The Rotterdam gallery affords very few examples of marine paintings, but landscape painting is worthily represented by two pictures by Ruysdael, the greatest of the Dutch painters of rural scenes. These two paintings represent his favorite subjects—leafy, solitary spots, which, like all his works, inspire a subtle feeling of melancholy. The great power of this artist is sentiment. He is eminent in the Dutch school for a gentleness of soul and a singular superiority of education. It has been most truly said of him that he used landscape as an expression of his suffering, his weariness, his fancies, and that he contemplated his country with a bitter sadness, as if it were a place of torment, and that he created the woods to hide his gloom in their shade. The soft light of Holland is the image of his soul; none felt more exquisitely than he its melancholy sweetness, none represented more feelingly than he, with a ray of languid light, the smile of a suffering fellow-creature. Because of the exceptional delicacy of his nature he was not appreciated by his fellow-citizens until long after his death.
Beside a painting by Ruysdael hangs a picture of flowers by a female artist, Rachel Ruysch, the wife of a famous portrait-painter, who was born toward the close of the sixteenth century, and died, brush in hand, in the eightieth year of her age, after she had shown to her husband and to the world that a sensible woman can passionately cultivate the fine arts and yet find time to rear and educate ten children.
And as I have spoken of the wife of a painter, I simply mention that it is possible to write an entertaining book on the wives of Dutch artists, both because of the variety of their adventures and the important part they play in the history of art. The faces of a number are known already, because many artists painted their wives' portraits, as well as their own and those of their children, their cats, and their hens. Biographers speak of most of them, confirming or contradicting reports which have been circulated in regard to their conduct. Some have hazarded the opinion that the larger number of them were a serious drawback to their husbands. It seems to me there is something to be said on the other side. As for Rembrandt, it is known that the happiest part of his life was the time between his first marriage and the death of his wife, who was the daughter of a burgomaster of Leeuwarden, and to whom posterity owes a debt of gratitude. It is also known that Van der Helst at an advanced age married a beautiful girl, for whom there is nothing but praise, and posterity should be grateful to her for having brightened the old age of a great artist. It is true that we cannot speak of all in the same terms. Of the two wives of Steen, for example, the first was a featherhead, who allowed the tavern at Delft that he had inherited from his father to go to ruin; and the second, from all accounts, was unfaithful. Heemskerk's second wife was so dishonest that her husband was obliged to go about excusing her peculations. De Hondecoeter's wife was an eccentric and troublesome woman, who forced her husband to pass his evenings in a tavern in order to rid himself of her company. The wife of Berghem was so intolerably avaricious that if she found him dozing over his brushes she awoke him roughly to make him work and earn money, and the poor man was obliged to resort to subterfuges to purchase engravings when he was paid for his pictures. On the other hand, one could never end reciting the misdeeds of the husbands. The artist Griffier compelled his wife to travel about the world in a boat; Veen begged his wife's permission to spend four months in Rome, and stayed there four years. Karel du Jardin married a rich old woman to pay his debts, and deserted her when she had paid them. Molyn, another artist, had his wife assassinated that he might marry a Genoese. I doubt whether poor Paul Potter, as the story runs, was betrayed by the wife whom he blindly loved; and who knows whether Huysum, the great flower-painter, who was consumed by jealousy in the midst of riches and glory for a wife who was neither young nor beautiful, had real grounds for his doubts, or whether he was not induced by the reports of his envious rivals to believe what was untrue? In conclusion, I must mention with due honor the three wives of Eglon Van der Neer, who crowned him with twenty-five children—a family which, however, did not keep him from painting a large number of pictures in every style, from making several voyages, and from cultivating tulips.
There are several small paintings by Albert Cuyp in the Rotterdam gallery, a landscape, horses, fowls, and fruit—that Albert Cuyp who holds a unique place in Dutch art, who in the course of a prolonged life painted portraits, landscapes, animals, flowers, winter pieces, moonlight scenes, marine subjects, figures, and in each style left an imprint of originality. But nevertheless, like most of the Dutch painters of his time, he was so unfortunate that until 1750, more than fifty years after his death, his paintings sold for a hundred francs, whereas they now would bring a hundred thousand francs—not in Holland, but in England, where most of his works are owned.
Heemskerk's "Christ at the Sepulchre" would not be worth mentioning if it were not an excuse for introducing the artist, who was one of the most curious creatures that ever walked the face of the earth. Van Veen—such is his real name—was born in the village of Heemskerk at the end of the fifteenth century, and flourished at the period of Italian imitation. He was the son of a peasant, and, although he had an inclination toward art, he was intended for a peasant. He became a painter by chance, like many other Dutch artists. His father had a furious temper, and the son was very much afraid of him. One day poor Van Veen dropped the milk-jug; his father flew at him, but he ran out of the house and spent the night somewhere else. The next morning his mother found him, and, thinking it would be unsafe for him to face the paternal anger, she gave him a small quantity of linen, a little money, and commended him to the care of God. The lad went to Haarlem, and, obtaining an entrance to the studio of a famous artist, he studied, succeeded, and then went to Rome to perfect himself. He did not become a great artist, for the imitation of the Italian school spoiled him: his treatment of the nude was stiff and his style full of mannerisms, but he painted a great deal and was well paid, and did not regret his early life. But herein consisted his peculiarity: he was, as his biographers assert, a man incredibly, morbidly and ridiculously timid. When he knew that the arquebusiers were to pass he climbed the roofs and steeples, and trembled with fear when he saw their arms in the street. If any one thinks this an idle story, there is a fact which serves to prove it true: he was in the town of Haarlem when the Spaniards besieged it, and the magistrates, who knew his weakness, permitted him to flee from the city before they began to fight, doubtless foreseeing that otherwise he would have died of fright. He took advantage of the permission and fled to Amsterdam, leaving his fellow-citizens in the lurch.
Other Dutch painters—for we are speaking of the men, not of their pictures—like Heemskerk, owed their choice of a profession to accident. Everdingen, of the first order of landscape-painters, owed his choice to a tempest which wrecked his ship on the shore of Norway, where he remained, was inspired by the grand natural scenery and created an original style of landscape art. Cornelisz Vroom also owed his fortune to a shipwreck: he was on his way to Spain with some religious pictures; when the vessel was wrecked near the coast of Portugal, the poor artist saved himself with others on an uninhabited island, where they remained two days without food. They considered themselves as good as lost, when they were unexpectedly relieved by some monks from a monastery on the coast, whither the sea had borne the hulk of the vessel with the pictures, which were unharmed. These the monks considered admirable. Thus was Cornelisz sheltered, welcomed, and stimulated to paint, and the profound emotions occasioned by the wreck gave his genius such a new and powerful impulse that he became a real artist. Another, Hans Fredeman, the famous trick painter who painted some columns on the frame of a drawing-room door so cleverly that Charles V. turned round to look as soon as he had entered, and thought that the walls had suddenly closed behind him by enchantment,—this Hans Fredeman, who painted palisades that made people turn back, doors which people attempted to open, owed his fortune to a book on architecture by Vitruvius which he obtained by chance from a carpenter.
There is a good little picture by Steen which represents a doctor pretending to operate on a man who imagines himself to be sick: an old woman is holding a basin, the invalid is shrieking desperately, and a few curious neighbors, convulsed with laughter, look on from a window.
When one says that this picture makes one break into an irresistible peal of laughter, one has said all that is necessary. After Rembrandt, Steen is the most original figure-painter of the Dutch school; he is one of those few artists whom, when once known, whether they are or are not congenial to our taste, we must perforce admire as great painters, and even if we consider them worthy of only secondary honors, it matters not, they remain indelibly impressed on our minds. After one has seen Steen's pictures it is impossible to see a drunkard, a buffoon, a cripple, a dwarf, a deformed face, a ridiculous smirk, a grotesque attitude, without remembering one of his figures. All the degrees of stupidity and of drunkenness, all the grossness and mawkishness of orgies, the frenzy of the lowest pleasures, the cynicism of the vulgarest vice, the buffoonery of the wildest rabble, all the most brutal emotions, the basest aspects of tavern and alehouse life, have been painted by him with the brutality and insolence of an unscrupulous man, and with such a sense of the comic, such an impetuosity, such an intoxication of inspiration, one might say that words cannot express the effect produced. Writers have devoted many volumes to him, and have advanced many different opinions about him. His warmest admirers have attributed to him a moral purpose—that of making debauchery hateful by painting it as he did in repulsive colors, for the same reason that the Spartans showed drunken Helots to their sons. Others see in his paintings only the spontaneous and thoughtless expression of the spirit and taste of the artist, whom they represent as a vulgar debauchee. However this may be, there is no doubt that in the effects produced Steen's painting may be considered a satire on vice, and in this he is superior to almost all the Dutch painters, who restricted themselves to an external realism. Hence he was called the Dutch Hogarth, the jovial philosopher, the keenest observer of the habits of his countrymen, and one among his admirers has said that if Steen had been born at Rome instead of at Leyden, and had Michelangelo instead of Van Goyen been his master, he would have been one of the greatest painters in the world. Another finds some kind of analogy between him and Raphael. The technical qualities of his paintings are much less admired, his work has not the finish nor the strength of the other artists, such as Ostade, Mieris, and Dou. But, even taking into consideration its satirical character, one must say that Steen has often exceeded his purpose if he really had a purpose. The fury with which he pursued the burlesque often got the better of his feeling for reality; his figures, instead of being merely ridiculous, became monstrous and hardly human, often resembling beasts rather than men, and he has exaggerated these figures until sometimes he awakens, a feeling of nausea instead of mirth, and a sense of indignation that nature should be so outraged. The effect he produces is generally a laugh,—a loud, irresistible laugh, which bursts from one even when alone and calls the people away from the neighboring pictures. It is impossible to carry further than Steen did the art of flattening noses, twisting mouths, shortening necks, making wrinkles, rendering faces stupid, putting on humps, and making his puppets seem as if they were roaring with laughter, vomiting, reeling, or falling. By the leer of a half-closed eye he expressed idiocy and sensuality; by a sneer or a gesture he revealed the brutality of a man. He makes one smell the odor of a pipe, hear the coarse laughter, guess at the stupid or foul discourses—to understand, in a word, tavern-life and the dregs of the people; and I maintain that it is impossible to carry this art to a higher point than that to which Steen has carried it.
His life has been and still is a vexed question. Volumes have been written to prove that he was a drunkard, and volumes to prove that he was a sober man; and, as is always the case, both sides exaggerate. He kept an alehouse at Delft, but it did not pay; then he set up a tavern and things went worse. It is said that he was its most assiduous frequenter, that he would drink up all the wine, and that when the cellar was empty he would take down the sign, close the door, and begin to paint furiously, and when he had sold his pictures he would buy more wine and begin life again. It is even said that he paid for everything with his pictures, and that consequently all his paintings were to be found in wine-merchants' houses. It is really difficult to explain how he could have painted such a large number of admirable works if he was always intoxicated, but it is no less difficult to understand why he had a taste for such subjects if he led a steady, sober life. It is certain that, especially during the last years of his life, he committed every sort of extravagance. He at first studied under the famous landscape painter Van Goyen, but genius worked in him more powerfully than study; he divined the rules of his art, and if it sometimes seems that he has painted too black, as some of his critics have said, it was the fault of an extra bottle of wine at dinner.
Steen is not the only Dutch painter who, whether deservedly or not, won a reputation for drunkenness. At one time nearly all the artists passed the greater part of their day in the taverns, where they became famously drunk, fell to fighting, and whence they came out bruised and bleeding. In a poem upon painting by Karel van Mander, who was the first to write the history of the painters of the Netherlands, there occurs a passage directed against drunkenness and the habit of fighting, part of which runs as follows: "Be sober and live so that the unhappy proverb 'As debauched as a painter' may become 'As temperate as an artist.'" To mention a few among the most famous artists, Mieris was a notable winebibber, Van Goyen a drunkard, Franz Hals, the master of Brouwer, a winesack, Brouwer an incorrigible tippler; William Cornelis, and Hondecoeter were on the best terms with the bottle. Many of the humbler painters are said to have died intoxicated. Even in death the history of the Dutch painters presents a thousand incongruities. The great Rembrandt expired in misery almost without the knowledge of any; Hobbema died in the poor quarter of Amsterdam; Steen died in poverty; Brouwer died at a hospital; Andrew Both and Henry Verschuringh were drowned; Adrian Bloemaert met his death in a duel; Karel Fabritius was killed by the explosion of a powder-magazine; Johann Schotel died, brush in hand, of a stroke of apoplexy; Potter died of consumption; Lucas of Leyden was poisoned. So, what with shameful deaths, debauchery, and jealousy, one may say that a great part of the Dutch painters have had an unhappy fate.