The Story of Dutch Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

with wings over the ears. Her honest face is modeled in firm planes, and is ruddy with health. This painter-like and admirably human portrait is dated in the year that has been adopted as separating the artist’s two periods: namely, 1628.

Among the portrait-painters whose work exhibits the characteristic qualities of Dutch seventeenth-century art are Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt (1567-1641) and Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn, both of whom lived at The Hague, where they are well represented in the Mauritshuis; Salomon de Bray (1597-1664), who lived in Haarlem, where he can be seen to best advantage, and Paulus Moreelse (1571-1638), who was born and lived the greater part of his life in Utrecht. To the average student of painting the last named is probably the most interesting. The others are highly esteemed in Holland, though it is pointed out that in the latter part of their lives quality gave way to quantity. Indeed, they were so prolific that one tires of trying to pick good examples out of the mass of mediocrity. In the case of Moreelse, however, it is different. His works, less numerous, have a choiceness of feeling and execution, his portraits of women and children being especially gracious in conception and treatment. Witness, for example, in the Rijks Museum the Maria van Utrecht and the portrait of a child of some seven years, The Little Princess. In place of breadth and freedom, these pictures are precise and meticulous in brushwork, the details of the costumes elaborately reproduced, the faces softly modeled with faint greenish-gray shadows. Yet they have character and suggest reality and possess an undeniable charm. Somewhat broader in method is his Portrait of a Young Lady, in the Budapest Museum. Seen to the waist, she is in black velvet, with cuffs and a deep collar of exquisite point-lace. Her pleasantly thoughtful face is painted with a somewhat dull and heavy brush, yet the expression is that of life, and its charm is increased by the soft hair being worn in large rolls over the ears and confined in a cap, of which only the dainty edges of lace appear. It is a portrait of singularly choice refinement.

To the occasional portraiture of the genre artists Maes, Terborch, and Netscher we have alluded in another chapter.

CHAPTER X
LANDSCAPE

IN the Berlin Gallery are two small examples of Holland Landscape with the Hamlet of Rhenen. They are by Hercules Seghers, whom Bode points to as the father of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape. Similar in general design, they are distinguished by a fine sweep of almost clear sky, swimming with vapor, from which a level country, dotted with the roofs and church towers of a hamlet and threaded by a stream, stretches in pale-yellow tones, broken up with brownish shadows, to the foreground. The identification of the scene and the assignment of these pictures to Seghers have been made possible by comparison with some etchings of the same artist that modern Dutch research has discovered. By the same means other pictures, including a Landscape in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, which used to be attributed to Rembrandt, have been restored to Seghers. This one again shows a plain, intersected by a stream, but bounded on the right by the abrupt shoulder of a mountain, whose top is merged in dark cloud, while the rest of the sky is an open expanse of whitish light. In the contrast of this with the dark tones of the ground, weirdly interspersed with fitful gleams, there is an extraordinary impressiveness. It is no wonder that it was mistaken for a Rembrandt; and the interest in Seghers deepens when it is ascertained that Rembrandt himself was strongly influenced during his earlier years in Amsterdam by the older artist. This has been proved by a comparison of certain of the etchings of the two men.

Hercules Seghers, in fact, seems to have been in his own day very much what Michel was to the modern revival of landscape-painting in France. He was a forerunner of the later movement, but unrecognized by the world, while almost the only records that exist of him are documentary evidences of debts. He was born in 1590, probably in Haarlem; worked in Haarlem, Utrecht, and The Hague, but chiefly in Amsterdam, where he died about 1640.

In the few examples of his work that still survive, we can trace the twofold tendency of Dutch landscape: in one direction its note of simple truthfulness to the facts of nature, and in the other the tincture of these facts with a romantic spirit. And, in addition to thus setting the motive, Seghers proclaimed the Dutch artist’s fondness for effects of sky, for tonalities of grays and browns, sparingly enlivened with greens.

For the Dutch landscapists were tonalists. With the single exception of Jan Vermeer, who approximated the plein-air of modern art, they transposed the hues of nature into a scheme of color which is none the less arbitrary and unnatural, although it preserves the values of nature’s coloring. In comparison with the naturalistic achievements of the modern artist, who studies nature in her own environment of light and renders her hues as actual light affects them, the Dutch artist was a composer on the theme of nature, but not a naturalist. The same, however, in only a less degree, is true of the Barbizon artists. They, too, were composers of schemes of tonality, so that, students of nature though they were, their landscapes will not compare in naturalness of suggestion with the work of many a modern man who will probably never enjoy their fame. Let me add that I do not mean to imply by this the essential superiority of the modern landscape-painter. That is another question, and only to be decided by each person for himself, according as he selects or does not select naturalistic representation as the standard of his taste. To one who does not the tonal transposition may seem preferable. Both methods, indeed, have their warrant in art.

But I press the distinction because, unless it is recognized, Dutch landscape-painting cannot be properly appreciated. If people approach it, and it is my experience that many do, with modern plein-air achievements in their eye and basing their judgment upon them, they can only suffer disappointment. The Dutch paintings will seem “old-fashioned,” false to nature, and uninspired. On the other hand, once the necessary attitude is assumed of accepting this transposition of color and light phenomena of nature into an equivalent of tonal values, proper appreciation is possible. Then one begins to study the examples partly for the quality of their tonality, partly for the degree in which they embody the character and spirit of the landscape, and partly, and probably chiefly, for the quality of the artist’s personality infused into them.