The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  The majority probably did not count on miracles. They worked by the sweat of their brows and experienced many slumps, when they had to get rid of their works for nothing.

  In 1641 Adriaen’s brother Isaac van Ostade15, crushed by financial troubles, sold thirteen of his paintings to a merchant for the ridiculous price of 27 guldens. (Documents have transmitted the name of the extortioner.) Two guldens barely covered his costs, the price of paints and canvas. Ten guldens were sometimes paid for apprentices’ copies.

  In the homes of seventeenth-century Holland, even those of the middle-class and less affluent bourgeois, one could find a hundred, two hundred, and even more paintings. This was something not encountered anywhere else. When we read that a certain widow in Rotterdam liquidated the estate of her deceased husband and sold, so to say wholesale, 180 paintings for 352 guldens, a situation not very advantageous for the artist opens before us. A huge supply: there were too many cheap paintings on the market. This state of affairs was partly alleviated by the growing affluence of the upper spheres of society, their passion for collecting, and their unremitting love for Dutch painting.

  We are surprised today that the paintings of the old masters van Eyck, Memling, Quentin Matsys—splendid progenitors of Flemish art—were relatively inexpensive, and did not arouse as much interest as one might suppose. In 1654 it was possible to purchase a portrait from the brush of Jan van Eyck at well-known dealers for 18 guldens.

  PAINTINGS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HOLLAND were objects of speculation, or increased exchange. They often went from hand to hand and were traded in different ways, which led some researchers to claim that in this country they became similar to money—a substitute currency. A closer analogy would be stock shares with a changeable, capricious market value, difficult to foresee.

  The Dutch painter could pay for almost anything with his paintings. He often saved himself from bankruptcy or prison by getting rid of his works. Rembrandt was notorious for it; for instance he gave away to Dirck van Cattenburgh a number of paintings and sketches to cover a large debt amounting to 3,000 guldens.

  Loans were secured by pledging paintings; debts (card debts as well) were paid with them, cobblers’, butchers’, bakers’, and tailors’ bills were settled with paintings. In such cases the latitude of prices was great, and the advantage of the creditor-predator evident. But exceptions occurred. The mediocre Flemish artist Matteus van Helmont16, who painted in the manner of Teniers17 and Brouwer, was unable to pay a debt to a brewer; he gave him only one painting, “The Peasants’ Wedding,” and subtracted from his bill the substantial amount of 240 guldens, a sum Vermeer never obtained. The excellent Joos De Momper, who painted “impressionist” landscapes surging like a stormy sea, had an inclination for wine and visited all too often the tavern of a certain Gijsbrecht van der Cruyse. As a result, twenty-three landscapes by De Momper were hung in the house of the owner of the winery in a special room, the finest in the house, upholstered in gilded leather—a collection not owned by the richest museums of the world.

  Jan Steen18, owner of an inn, painted a canvas for his supplier and received a barrel of wine. A certain painter of flowers who was in debt to a baker for 35 guldens gave him a painting that the baker sold for triple profit soon afterward.

  With paintings it was possible to pay off a house, buy a horse, and give a dowry to a daughter if the master did not possess any other wealth. We are familiar with some of the complex, long-term contracts. A painter sells his colleague a house for the sum of 9,000 guldens. The buyer commits himself to deliver each month a painting valued at 31 guldens (a “large” one, because a middle-size painting was worth 18 guldens). If there was a delay in delivery, an agreed-upon fine was set at the amount of six guldens. The painter’s supplies, paints, canvas, and frames were paid half-and-half by both sides.

  Here is a peculiar agreement touching on otherworldly matters. In exchange for lower rent, a painter promised the landlord to paint the portrait of his beloved daughter, deceased years ago.

  The painting of portraits (they made Rembrandt’s reputation and then contributed to his fall) limited the artist’s risk, because as a rule the model was the purchaser. He would ask to be immortalized in the period of his prosperity, and often the ambition to entrust this task to a good master got the better of stinginess. One had to paint full cheeks, eyes boldly looking into the future, and also the lace and satin of festive attire as exactly as possible. Everyone wants to look better and more dignified than in reality.

  Sometimes painters would succumb to the amusing mythomania of their clients. The buyer who signed a contract with Jan Lievens19 obligated the artist to present him as Scipio Africanus and his wife as Pallas Athena. The grocery merchant Gabriel Leyencamp, with the unbridled fantasy characteristic of grocers, requested that the painter represent him as the Archangel Gabriel, and his beloved as the Madonna.

  ON THE ART MARKET there were many mediocre paintings next to good ones and even shoddy ones (rubbish covered with a patina appears more noble to us), as well as an innumerable number of copies. After all, apprentices started their education by copying, mature masters “repeated” their own paintings, and those who were less able counterfeited the talented and fashionable painters without scruples.

  In 1632 Adriaen Brouwer declared before a notary that he had made only one painting, titled “Peasants’ Dance,” and that the painting was in the possession of Rubens. In this way the artist wanted to cut himself off from the counterfeit Brouwers in circulation, probably a struggle with windmills. The procedure of counterfeiting paintings, as old as art itself, developed in Holland in the seventeenth century on a grand scale and with a rush.

  The story we will now tell, simplified greatly, has all the elements of a picaresque novel. It could be called “The Greatness and Fall of Gerrit Uylenburgh20.”

  Who was the hero? A painter without talent. As we know from history, these can be individuals who are dangerous for those around them, especially when endowed by nature with a will to power or at least an overwhelming imperative pushing them to make a career at any price. His father Henry Uylenburgh, cousin of Rembrandt’s wife Saskia, tried his hand at many jobs: he traded works of art, was an estate appraiser, cleaned and varnished. A modest, laborious, worry-filled gray life.

  His son Gerrit was made of different clay. Clever, ambitious, he had a gift of winning people over and wove an intricate web of connections and acquaintances until he gained the confidence of the Republic’s influential personalities. In 1660 the Estates General entrusted him with a mission of envoy to the court of the English King Charles II. As a gift for the king Gerrit carried twenty-four paintings of the Italian School purchased from a wealthy widow for the sum—by no means trivial—of 80,000 guldens.

  The journey toward the shores of the island with his precious cargo decided Uylenburgh’s fate. Neither sea demons nor the Great Tempter needed to trouble themselves; the temptation was born of itself in Gerrit’s practical head. It took the form of a dazzlingly simple idea. There was not much sense in importing paintings from Venice or Rome, since enough artists lived in Holland who knew how to paint everything no worse and, in addition, far less expensively. The Italians had to be beaten with their own weapon. This was his war cry.

  After his return to Amsterdam, Gerrit bought two houses where he arranged exhibition rooms, ateliers, and gathered artists who craved a steady income. This is how the great fabrication of Italian painting in Holland began. The whole affair was surrounded with proper discretion.

  In the beginning everything developed favorably and the business flourished. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, crafty fate threw its treacherous nets over Gerrit. It was when he signed a very profitable contract with the Prince-Elector of Brandenburg to supply him with thirteen paintings by famous Italian masters. He took an advance of 4,000 guldens. But who could have foreseen that in the prince’s court at the time was a Dutch painter of flowers, Henry Fromentin, who years ago had worked dog-cheap for the manufactu
rer of the Italian paintings “Made in Amsterdam.” His revenge was sweet, his expertise overpowering; not a single one of the paintings was an authentic work of the Italian School.

  From now on events develop at an accelerated pace. The prince sends the paintings back, the whole affair gets publicity. Outraged Gerrit calls a commission of nine experts, which pronounces a Solomon’s verdict: some paintings are good, some less good, but all could be found in collections of Italian art. It is not known what this was supposed to mean. In enigmatic verdicts, as in mysterious women, a certain lack of clarity possesses its own charm.

  Ambitious Gerrit is not satisfied with this resolution. For years he fiercely defends his merchant’s honor and, speaking more simply, his existence.

  The judgments of experts multiply. A group of specialists, among them excellent painters such as van Aelst and Kalf21, categorically decides that Gerrit’s entire collection is an accumulation of incompetent kitsch. On the other hand the verdict of another commission, called later on, is less emphatic; thirty-one painters speak for the authenticity of the paintings, twenty against. As with the conjectural prosecution, the contradictory opinions of experts obscure the matter even further.

  The affair develops on two planes. The first is a spectacular scandal that holds the entire artistic world of Holland in suspense. Jokes, pamphlets, and poems circulate written by self-taught but also well-known poets like Vondel22. They defend Uylenburgh or pitilessly make fun of him. Let us be frank—all those who passionately like to watch public executions or bankruptcies with a bang have here a great dose of healthy entertainment.

  We can guess at the hidden mainsprings of the affair on another, deeper level. How to explain the great disparity of opinion of the several score Dutch painters who took part in the appraisal? Was it not a trial in absentia of the art of the Italians, who were a dangerous, unbeatable competition for the native artists?

  At last Gerrit is forced to capitulate. In 1674, he auctions his “Italian” paintings, and two years later sells the rest of his collection, which includes excellent paintings by Rembrandt, Lastman, van Aelst, Metsu23, and Hercules Seghers. All of them are authentic beyond any doubt.

  Uylenburgh leaves his ungrateful homeland. He departs for England—that is, the place of his great temptation. Thanks to the generosity of an English colleague, he will paint landscape backgrounds for portraits until the end of his life.

  Ars alit artificem. Like all golden thoughts and sentences from almanacs, this one should be treated with a proper dose of skepticism. If art indeed nourishes artists, it is a mannered, absentminded, and often completely unpredictable nourisher.

  The Dutch painters of the “golden age” undertook all kinds of employment that a contemporary so-called artist would reject as degrading. They were artisans, and their humility toward life was great and beautiful.

  Several of the other occupations had something in common with their profession, requiring competence with a brush and knowledge of materials, though these went beyond the frames of paintings. They painted everything: ceilings, pictures on mantelpieces, frontons, they decorated ships, carriages, spinets, clocks, tiles, ceramics, and painted shop signs on order. The good painter Gerrit Berckheyde24 was christened the Raphael of signboards. A French traveler, Sorbière25, admired the aesthetic appearance of Dutch shops “dont les enseignes sont quelquefois de fort bons tableaux.” Carel Fabritius26 patched up his home budget by painting municipal coats of arms at 212 guldens apiece.

  Others, the best known painters among them, led a “double” professional life. They were cooks, innkeepers, owners of taverns or brick kilns, petty clerks, traders of works of art, real estate, stockings, tulips, and whatever was at hand.

  The smile of fortune, the grace of fate, occurs more often in affluent countries, where everyone quietly counts on it. Gerard Dou, that lucky charmer, received 500 guldens a year from the Swedish envoy in The Hague for the right of purchase alone.

  The good reputation of Dutch painters secured invitations to foreign courts, so Godfried Schalcken, Adriaen van der Werff, and Eglon van der Neer27, for example, spent years in the service of the Prince Elector in Düsseldorf. But the great ones—Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt—never traveled to the other side of the Alps, or even neighboring countries. They remained faithful to the trees, walls, clouds of their homeland, and to their native towns. What is stranger still, this provincialism by choice constituted their strength, and decided their posthumous triumph.

  Lack of stability, the uncertainty of tomorrow were the artists’ curse. They tried to remedy it in different ways, and to secure a stable means of existence for some period of time. Only a few succeeded. A highly valued painter, Emmanuel de Witte28, signed a contract with a notary, Joris de Wijs, giving his entire yearly production in exchange for 800 guldens and room and board. It happened that a rich merchant or collector setting out on a voyage to France or Italy would take an artist with him who for a set sum sketched landscapes, unusual attractions, and town sights.

  We have tried to look at the life of seventeenth-century Dutch painters from the banal and not very striking point of view of the balance sheet: “he owes,” “he has”—that is, petty bookkeeping. It is better and more honest than the pathos and sentimental sighs favored by authors of vies romancées written for tender hearts.

  It is true that fate did not spare the members of the Guild of Saint Luke. We know that Hercules Seghers and the seventy-five-year-old Emmanuel de Witte, overwhelmed by material difficulties, committed suicide. Hals, Hobbema, and Ruysdael died in the poorhouse. Poverty and alcoholism occurred often, but not always. The excellent Philips Wouwerman29 gave his daughter 20,000 guldens as a dowry; the Marinist Jan van de Capelle30 could rest in peace because he left an estate valued at 100,000 guldens, a splendid collection of two hundred paintings (among others, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt), and several thousand drawings. It should be added, however, that van de Capelle drew his income to a greater degree from a prospering dye-works than from his painting.

  Information preserved about the lives of the Dutch painters is sparse. They belong to that species of artists who leave works behind them, not complaints and laments. Really there are no dramatic stories, unhealthy blushing, or sensational scandals. Their entirely earthly existence can be summarized in a few dates: birth, qualification as a master, marriage, children’s baptism, and finally death.

  They can only be envied. Whatever their greatness and miseries, the disillusionments and failures of their careers, their role in society and place on earth were not questioned, their profession universally recognized and as evident as the profession of butcher, tailor, or baker. The question why art exists did not occur to anyone, because a world without paintings was simply inconceivable.

  It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary art declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

  The old masters—all of them without exception—could repeat after Racine, “We work to please the public.” Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

  Let such naïveté be praised.

  THE BITTER SMELL OF TULIPS

  …galant tulip will hang down his head like to a virgin newly ravished1…

  —ROBERT HERRICK

  1

  HERE IS A STORY of human folly.

  It is not about fire consuming a great city on a river, nor the slaughter of defenseless people. It is not about a vast plain bathed in morning light where armed riders meet other riders to find out which of the two commanders will earn at the end of the day, after a murderous battle, a modest place in history, a monument of bronze, or, with less luck, give his name to an alleyway in some suburb of poverty.

  Our drama is modes
t and with little pathos, far from the famous hemorrhages of history. Because everything began innocently—with a plant, a flower, a tulip (this is hard to imagine) that unleashed collective, uncontrollable passions. Further, for those who have studied the phenomenon the most amazing thing was that this folly shook a sober, hardworking, and parsimonious nation. The question arises: How did it happen that in enlightened Holland and not somewhere else, tulpenwoede—tulipomania—reached such frightening dimensions, shook the foundations of a solid national economy, and drew representatives of all social levels into a gigantic frenzy of gambling?

  Some explain it with the proverbial love of the Netherlanders for flowers. An old anecdote recounts that a lady requested an artist to paint a bouquet of rare flowers for her because she could not afford to buy them. This is how a new and so far unknown branch of painting came into being. Let us stress that for this lady, inspirer of a new genre in art, aesthetic motives played a totally secondary role. What she wanted most was a real object: a crown of petals on a green stem. The artist’s work was a mere substitute, a shadow of existing things. Similarly, lovers doomed to separation must be content with the likeness of a beloved face. In the beginning the painting expresses nostalgia for a faraway and unreachable lost reality.

  There are other reasons, more prosaic and down-to-earth, that sufficiently explain the peculiar Dutch predilection for flowers. Deprived of luxuriant, exuberant vegetation and disciplined by a rational economy, the country amazed many travelers because they found no humming wheat-fields there. Wheat was imported from abroad. There was little land, its quality often poor, while the price was always exorbitant. Most arable land was devoted to pastures, orchards, and gardens. The nature of the country required an intensive economy of land that was spatially restricted.