The Story of Dutch Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

For it is in this way that the art of every country may be studied with most interest and profit. Although there will appear from time to time certain individual artists, whose genius cannot be satisfactorily correlated to its environment, but will indeed, as in the case of Rembrandt’s, seem to be actually contradictory to it, yet even they can be more fully comprehended through the very contrast that they offer to the mass of their contemporaries, whose relation to their environment is readily discernible. Apropos of this customary connection between the artist and the spirit of his time, may be quoted that phrase of Richard Wagner’s, that all great art is produced in response to a common and collective need on the part of the community. It may serve as an excellent touchstone for testing the quality of this new Dutch art which we are to study, so let us for a moment examine its face value, leaving the fuller application of its meaning to all the subsequent pages of this book.

In Wagner’s mind great art, as he conceived it, stood out in clear contrast against a background of less art, of art which is produced in response to some more restricted impulse than that of a common and collective need of the people; for example, in catering to the whims of fashion. Such was the major part of the art of France produced in the last days before the Revolution. The great mass of the people were too abased by ill rule and exactions to have any consciousness but that of hunger, any common collective need but to fill their bellies. The only articulate demand to reach the artists was from the ephemeral swarm of courtiers, sycophants, and, as we should say to-day, “grafters,” who buzzed in splendor and profligacy at court. For a moment the glamour of this life inspired a great artist, Watteau, who, however, it is to be noted, was a foreigner. What he himself was he owed to Flanders. To him the glamour of the French court was but a pageant, a spectacle passing before his eyes, leaving his heart and conscience untouched. When, however, artists of French birth, reared in the home environment, followed in his steps, they revealed nothing of Watteau’s idealistic detachment from the grossness of the theme, but became purveyors to the shallow profligacy of their patrons. And to this day Van Loo, Boucher, and Fragonard have no place with other old masters in the hearts of the people; they are still the favorites of fashion. Nor was it until the upheaval of the Revolution had precipitated the gathering consciousness of a common and collective need on the part of the people, that French art in the nineteenth century began to develop a vital response. Moreover, what was characteristic of French art during the eighteenth century was generally symptomatic of the art of the whole of Europe. The latter had little or no creative force, was essentially an art of more or less feeble and perfunctory imitation. For the age itself was non-creative; a period of exhaustion after the strenuousness of the seventeenth century, or of the slow forming of new alinements after the shattering of the old ones; of speculation and doubts rather than of convictions.

So the artists, feeling no spur in the needs of the moment, fell to imitating the Renaissance artists of Italy. Among them, if we may anticipate the end of our present story, were the Dutch. They, too, had exhausted the immediate impulse of their own environment. War had made them a world-power, and peace brought them the foreign entanglements that maintenance of such a position entailed. They were no longer under the compulsion of an immense centripetal energy, a nation concentrated upon its own self-reliance. They began to spread themselves as cosmopolitans, aping the fashions of the rest of the world; and, as the fashion of the period was to be Italianate, so the artists of Holland, lacking at home the momentum of a common and collective need, ceased to be a school of great original painters, and became instead clumsy imitators of the splendors and elevation of the Italian masters of the Renaissance.

After this glance at the nature and cause of decline of Dutch art in the eighteenth century, we may return with a better appreciation of what is ahead of us in our study—the establishment in Holland in the seventeenth century of a new art, the product of a new nation; of a group of original and distinguished painters who formed, as Fromentin says, “the last of the great schools, perhaps the most original, certainly the most local.”

The course of our story, therefore, spreads before us. It is to discover in what respect the Dutch School of the seventeenth century was great, how it was original, and in what way its genius grew out of and responded to the common and collective need of the Dutch people of the period. Meanwhile there are the previous fifty years of the sixteenth century to be accounted for, which brings us back to the prologue of the drama, the abdication of Charles V.

That monarch, born in Ghent and educated in Flanders, had a special feeling of regard for his “dear Netherlanders.” Incidentally, they were the richest jewel in the imperial crown, and he had drawn from them annually two fifths of the enormous revenue that he squandered in wars of ambition elsewhere. He had, moreover, proved his love for them by systematic slaughtering of dissenters, that the remnant might be preserved within the fold of the Catholic Church. It was Brussels, therefore, that he selected as the scene of his abdication. Formerly the capital of the Dukes of Burgundy, it had been under imperial rule the seat of government of the vice-regents of the Netherlands; a city of royal and princely palaces, immediately surrounded by parks and game-forests, and fields and gardens, teeming with opulence; the royal center of a group of cities. Of these Antwerp was the commercial chief, the greatest emporium of trade in Europe, with an exchange in which five thousand merchants daily congregated, and a port where five hundred vessels daily made their entrance or departure. It was the distributing-point for the imports from the East and for the products of the Netherlands: textiles of most sumptuous fabrics as well as of plain cloths and linens, works of gold and silver craftsmanship, agricultural and dairy produce from the rich polders of the northern provinces, and fish from a hundred thriving towns and villages along the coast.

So when the emperor, enfeebled by excesses of action and appetite, felt his grip of power slackening, and determined to transfer this people of three million souls, the most industrious, versatile, and liberty-loving in the world, from his own pocket to that of his son, he saw to it that the proceeding should be conducted with a pageantry of ceremonial worthy of the occasion.

It was enacted in the hall of the renowned Order of the Knights of the Golden Fleece, the walls of which were hung with superb tapestries from the looms of Arras, representing the Biblical story of Gideon. The floor was occupied by official representatives of the provinces, clad in the sumptuous bravery of costume that distinguished this country and the times. Upon the dais at one end, beneath a splendid canopy, three chairs awaited the principals in the drama. Precisely at the stroke of three, the emperor entered from the adjoining chapel. Strange whim of Fate, he supported his gout-ridden body by leaning on the arm of the man who was eventually to be chief in undoing the policy that this day inaugurated—William, Count of Orange. Behind the emperor came Philip, and the regent, Queen Mary of Hungary, the “Christian widow” admired by Erasmus, who on one occasion had written to her brother, the emperor, that “in her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted with such severity as that error might be at once extinguished, care being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopulated.” Following the principals, appeared the Knights of the Fleece in full regalia, and a retinue of nobles, many of them, Egmont, Brederode, Berlaymont, Aerschot, and others, destined to figure in the subsequent drama of the Netherlands.

After a long oration by a member of the Privy Council, depicting the bodily infirmities of the emperor, his great zeal for his people’s welfare, and the particulars of the cession he was about to make, Charles himself read a long recapitulation of his wars and triumphs, dwelt upon his failing strength, and commended his successor to the good will and allegiance of his “dear Netherlanders.” At the conclusion of the speech the whole audience was melted to tears and the emperor himself wept like a child. Philip knelt in reverence, as his father made the sign of the cross above his head and blessed him in the name of the Holy Trinity. Then, while the assembled host applauded he rose to his feet, ruler by the grace of God, vice the emperor, of the Netherlands, Spain, and her American possessions. But he could not speak the language of the Netherlands; his acceptance of their allegiance and his own promises of regard for their interests had to be made through an interpreter.

Philip, as he assumed possession of the lives of millions, is characterized by Motley[A] as “a small meager man, much below middle height, with thin legs, a narrow chest, and the shrinking, timid air of an habitual invalid. In face, he was the living image of his father, having the same broad forehead and blue eye, with the same aquiline, but better-proportioned, nose. He had the same heavy hanging lip, with a vast mouth and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His demeanor in public was still, silent, almost sepulchral. He looked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed and even suffering in manner. This was ascribed partly to a natural haughtiness which he had occasionally endeavored to overcome, and partly to habitual pains in the stomach, occasioned by his inordinate fondness for pastry. Such,” adds Motley, “was the personal appearance of the man who was to receive into his single hand the destinies of half the world; whose single will was, for the future, to shape the fortunes of every individual then present, of many more in Europe, America, and at the ends of the earth, and of countless millions yet unborn.”