The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  —LESSING, EMILIA GALOTTI

  A LARGE ROOM, RATHER dark despite a high vaulted window on the left. Lazy daylight seeps through thick glass panes framed in lead.

  Where a painter is seated, wooden easels have been placed perpendicular to the window. He wears a beret, an old, thick jacket, puffed pantaloons, and heavy, shapeless boots. He rests his right leg against the lower crossbar of the easel. His hand, with a brush, approaches the surface of the painting.

  One can easily imagine his patient, irregular swinging movement: bending forward—placing the paint; leaning backward—checking the effect. A piece of paper is nailed to the upper frame of the painting: a sketch of the work being painted.

  At the rear, elevated above the rest of the atelier (it is entered by steps), an apprentice grinds pigments against a darkening wall.

  Is this how art is born? In a dark interior amid dust, cobwebs, and an indescribable disorder of objects with no grace or beauty? Even the painter’s accessories—messy sketchbooks, jars, brushes, sheets of paper, a plaster cast of a head, a wooden mannequin—are degraded to the role of kitchen utensils.

  There is no trace of mystery, magic, or rapture in this painting. It requires a great and devious imagination, like that of a certain art historian, to see a Faustian atmosphere here. There is no one behind the painter’s back. With a small change of props, a maker of tables or a master of the needle could be working in this room.

  All the subtle tastes of the aesthetes, all their fantasies must be disappointed and retreat from the thick physicalness of the work. The painter’s matter is heavy, rough-hewn, and massive.

  Such is the “Painter in His Workshop” by Adriaen van Ostade1 (1610–1685): oil on an oak board, with the dimensions 38 by 35.5 centimeters.

  SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THROWING off their foreign yoke the small Netherlands, with a population of barely two million, became a colonial empire, a flourishing, powerful country and political organism strong enough to defy powers like France, England, and Spain. In the Europe of the seventeenth century, torn by religious wars, it was an unusual, universally admired asylum of freedom, tolerance, and prosperity.

  A large number of accounts by travelers who visited Holland during its “golden age” have been preserved. The young bourgeois republic intrigued visitors with the uniqueness of its lifestyle and peculiar political system, the inhabitants’ antlike industriousness and inventiveness, as well as their healthy, concrete, down-to-earth attitude toward life.

  William Temple2, the English ambassador at The Hague and meticulous observer of the Dutch scene, noted: “Men live together like Citizens of the World, associated by the common ties of Humanity, and by the bonds of Peace, Under the impartial protection of indifferent Laws.” The envoy of His Royal Highness idealized the country of his mission, which is not strange because he moved in the highest social spheres. Numerous pamphlets and lampoons of the period show that the Dutch were envied and fiercely disliked by their neighbors, who compared them to parasites feeding on human blood. Cardinal Richelieu flung abuse at them: “Bloodsuckers, starving lice.” It was written that they were “merchants of butter who milk cows in the trough of the ocean, and live in forests they have sown themselves, or in swamps changed into gardens.” Who could fail to notice in this sentence an unintended note of admiration?

  There are also less subjective observations that touch on our subject, and, what is more important, are not seasoned with bile. Peter Mundy3, who visited Amsterdam in 1640, was surprised by the passion of the Dutch for painting. Pictures could be found not only in the homes of rich bourgeois but also in various shops and taverns, even in artisans’ workshops, streets, and squares. Another traveler, John Evelyn4, saw a huge number of paintings at the annual fair in Rotterdam, while in other countries these were luxury objects only the rich could afford. The very fact of exhibiting them among stalls, clucking chickens, mooing cattle, junk, vegetables, fish, farm products, and household objects must have seemed very peculiar, and was difficult for an average visitor to understand.

  Trying to explain this phenomenon, Evelyn let himself be carried away by fantasy when he claimed that even ordinary peasants spent two or three thousand pounds on paintings (a huge sum, equivalent to an acre of a garden or almost three acres of meadow), and that they did it from purely mercenary motives because after a certain time they sold their “collections” with a considerable profit. The English traveler was wrong. Paintings were indeed objects of speculation, but they were not the best investment of capital. It was much more profitable to lend money at interest, or, for instance, buy shares of stock.

  One thing is certain: painting in Holland was omnipresent. It seems that the artists tried to augment the visible world of their small country and to multiply reality by the thousands, tens of thousands of canvases on which they recorded seashores, floodwaters, dunes, canals, distant vast horizons, and the views of cities.

  The luxuriant development of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century is not associated with the name of any powerful protector, eminent person, or institution who spread a coat of patronage over the painter. When we speak of a “golden period” in the history of culture, we have a custom of always trying to find a Pericles, a Maecenas, or the Medicis.

  In Holland it was different. The Princes of Orange do not seem to have noticed their native art, Rembrandt, Vermeer, van Goyen, and so many others. They preferred the representative Baroque painting of the Flamands or Italians. When Amalia van Solms5, widow of Prince Frederick Henry, decided to beautify her suburban villa her choice fell precisely on a Flamand, Rubens’s pupil Jacob Jordaens6, a painter of sensual, large, and fat works. Lucrative orders from the court were thus out of the question. The gentry, small in number and deprived of political influence, had no ambition to support the art of their country or even to mold fashion and taste. Finally the church, traditionally a powerful protector of artists in all other countries, closed to them the doors of its temples, which displayed dignified, austere, Calvinist nakedness.

  The question comes to mind: what was the material situation of the Dutch painters, and to what should we ascribe their enormous productivity? It could not have been only an idealistic love for beauty. Our answer will be complex and unfortunately not unequivocal. We are doomed to fragmentary, incomplete data, barely translatable into contemporary language.

  MEMBERS OF THE FRATERNITY of Saint Luke—a proud name, which might also designate evangelical poverty—were treated as artisans, and without exception came from the lower social classes. Sons of millers, petty merchants and manufacturers, innkeepers, tailors, dyers, such was their social status and no other. And their works? They were certainly objects of aesthetic delight, but they were also creations subject to the laws of the market, the implacable laws of supply and demand.

  “Each thing that is an object of exchange must be comparable to other things. This is the purpose of money, which has become an intermediary,” writes Aristotle. Therefore our search must necessarily meander among boring numbers, and we will attempt to gather the spilled pebbles into a hopefully sensible whole.

  It is difficult to determine the costs of supporting an “average” family (terrible term of the statisticians) of Dutch artisans in the period we are describing. We do not know the retail prices of many necessities, only wholesale prices. But we know that the cost of living almost tripled between the end of the sixteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth century. Currency lost its value. Earnings increased, but not in proportion to inflation. As usual the estates and the capital of the wealthy swelled, but the margin of indigence and even poverty was considerable.

  What are we to make of a situation as fluid as life itself? What subtle surveying instruments could be used to seize the economic phenomena in all their complexity but also in a concrete place and time? On the basis of available sources one could say that in a given year a house in Amsterdam cost so much, but this is very little to go on. Sociologists, and especially their strange mutation “s
ociologists of art,” are prodigal with florins and guldens to dazzle the reader and bestow the splendor of science, almost mathematics, on their poor knowledge.

  Let us therefore use the approach that seems most sensible: to determine (when source materials make it possible) the payments and earnings in seventeenth-century Holland. We accept as a monetary unit the gulden, worth more or less as much as the florin, which was also used as currency. Other legal tender existed, but it is safer not to venture into that thicket.

  Different attempts have been made with limited success to establish the relation of the gulden to contemporary currencies. The comparison with gold, a seemingly reliable measure, also turned out to be problematic; in relation to this precious metal the gulden constantly lost value. One should therefore take into account the complicated quotations of the stock exchange. One serious researcher wrote that in Rembrandt’s time the gulden had a purchasing power twenty times greater than the contemporary gulden. This might be true, but years have passed since the publication of his dissertation, and the meaning of the statement, taken from the air, has evaporated back into the air.

  We are dealing with a beast difficult to describe—it is better to realize this right away. Worn-out coins, talents, cistertians, ducats, Rhine thalers, are like old demons where the same eternal potentiality of good and evil is lurking, a force pushing toward crime and deeds of mercy, passion concentrated in a small piece of metal that is similar to the passion of love or a call leading to the peaks of a human career, but also under the ax of the executioner.

  We can find a measure for wealth with Paul Zumthor, who presents us with the tax registers from Amsterdam in 1630. These show that about 1,500 estates were valued at 25,000 to 55,000 florins. Considerably larger estates existed, such as that of Lopez Suasso, a Portuguese who settled in Holland and lent 2 million guldens to Prince William III for his English expedition.

  Physical laborers and artisans employed in manufacturing were poorly remunerated. The fate of weavers at the beginning of the century is particularly worthy of pity; in Leyden alone, twenty thousand of these unfortunate people, who received a pittance for a twelve-hour day of work, were cooped up in various hovels. Numerous revolts and disturbances improved their situation, so that by the middle of the century they earned seven guldens a week. The wages of a fisherman on a herring boat were five to six guldens a week; qualified workers such as ship carpenters and masons in large cities earned ten guldens a week.

  We know nothing of the mass of ordinary people, the poor, the noisy, the ones who drank heavily or hunted constantly for any earnings. Old dictionaries transmit the names of their “professions”: unlicensed traders, day laborers, peddlers. One can believe they revealed an animal resilience and determination in the craft of life, that despite everything they kept their heads above water.

  THE PRICES OF PAINTINGS and the peculiar mechanisms of the market where works of art were thrown are well known, thanks to published materials from the abundant Dutch archives.

  The rich harvest of talents, the hundreds of ateliers in nearly every town of the Republic created a huge supply of paintings that exceeded the demand by far. Painters worked under the overwhelming pressure of a growing number of competitors. Art criticism did not exist. The enlightened spheres did not impose any definite taste—this was democratic but often resulted in an outstanding painter finding himself in a material situation worse than that of a less gifted colleague. Speculation in works of art was highly developed, governed by rules totally different from aesthetic considerations.

  In a recently published book J. M. Montias has checked fifty-two inventories from the years 1617–1672, preserved in the archives of Delft. He estimated the average price of a painting was 16.6 guldens (7.2 guldens for an unsigned painting). The industrious calculation is worth our attention, for it contains a valuable piece of general information. Let us try to be disloyal to statistical “truth” in favor of what is singular, full-blooded, and not comparable: the concrete price paid for concrete paintings. Here we discover an amazing range and diversity.

  What determined the market price of a painting? The name of the artist and the renown of the atelier, but to an even greater extent, the subject matter. There is no reason to be indignant. The represented world or a story about people has always satisfied the need for knowledge inherent in our nature, and admiration for successful imitation is something very normal despite the prophets of sterile purity.

  Both the public and seventeenth-century Dutch writers about art, such as Karel van Mander7 and Samuel van Hoogstraten8 (painters themselves), placed the so-called historiën at the top of the genres. These were figurative compositions. A hero, a crowd, a dramatic event taken from the Bible or mythology enjoyed unabated popularity and fetched high prices. This judgment is constant, originating in antiquity (vide Pliny); it continued with theoreticians of Renaissance art all the way to the nineteenth century. Historical painting meant the towering peak of art.

  A French traveler noted with surprise that 600 guldens were asked for a painting by Vermeer that represented only one person. It is like a distant echo of medieval standards, when the artist depicting the interior of a church was paid according to the number of columns he painted.

  A Dutchman ordering market scenes from his favorite painter requested that they have an ever-larger number of slabs of meat, more and more fish and vegetables. O the insatiable, never satisfied hunger for reality!

  In theory landscapes, genre scenes, and still lifes were valued much lower than historical painting. So why does seventeenth-century Dutch art have such an abundance, even more a predominance, of works belonging to these “lower” genres? Because strong competition requires specialization; such is the law of the market. Every grocery merchant knows that for the good of his firm he must stock a special brand of tea or a particularly aromatic brand of tobacco that attracts buyers.

  The same happened in art. The struggle for survival forced the painter to remain faithful to a chosen genre. Because of this a potential buyer would retain him in his eye and memory; it was universally known that Willem van de Velde9, for example, was synonymous with the “Maritime Firm,” and Pieter de Hooch10, with the “Firm of Bourgeois Interiors.” If one lovely day a portrait painter reached the conclusion that he had had enough of the fat, bloated faces of councillors and decided from then on to paint flowers—which are so much more graceful—he took an enormous risk on his shoulders. For he would lose his present clients and enter the domain of other painters who for years had specialized in bouquets of tulips, narcissuses, and roses.

  AMONG SO MANY MASTERPIECES in the Uffizi Gallery it is easy to overlook a small painting from the brush of Frans van Mieris11, “The Family Concert.” It is a scene from the life of elegant Dutch society, known for its fervent passion for music. The instruments have just gone silent, and the admirers of Polyhymnia refresh themselves with wine. Against the background of a rich interior only six persons are presented, as that Frenchman who looked at Vermeer would say. Despite this the Prince of Tuscany, Cosimo III, paid a sum for the painting that was stunning by Dutch standards—2,500 guldens, 900 guldens more than the merchants who ordered Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” took from their pockets.

  What was the range of prices of Dutch paintings in the seventeenth century? This is a problem that cannot be reduced to a clear, comprehensible formula, or summed up in a single pale “average.”

  In the complicated mechanism of the trade of works of art, not only rational factors but also unpredictable chance played a role—for instance the material situation of the artist at a given moment, and the good but often bad will of the buyer, who only waited for the best moment to enter into possession of paintings and pay as little as possible.

  During the period of his fame Rembrandt set hard conditions and often received as much as he asked. But others, recognized today as masters, had to be satisfied with a payment so pitiful it is difficult to understand how they avoided going under, even with the
greatest industriousness.

  IN 1657 A WELL-KNOWN antique and art dealer, Johannes de Renialme, died in Amsterdam. As usual in such cases, work began immediately on a detailed inventory of his estate. In addition to property, jewelry, and curios, it included more than four hundred paintings. And what paintings: Holbein, Titian, Claude Lorraine, the most eminent Dutch masters. Next to each item a realistic market price was given, the price that could be received hic et nunc according to the opinion of competent painters and professional appraisers if the inheritance was to be realized. In Dutch archives many inventories are preserved that are priceless, trustworthy documents for researchers.

  Rembrandt’s painting “Christ and the Adulteress” was appraised highest, at the respectable sum of 1,500 guldens. This seems completely understandable because of the artist’s rank and the elevated subject, belonging to those historiën so much praised by art theoreticians. But despite the theoreticians a typical genre scene came right after Rembrandt, namely Gerard Dou’s12 “Kitchen Maid,” highly appraised at six hundred guldens. Dou was a sought-after, constantly fashionable painter. Warm, somewhat sweetish colors, a masterly play of light, immaculate, precise drawing (anecdotes were told how he spent the whole day painting brooms and brushes, each bristle separately), these won him admirers beyond Holland’s frontiers as well. But other genre painters, not at all worse, were treated harshly. At the very bottom of the inventory of Johannes Renialme’s estate came Brouwer13, in our estimate an excellent painter, whose canvas was scandalously appraised at barely six guldens.

  We can only guess at the impact of this huge range of prices on the psychology of the painters, from reimbursement for costs of materials all the way to a sum of many years’ wages for a qualified artisan. It might have been a stimulant for many, because it contained an element of hazard: hope for great winnings, a sudden change in life’s bad luck. A chance existed that one day a generous buyer would appear, a prince from a fairy tale like Cosimo who with one purchase would open perspectives of wealth. Very likely Gerard Terborch14 nourished such a hope in his heart when he painted “The Peace of Muenster” (1648).