fixed interest on the common aspects of the afternoon fields, steaming in moist sunshine; in which Adrian van Ostade passed from the vulgarities of the alehouse to the skilfully rendered charm of the cottage door and the bench in the sunlight; in which Jan Steen perfected himself in as keen and comprehensive a knowledge of the world of men as Art has ever displayed; and in which Rembrandt contentedly imaged Dutch life and landscape, always with nearly equal vigour, nearly equal artistic precision, though at one time in a style that formed the style of Gerard Dow and at another in one that was inherited by Philip de Koningh or by Nicholas Maas.
There were various local centres for these various workers and their works. Leyden itself was a centre—the birthplace of Rembrandt, the birthplace ofVan Goyen. The Hague became a centre, and Van Goyen removed to it; Amsterdam a centre, and Rembrandt was a leader there. But Haarlem was the favourite, and probably because of the privileges that belonged to the Guild of St. Luke—St. Luke, the painters’ patron saint—which was established in that town. The Guild of St. Luke at Haarlem has left us valuable records—not indeed the raciest, but certainly among the most trustworthy we can hope to have access to—upon Dutch Art, which has wanted always, and wants to-day, a trustworthy general historian. Laurens Van der Winne (as the Dutch writer, M. van der Willigen, tells us, in hisArtistes d’Harlem), towards the end of the seventeenth century, made a list of one hundred and seventy-four men who in his time were all reputed as good painters, and whom he had personally known. His son, in 1702, after the father’s death, noted that of these only sixteen were then living; and the grandson, possessing himself of manuscript books and account-books of the period, was able to enlarge the list of early members of the Guild, and to add to our knowledge of its laws. ‘No one without the pale of the Society could sell or introduce his pictures. Many painters thus found themselves obliged to join the brotherhood in order to enjoy its advantages. Everyyear two sales were announced by the officer of the Society; each member could bring to the sale whatever he desired to sell.’ ‘Many painters were attracted to the town,’ for lesser or longer periods; but, though many painters contributed to the Guild, ‘it appears,’ writes the Haarlem citizen, ‘that they did not all live here.’ Notwithstanding the advantages of the Guild, the profession of painting was not lucrative for the many. Even the busiest and most prolific artists, like Wouvermans, were debtors sometimes to men who befriended them. Others were so indigent that they must needs be excused their payment of the yearly moneys to the brotherhood. In 1661, Frans Hals, the greatest of the Haarlem masters, found himself in this circumstance. Haarlem, since his death, has happily delighted to honour him.
The art of Holland, like the national life, saw many vicissitudes during that eventful Seventeenth Century; and the second half of the century brought changes of taste and fashion, which cast for a while into the shade even such supreme art as the art of Rembrandt. Leaders of social opinion were not proof against the attractions of the work of Both and Berghem, which sacrificed so much that it might gain, as it did gain, the outland charm of southerncolour and southern light; and the friend of Rembrandt, Jan Six, as one of many, showed himself in the later years of the century a convert to that newer and brilliant but bastard art. By the time that Cuyp and Wynants had died old and Adrian Van de Velde had died young—when the seventeenth century was entering its fourth quarter—there remained among the home-bred landscape painters hardly one to hold his own against the newer fashion. Hobbema, it is true, worked on, with great and patient fidelity, but he worked unregarded and died poor.
And in other branches of Art, after this time, the school declined. William Van de Velde and Backhuysen—the two great painters of the sea and the fleet—had had a worthy precursor in Renier Zeeman, but they had no worthy successors. The best painters of gentle life and of the life of the tavern were falling away. In the comparatively humble but yet delightful field of ‘still life,’ only, could the early years of the Eighteenth Century surpass the achievements of fifty years before. The admired painter of flowers, Jan Van Huysum—whose drawings are seen in large numbers at the British Museum, and whose work is known, perhaps, at its best and boldest in his drawings—then arose. Hewas one of a whole family of flower and fruit painters; and not the only one who gave some excuse for the ecstasy of a French novelist who was also a connoisseur. Balzac declared of him that his work would hardly be paid for if it were covered with diamonds. But Michael, his kinsman, was perhaps almost as worthy of that praise. To their work succeeded, far on in the Eighteenth Century, the vulgar mimicry of Van Os, with the colours of the chromo-lithograph. And as to Landscape Art—that, free once more from Italian influence, was indeed natural and Dutch again in its aim, with Van Stry especially; but in its practice it insisted rather upon the importance of detail than upon the value of effect. Jacob Cats carried to its last length the trivial elaboration which had become the fashion of his day. The virtue had gone out of Dutch Art, and Dutch Art faded imperceptibly into modern painting.
It was one of the characteristics of the great men of the Renaissance, that they tried many arts and were masters of many. It was one of the characteristics of the Seventeenth Century Dutchmen, that they tried many branches of Art, and were masters of all that they tried. Supreme in technicalities of painting and in technicalities of etching, theywere the first to use with any large effect the medium of water-colour, and their use of that, in a manner not tentative and occasional, like Dürer’s, but often familiar and accomplished as our own (of our great last generation), is shown by many drawings. Coloured sketches assigned to Rembrandt, doubtless on good foundation, are in the collections of the British Museum and of M. J. De Vos, a veteran collector at Amsterdam; and on our Burlington Club walls—not to speak of the wonderful pen drawings, so decisive at once and free—is a sketch of a city gate, from the collection of Seymour Haden, a sketch in which line counts for little, and the effect is sought and gained by tender gradations of tinting in monochrome. Probably of the same period are the two drawings in which Philip De Koningh, who in landscape came nearest to Rembrandt, has used his orange-browns with subtle variation, to portray his wonted effects of infinite distance.
Colour, or it may be a wash of sepia, used by Rembrandt and by De Koningh chiefly to suggest distance or tone, is used by Berghem more often to suggest the pleasantness and warmth of sunlight, which were so precious to him, and were the charm of his art. His artificial but agreeable landscape ofordered valley and well-disposed mountain and happy peasant of the opera, is represented notably by one of the many splendid drawings belonging to Malcolm of Poltalloch—a delicately coloured design, airy and sunny almost as De Koningh’s best paintings, and to be noticed, not only for the extreme rarity of such work in water-colour at that time and by that master, but also for its foretaste of the subtlety with which our own great art of water-colour learned, so many generations afterwards, to reach atmospheric effects.
But it was in the painting of interiors that the resources of the art of water-colour were used most fully by the Dutchmen, and they were used only most fully in the old age of Berghem, and after the death of Rembrandt, when Adrian van Ostade, himself now old, had come from Haarlem to Amsterdam, and they were used best by that master of ignoble conception and often repulsive work. The special virtues of Ostade—accomplished management of light and shade, and faultless composition of mean subjects—an instinct, that is, for the spacing out, the perfectly balanced filling, the never crowding, of his given area of paper or canvas—have long ago been acknowledged; and his sense of beauty in colour and beauty in grouping, andbeauty indeed sometimes in line, in inanimate things, has gone far to atone for that vulgar indifference to charm of figure and face, common indeed to many of the Dutchmen, but Ostade’s to an exceptional degree. Drawings of Mr. Malcolm’s and Mr. Cook’s show him, once for all, the consummate practitioner of a branch of art, the precedence in which—the invention of which, almost—our own country has liked to claim. Rich and mellow, tender and luminous, beyond all that has thus far been acknowledged, was the best work of Ostade in his old age, in the English art of water-colour. Dusart followed him in elaboration of work, but not at all in felicitous adaptation of the means to the end.
There are naturally certain masters rightly famed for their work in oil painting, who are seen at a disadvantage in drawings, whether by pen or chalk or washes of colour. It is not all who gave to their smaller designs, with whatever purpose of immediate sale, completion so brilliant and expressive as that which we see, for instance, in a little red chalk drawing of Wouvermans—a group of figures, horses and dogs—a sharply finished work, exquisite in its possession of every quality for which the master may be praised. Again, some men dependent onglow of colour or gradations of tone beyond the art of limited material, or at least beyond their command of it—Cuyp, for instance—might be judged hardly by drawings. The pleasantness of Cuyp is not in his drawings.
And then there are the great masters of one generation, who have not been great masters at all in another: their excellence, seen late, escaped the appreciation of their contemporaries or of their immediate successors. Fashions in art change, and Van der Heist, exalted by Sir Joshua above Rembrandt, drops later to his proper place. Each age, we may be sure, has something right in its criticism: the great Sir Joshua himself, who thought that ‘Bruges afforded but scanty entertainment to a painter,’—Bruges, with its masterpieces of the sacred art of Memling—had the keenness to see the style and the beauty under the orgies of Jan Steen. But to this inevitable variation and inconstancy of taste is due, alas! much permanent loss—things that were treasures once being now not to be guarded, or things of no account until now, being treasures for to-day. And the loss is felt most surely in the case of drawings—so short a period of neglect being enough to destroy them. It may be that certain artists unrepresented in collections, orrepresented inadequately, drew very little. All did not multiply studies with the fertility of William Van de Velde; but all must have drawn, and the work of some is missing to us. The flying sheets of long unvalued artists, on which Hobbema pencilled the forms of many trees, with a patient precision which in modern art only Crome has equalled—on which Wynants drew his narrow path, wandering over the sandhills or by the side of the farm—on which Jan Steen caught the rare girl’s prettiness and the last subtleties of vivacious gesture—on which De Hooch or Metsu drew tenderly faces of grave quietude, absorbed in daily and common occupation—these flying sheets, one fears, were dust and refuse two hundred years ago.
(Introduction to Burlington Club Catalogue, April 1878.)