by Will Durant
Vandyck tried his hand at mythological pictures, but though he had pursued many women he was not at home with nudes. His forte was always portraiture, and during these four years in Antwerp he gave some respite from oblivion to Baron Philippe Le Roy and a devoted dog;69 to General Francisco de Moncada and his horse;70 to Count Rhodokanakis,71 looking like Swinburne; to Jean de Montfort,72 looking like Falstaff; and—most beautiful of these Vienna Vandycks, young Rupert, Prince Charming Palatine, soon to be fighting for Charles I in England. Alluring, too, is the portrait of Maria Luisa of Tassis,73 lost in her swelling robes of black satin and white silk. And as good as any of these is Vandyck’s etching of Pieter “Hell” Brueghel (the Younger), an old man still seething with the unspent sap of an amazing dynasty.
Some of these portraits he took with him when Charles I invited him to try England again. Charles, unlike his father, had a sure taste in art. He surmised that this handsome Fleming was just the man to do for him what Velázquez was doing for Philip IV. Vandyck came and transmitted the King, Queen Henrietta Maria, and their children to posterity, indelibly marked with the Vandyck elegance. Most famous of the five royal portraits is the one in the Louvre—the proud incompetent King posing in riding costume, one arm akimbo, sword prominent, jaunty hat, and Vandyke beard; but the tired horse, champing the bit between hunts, can be more easily loved. In Dresden and Turin are rival paintings of Charles’s children, as yet harmless and innocent. Charles was more human than he pretended; his capacity for warm affection showed in his fondness for Vandyck; he knighted him, gave him expensive homes in London and the country, a yearly pension of £200, additional payment for each picture, and every welcome at the court.
The happy artist lived up to his income, loved fine clothing, had his coach-and-four, his thoroughbreds and his mistresses, and filled his homes with music and art. He bettered Rubens’ instruction in delegating work—left the painting of costumes to assistants, painted a portrait in an hour from a sketch made at one sitting, and made hay while the sun played hide-and-seek. Once (story says) Charles I, suffering from parliamentary parsimony, asked the extravagant artist if he knew what it meant to be short of funds. “Yes, Sire,” answered Vandyck. “When one keeps an open table for his friends and an open purse for his mistresses, he soon reaches the bottom of his money chest.”74
If at times he sank into debt, it was not for lack of patronage. Half the English aristocracy waited in turn to receive his imprimatur: James Stuart, Duke of Lennox,75 as handsome as his dog; Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick;76 Lord Derby and his family;77 Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford,78 challenging fate. Poets too had their hour—Carew, Killigrew, Suckling. And finally there was Old Parr,79 claiming to be 150 years old and looking it. Vandyck painted three hundred portraits in England, almost all distinguished by the grace and dignity that he saw in a lord even when they were not there.
His mistress, Margaret Lemon, competed expensively with the aristocracy for his services. The King suggested that marriage would be cheaper, and he helped Vandyck to secure (1639) the hand of Lady Mary Ruthven, of a family famous in Scottish history. The artist painted a handsome picture of his bride,80 but it could not compare with the lovely face he gave himself in the Self-Portrait81 that all the world knows—rich wavy hair, sharp eyes, refined features, scissored beard, gold chain proclaiming his knighthood. Did Vandyck flatter Sir Anthony? If so, it was of no use, for his health, consumed too lavishly, had already begun to fail. Loath to be remembered only for portraits, he asked Charles to let him paint historic scenes on the walls of the banqueting hall at Whitehall, but Charles was living from an empty purse. Vandyck crossed to Paris (1640), hoping for the commission to paint the Grande Galerie of the Louvre; Louis XIII had already chosen Poussin, and when Poussin relinquished the assignment it was too late for Vandyck. He fell ill, rushed back to London to his lying-in wife. He died (1641) eleven days after she gave birth to a daughter. He was not yet forty-two.
He founded no school and left no mark upon Continental art, but in England his influence was overwhelming. Local painters like William Dobson, Robert Walker, and Samuel Cooper made haste to copy his flattering, lucrative style; and when a great burst of portraiture came with Reynolds and Gainsborough, it was the Vandyck legacy that provided schooling and stimulus. Vandyck’s portraits were not profound; he was too hurried to search for the soul, and sometimes he stopped at the face or the beard. The Cavaliers who surrounded Charles I were known for their fine manners, but it is unlikely that so many of them looked like poets; and some of the romance that we find in their brave stand for their King may have come to us from seeing them through Vandyck’s eyes. It would be unfair to expect from so frail and fortunate a youth the robust vitality of Rubens or the de profundis clamavi of Rembrandt; but we shall continue to cherish these Genoese, Flemish and English portraits as bright and “precious minims” in our inheritance.
V. THE DUTCH ECONOMY
What a leap it is from those perfumed English lords to the stout, tough burghers of Haarlem, The Hague, and Amsterdam! It is a unique world behind the dykes, a world of water rather than land, a life of ships and commercial ventures rather than of courts and chivalry. There is hardly anything more startling in economic history than the rise of the Dutch to world power, or more comforting in cultural history than the way in which this wealth so soon graduated into art.
The United Provinces had some three million population in 1600. Only half of it tilled the land; by 1623 half of it lived in cities, and much of the land was owned by urban landlords who trusted that commercial profits could be deodorized by putting them into the soil. Even in agriculture Dutch energy and skill had taken the lead in Europe; new dykes and dams were ever reclaiming “polders” from the sea; canals fertilized farms and trade; intensive horticulture complemented extensive stockbreeding; and Dutch engineers in the late sixteenth century brought the windmill to perfection just as Dutch painters were bringing it into art. Half of industry was still handicraft, but in mining and treating metals, weaving cloth, refining sugar, brewing beer it was advancing to a larger, less happy, more remunerative scale. Every year 1,500 “doggers”—two-masted fishing vessels—sailed from Dutch ports to snare herring. Shipbuilding was a major industry. During the truce with Spain (1609–21) the Netherlands sent out 16,000 vessels, averaging fifty-seven tons, with crews totaling 160,000 men—more than England, Spain, and France combined.82
Anxious for trade outlets and raw materials, Dutch captains explored uncharted seas. In 1584 Dutch merchants established themselves at Archangel, and advanced against the Arctic ice in a vain effort to find a “Northeast Passage” to China and thereby win a prize of 25,000 florins offered by the government of Holland. Dutch names on modern maps of the Spitsbergen Archipelago recall the voyages in which Willem Barents lost his life during a winter on the ice of Novaya Zemlya (1697). In 1593 the adventurous Dutch sailed into the rivers of the Guinea Gold Coast of Africa, made friends with the natives, and inaugurated a busy trade.
Till 1581 Dutch merchants had bought Oriental products on the docks of Lisbon to resell them in northern Europe. But in that year Philip II, having conquered Portugal, forbade trade with the Dutch, who thereupon decided to make their own voyages to India and the Far East. Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal, or their descendants, were well informed about Portuguese trading posts in the East, and the Dutch profited from this knowledge.83 In 1590 Dutch merchantmen, even during the war with Spain, passed through the Straits of Gibraltar; soon they were trading with Italy, then with the Arabs, sturdily ignoring religious differences. They made their way to Constantinople, signed a treaty with the Sultan, sold goods to both the Turks and their enemies the Persians, and moved on to India. In 1595 Cornells de Houtman led a Dutch expedition around the Cape of Good Hope and via Madagascar to the East Indies; by 1602 sixty-five Dutch ships had made the return voyage to India. In 1601 the Dutch East India Company was organized, with a capital of 6,600,000 florins—forty-four times more than the Englis
h East India Company, formed three months before.84 In 1610 Dutch merchants opened trade with Japan, in 1613 with Siam; in 1615 they secured control of the Moluccas, in 1623 of Formosa. In one generation they conquered an empire of islands, and they ruled it from their Java capital, Jakarta, which they named Batavia. In that generation the company returned an average of 22 per cent annually to its shareholders. Pepper was imported from the “Spice” Islands and sold in Europe for ten times the price paid to the native producers.85
Taking the planet for their province, the Dutch sent ships to seek a Northwest Passage to China. In 1609 they hired an English captain, Henry Hudson, to explore the Hudson River. Twelve years later they organized the Dutch West India Company. In 1623 they established the colony of New Netherland, comprising the present states of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. In 1626 they bought “New Amsterdam” (Manhattan) from the Indians for trinkets valued at twenty-four dollars. They were rapidly clearing and developing these lands when their North American possessions fell as a prize of war into English hands (1664). Similar Dutch acquisitions in South America were surrendered to the Spanish and the Portuguese; only Surinam remained, as Dutch Guiana.
Despite these losses, the Dutch Empire shared abundantly with Dutch trade in Europe to give the merchants of Holland a financial base for their political power, their splendid homes, and their patronage of art. During the first half of the seventeenth century the United Provinces held the commercial leadership of Europe, and their wealth per capita was greater than that of any other country in the world. Raleigh was dismayed by the superiority of the Dutch to the English in living standards and business enterprise.86 A Venetian ambassador (1618) thought that every Hollander was in comfortable circumstances, but he had probably little acquaintance with the lower classes, whose poverty Rembrandt knew so well. “Millionaires” were numerous in Holland; some of them made fortunes by selling shoddy materials to the Dutch army and navy defending Holland;87 and such men labored zealously to prevent the outbreak of peace.88
Most Dutch wealth was in the province of Holland, whose commerce, from the neighboring sea, was many times greater than that of the other northern provinces. Several towns in Holland had a prosperous bourgeoisie—Rotterdam, The Hague, Haarlem, Utrecht—but none could rival Amsterdam. The growth of its population tells the tale: 75,000 in 1590, 300,000 in 1620. Merchants, craftsmen, and bankers had flocked to it from war-ravaged Antwerp. After 1576 the Jews of Antwerp transferred to Amsterdam their financial activities, their commerce, their jewel industry—the diamond cutters of Amsterdam still lead the world. The merchant rulers of the city allowed considerable religious freedom, for only in this way could trade be encouraged with peoples of diverse faiths. The Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609, was in this age the strongest financial institution in Europe. Dutch currency was sought and trusted everywhere.
VI. DUTCH LIFE AND LETTERS
The Dutch were charged by their rivals with undue commercialism, a fever of money-making, and the coarseness of manners sometimes connected with absorption in economic life. Dutch historians amiably admit these allegations.89 And yet can we call a culture commercial that so loved cleanliness, tulips, music, and art, that set up a school in every village and wiped out illiteracy, that created an intellectual atmosphere electric with controversy and ideas, and allowed such freedom of thought, speech, and press as soon made Holland the international refuge of rebel minds? “There is no country,” said Descartes, “in which freedom is more complete, security greater, crime rarer, the simplicity of ancient manners more perfect than here.”90 And in 1660 another Frenchman wrote:
There is not today a province in the world that enjoys so much liberty as Holland…. The moment a seigneur brings into this country any serfs or slaves they are free. Everybody can leave the country when he pleases, and can take all the money he pleases with him. The roads are safe day and night, even for a man traveling alone. The master is not allowed to retain a domestic against his will. Nobody is troubled on account of his religion. One is free to say what he chooses, even of the magistrates.91
The basis of this freedom was order, and the clarity of the mind was mirrored in the neatness of the home. Courage, industry, and obstinacy characterized the men; domestic assiduity and mastery marked the women; calm temper and a bluff good humor were in both sexes. Many Dutch businessmen retired after making a reasonable fortune, and gave themselves to politics, literature, golf,IV music, and domestic felicity. The Dutch “hold adultery in horror,” wrote Lodovico Guicciardini. “Their women are extremely circumspect, and are consequently allowed much freedom. They go out alone to make visits, and even journeys, without evil report…. They are housekeepers, and love their homes.”93 There were many women of fine culture, like Maria Schuurman, “the Minerva of Holland,” who read eleven languages, spoke and wrote seven, practiced painting and sculpture well, and was adept in mathematics and philosophy. Maria Tesselschade’s poetry was almost as beautiful as her person; she translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata to universal praise; she painted, carved, and etched; she played the harp and sang so well that half a dozen notables, including Constantijn Huygens, Joost van den Vondel, and Gerbrand Bredero, laid proposals at her feet; she married a sea captain, became a devoted housewife and mother, and left behind her a tradition, still dear to Dutch memory, of intelligence, accomplishments, and nobility.94
The love of music was even more widely spread than the appreciation of art. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck of Amsterdam, the greatest of Dutch organists, taught Heinrich Scheidemann, who taught Johann Adam Reinken, who taught Johann Sebastian Bach. Along with all this excellence went some corruption in Dutch commerce, much drunkenness, many brothels, and a taste for gambling in all its forms,95 even to speculation in the future prices of tulips.96
Haarlem was the center of the tulip culture. The bulbs had been imported from Italy and South Germany toward the end of the fifteenth century. Paris too made the flower a fashion and distinction; in 1623 one fancier refused 12,000 francs ($30,000?) for ten tulip bulbs.97 In 1636 nearly the entire population of Holland took to speculating in tulips; special bourses existed where one could buy or sell tulip crops or futures; tulips had their own financial “crash” (1637). In that year an auction of 120 precious bulbs for the benefit of an orphanage brought 90,000 florins; credat qui vult.
Into this genial atmosphere the refugees from Flanders, France, Portugal, and Spain, and foreign merchants from half the world, imported a stimulating variety of exotic ways. The universities of Leiden, Franeker, Harderwijk, Utrecht, and Groningen gathered world-famous scholars, and produced others in turn. Justus Lipsius, Joseph Scaliger, Daniel Heinsius, and Gerard Vossius were all professing at Leiden in the first half century (1575–1625) of its career; by 1640 Leiden was the most renowned seat of learning in Europe. Among the general public of the United Provinces literacy was probably higher than anywhere else in the world. The Dutch press was the first free press. The Leiden weekly News and the Amsterdam Gazette were read throughout Western Europe because they were known to speak freely, while elsewhere the press was at this time governmentally controlled. When a king of France asked to have a Dutch publisher suppressed he was astonished to learn that this was impossible.98
Men of letters were many in Holland, but it was their misfortune that they wrote either in Latin, which was dying, or in Dutch, which narrowed their audience; the Dutch could not make their language, like their marine, a common carrier. Dirck Coornhert and Hendrik Spiegel upheld the lusty vernacular as a literary vehicle, and struggled to free it from uncongenial accretions. Coornhert—artist, writer, statesman, and philosopher—was the first and most virile figure in the cultural blossoming that crowned the political revolt. He drew up, as city secretary at Haarlem, the manifesto of 1566 for William of Orange, was imprisoned at The Hague, escaped to Cleves, earned his living as a skilled engraver, translated The Odyssey, Boccaccio, Cicero, and the New Testament. Back in Holland, he labored for rel
igious toleration, and symbolized the intellectual history of the next—seventeenth—century by losing the faith that he saw so mangled in bloody disputes. He became an agnostic, confessing that man will never know the truth.99 His principal book, Zedenkunst (The Art of Well-Living), proposed a Christianity without theology, a system of morality independent of religious creeds. By some oversight he was allowed to die a natural death (1590).
It was characteristic of Holland that businessmen often mingled literature with their material affairs. Roemer Visscher, wealthy merchant of Amsterdam, gave help and hospitality to young writers, made his home a salon rivaling those of France, and himself wrote poetry that won him the title of the Dutch Martial. Pieter Hooft made his Castle of Muiden, on the Zuider Zee, a haven for the Dutch Renaissance; into his Muiderkring, or Muiden Circle, he welcomed poets, scientists, diplomats, generals, and physicians; and he himself, in his last twenty years, wrote the Nederlandsche Historien, telling the story of the Netherlands revolt in prose so strong and beautiful that Holland celebrated him as its Tacitus.
Three among a hundred poets brought the vernacular to its literary peak. Jacob Cats, for twenty-two years grand pensionary of Holland, expounded proverbial wisdom in popular verse, salted with spicy anecdotes; for centuries the works of “Father Cats” were in every literate Dutch home. Joost van den Vondel climbed over misfortunes and enemies to the supreme place in the literature of Holland. His father, a hatter, was banished from Antwerp for Anabaptist opinions, and Joost was born in Cologne. In 1597 the family settled in Amsterdam, where the father, going from one extreme to the other, opened a hosiery shop. Joost inherited the business, but left its operation to his wife and son while he made up for lack of formal education by studying Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and German. His twenty-eight plays were formed on Greek and French models, carefully obeying the unities. His satires ridiculed predestination and the debates among the Protestant sects. He felt the aesthetic appeal of Roman Catholic ritual, and of Maria Tesselschade, who was both Catholic and beautiful. After her husband died (1634) and Vondel’s wife died (1635), the two poets entered into close friendship. In 1640 he was received into the Catholic faith. He continued to flay religious animosity, economic chicanery, and political corruption, and won a warm place in Dutch hearts by singing the courage and glory of the Netherlands. In 1657 the hosiery business, which his son had mismanaged, went bankrupt. The son fled to the East Indies, the poet sold all his modest possessions to satisfy the creditors, and for ten years he earned his bread as a pawnbroker’s clerk. At last his government pensioned him, and he spent the last thirteen of his ninety-two years in peace.