GERARD (GERRIT) DOU
This artist, born in Leyden, 1613, and dying there in 1675, spent his whole life in his native city, helped to found its Guild of St. Luke, and influenced several other genre painters. Among the latter were Gabriel Metsu, Godfried Schalcken, Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland, and Frans van Mieris the Elder, who handed on the tradition of the Leyden School to his son, Willem van Mieris. Dou himself had enjoyed the influence of Rembrandt, in whose studio he worked during the three years preceding the master’s move to Amsterdam in 1631. But before this time he had been instructed by his father, who was a painter on glass, and by Bartholomeus Dolando, an engraver. Dou’s own matured style very remarkably reflects both the earlier and the later experiences of his training. While he learned to feel his subject in the manner of Rembrandt, he contrived also to see it with a precise eye for detail and to render it with the nicety of a painter on glass or of one who uses the burin. He was an impeccable draftsman and a good composer, so long as the subject contained only a few figures and was treated in a small size. For large canvases and the handling of a complicated composition his style was altogether too minute in character. On the other hand, his color is always harmonious, though in some works inclined to an excessive polish; and the chiaroscuro, skilfully applied, is, when the subject permits, very charmingly expressive of the sentiment. He devoted himself to the representation of interiors and, as we have seen, adopted the device of showing them through an arch or beyond a lambrequin, formed of a heavily draped curtain, frequently also representing one or more figures at a window with the obscurity of the room behind them. In thus adapting Rembrandt’s principle of chiaroscuro to the rendering of the physical phenomenon of a concave space more or less immersed in shadow, no one was more skilful than Dou. To give depth and quality to the obscurity of the distance and especially of the ceiling, he would hang a chandelier or lantern in the middle distance and catch the light upon it. Similarly, he would place some objects in the foreground to bring the latter forward, and then between these two foci of secondary light concentrate or scatter the main group of figures in highest illumination.
The two finest examples of his skill in thus building up a composition of values of light are The Young Mother, in the gallery of The Hague, and The Dropsical Woman of the Louvre. The former, because of its charming sentiment, is Dou’s most popular picture; but the other, in consequence of the superior simplicity and concentration of its composition, the comparative breadth of its treatment and fuller richness of color and quality of chiaroscuro, is without much doubt his masterpiece. However, another example which approaches it very closely is A Lady at her Toilet, in the Munich Gallery. Dou’s interest in chiaroscuro led him to experiment with so-called night-pieces, where the gloom of the interior is illuminated by a candle that makes a central spot of brilliance, fitfully reflected in a partially diffused glow. Such are An Old Woman who has Lost her Thread and the Young Man and Girl in a Cellar, both in the Dresden Gallery; while the most elaborate and famous example is The Night School of the Rijks Museum, somewhat damaged by time, in which there are five separate points of varying degrees of illumination.
In a picture in the Dresden Gallery Dou has represented himself at work in his studio, a bare and homely room, lighted by a large window on the left. This window, with slight differences of shape and size, appears in many of his works, occupying a similar position; while, even when it is not shown, its effect is noticeable in the artist’s tendency to light his compositions from the left. Another instance of his tendency to repetition of motive may be traced in the frequency with which he used over and over again the same piece of furniture or object of furnishing. For example, in a still-life (No. 1708) in the Dresden Gallery appears the same candle-stick that is introduced in a number of other pictures. The point is interesting as showing the way in which Dou artificially arranged his subject-matter; and he was followed in this respect as in others by all the genre painters. Each had his particular motive of composition and freely repeated it; his particular bit of costume or article of furnishing that with variations of arrangement he used repeatedly. Holland genre, in fact, ceased almost from its beginning to be a direct representation of actual domestic life. It was based upon the latter, but the artist reserved a complete liberty of selection and arrangement. He was not intent upon illustrating the life, and only borrowed hints from it to assist him in creating a picture of his own invention. It is a point to be observed by the modern public, which is apt to resent, as shallow in motive and uninteresting in subject, a picture which has been designed mainly or solely as a picture; that is to say, for the beauty of form, color, light, and tone that may be expressed in a composition of objects, arbitrarily brought together for this purpose. Such an attitude on the part of an artist is, however, thoroughly justified by the example of the Holland School of genre, which it is the fashion to-day to admire so generously.
NICOLAES MAES
Some may criticize this placing of Maes among the lesser artists of genre. Bode ranks him with Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch among the “great genre painters of Holland,” and adds that “there is scarcely any pupil of Rembrandt’s who approaches the great master so nearly as Maes does in this series of pictures.” He is alluding to Dreaming, or, as it is sometimes called, A Reverie, a young girl gazing out of a window, and to Asking a Blessing, in the Rijks Museum; to The Young Card-Players, in the National Gallery, and to Nurse and Children with Goat-Carriage, in a private collection; and also to certain pictures of old women, such as the one owned by Mr. John G. Johnson of Philadelphia, that was recently seen in the Exhibition of Dutch Art in the Metropolitan Museum. In all of these pictures the figures are life-size, and, to quote Bode, “one weakness is common to all of them: that they present simple motives on a large canvas with rough execution and without the powerful
OLD WOMAN SPINNING NICOLAES MAES
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM