Son of a prosperous portrait-painter of Dordrecht, Aelbert Cuyp enjoyed ample means, married a widow, rich and well connected, was highly esteemed and held public offices in his own community, and throughout the eighteenth century continued to be prized by collectors as the “Dutch Claude.” The result was that he could paint to please himself. It is true that occasionally he was persuaded to paint portraits of his wife’s aristocratic connections, some on horseback, but these less characteristic pictures are exceptions. Living far from the centers of artists, he was devoted to country life, making visits occasionally along the Maas to Nimwegen or up the Rhine as far as Bergen, but for the most part indulging his love of nature in the neighborhood around his native city. The happiness of the man and the artist’s joy in the life of simple things—his ample means made possible the simple life—are reflected in the sunniness of his landscapes, and in the big, lazy, comfortable kine that graze and bask and chew the cud beside slowly moving waters in the neighborhood of pleasant homesteads, steeped in the warmth of sunshine. “Only in his own home on the lower Maas,” writes the modern artist, Jan Veth, himself a native of Dordrecht, “only near Dordrecht, could he find this happy country, where a delicate vapor from the rich marshy lands lies over the meadows, which in the morning and evening hours are covered with a peculiar golden veil.”
His best pictures are in private collections in England and Paris and in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the galleries of St. Petersburg and Budapest. They number nearly fifty that can be regarded as masterpieces. On the other hand, the pictures by which he is represented in many galleries will disappoint the student who has formed a high expectation of this artist’s merit. For he was as unequal in his manner as he was varied in his choice of subjects, which, besides landscape and portraiture, included also genre, still-life, church interiors, and historical paintings.
He was born in Dordrecht in 1620 and died there in 1691. Besides the instruction that he received from his father, he is supposed to have been influenced by Van Goyen, for his early work shows a recollection of the latter’s grayish tones.
ADRIAEN VAN DE VELDE
In the Rijks Museum is a portrait by Adriaen van de Velde that represents himself and his family. In a country spot they have alighted from their carriage, and while a groom attends to the handsome horses, the artist and his young wife, a little child, and a nurse with the baby in her arms are grouped in the road. The artist is of refined and gracious mien, while the spirit of the whole scene breathes prosperity and happiness. The portrait is indicative of his art, of the gracious freshness, joyousness, and sweet tranquillity that characterize his landscapes. For, though he painted some Biblical and historical subjects, his true métier was landscape, with the ingratiating addition of groups of figures and animals. So highly appreciated was his gift of treating these groups that many of the landscape artists of Amsterdam employed him to introduce them into their pictures. Hobbema was among the number, as may be seen in that artist’s picture, The Water Mill, owned by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, where the cow and the figures of the man and woman are by Van de Velde.
Born in Amsterdam in 1636, Adriaen belonged to the Van de Velde family of artists, his earliest teacher being his father, the naval painter, Willem the Elder. Then he studied with Jan Wynants at Haarlem and later with Philips Wouwerman. He was also influenced by Potter and Nicolaes Berchem, perhaps gaining from the latter his occasional fondness for the Italianized kind of landscape. But this is mere supposition.
Even Berchem (1620-1683) is only supposed to have visited Italy, because of the character of the subjects he represented. All that is definitely known about him is that he resided in Haarlem and Amsterdam. His treatment, however, of the Italianized landscape, with its goats and cows and peasants, is inferior to the art of Van de Velde. It charms at first by its sunny picturesqueness; but it is discovered by degrees to be a product of routine and mannerism. A studied affectation becomes apparent in the arrangement of the groups, and a monotonous reiteration of the effects of light: some object always placed near the center to catch the chief illumination, while a corresponding formality is repeated again and again in the distribution of the light and shade.
But such mechanics of picture-making never occur in Van de Velde’s landscapes. There is always a freshness of vision, characterized, moreover, by delicate observation, that puts him on a par with Wouwerman, though the sentiment of his pictures is his own.
THE NAVAL AND MARINE PAINTERS
It has already been remarked that the naval and marine pictures are an exception to the general rule that Dutch painting reflects nothing of the war and the turbulence of the times. The headquarters of the craft was naturally the great shipping and commercial center, Amsterdam. Here in the early part of the seventeenth century lived Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom. Born in Haarlem in 1566, he had, previously to his settling down in the Dutch capital, visited France, England, and Italy, while there is good reason to believe that shipwreck had increased his experiences by enforced sojourn on the west coast of Africa. He makes a brave showing in the Rijks Museum with records of Dutch vessels running down Spanish galleys and a sea-fight on the Haarlem Meer, and always his signature appears proudly on a pennon at the masthead of a winning ship.