The Story of Dutch Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

the standards and manners of the French, whose influence became more and more powerful in Holland as the seventeenth century drew to a close.

Gerard de Lairesse, a painter of Flemish extraction, who settled in Amsterdam in the sixties, helped to establish the vogue of “taste.” He had a considerable following of students and dilettanti to whom he expounded his views on art, assailing the vulgarity of such as Hals, and advocating the courtly style by which the theme is “ennobled.” He himself introduced the fashion for historical pictures, vapid and theatrical; and these qualities, interpreted in a minute and precise style, found their way into genre. The Dutch interiors became transformed into palatial chambers, decked with columns, amid which the inmates strut and pose with affectation of superior elegance and refinement. Such are the genre pictures of Caspar Netscher. Now and then, as in A Lady at the Clavichord of the Dresden Gallery, his motive and execution remind us that he had the privilege of being a pupil of Terborch; but these moments are rare. Usually his pictures are but petty and meretricious echoes of the great days of genre. Nor are his portraits less trivial. They are numerously represented in the Rijks Museum and other galleries, suggesting the popularity that he enjoyed and also explaining it; for, with few exceptions, they exhibit the shallowness and display of a society that, like the jackdaw in the fable, has borrowed the plumes and is aping the manners of the peacock. The same is true of the portraits of Godfried Schalcken, who also indulged in genre that supplemented the poverty of the artistic motive by the mild humor of its subjects. To these names of the decadence may be added that of Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland.

Before completing the story of Dutch genre with a separate notice of Terborch, Jan Steen, and Vermeer, allusion must be made to the “society pictures.” Their prototype appears in Flemish painting, in such canvases of fashionable life as we have already noted by Lucas van Valckenborch. The Dutch development of this motive, however, produced smaller canvases, very carefully composed, with superior quality of color and skilful rendering of detail. The leader in this class of picture was Dirck Hals (1591-1656), who was a pupil of his brother Frans; and it is the latter’s corporation pictures that became the model for corresponding groups of “society people,” banqueting, engaged in concerts, or disporting themselves in garden-parties. Dirck’s pictures are bouquets of gay color, animated with lively and characteristic action, and, notwithstanding their slightness of motive and superficiality of technique, form attractive spots in the galleries of Europe. He, like the rest of the society painters, varied these subjects with others of an unfashionable and sometimes coarse description, involving the amusements of the soldiery on furlough or in the intervals of peace. Willem Cornelisz Duyster, who died in 1635, painted creditably both these kinds of picture; and two other names, frequently met with in the galleries and not unacceptably, are Palamedesz (1601-1673) and Pieter Codde (1600-1678).

THE DESPATCH GERARD TERBORCH

HAGUE MUSEUM

CHAPTER VIII
GERARD TERBORCH, JAN VERMEER, AND JAN STEEN

TERBORCH is the aristocrat among Dutch painters, Rembrandt excepted. But Rembrandt’s is an aristocracy of genius, while Terborch’s is an aristocracy of talent and temperament. He owed something of this to his father, who, besides being a painter, held an official post in his native town, Zwolle, where Gerard was born in 1617. The father had enlarged the horizon of his life, by travel and the study of foreign languages, and the son followed his example. He was already a good draftsman, when he moved to Haarlem to study with the landscape-painter, Pieter Molyn. After three years spent in Haarlem, during which he experienced the influence of Frans Hals, he spent some time in England and later in Italy. Then followed some five years in Amsterdam, where he profited by the example of Rembrandt. In 1646 he went to Münster, in Westphalia, being present there during the negotiations of the peace, mingling with the delegates and painting portraits, which he afterward embodied in the famous group-picture, The Peace of Münster, now in the National Gallery, to which it was presented by the late Sir Richard Wallace. On the completion of this picture in 1648 he visited Spain and made the acquaintance of Velasquez and his work. Returning to Holland, he spent four years in Zwolle, and then, in 1654, the year in which he married Gertrude Matthyssen, settled in Deventer. Here he continued to reside until his death in 1681.