The Story of Dutch Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

are fishing for the men and women that swim around them, while the banks are crowded with spectators. On the left are serried ranks of Hollanders, closing round those in whom they have confidence, namely, the Princes of Orange, Maurice and Frederick Henry, James I of England, and the young King of France, Louis XIII. On the opposite bank a less orderly mass of people confronts them, headed by the Archduke Albert and the Duchess Isabella, to whom Philip had made over the sovereignty of the Netherlands. So far the allegory epitomizes the political situation in which the Hollanders found themselves. Meanwhile, the religious aspect of the situation is suggested in the circumstances of the fishing, which seems to refer both to the old struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism and also to the new one arising out of the dissension in the latter between the rival sects of the Gomarists and Arminians. The happy outcome of it all is prefigured in the rainbow that spans the scene.

To appreciate the allegory involved in The Enraged Swan it is necessary to summarize the events that followed the conclusion of the truce in 1621. Spain would have been glad to substitute for the truce a permanent peace, but held out for terms that were unacceptable to the Hollanders; and war in a desultory fashion was renewed. By this time the Thirty Years’ War had commenced, and the religious and political struggle, that hitherto had centered in Holland, was being continued in a distant and larger field. Maurice died in 1625 and was succeeded in the office of Stadtholder by Frederick Henry, an able soldier and wise and patriotic statesman, who set himself to consolidate the internal resources of the republic. The latter showed its recognition of his services by the fatal expedients of making the office of Stadtholder hereditary in the house of Orange and of agreeing to the marriage of Frederick’s son William with the eldest daughter of Charles I. The effects of this were, on the one hand, to create within the republic an Orange party that in time intrigued for absolutism of government, and, on the other, to embroil Holland in the struggle between the Stuarts and the Parliament of England, and later, upon the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II, to involve the republic both in diplomacy and in war with that utterly unprincipled person.

Meanwhile peace was finally concluded with Spain in 1648, by the Treaty of Westphalia, or, as the compact is also styled, the Peace of Münster, which was proclaimed on June 5, 1648, the day on which Egmont and Horn had been executed by Alva eighty years before. By this time Frederick had been succeeded in the Stadtholdership by his son William, who, with the assistance of the Orange party, was intriguing for absolute rule. Fortunately for the republic, his death occurred two years later, a few days before the birth of his son, who eventually became Stadtholder and subsequently William III of England. Meanwhile, during the prince’s minority, the government was in the hands of Johan de Witt, whose book “The Interest of Holland” is an able summary of the political and commercial conditions of the republic at the time. His patriotism had been whetted to a personal edge by the fact that he had been imprisoned illegally and arbitrarily by the late Stadtholder, and his opposition to the pretensions of the Orange party was in consequence unceasing throughout his official term, which lasted from 1650 to 1672. It is this that is commemorated in The Enraged Swan.

The picture represents a swan standing above its nest of eggs, in a fierce and threatening attitude, prepared to repel the attack of a dog. Above the latter is an inscription in Dutch, signifying “The Enemy of the State,” while one of the eggs is lettered “Holland,” and beneath the swan are the words “Grand Pensionary,” the title of the office of Johan de Witt. Since the artist, Jan Asselyn, died in 1652, it is possible that his picture originally had no allegorical intent, but that its owner, seeing its application to the political situation, caused the inscriptions to be added. However this may be, it remains a curious document of the internal dissensions that at this period rent the little republic, and ended with the murder of De Witt and his brother by an Orange mob in 1672.

Of the entanglements into which the union of the house of Orange with the Stuarts eventually led the country, it is enough here to recall that the enmity of Spain had been replaced by that of France. The ambition of Louis XIV threatened not only Holland but Europe; and it was against this that William III during his Stadtholdership, and later, when he also occupied the throne of England, directed the military resources of both countries and his own unrivaled genius as a diplomatist. The result was a war, interrupted temporarily by nominal treaties of peace, but actually protracted beyond the lifetime of William, until the power of France had been beaten down by Marlborough, and peace was secured by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Hobbema, the last of the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, had died six years before.

Peace removed the barriers that Holland had erected for her self-preservation. Her artists, like her traders, wandered afield. The old centripetal tendency, which compelled the artist to find initiative in his own surroundings at home and so bred a distinctly Holland school, was superseded by the tendency to look for motive outside. The painter found it in Italy; he and his art became Italianate. This is not to say that the Holland painters of the eighteenth century are without merit. The best undoubtedly have a charm of their own; but it is not of the kind that one has learned to recognize and respect in the earlier pictures, as being a characteristic product of a nation fighting to maintain the integrity and independence of its nationality. The charm is by comparison slender and superficial, the product, not of originality, but of imitation. For the art of Holland had ceased to be the expression of conviction, and no longer exemplified the morality that had given character to its motive and unimpeachable integrity to its technique.

CHAPTER IV
FRANS HALS

THE readiest way to study the art of Holland in the seventeenth century is under the separate heads of portraiture, landscape, marine, genre, and still-life. In this way one obtains a comprehensive survey of the development of each of these branches, and is not confused by the fact that many of the artists practised in more than one of them. But at the start it must be observed that these separate departments are inclosed in a common motive. As Fromentin says, the art of Holland was essentially an art of portraiture. It followed from the character of the people and the conditions under which they found themselves. They were a nation of burghers, practical in mind, direct in action, self-centered, and full of personal and local pride. What more likely, in fact more inevitable, than that they should need and their painters should supply an art which gave a complete, exact, and for the most part unembellished portrait of the country, its people, and their habits of life.