Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  The eulogists of Holland had not arrived at their improbable social epiphany overnight. What makes their position so diametrically opposite from Ruskin’s is that while our Prophet read what he supposed to be the essentially prosaic and (his favourite word) ‘carnal’ nature of Dutch painting to be evidence of a hopelessly debased and vulgar culture, immune to any possibility of the spiritual life, French writers in whom art criticism, social evangelism and political activism were married to at least the same degree as Ruskin, came to precisely the opposite conclusion from the same evidence! Years before they were eyewitnesses and reporters on Dutch society, these critics, banded together as Jeune France, were impassioned devotees of its art, including its landscape painting.

  Many of those who would become the champions of Dutch painting in France in the 1830s were first exposed to it when they were very young in the great aristocratic collections which passed, sometimes by force, to the new Louvre – the collection of the Marquis de Vaudreuil, for example – as well as in the loot brought to Paris by the wagons of Napoleonic triumph. It was through that more doubtful route that the great treasures from the Stadholder William V’s collection, including the great Potter in The Hague and a number of Ruisdaels, were first seen by Michelet who never forgot them. After 1815 these canonical works disappeared in two directions: the expropriated works properly repatriated back to the royal collection in The Hague (the nucleus of the Mauritshuis) and in much greater numbers (from, for example, the Prince de Conti and the Choiseuls) into the collections of the aristocratic magnates of Britain, via the auctions and sales inventoried by John Smith.

  So when the writers, poets and artists of Jeune France were looking for counter-paradigms around which they could rally against the academy, the lost treasures of Dutch art were one of their first thoughts. Though they might come to despise it in the end (and not all did), the railway train got them from Paris to Antwerp and eventually to Utrecht by the late 1830s and early ’40s. And another crucial technological breakthrough – lithography – helped them publish the works of the Dutch masters in their periodicals, none more important than Arsène Houssaye’s L’Artiste, which published art criticism by Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Félix Pyat, Petrus Borel, Eugène Delacroix and of course the young Thoré.

  The qualities which these writers saw in Dutch art, and which they held to be socially and morally redemptive, were precisely those which Ruskin read as evidence of the degenerate vulgarity of the culture: namely its earthiness, its rejection of grand or sacred narrative; its rejection of received assumptions about the beautiful and the ugly; the willingness of artists to consider themselves as proximate to their subjects, however drunk or debauched or dirty or violent those subjects might be. They also, of course, indulged in a great deal of wishful thinking – nourished by the anecdotal early eighteenth-century biographies of Dutch artists by Arnold Houbraken – as to their autodidact background. Rembrandt – their favorite farouche – was firmly lodged in their imagination as the miller’s son with flour in his hair, marrying the peasant girl Saskia. And in keeping with Romantic assumptions about the indivisibility of personal temper and painterly style, they also read imaginary connections between those biographies and aspects of handling – van Goyen’s notorious propensity for gambling thus became an explanation for the loose sketchiness of his style and his rejection (as was then thought) of under-drawing; Dou’s apparent manic fastidiousness was of a piece with the gem-like licked finish of his genre paintings and still lifes, and so on.

  Most important of all, though, the writers of Jeune France were attracted to the greatest work of Dutch art for what they called its ‘poésie’: and here again both Potter and Jacob van Ruisdael played a crucial role. Poesy (for which these writers were at least in part indebted to their readings of German idealism) meant the intimation of unworldly things from the close inspection of the worldly; the implication of interiors from the avid description of surfaces. So that while Ruskin took Potter’s cows to be evidence that all the Dutch cared for was a kind of merchant’s inventory of leather on the hoof, Arsène Houssaye could write of the same painting that Potter ‘fixes nature itself on the canvas as if it were a mirror . . . he [Potter] proves triumphantly that cattle have a soul, a spirit, even a mind (pensée), that these animals speak to you with their eyes, their movement, their postures (attitudes)’. Lammenais, the arch Christian mystic socialist in this company, felt precisely the same way. Jacob van Ruisdael was, just as Goethe had thought (Houssaye again), ‘le poète des coeurs blessés . . . the poet of wounded hearts; he is not just copying nature; he is giving it its soul’. Ruisdael is ‘sad, dreamer, poet above all’. Thoré went even further. In 1844 he compared Ruisdael’s Little Tree with Michelangelo’s sculpture for Lorenzo de Medici known as The Thinker – so that the ‘petit buisson’ attempting to find some peace amidst the agitations of nature became anthropomorphised as a tragic hero – an association which, it’s safe to say, definitely would not have occurred to Ruskin.

  But then Thoré had already decided – as he wrote in an essay on Adriaen van Ostade in 1847 – that Dutch painters of the golden age exhibited a kind of peculiar mysticism, suspended between the material and the immaterial worlds: ‘The Dutch of Ostade are . . . more Christian than one would ever imagine, practising the spirit of the Gospel, the detachment from earthly vanities, equality and fraternity.’ So while, for Ruskin, Dutch painters betrayed their shallow attachment to the surface appearances of this world through their vulgar concern with finish, for his French contemporary art critics, they were the pioneers not of the finite but the infinite world.

  These two stances, about as opposite as one might imagine, were I suppose partly conditioned by the nature of the enemy to be attacked. In France, in the 1840s and ’50s, it was still, by and large, classical academicism, or the stale posturings of the style troubadour. The earthiness of Dutch painting, by contrast, became obviously important for the painters who set themselves most resolutely against the grandiose histories and florid portraiture of the official Salons – painters as diverse as Daumier and Millet, and the plein air Barbizons (Corot and Rousseau). Dutch pictures were as yet very thinly displayed in the Louvre and even scarcer in the grand collections of the plutocracy. The late 1850s were the time when both of those situations changed. In England, on the other hand, the enemy was to be found in the bourgeois and aristocratic houses, which were positively stuffed full of Dutch art since the auctions of the post-Waterloo years. And it was in that over-upholstered milieu that Ruskin believed the taste for Cuyp and Ruisdael had deadened both private and public sensibility.

  Whatever the reason for these strikingly opposed responses, their effects on the critical discourse about the nature of Dutch art were, I think, serious and long-lasting. Ruskin’s brutal dismissal of Dutch art as, at best, so many painted lies about nature and, at worst, the painterly equivalent of the forces of Antichrist, deserving nothing better than being consigned to a great incineration, in effect left the field to writers like Mrs Anna Jameson, whose massively popular books on painting measured Dutch art for the degree to which it was ‘charming’ or not. Unshakably established as part of moneyed taste, writing about Dutch painting in England became (as it certainly had not been in the eighteenth century) almost exclusively a matter of disputes about authentication, and the development of simple chronologies of style from ‘early’ to ‘late’. It was quite unthinkable, for example, that a serious study of Dutch art should play any part at all in the meditations of those critical communities which seemed in the year of Ruskin’s death, a century ago, to be pointing towards the future – the aesthetic movement and Arts and Crafts. As far as Dutch painting was concerned, Ruskin had done something much more fatal than burned the lot of it – he had made its study the exclusive province of connoisseurs. It had become an intellectual dead end, the subject of parlour talk.

  Across the Channel, something like the opposite was true. The early and acute insights of Thoré, Houssaye and
Esquiros had blossomed in two extremely powerful ways. First, Thoré’s own impassioned promotion of the work of Frans Hals generated a completely new understanding of his portraiture (close in many ways to Riegl), and his rediscovery of Vermeer had led him to see hard archival-based documentation as the next step towards proper historical reconstruction of the lives and working conditions of the artists which he himself realised he had over-idealised. The first major archival publications about Dutch painting that I know of were thus the production of a French specialist and friend of Thoré’s, Henri Havard. Second, and perhaps in the end more fundamental to the future of thinking and practising art, the critical insight that Dutch art did not thrive on a transparent or literal relationship between the objective material world and the manner of its representation, but rather posed an enormous question mark over that representation, was astonishingly fertile for thinking about the function of painting in general. It was, in ways incomprehensible to Ruskin, who insisted over and over again that the painter’s job was to do no more but no less than represent the truth of nature, the bud of modernism. It was in precisely the artificiality – the ‘lies’ told about nature in so much Dutch painting – that the way forward actually, for better or worse, lay. And in this respect, forgive me for saying, it was Jacob van Ruisdael, Rembrandt van Rijn and Théophile Thoré, and not John Ruskin, who turned out to be the real prophets of Modern Painting.

  Dutch Courage

  Guardian, 23 June 2007

  Feeling conjugally challenged? Look at Frans Hals’s double portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen in the National Gallery’s forthcoming Dutch Portraits show and, instantly, all will be right with your corner of the world. The graceful painting, silvery with intimate affection, documents one of the great changes in the history of European marriage: the possibility of the shared smile – the glimlach revolution. Not that lipwork had hitherto been out of the question for portraiture. But La Joconde she isn’t. Leonardo’s thinly knowing smirk implies private knowledge, to be decoded only through the proprietorial collusion of patron and painter. But Hals’s newly married couple, Beatrix sporting both betrothal and wedding rings on her right hand, advertise their mutual pleasure openly for our shared celebration. They incline to each other and, through their self-identification as a harmonious pair, radiate that sympathy outwards through the picture plane towards us. Behold, the painting says, as Isaac holds his hand to his heart, the very picture of proper Christian marriage in which duty also happens to be pleasure.

  To gauge the magnitude of that alteration you can look at Jan Claesz’s twin portraits in the exhibition of a married couple from the first decade of the seventeenth century. The figures are still rigid with conventions of social duty, above all that of engendering, the human bond entirely subsumed by the obligations of decorum.

  Precisely because, during the seventeenth century, the Dutch travelled that journey from iconic formalism, through a period of easygoing naturalism, back to refined family ensembles dressed to display patrician rank and classical taste, the National Gallery show is an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the genre itself. As patrons reminded painters (including Rembrandt) whom they thought had been altogether too free with artistic licence, likeness was their first duty. But as Richard Brilliant argued in his elegant book, Portraiture, the artist has often interpreted that job as the likeness of an idea, a sense of a person, rather than the laborious imitation of physiognomic detail. Roger Fry complained of a Sargent portrait of a British general that he couldn’t see the man for the likeness. He was commenting at a time when a portrait was thought to be the capture of a bundle of psychological characteristics stamping the unique quality of a person, which could be read through facial expression and body language, and then transcribed on to the canvas as a sign of essential self. This was no more than a subjective hunch about a person, masquerading as some deeper objective reality. But it meant that modern portraiture has generally been imitation complicated by interpretation.

  Centuries earlier, before the Romantics inaugurated the cult of the unrepeatable self, the work of the portraitist was to represent the imagined mask of, say, the scholar (Holbein’s Erasmus), the Doge (Titian’s Andrea Gritti) or the virtuoso courtier (Raphael’s Castiglione); all of them personifications rather than revelations. But between the normative icon of the Renaissance and the naked ego-show of the nineteenth century, bolder portraitists such as Hals nudged the decorous expectations of their patrons towards informality while never quite disobeying the obligation to represent something (wealth garnered in virtue, for instance) as well as someone. Then, enter the Haarlem smile, hallmarked not just by Hals, but by followers such as Jan de Bray, whose happy couple, the printer Abraham Casteleyn and his wife Margriet de Bancken, perpetuate the Halsian manner well into the 1660s, with the adoring huisvrouw (housewife) leaning towards her husband, while he gestures with creamy complacency towards us.

  Just why Haarlem should have broken the solemnity barrier is a mystery, though perhaps the conjunction of breweries and textiles, both giving a glossy shine to things, the humanist slant of its academies removed from Calvinist-canting Leiden, had something to do with it. But the Haarlem painters also knew that the line between the sympathetic smile and the coarse grin, with teeth exposed, was the severe boundary that separated portraiture from genre painting. The most famous of all Hals’s paintings, The Laughing Cavalier, is, in fact, neither. And no wonder, for the raucous guffaw, with its noisome reek of herring and onions, was the sign of low-lifes, both the people and the pictures.

  The van der Laen marriage portrait is something else again, on one level an omnium gatherum of all the stock marital pieties that could have been pulled straight from a domestic-morality manual such as Jacob Cats’s Houwelyck. Beatrix leans against her solid spouse in a gesture of trusting subordination to his considerable substance. At her feet, inevitably, trails ivy, the symbol of fidelity, while behind the couple a vine, the emblem of fruitful devotion, twines itself around a sturdy trunk. The partners were famously loaded: a prosperous Russian trade merchant married to a local heiress. But what would otherwise be an egregious display of conspicuous fortune is carefully offset by sartorial signals of their old-fashioned homeliness. The sharp clothes may flash with Hals’s silky light, but they are sober Christian black and Beatrix sports the kind of aggressively unfashionable millstone ruff which, by the 1630s, was more likely to be found encircling the neck of a matron. And if raw money is modified by old piety, it’s also polished by culture, hence the display of their poetic pretensions, embodied by the garden, the kind of place extolled in the gently Arcadian love poetry of P. C. Hooft, complete with Italianate pavilions, classical statuary and fountains.

  But Hals has moved the picture well beyond an anthology of allusions. The scene is bright with human as well as botanical nature; the smiles seem spontaneous rather than assumed. In an exquisite touch of intimacy, Hals has the fine silk of her hair escaping her under-cap, the ondermuts that was seldom thought proper for portraits, but whose delicate pink seems to rhyme with her rosy complexion. His ability to convey this move to warm informality was technical as well as conceptual. Inspired perhaps by Rubens (for the Flemish presence was strong in Haarlem), Hals’s handling of paint was itself looser than anything that had yet appeared in Dutch art, the darting hand suggesting the energetic innocence of impulse.

  Of course, the balance between bravura and decorum was always delicate. Hals’s portrait of the twenty-something plutobrat Willem Coymans obliges the patrician by incorporating his coat of arms – the black cattle that made him an urban kooi-man (cow-boy). But by describing the translucent fallen collar and the gold-embroidered coat through a web of dashing, hectic strokes, Hals manages to give Coymans the look of unbothered insouciance, making his improbable expression of thoughtful self-regard a tad more credible.

  We’re constantly being cautioned by the anachronism cops not to read backwards and trawl through Dutch art for the ancestry of modern
bourgeois informality. And if it’s countervailing images of Calvinist sobriety you want, you’ll find enough dutiful sobersides in the show. (Casteleyn and de Bancken turn up again in startling profile as Calvinist clones.) But the curators have been right, for the most part, to go for the graceful flash, in the work, for instance, of the satiny Cornelisz Verspronck, which briefly lit up the Low Countries and lingered to haunt the archivists of European memory – Proust, Claudel, Zbigniew Herbert – as the sorry old continent staggered from butchery to banality. Their observation that the seventeenth-century Dutch painters, stereotyped by Hollandophobes like Ruskin as incapable of rising above the prosaically material, illuminated the poetry of daily life turns out to be right. For a generation or two, the Dutch did move art on, and through it ennobled quotidian humanity, investing two genres in particular – landscape and portraiture – with the force of natural truth. That happened because the kind of patrons – the Church and the court – that were least interested in nature fell away as serious players in the Dutch art market. Instead, there were just punters, you and me, tens of thousands of us, who, if we were, say, in whalebone or the rye trade, could afford a few guilders on a Van Goyen riverscape, or a bit more on an image of ourselves, a contrefeitsel – us edited into grandeur, or piety or marital devotion or cultured finesse, but us all the same.