878. "THE PRETTY MILKMAID."
Philips Wouwerman (Dutch: 1619-1668).
Wouwerman—whose pictures may nearly always be told by a white horse, which is almost his sign-manual—is selected by Ruskin as the central instance of the "hybrid school of landscape." To understand this term we must recall his division of all landscape, in its relation to human beings, into the following heads: (1) Heroic, representing an imaginary world inhabited by noble men and spiritual powers—Titian; (2) Classical, representing an imaginary world inhabited by perfectly civilised men and inferior spiritual powers—Poussin; (3) Pastoral, representing peasant life in its daily work—Cuyp; (4) Contemplative, directed to observation of the powers of nature and record of historical associations connected with landscape, contrasted with existing states of human life—Turner. The hybrid school of which Berchem and Wouwerman are the chief representatives is that which endeavours to unite the irreconcilable sentiment of two or more of the above-mentioned classes. Thus here we have Wouwerman's conception of the heroic in the officers and in the rocky landscape; of the pastoral in the pretty milkmaid, to whom an officer is speaking, and who gives her name to the picture. So again the painter's desire to assemble all kinds of pleasurable elements may be seen in the crowded composition of an adjoining picture (879). Wouwerman is further selected by Ruskin as the chief type of vulgarity in art—meaning by vulgarity, insensibility. He introduces into his pictures—see, for instance, 879—every element that he thinks pleasurable, yet has not imagination enough to enter heartily into any of them. His pleasure is "without a gleam of higher things," and in his war-pieces there is "no heroism, awe or mercy, hope or faith." With regard, finally, to the execution, it is "careful and conscientious," the tone of his pictures generally dark and gray, the figures being thrown out in spots of light (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. viii.). "There is no good painting," Ruskin says of a Wouwerman at Turin, "properly so called, anywhere, but of clever, dotty, sparkling, telling execution, as much as the canvas will hold" (ibid. § 8). Wouwerman was born at Haarlem; his father was a painter. From him Philips learnt the practice of art, afterwards studying landscape under Wynants. He worked for some time at Hamburg, in the studio of Everard Decker. In 1640 he returned to Haarlem, where he remained for the rest of his life. He had two brothers who were also painters. His productivity was enormous. He lived forty-nine years, and it has been calculated that even if we deny his authorship of one half the pictures ascribed to him, we leave him with at least 500, or about one for every three weeks during his productive years (Bryan's Dictionary of Painters). Few galleries are without several pictures by Wouwerman. In the Wallace Collection he is represented by six, in the Dulwich Gallery by ten.
The picture is known after the milkmaid whom the officer is chucking under the chin, whilst the trumpeter takes a sarcastic pleasure, we may suppose, in sounding all the louder the call "to arms."