Littell's Living Age/Volume 115/Issue 1489/Dutch Art

No one need go to Holland to know the country, and if you do find yourself there you may follow out your study of its social history without going farther than its picture galleries. You may rely with absolute confidence on the realism of Dutch art, and, strange to say, the most capable artists have been as faithful as their less gifted fellows. It does not take you back to prehistoric days when skin-clad Frisians and Batavians were damning, dyking, and draining — reclaiming the drowned alluvian from the incursions of the sea and the ocean. Nor had it even begun to blossom when the venerable Rhenish school had already been made illustrious by forgotten predecessors of Meister Stephen and Meister Wilhelm, of Cologne. But it dates from the period when chivalrous courage, constancy, and self-sacrifice had given Holland an actual history, when its substantial burghers found money to spare for matters comparatively frivolous, and when artists ranked among the recognized guilds that were decently remunerated like other handicrafts. From the first, Dutch artists turned their attention to the real, making little pretension to inspiration and showing few signs of imagination. The nation was Protestant and practical, and had it been far less practical than it was the time had gone by for seeking popular subjects in the sanctified legends and the holy superstitions of the southern Church. The painters of the Netherlands had not even imagination sufficient to aspire to embody the memories of the glorious deeds hr which their ancestors had immortalized themselves in making their country. Here and there, the exceptions proving the rule, in some dingy room in the town-halls of Leyden or Haarlem, you may chance on a scene from the stirring sieges, where some one with the soul of a sign painter has cleverly missed the spirit of his subject. But there are no great national battle-pictures of those struggles of the War of Independence when Dutchmen fought Spaniards waist deep in the water; and while Backhuysen and Vandervelde launch fleets of peaceful merchantmen and herring-boats, there are no souvenirs of Lumé de la Marck and his desperate beggars of the sea. It is a loss, no doubt; and yet the stranger gains far more than he loses. He feels, if he does not confess, the winning charms of conscientiousness, patience, and perseverance. If he has little excitement, he has a great deal of quiet enjoyment. He is never elevated above earthly things by such a transcendent masterpiece of genius as the “Transfiguration, nor entranced by a face so heavenly as the Madonna’s of San Sisto. But, on the other hand, he is seldom or never disappointed by a failure of some master he has taught himself to love; nor is he disenchanted by the introduction of tawdry stage proper ties out of keeping with some sublime mise en scène. There are Madonnas by Titian, by Murillo, nay even by Raphael himself, which give you the impression of indifferent and somewhat vulgar reproductions of the artists’ grandest and sweetest conceptions. Italians generally, and the school of Venice especially, are too apt to deck the Virgin with jewels and robe the Fathers in silks and brocades, while the simple fishermen of Galilee find themselves grouped round a board which is loaded with dainties and groans with golden plate. There is nothing of such extravagance in the Dutch school. In the first place, the talent — or genius — of the artists may always pretty much be depended upon to turn out much the same quality of work as we might expect of a people whose temperament is rather solid than spiritual. In the second, the painter paints precisely what he has seen, and although he sometimes scandalizes you by a touch of coarse ness that might have been spared, at least you must pay homage to his honesty — and honesty in art carries its own reward, like virtue in morals. In landscape, for example, a Salvator who has nursed his genius in the savage solitudes of the Abruzzi may carry his recollections with him to Rome, and reproduce them with the vigour that carries irresistible conviction in the quiet seclusion of the palace of his Roman patrons. But the picturesque genius of a Salvator working upon a solid foundation of observation and experience is sure to betray a score of tolerably competent imitators into weaknesses and indiscretion. Either these works become servile copies of his failures, and as painful as those of the professed copyists you see drudging for a living in every gallery you visit, or else they trust for success to general picturesqueness of effect, and draw on the imagination for the details of their artificial nature. Thanks to the character of his country, the Dutch landscape-painter would have been saved from all snares of the sort, even had he been more predisposed td fall into them. Except for the dreary lines of the sand dunes, from Utrecht westward there is not a roll in the ground that can be dignified with the name of an eminence; the water stagnates; and Hobbema and Ruysdael had to go far over the Dutch frontiers to fetch home their rushing waterfalls. Hobbema and Ruysdael occasionally did go abroad for sensational scenery, but as a rule the Dutchman could do no better than look out of his window or stroll to the nearest gate of the town he happened to live in. he did so accordingly, and as there was no room anywhere for the play of his fancy, he had to endeavour to outshine his rivals by assiduous observation and minute and meritorious fidelity.

The consequence is, as we said, that any of us may see Holland without going there. People who care little for painting, and know as little of physical geography — who, in spite of the works of Salvator Rosa, are ignorant whether the Abruzzi is a country of mountains or a maremma — are perfectly familiar with” A Dutch Landscape.” Land them at Rotterdam, and let them leave that city by the railway to the Hague, and they seem to be as much at home as if they were travelling on the South Western or the London and Brighton. Far as eye can reach stretches that dull flat of rank, rich, unwholesome-looking green they have seen so often, with the shadowy sails of the more distant windmills vaguely breaking the horizon. There is the straight network of ditches arranged rectangularly to drain the superabundant moistures into the broad canal with its deep-laden barges and an occasional trekschuit. Dotted about everywhere are the groups of great coarse-bred cattle, often watery sky-blue in their colour like the milk they yield in such profusion — the cattle that enliven the pieces of Cuyp and Paul Potter. Here and there, at long intervals, stands in its brick enclosure one of the bald, red-roofed farmhouses; or, much more frequently, you pass by a windmill, the sturdy miller, red nightcap on head and china pipe in mouth, standing in the doorway on the top of the ladder, superintending the lowering of the sacks into the rough, broad-wheeled cart which the grey horse has backed against the wall. With the boor who drives, and the miller’s man and the miller’s wife in her clean-starched cap with the lappets pinned back at the ears, the group might have been standing there since Wouverman or Jan Steen took them for a study. Not that it by any means follows that the painters came for their studies to this particular mill, for similar scenes are repeating themselves at thousands of mills over the length and breadth of the country, as they have been repeating themselves for centuries. And these few miles of journey to the Hague have sampled for us the general surface of Holland, yet have scarcely given us a single new idea, and at most only deepened or refreshed our previous impressions. We may dispense with Murray and Baedeker when we take for our guides the ideas we have picked up, almost unconsciously, among the works of the Dutch masters scattered through our English galleries.

Rural Holland must always remain what it always has been, but the cities have changed somewhat with the manners and customs of the citizens. It is the older Holland you have an opportunity of studying in the galleries of the Hague and Amsterdam. You have seen Rotterdam, a vulgar Venice as Hood called it, with its spick and span new stuccoed houses, its varnished doors, its green window sashes, and its bright brass knockers. You will see the Hague, the new diplomatic capital, and Amsterdam, the rich commercial capital, and then, doubtless, you will hurry out of the country, without wandering up to the Texel or away into the wastes of Gröningen. You may visit some of the quaint old-fashioned towns — Alkmaar, for instance — that are now either in decay or conserving painfully the faded remains of their former splendour. So look well at that picture of Delft, and. it may very probably tempt you to go thither. What can be more perfect in its way than that stretch of weed-grown moat, sleeping half in the shadow, half in the sunshine, under the venerable city wall, with its bartizans and turrets and embattled gate, and the steep, moss-grown house gables, rising behind it. You feel it is a bit of Delft, a couple of hundred years old, painted down to the very cracks in the bricks; but if you care to verify it, do so by all means. The bit remains still, to speak to the painstaking fidelity of the painter, and, fur any better idea it may give you of Delft, you will have had your journey for your pains. But, after all, architectural subjects are tame, and what you care for more is the humours of old Dutch life, and a glance at the familiar habits of the people. You have only to choose among a dozen of chroniclers in colours, but take Teniers for choice. There is an interior — boors drinking, of course, smoking, dancing; low, heavy beams; rude, massive tables; a vast fireplace, and a rugged earthen floor. The figures in the background are types, you may still check them off anywhere, with no necks and no waists, and calves a trifle thicker than their thighs. But those that are the more prominent are obviously portraits; the intense and pronounced individuality of each of them peeps out under the boorish exterior. Look at that venerable trio of village fathers — the sage in the middle knitting his long, bald, brown forehead as he spells a meaning out of the news-letter of the day, while those on either side are bending across him, listening with eyes and ears and mouths. No wonder it is hard to hear him read, for the noise in the place must be distracting. There is the screech of the fiddle from where the musician sits throned high on his cask, and you can see that the peasants who are clattering out of time to the music are shouting with the full force of their lungs, while laughter is shaking the sides of the fat hostess who is standing with arms akimbo, and of that other ancient with the blue-veined beer jug in his hand. You have had enough of the vulgar debauch and want something from more refined society. Very well: turn to that Terburg, and you have it. Only it is as dull and uncharacteristic as fashionable life generally is, and the conscientious painter has made no attempt to idealize. A lady, young, fat, and fair, in pearls and a white satin stomacher, is listening to the vapid nothings of a handsome and stupid cavalier in inlaid cuirass and Terburg’s inevitable slashed satin trunk hose. It is a relief to turn to the Backhuysen, where that high-built galley with the red lion of the Netherlands at her bows is heeling to a fresh breeze in spite of her own exceeding stiffness, while the lighter fishing craft, as they scud for shelter, pitch over the curling crests of the green billows. We need hardly talk, of such world-famed paintings as Paul Potter’s bull or Rembrandt’s school of anatomy. Only in that Potter the animal is as he was in the very flesh — it seems odd the twist of a little tuft behind a bull’s shoulder should have been immortalized — and the judges who assisted at the Hague exhibition some weeks ago might have classed him with any of the beasts that were shown in the yard. Nor have we left ourselves time now to speak of the portraits, although in that primary virtue of uncompromising fidelity Van der Helst must take rank even before the unrivalled Velasquez. The jolly burghers who fèted the peace of Munster will live on in their every lineament till the colours and the canvas perish by age or accident. For, like truth, Dutch art is eternal, and must always win admiration although it may find few enthusiastic worshippers.