The Story of Dutch Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

PORTRAIT OF NICOLAES VAN DER MEER FRANS HALS

BURGOMASTER OF HAARLEM

HAARLEM MUSEUM

goblets, the fruit and wine, banners and weapons. He has not only seen these things, he has felt their beauty; discovered, in fact, by an act of imagination, the sentiment of beauty they involve.

And here I may add, in the way of anticipation, that, if a person is dull to the sentiment of beauty that things inanimate may suggest, he is not going to proceed very far toward an appreciation of the art of Holland in the seventeenth century, for it was largely concerned with the beauty that is inherent in material things. If he is conscious of nothing more in the rendering of costumes and accessories with which these pictures abound than the cleverness of material representation, he will soon tire of the study, for the skilfulness is so frequently repeated, and its very repetition will fatigue. He may begin by exclaiming: “How wonderfully that sash, this velvet gown, or what not is painted!” but, unless he can go on and share the enthusiasm for beauty that inspired and assured the artist’s skill; if, in a word, his own imagination cannot conspire with the imagination of the artist, he will very shortly be an exceedingly tired student of Holland art.

So far we have discussed the imagination with which Hals observed his subjects; it remains to note how imagination was involved in the rendering of them. Really the two processes, the mental and the manual, are inextricably united, for it was the way he felt his subject that determined the impression he received of it, and the impression itself that suggested the mode of rendering it. Yes, he was an Impressionist. The term, as we know, is modern, dating from about 1871, but the idea involved in it has been derived from the example of Frans Hals and of his great contemporary Velasquez, with whom, however, so far as is known, he had no possible chance of conferring. These two original minds, separated by distance and the difference of race and by the barrier of hostilities that precluded any acquaintance with each other or each other’s work, were nevertheless kindred geniuses who simultaneously discovered a new way of seeing and rendering their subject. It did not survive their generation, for the artists of the next century turned again to Italy, and Hals and Velasquez were practically forgotten, until in the early sixties of the nineteenth century Edouard Manet rediscovered Velasquez, and the study of him led to the recognition of Hals, so that both became an example and inspiration to modern art. It produced, in fact, a revolution in the artist’s point of view and method of painting, and the principle involved was dubbed Impressionism.

Some confusion still exists as to what is implied by this term. Many, for example, having heard that Claude Monet is an Impressionist and observing that he covers his pictures with little dabs of paint, suppose that in this consists Impressionism. Others of wider observation, having found themselves puzzled and even outraged by the vagaries in paint that are committed under cover of Impressionism, have concluded that Impressionism is something which, in the words of the late Lord Dundreary, “No fellah can understand”; no layman, at least; and, according to their temperament, they either foam at the mouth with disgust of Impressionism or regard it as a comparatively harmless form of lunacy. In either case they miss the fact that Impressionism has become a vital principle of modern thought, expressing itself not only in the arts: in painting, sculpture, literature, play-writing, acting, music, and dancing, but also in modern methods of education, and, by a natural extension of the idea involved, even in the modern attitude toward matters of criminology and sanitation. These, however, are modern evolutions from the single, simple principle involved in the Impressionism of Hals and Velasquez. Before discussing this, let us note what is surely interesting and extremely suggestive, namely, that both the rudimentary principle, as it appears in Hals, and the efflorescence to which it attained in the nineteenth century were contemporary with a signal advance in the growth of the scientific spirit. It is, in fact, of the latter that Impressionism is a phase.

With Hals, as with modern Impressionists, it represents a more natural way of seeing. When the eye is directed toward an object, it sees the latter as a whole; it perceives some details and fails to perceive others; it automatically selects and eliminates. There is another way of seeing, as when the object is kept for a long time under observation, and the eye travels over it at leisure and exhaustively examines every part. Of a picture that records the results of this way of seeing, we exclaim, “How realistic!” And so in a sense it is; but, on the other hand, we know that it does not really represent the way in which we see things in every-day life. What our eye usually records is not an inventory of details, but a summarized impression of a personality; and the more vivid the impression, the less likely is it to be distracted by a number of details. We are impressed by the general significance of the personality, and note only those details that most contribute to it; the details that are themselves most significant and characteristic. Such was Hals’s way of seeing his subject; and, if it resulted in a very vivid impression in the case of an individual portrait, how much more when it embraced the complicated impression of a group! The latter, as a matter of fact, does include more than any eye could possibly embrace in a single act of vision; but this was a necessary concession to the difficulties of the problem, which was to effect a compromise between the conflicting claims, on the one hand, of the group as a whole, and, on the other, of each of the individual units composing it. Admitting the need of this reconciliation of opposites, we can scarcely hesitate to acknowledge the vividness of the total impression and the no less vivid impression of each one of its component units.

When we analyze the principle of this method of seeing, it is found to be that of relativity. In selecting this or rejecting that the artist has been guided by its more or less of value in relation to the whole. The composition, in fact, is an adjusted balance of varieties of values; an interlocked scheme of mutual relations; shrewdly calculated to assert the significance of the whole without undue impairment of the varying character of the parts. And this principle, thus applied to the whole composition, operates also in the treatment of every part. Whether it be the folds of a sash, the modeling of an arm in a sleeve, the substance and set of a ruff, or the construction of a face, each is attained by observing the relation of the values. In this case, however, one uses values, not to measure the amount of relative importance that they play in the general scheme, but in the technical sense of the amount and quality of light reflected from the several facets of the surface. Hals chose to view his subject in a diffused light that permitted practically no shadows, but reduced the whole to a tissue of more light and less light, of higher and lower values. While this sounds like the method of the modern plein-air painters, which has been evolved from the example of Hals and Velasquez, it is not quite the same; for Hals does not represent the light as being independent of the figures and enveloping them, but still adheres to the old convention of making the figure itself a center of light, as, for instance, a lamp is. Thus in one of his groups, where a window appears at the back, the light beyond it is of lower value than that which illumines the figures; and, in another case, a landscape presents a darker background. But, having adopted this convention, he adheres to the logic of it, and, like the modern painter who has followed his example, but with the difference that he tries to represent the effect of plein-air, models his forms in colored light by the juxtaposition of the various values.