II.—THE PAINTERS AND PAINTINGS OF NORTHERN EUROPE.
This paper is abridged from “German, Flemish and Dutch Paintings,” by H. J. Wilmot Buxton, M.A., and Edward J. Poynter, R.A.
Art in Germany and the Netherlands may be considered as beginning about the middle of the fourteenth century. There is, however, no name of importance in the German school of artists until the time of Albrecht Dürer. Before him painters had shown little or no originality in their work. They had followed the Byzantine models largely, and had been influenced by the servile and narrow influences of the middle ages. With the new intellectual and spiritual life which sprang up in the fifteenth century, artistic life awoke in Germany. Dürer was the first and greatest master of the school. He was born in Nuremberg on the 21st of May, 1471.
His father was a Hungarian, who settled in Nuremberg as a goldsmith. Albrecht Dürer was taught his father’s trade, but fortunately his talent for art was observed, and he was sent, in 1484, a boy of thirteen years, to Schongauer. In 1486 he was apprenticed to Michael Wolgemut for three years. From the studio of his master, Albrecht Dürer passed, in the year 1490, to a new world—he traveled; and in those “wander-years,” which lasted till 1494, he was doubtless laying in stores of learning for the after-time; but unfortunately we know nothing of those years, except that he had a glimpse of Venice, the first sight of the Italian paradise which, in his case, though seen again, never made him unfaithful to the art of his fatherland. In 1494, Albrecht Dürer returned to Nuremberg, and married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a singer. He received two hundred florins with his wife for her dowry, and it has been said that with her he found more than two thousand unhappy days. In 1506, Dürer again traveled to Italy, and found a warm welcome from the painters at Venice, a city which he now beheld for the second time. Doubtless he learned much from the works which he saw, and the criticism which he heard, but, fortunately for his country, he could go to Italy without becoming a copyist. Giovanni Bellini paid him especial honor, and Dürer tells us that he considered Bellini “the best painter of them all.”
Between the years 1507 and 1520, Dürer produced many of his most famous works. In 1509, he bought a house for himself in the Zisselgasse, at Nuremberg. In 1515 Raphael sent a sketch from his own pencil to his great brother, who has been well styled the “Raphael of Germany.” The sketch is in red chalk, and is preserved in the collection of the Archduke Charles, at Vienna. In 1520 we find Dürer appointed court-painter to the emperor, Charles V., a position which he had already held under Maximilian. His own countrymen seem to have been niggardly in their reward of genius, for the court-painter had only a salary of one hundred florins a year, and painted portraits for a florin (about twenty English pence). In the same year Dürer, accompanied by his wife, visited the Netherlands, and at Antwerp, then the most important town of the Low Countries, both he and his wife were entertained at a grand supper; the master has recorded in his journal his pleasure at the honor bestowed upon him. At Ghent and Bruges all were delighted to show their respect for his genius. At Brussels, Dürer was summoned to the court of Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, to whom he presented several engravings. Either through jealous intrigues, or from some other cause, his court favor was of short duration. In Brussels he painted several portraits which were never paid for, and for a time he was in straitened circumstances. Just at this time, however, Christian II., king of Denmark, became acquainted with him, and having shown every mark of honor to the painter, sat to him for his portrait. Soon afterward he returned to Germany.
Once more at home in his beloved Nuremberg, Dürer wrote to remind the Town Council that whilst the people of Venice and Antwerp had offered him liberal sums to dwell among them, his own city had not given him five hundred florins for thirty years of work. But we must pass to the end. Whether the health of Albrecht Dürer had been injured by home cares and the tongue of Agnes Frey, we know not, though many passages in his letters and journal seem to point to this fact. He died on the 6th of April, 1528, and was buried in the cemetery of St. John, at Nuremberg.
Most of Dürer’s works are to be found in Germany. In the Louvre there are only three or four drawings. The Museum of Madrid possesses several of his paintings—a “Crucifixion” (1513), showing the maturity of his genius, two “Allegories” of the same type as the “Dance of Death,” so favorite a subject at this period, and a “Portrait of Himself,” bearing the date 1496. At Munich we may trace, in a series of seventeen pictures, the dawn, the noonday, and the evening of Albrecht Dürer’s art. The “Portrait of his Father,” 1497, is one of his earliest works. His father was then seventy years old. The color is warm and harmonious. The masterpiece of Dürer’s art is the painting of the four apostles—“St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Mark.” This wonderful work is clearly the production of his later years; it bears no date, but the absence of the hardness, which Michael Wolgemut’s workshop had imparted to his early style, is gone, and the whole work shows the influence of his travels and unflagging study. It is usually assigned to the year 1526. The picture has been supposed to represent the “Four Temperaments,” but there is no satisfactory proof that Dürer intended this.
Vienna possesses some of the finest specimens of his art. In the legend of “The Ten Thousand Martyrs,” who were slain by the Persian king Shahpour II., Dürer has described on a panel of about a foot square every conceivable kind of torture. These horrors are witnessed by two figures which represent the painter himself, and his friend Pirkheimer.
The “Adoration of the Trinity” is one of the most famous of Dürer’s works. It is a vast allegorical picture, representing the Christian Religion.
Of his wood-cuts the best known are the “Apocalypse,” 1498; the “Life of the Virgin,” 1511; and the “History of Christ’s Passion.” Of his copper-plate engravings, “St. Hubert,” “St. Jerome,” and “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” bearing the date 1513, in which we see what Kugler calls “the most important work which the fantastic spirit of German art has ever produced.” The weird, the terrible, and the grotesque look forth from this picture like the forms of some horrible nightmare. Another famous engraving, called “Melancholy,” is full of mystic poetry; it bears the date 1514. To these may be added a series of sixteen drawings in pen and ink on gray paper, heightened with white, representing “Christ’s Passion,” which he never engraved. They are in his best style, and among the finest of his works.
HANS HOLBEIN.
Contemporary with Dürer lived another great artist, Hans Holbein. He was born at Augsburg, in 1497. Comparing him with Albrecht Dürer, Kugler says that “as respects grandeur and depth of feeling, and richness of his invention and conception in the field of ecclesiastical art, he stands below the great Nuremberg painter. Though not unaffected by the fantastic element which prevailed in the Middle Ages, Holbein shows it in his own way.” What we know of Holbein’s life must be told briefly. He was painting independently, and for profit, when only fifteen. He was only twenty when he left Augsburg and went to Bâle. There he painted his earliest known works, which still remain there. In 1519, after a visit to Lucerne, we find him a member of the Guild of Painters at Bâle, and years later he was painting frescoes for the walls of the Rathaus—frescoes which have yielded to damp and decay, and of which fragments only remain. These are in the Museum of Bâle, as well as eight scenes from “The Passion,” which belong to the same date. Doubtless Holbein had gone to Bâle poor, and in search of any remunerative work. It is said that he and his brother Ambrose visited that city with the hope of finding employment in illustrating books, an art for which Bâle was famous. Hans Holbein was destined, however, to find a new home and new patrons. In 1526, Holbein went to England. The house of Sir Thomas More, in Chelsea, received him, and there he worked as an honored guest—painting portraits of the ill-fated Chancelor and his family. Of other portraits painted at this time that of “Sir Bryan Tuke,” treasurer of the king’s chamber, now in the collection of the Duke of Westminster, and that of “Archbishop Warham,” in the Louvre, are famous specimens. Having returned to Bâle for a season, hard times forced Holbein to seek work once more in England. This was in 1532, when he was taken into the service of Henry VIII., a position not without its dangers. He was appointed court-painter at a salary of thirty-four pounds a year, with rooms in the palace. The amount of this not very magnificent stipend is proved from an entry in a book at the Chamberlain’s office, which, under the date of 1538, contains these words: “Payd to Hans Holbein, Paynter, a quarter due at Lady Day last, £8 10s. 9d.”
Holbein was employed to celebrate the marriage of Anne Boleyn by painting two pictures in tempera in the Banqueting Hall of the Easterlings, at the Steelyard. He chose the favorite subjects for such works, “The Triumph of Riches,” and “The Triumph of Poverty.” The pictures probably perished in the Great Fire of London. In 1538, Holbein was engaged on a very delicate mission, considering the matrimonial peculiarities of his royal master. He was sent to Brussels to paint the “Portrait of Christina,” widow of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, whom Henry would have made his queen, had she been willing. Soon after, having refused an earnest invitation from Bâle to return there, Holbein painted an aspirant to the royal hand, Anne of Cleves. Perhaps the painter flattered the lady; at all events the original was so distasteful to the king that he burst into a fit of rage which cost Thomas Cromwell his head. Holbein continued his work as a portrait painter, and has left us many memorials of the Tudor Court. He died in 1543, of the plague, but nothing is known of his burial place. Some time before his death we hear of him as a resident in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft, in the city.
The fame of this great master rests almost entirely upon his power as a portrait painter. In the collection of drawings at Windsor, mostly executed in red chalk and Indian ink, we are introduced to the chief personages who lived in and around the splendid court in the troublous times of the second Tudor.
JOHANN FRIEDRICH OVERBECK.
After the death of Dürer and Holbein the German school did not long hold its supremacy. Its decline was rapid, and not until the present century was there a re-awakening. Johann Friedrich Overbeck, the chief of the revivalists of German art, was born at Lübeck, in 1789. When about eighteen years of age he went to Vienna, to study painting in the academy of that city. The ideas on art which he had carried with him were so entirely new and so little agreeable to the professors of the academy, that they met with but small approval. On the other hand, there were several among his fellow-pupils who gladly followed his lead; and in 1810, Overbeck, accompanied by a small band of youthful artists, went to Rome, where he established the school which was afterward to become so famous.
Overbeck, who was professor of painting in the Academy of St. Luke, a foreign member of the French Institute, and a member of all the German academies, died at Rome in 1869, at the advanced age of eighty years. He painted both in fresco and in oil. Of his productions in fresco, the most noteworthy are a “Vision of St. Francis” in Santa Maria degli Angeli, at Assisi, and five scenes from Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” in the villa of the Marchese Massimo, in Rome. Of his oil paintings, the best are the “Triumph of Religion in the Arts,” in the Städel Institute at Frankfort; “Christ on the Mount of Olives,” at Hamburg; the “Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem,” painted in 1816 for the Marien Kirche, at Lübeck; and a “Descent from the Cross,” at Lübeck. Overbeck also executed a number of small drawings. Of these we may mention forty designs of the “Life of Christ,” and many other Biblical subjects.
THE SCHOOL OF THE NETHERLANDS.
In the Netherlands, we find before the seventeenth century, two schools of art; that of Bruges, whose most famous painters were the brothers Van Eyck, and that of Antwerp, whose founder, Matsys, did some fine work. It was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, that art in the Netherlands attained its full strength and life. The artist to whom the revival was due was Peter Paul Rubens. He was born on the day of the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul—the 29th of June, 1577, at Siegen, in Westphalia. His father was a physician, who being suspected of Protestant proclivities, had been forced to flee from his native town of Antwerp, and was subsequently imprisoned, not without cause, by William of Orange, whose side he had joined. When Peter Paul was a year old, his parents removed to Cologne, where they remained for nine years, and then on the death of her husband, the mother of Rubens returned with her child to Antwerp. Young Rubens was sent to a Jesuit school, doubtless in proof of his mother’s soundness in the faith of Rome, and studied art. Fortunately for the world, Rubens possessed too original a genius to be much influenced by his masters. He visited Italy in 1600, where the coloring of the Venetians exercised a great influence upon the young painter, and we may consider Paolo Veronese as the source of inspiration from which Rubens derived the richness of his tints. In 1601 we find Rubens in the service of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, an enthusiastic patron of art, and two years later he was sent to Philip III. of Spain, on an “artistic commission,” some secret mission, perhaps, but certainly as the bearer of costly presents. On his return from Spain he passed some time in Mantua, Rome, and Genoa; the dramatic power of his pictures he derived probably from Michelangelo, as he had learned richness of coloring from Veronese, and we can trace the influence of Giulio Romano, whose works he must have studied at Mantua.
Rubens settled in Antwerp, and married in 1609 his first wife, Isabella Brandt. Always popular, and always successful, Rubens founded a school of painting in Antwerp, which was soon crowded with pupils. His life, however, was destined to be full of action and movement. In 1620 he went to Paris at the invitation of Marie de Medicis, then living in the Luxembourg Palace. The work which the widowed queen proposed to Rubens was to decorate two galleries, the one with scenes from her own history, the other with pictures from the life of Henri IV.
In 1626 Rubens visited Holland, saw the principal painters of that country, and lost his wife in the same year. The picture of the two sons of this marriage is in the Lichtenstein Gallery, in Vienna. In 1627 Rubens was employed in diplomatic service at the Hague, and in the next year he was ambassador to Philip IV. of Spain, from the Infanta Isabella, widow of the archduke Albert. In 1629 we find the painter still acting as a diplomatist, and this time to the Court of England. The courtly manner, handsome person, and versatile genius of Rubens made him a favorite at Whitehall.
On his return to Antwerp in 1630, he married his second wife, Helena Fourment, a girl of sixteen, belonging to one of the richest families in the city. She served him many times as a model for his pictures. The great master died in 1640, wealthy, honored, and famous, not only in his own city, but in many another. He was buried in the Church of St. Jacques at Antwerp.
In speaking briefly of the chief works of Rubens, we come first to the “Descent from the Cross,” in Antwerp Cathedral. We find in this wonderful work perfect unity, and a nobler conception and more finished execution than usual. Of the coloring it is needless to speak. But even here in this masterpiece we notice the absence of spirituality. The dead Christ is an unidealized study, magnificently painted and drawn, but unredeemed by any divinity of form, or pathos of expression in the head, so that we discover no foregleam of the Resurrection; it is a dead body, no more. Among the eighteen pictures by Rubens in the Antwerp Museum, is a “Last Communion of St. Francis,” which has a great reputation, but suffers from the ignoble type of St. Francis’s head. It was painted in 1619.
In the Gallery at Munich we find ninety-five paintings by this master, illustrating all his styles. The masterpiece is the “Last Judgment.” Passing to Vienna, we find in the Lichtenstein Gallery the portraits of Rubens’s “Two Sons,” and a long series of pictures illustrating the “History of Decius.” In the Belvedere is a magnificent portrait of his second wife, “Helena Fourment.” In the Louvre we find forty-two paintings by Rubens. The greater number of these belong to the series illustrating “The Life of Marie de Medicis.” At Madrid in the Museo del Rey is a “Glorified Virgin,” a truly wonderful work. Turning to Russia, we find in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg some fine works by this master; especially deserving of notice is the “Feast in the House of Simon.” Coming home to England we find this great master again largely represented. The “History of Ixion on the Cloud” is in the gallery of the Duke of Westminster; and “Diana and her Nymphs surprised by Satyrs,” painted for Charles I. in 1629. Blenheim contains many great works by Rubens.
ANTOON VAN DYCK,
The greatest of the pupils of Rubens, the son of a merchant of good standing, was born at Antwerp, in 1599. At ten years of age he was studying art under Van Balen, and was registered in the Guild as his pupil; from him he proceeded to the studio of Rubens. His wonderful precocity enabled Van Dyck to become a master in the Guild of Antwerp painters when only nineteen. In 1620 he was engaged as an assistant by Rubens, and in the following year he was in England employed by James I. This royal service soon ended, and in 1623 Van Dyck went to Italy; in Venice he copied many of Titian’s works, and spent some time in Rome, and a much longer time at Genoa. Wherever he went he was busy with brush and canvas, and in Genoa he painted many of his best pictures. From 1626 to 1632 Van Dyck was in Antwerp, diligently working at some of his greatest pictures, historical subjects and portraits. In the Cassel Gallery there are fourteen of his portraits, among which that of the “Syndic Meerstraten” is one of the most characteristic of his art at this period. At the close of these six years of Antwerp work a new world opened to him. His first visit to England seems to have been unfruitful, but in 1632 he became one of the court painters of Charles I. Success and honor now crowned the new works of Van Dyck. He received a salary of £200 a year as principal painter to the Stuart court, and was knighted by the king. Nothing succeeds like success, and we find Van Dyck sought after by the nobility and gentry of England, and at once installed as a fashionable portrait painter.
Later, after his return to Flanders, in 1640, with his wife, a lady of the Scottish house of Ruthven, he went to Paris, hoping to obtain from Louis XIII. the commission to adorn with paintings the largest saloon in the Louvre, but here he was doomed to disappointment, as the work had been given to Poussin. Van Dyck returned to England, and found that he had fallen, like his patron, Charles I., “on evil tongues and evil days.” The Civil War had commenced. There was no time now for pipe or tabor, for painting of pictures or curling of lovelocks, and whilst trumpets were sounding to boot and saddle, and dark days were coming for England, Van Dyck died in Blackfriars, on the 9th of December, in 1641, and was buried hard by the tomb of John of Gaunt, in old St. Paul’s.
Possessed of less power of invention than his great master, Van Dyck shows in his pictures that feeling which is wanting in the works of Rubens. It is infinitely more pleasant to gaze on a crucifixion, or some other sacred subject, from the pencil of Van Dyck, than to examine the more brilliant but soulless treatment of similar works by his master. As a portrait painter Van Dyck occupies with Titian and Velasquez the first place. In fertility and production he was equal to Rubens, if we remember that his artistic life was very brief, and that he died at the age of forty-two. He lacked the inexhaustible invention which distinguishes his teacher, and generally confined himself to painting a “Dead Christ” or a “Mater Dolorosa.” Of Van Dyck’s sacred subjects we may mention the “Taking of Jesus in Gethsemane” (Museum of Madrid), “Christ on the Cross” (Munich Gallery), the “Vision of the Blessed Hermann Joseph” (Vienna), the famous “Madonna with the Partridges” (St. Petersburg), and the “Dead Christ,” mourned by the Virgin, and adored by angels, in the Louvre.
Portraits by Van Dyck are scattered widely throughout the galleries of Europe, and his best are probably in the private galleries of England. In all his portraits there is that air of refinement and taste which rightly earned for Van Dyck the name which the Italians gave him, Pittore Cavalieresco.
REMBRANDT.
Contemporaneous with the Flemish school of which Rubens and Van Dyck were the masters, was the Dutch school, of which the great name was Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. Few persons have suffered more from their biographers than the painters of the Dutch school, and none of them more than Rembrandt. The writings of Van Mander, and the too active imagination of Houbraken, have misrepresented these artists in every possible way. Thus Rembrandt has been described as the son of a miller, one whose first ideas of light and shadow were gained among his father’s flour sacks in the old mill at the Rhine. He has been described as a spendthrift reveler at taverns, and as marrying a peasant girl. All this is fiction. The facts are briefly these: Rembrandt was born on July 15, 1607, in the house of his father, Hermann Gerritszoon Van Rijn, a substantial burgess, the owner of several houses, and possessing a large share in a mill on the Weddesteeg at Leyden. Educated at the Latin school at Leyden, and intended for the study of the law, Rembrandt’s early skill as an artist determined his father to allow him to follow his own taste.
But it was not from these nor from any master that Rembrandt learnt to paint. Nature was his model, and he was his own teacher. In 1630 he produced one of his earliest oil paintings, the “Portrait of an Old Man,” and at this time he settled as a painter in Amsterdam. He devoted himself to the teaching of his pupils more than to the cultivation of the wealthy, but instead of being the associate of drunken boors, as some have described him, he was the friend of the Burgomaster Six, of Jeremias de Decker the poet, and many other persons of good position. In 1632 Rembrandt produced his famous picture, “The Lesson in Anatomy;” about that time he was established in Sint Antonie Breedstraat; in the next year he married Saskia van Ulenburch, the daughter of the Burgomaster of Leeuwarden, whose face he loved to paint best after that of his old mother. We may see Saskia’s portrait in the famous picture, “Rembrandt with his wife on his knee,” in the Dresden Gallery; and a “Portrait of Saskia” alone is in the Cassel Gallery.
In the year 1640 Rembrandt painted a portrait, long known under the misnomer of “The Frame-maker.” It is usually called “Le Doreur,” and it is said that the artist painted the portrait in payment for some picture frames; but is in reality a portrait of Dorer, a friend of Rembrandt. The year 1642 saw Rembrandt’s masterpiece, the so-called “Night-watch.” Saskia died in the same year, and the four children of the marriage all died early, Titus, the younger son, who promised to follow in his father’s steps, not surviving him. Rembrandt was twice married after Saskia’s death. The latter years of the great master’s life were clouded by misfortune. Probably owing to the stagnation of trade in Amsterdam, Rembrandt grew poorer and poorer, and in 1656 was insolvent. His goods and many pictures were sold by auction in 1658, and realized less than 5,000 guilders. Still he worked bravely on. His last known pictures are dated 1668. On the 8th of October, 1669, Rembrandt died, and was buried in the Wester Kerk.
Rembrandt was the typical painter of the Dutch School; his treatment is distinctly Protestant and naturalistic. Yet he was an idealist in his way, and as “The King of Shadows,” as he has been called, he brought forth from the dark recesses of nature, effects which become, under his pencil, poems upon canvas. Rembrandt loved to paint pictures warmed by a clear, though limited light, which dawns through masses of shadow, and this gives much of that air of mystery so noticeable in his works. In most of his pictures painted before 1633, there is more daylight and less shadow, and the work is more studied and delicate.
In the National Gallery we find two portraits of Rembrandt, one representing him at the age of thirty-two, another when an old man. In the same collection is the “Woman taken in Adultery” (1644), and the “Adoration of the Shepherds” (1646), both superb in arrangement and execution. Germany and Russia are almost as rich as Holland in the number of Rembrandt’s pictures which they possess. The “Descent from the Cross,” in the Munich Gallery, is a specimen of the sacred subjects of this master. He interprets the Bible from the Protestant and realistic standpoint, and though the coloring of the pictures is marvelous, the grotesque features and Walloon dress of the personages represented make it hard to recognize the actors in the gospel story. Many of his Scripture characters were doubtless painted from the models afforded him in the Jews’ quarter of Amsterdam, where he resided. The magnificent panoramic landscape belonging to Lord Overstone, and the famous picture of “The Mill” against a sunset sky, are signal examples of his poetic power, and his etchings show us this peculiarity of his genius, even more than his oil paintings. Of these etchings, which range over every class of subject, religious, historical, landscape and portrait, there is a fine collection in the British Museum; and they should be studied in order to understand the immense range of his superb genius. The “Ecce Homo,” to say nothing of the splendor, the light and shade, and richness of execution, has never been surpassed for dramatic expression; and we forgive the commonness of form and type in the expression of touching pathos in the figure of the Savior; nor would it be possible to express with greater intensity the terrible raging of the crowd, the ignobly servile and cruel supplications of the priests, or the anxious desire to please on the part of Pilate. The celebrated plate “Christ Healing the Sick,” exhibits in the highest perfection his mastery of chiaroscuro, and the marvelous delicacies of gradation which he introduced into his more finished work.
The number of Rembrandt’s pictures in Holland, although it includes his three greatest, is remarkably small—indeed, they may be counted on the fingers; and lately, by the sale of the Van Loon collection, the Dutch have lost two more of his finest works in the portraits of the “Burgomaster Six” and “His Wife.” But his works abound in the other great galleries of Europe.
There is really in nature such a thing as high life. A life of health, of sound morality, of disinterested intellectual activity, of freedom from petty cares is higher than a life of disease and vice, and stupidity and sordid anxiety. I maintain that it is right and wise in a nation to set before itself the highest attainable ideal of human life as the existence of a complete gentleman.—Hamerton.