The union of florists in Haarlem became alarmed by sensational news that gripped everyone with feverish excitement: a poor, unknown shoemaker from The Hague was growing an unusual variety of tulip called “Black Tulip.” It was decided to act immediately—that is, to check the matter on the spot and as far as possible to obtain the specimen. Five gentlemen dressed in black entered the dark cubbyhole of the shoemaker. They began commercial negotiations—very strange negotiations, because the gentlemen from Haarlem were playing the role of benefactors. Supposedly they had come there out of pure philanthropy to help the poor artisan, but at the same time they were unable to conceal how much they cared to possess the “Black Tulip.” The master of last and leather took in the situation, and tried to get the highest price. After much haggling a transaction finally took place: 1,500 florins, not a trifling sum. A moment of happiness for the poor shoemaker.
Now something unexpected happened, something that in drama is called a turning point. The merchants threw down the bulb bought at such a high price and in fury trampled it to a pulp. “You idiot”—they shouted at the stupefied shoepatcher—“we also have a bulb of the ‘Black Tulip.’ Besides us, no one else in the world! No king, no emperor or sultan. If you had asked ten thousand florins for your bulb and a couple of horses on top of it, we would have paid without a word. And remember this. Good fortune won’t smile on you a second time in your entire life, because you are a blockhead.” They left. The shoemaker staggered, dragged himself to his attic, lay down on his bed and, covering himself with his coat, breathed his last breath.
TULIPOMANIA—THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY botanical folly we know—was an episode inscribed on the margin of Great History. We have chosen it not without reason. It should be honestly confessed: we have a strange liking for presenting follies in the sanctuaries of reason, and we also like to study catastrophes against a gentle landscape. There are reasons more important than frivolous personal or aesthetic inclinations, however. For doesn’t the affair we have described remind us of other, more dangerous follies of humanity that consist in the irrational attachment to a single idea, a single symbol, or a single formula for happiness?
This is why we cannot put a large period after the date 1637 and consider the matter definitively closed. It is not reasonable to erase it from memory, or count it among the inconceivable fads of the past. If tulipomania was a kind of psychological epidemic, and this is what we believe, the probability exists—bordering on certainty—that one day it will afflict us again in this or another form.
In some Far Eastern port it is getting ready for the journey.
GERARD TERBORCH: THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE
I am sending you a human figure for your studies to become a painter. It has no pedestal because it was too heavy and too large to fit in the chest; you can have one made for a small sum of money. Use this figure, don’t allow it to stand idle as it was here but draw assiduously, especially those large, animated human groups for which Pieter de Molyn1 liked your work so much. If you paint, paint contemporary things, scenes from life, they can be done the most quickly. Be tenacious so you complete the paintings you have started; you will be loved for them, with God’s help, just as you were loved in Haarlem and Amsterdam. Whatever you start in the Lord’s name will always bring you luck. Serve God above all, be modest and polite toward every man, in this way you will assure your success. I am enclosing also clothes, long brushes, paper, chalk, and all the beautiful paints…
This letter, in which elevated and everyday matters mix so naturally, moral teachings as well as painter’s accessories, was written in 1635 by Terborch the father from the small town of Zwolle to his seventeen-year-old son Gerard, who was staying at the time in London. Among the sparse, gray materials for biographies of Dutch artists, this is an exceptional document: it preserves the warmth and the glow of a sunny day.
If we may use two old-fashioned expressions in one sentence, we would say he was born under a lucky star and was a child wonder in addition. Well-to-do, his career had no heavy blows, dramas, or crises. His talent developed very early: the preserved drawings of the eight-year-old boy are not only amazingly mature but show the discovery of his own artistic form, his own style. He learned the profession with his father, who was an able draftsman, then with Pieter de Molyn mentioned in the letter. He was seventeen years old when he became a qualified painter included among members of the guild.
In the usual course of events such a promising young artist would now settle down, open an atelier, take in disciples, and begin a family. Terborch junior traveled. His years of wandering were extensive: England, Italy, Spain (where apparently he painted the portrait of Philip IV), France, Flanders, and Germany. He was almost forty years old when after mature reflection he married, settled in the small northern town of Deventer, far from the artistic centers, amid the harmonious clan of Terborchs who bestowed on him their respect and love. He was not only a well-known painter, but what is more important also held the post of City Councillor.
The peak event of his artistic career was a trip to Muenster together with a Dutch delegation conducting peace negotiations with Spain. These were concluded with the signing of a treaty in 1648 that ended eighty years of struggle. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this event. Terborch recorded the ceremonial moment of the treaty oath.
It is a very peculiar work. Painted on tin, with the dimensions 45 by 58 centimeters, the artist crowded onto this small surface fifty or even as some scholarly sources claim seventy figures of secretaries, high officials, plenipotentiaries and diplomats, not forgetting himself. The whole gives the impression of a rather monotonous, frozen, posed group of people, and the painter, realizing this, tried to breathe life into it by showing some faces in profile and others en face, as well as several hands timidly stretched out in the gesture of an oath. The work is not very attractive coloristically: on the left side of the painting a man in a bright red cape, on the right side a young man like an insect, dressed in the golden scales of a sumptuous costume. In the middle, a table covered by fabric that is green verging on black, and on top of it the vermilion cover of a Bible. A lazy light with no luster falls through the window. The painting always makes the impression on me of a ceremony opening a World Congress of Insects. I think I could define some of the species.
I realize I am allowing myself to write blasphemies, because “Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Muenster,” according to general opinion, is a masterpiece. Critics have even seen in the faces of the diplomats (not larger than a fingernail) the struggle of contradictory feelings, fear and hope, joy and depression. I think only that this is not Terborch’s best painting, but a very characteristic example of the particularity of Dutch painting. Every pupil of Rubens, Velazquez, or the Italians would set this scene in motion by filling it with noise, color, pathos, hyperbole (because everything has to be made bigger and more splendid), and fill the empty spots under the ceiling with antique gods or archangels blowing their trumpets. Terborch paints his historical work without pathos, in a neutral way as if it were a genre scene that could be imagined more easily on the walls of a middle-class room with a fireplace than in a gala room of a city hall. It is a painting-record, and now we know how it really was. Only in one domain did the painter turn out to be a fantast of unbridled imagination—namely, he requested such a horrendous price for the work that until the end of his life he could not find a buyer.
It seems that for some time Terborch nourished the illusion that he was able to paint lucrative group portraits. Soon after “Swearing of the Oath” he painted “Family against a Landscape” this picture causes a sudden influx of warm humor, and recalls a canvas painted three centuries later, the “Artillerymen” of the Douanier Rousseau2. The mustached soldiers pose as if for a souvenir picture, looking alike as two drops of water, as two buttons of a uniform. Behind them an extremely long cannon barrel seems cast not in metal but heavy dream. In Terborch a group of old men, adults, young
people, and children emerges black and foreign, stiff, festive as a colony of mushrooms from the juicy greenness of a ravine.
When I look at Terborch’s paintings the impression never leaves me that they are the works of two harmoniously collaborating brothers, a painter and a miniaturist. The silhouettes of the figures emerging from darkness are invariably precise. The strokes of the brush are short, the hand’s motion restrained, slow, delicate, without effusion or blurred contours; an attempt to tell the world in a black, pearl-like, and gray tonality.
Terborch stayed in Muenster three long years, and during this time executed a number of portrait studies getting ready, so he thought, for his magnum opus. Not many of these sketches and studies remain—so much the more surprising are two excellent miniatures, as if a few measures of an overture moved an entire laboriously composed opera into the shadow.
The first is a portrait of a Spanish aristocrat, at the head of the delegation to the peace negotiations, who carried the sonorous name Don Caspar de Bramante y Guzman Conde de Peneranda. Terborch became so attached to the Spanish diplomat that he placed himself on the side of the “eternal enemies” of his country in the scene of “Swearing of the Oath,” and his colleagues pointed out his tactlessness. But the portrait of Conde de Peneranda is excellent. It seems as if the waves of changing moods run through his face: melancholy and serenity, disappointment and tides of energy. A splendid high forehead, sharp pitch-black eyes, and a long, thin, narrow nose like the beak of a sad parrot. A small close-cropped beard, a mustache turned up by a barber’s artifice like two sharp hooks. On his neck, like the swish of a sword, a thin cambric collar with the sharp points called gollilla. He is dressed in ceremonious court costume, a cape embroidered with gold. Rarely does Terborch give such proof of coloristic virtuosity: dark violet, gold, intensive red juxtaposed against gray and black.
The miniature portrait of the youngest member of the Dutch delegation, Kaspar van Kinschot3, is of an entirely different character. He is dressed in a light coat with pale blue and white stripes. His girlish face is encircled by thick hair falling to the shoulders, his big eyes are full of gentle resignation. Poor Kaspar died soon after the signing of the treaty, plunging his native palestra in sorrow as well as the muses, for he was the author of fairly deft Latin poems.
Terborch entered art history as a painter of genre themes and a portraitist. He practiced portrait painting with success, most likely owing much to contacts made in Muenster; the numerous trips from quiet Deventer to Amsterdam. The Hague, Haarlem, and other cities are proof of this. Near the end of his life he received from Prince Cosimo de’ Medici III a prestigious order for a life-sized self-portrait with one of his favorite paintings in his hand. Cosimo wanted to create a whole gallery of similar works, “a painting within a painting.” Other painters were invited, such as Dou and van Mieris, who were popular in France and Italy, and they executed the order quickly. Terborch, on the other hand, delayed, was fussy, grumbled, and wrote that the sum of 500 guldens was decidedly too low. He needed at least four months to execute the “portrait with a picture,” putting aside other urgent orders, he was now very busy, and so on. No contemporary painters and few of their descendants possessed to such a degree a business acumen based on two firm principles: never to go below the honorarium designated by the painter, and to value yourself highly in order to be valued by others.
Terborch was an unsurpassed painter of children (his house swarmed with models). The majority of artists painted children as chubby cherubs, or dolls clothed in costumes modeled on those of adults, creatures deprived of their own life and personality—chrysalises looking at us with idiotic expression, or larvae, unfinished dwarfish forms of the human species.
Look at “The Lesson,” a painting in the Louvre: a bent head of a boy with thick red hair falling on his forehead like a fur cap emerges from a dark background. We do not see either books or school supplies, yet we know that this silent, concentrated boy is studying the secrets of arithmetic. His mother, seen in profile and indifferent to her son’s efforts, looks into the distance as if she wanted to guess his future fate. I have invented all this unnecessary anecdote to motivate these two heads against the heavy, dark background—heads that have nothing in common either from the painterly or compositional point of view.
The “Boy Cleaning His Dog’s Coat” in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek: a corner of a room, next to the wall a small table with books and school materials, parallel to the lower frame of the painting a bench (Terborch acknowledged only closed, delimited spaces), on the bench an old hat with a large brim. In the middle of this modest scenery a boy sitting on a low stool with a dog on his knees. His agile fingers move along the skin of the animal. The boy applies himself to this activity with tense concentration, with the exclusiveness and total application only children are capable of. Those who “read paintings” cannot agree whether it is in praise of cleanliness or a reproach for preferring unimportant activities to school duties. (Here is an example of the intellectual games of bored elderly gentlemen.) What enchanted me always in this painting were its gentle, noble colors: the toned-down olive-green of the walls, the ochre of the objects, and only two more lively accents, the blue pants of the boy, and the dog’s brown and white fur.
Whenever I am in Amsterdam I visit and spend a few moments chatting with Helena van der Schalke, a resolute three-year-old girl with dark eyes and small, very red lips. She is in a white dress, a woman’s white bonnet, and a white, flaring, wide skirt down to the ground. A basket trimmed in black hangs on a black ribbon from her right arm, which is bent at the elbow. This very basket, inclining backward, destroys the static perpendicular axis of the composition: whirling movement, restlessness. For indeed Helen appears here only for a moment: she looks at us with curiosity and anxiety, she will immediately run away to her inconceivable childish worlds.
The psychological inquisitiveness of the painter bordered on prophesying the future, because when he painted the twelve-year-old son of William III of Orange, Henry Casimir van Nassau-Dietz, he represented a young man with a long face and not a single trace of grace, with small drilling eyes and tight lips. Indeed, the prince grew up to be a man of difficult character, to speak delicately.
Terborch created his own type of portrait, fundamentally different from that of Hals, Rembrandt, and other masters of the period, and with his own inimitable style. He strove for an almost extreme reduction of painterly means. He substituted a play of colors with a broad scale of grayness, and built a static, cohesive form. Usually he painted an entire figure standing against a dark wall, dressed in a thick woolen cape loosely falling from the shoulders, a frock coat, trousers down to the knees, pearly gray stockings, and elegant low shoes clasped with a buckle, the right one placed forward and the left arranged perpendicular to the lower frame of the painting, endowing the figures—even those markedly corpulent—with an almost dancelike grace. The entire composition could be compared to a spindle or two cones connected at their bases. On the basis of what was said about him, one might judge that Terborch was an engraver who for some unknown reason used oil paints. When seen from a distance the background of the painting “Portrait of a Man” in the Louvre has a dull tone, noir d’ivoire4. Looking closer we notice irregular stripes of deep juicy browns. The background becomes differentiated and sonorous.
With few exceptions the persons portrayed by Terborch who face the spectator stand in an empty space without doors, windows, or furniture. Only occasionally an ordinary chair or table appears, and there is only enough light to show faces, hands, and the white accessories of their dress.
Who ordered these unattractive canvases? We know the Dutch loved objects, the wordly reward for industriousness and saving. The ship owner would be portrayed against a window through which all of his ships could be seen. Gabriel Metsu paints a splendid fat man sprawled out in an armchair surrounded by his wife, children, servants, and his paintings hanging on the walls; the open door with a stone portal leads to further
splendors. Terborch’s clients—regents and patricians—despised such ostentatiousness. They are found in his paintings without the insignia of office, without proofs of affluence. The master painted them delicately but surely standing on the ground, combining the intimate and monumental in these portraits, ease and hieratic posture, the ceremonial and the everyday. This is how they have come down to our days, these very conservative representatives of Calvinist virtues and archetypal accumulation of capital.
Terborch’s genre paintings do not overstep the thematic range of Dutch painting—military scenes, mothers combing children, a few persons giving a concert in an elegant interior, a suitor playing an instrument, and a lady—but almost always they contain an element of distance, irony, and discreetly concealed ambiguity. In Kassel, which has a very decent museum, we find Terborch’s painting representing a lonely woman playing the lute. Most likely it was Gesina, Gerard’s favorite sister and model, an unmarried, talented woman whose rounded forehead and upturned nose we encounter in many of the master’s paintings. A duet of a man and a lady signified, as a rule, a prelude to a love game. Then what does this portrait mean—a lonely woman in a white dress and satin doublet with a golden sheen, lined with white fur? In her artfully arranged light hair there are four short vermilion ribbons. The painter caught the moment of indecision, anxiety: she is bent forward with eyes fixed on the musical score as if looking for a lost note or chord in the bushel of other notes. We do not know for whom this lady is playing—is it a lament for someone who has gone, or the lure of a nightingale?
Terborch was a peculiar colorist. He avoided what we call the building of form with color. Muted browns, ochres, and grays prevail in his reticent paintings; against these backgrounds a dress suddenly explodes in shades of ultramarine, luminous yellows, cinnabar red.
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