Not only the direction of its canals and streets remind one of the former nature of this quarter, the places of amusement likewise are reminiscent of the times when well-to-do citizens had their gardens and pleasuregrounds amidst the meadows, before the city encroached upon them. There were, for instance, two large gardens with mazes and fountains, formerly the property of Amsterdam burghers, afterwards for many years an attraction for the public. One of them, at the end of the Rozengracht, was owned and managed by Lingelbach, the father of Johan the painter. An inscription in the burial-book of the Westerkerk, saying that Rembrandt's corpse came on the 8th of October, 1669, “from the [pg 151] [pg 152] Rozengracht opposite the Labyrinth,” painfully reminds us how for the last sad years of his life the great painter had lived opposite this popular place of public amusement.
Plate 23. The House Of Mr. F. Banning Cocq (the Captain And Prominent Person In Rembrandt's “Night-watch”) In Amsterdam After an anonymous drawing in the family archives of Jhr. D. de Graeff at The Hague
II
Having dealt with the town's appearance, principally from an architectural point of view, in the preceding pages, because architecture is so essential in expressing a people's character and aspirations, we must now give our attention to another condition instrumental in completing a town's aspect, namely, the daily life which is animating it. We, fast-living twentieth-century people, are apt to suppose that life some centuries ago was moving steadily but slowly, that people were spared the enervating excitements of our own days and that they consequently had a much more quiet and regular existence. Contemporary documents prove that this opinion is wrong, at least in so far as Amsterdam is concerned. Already in 1618 the Venetian Antonio Donato wrote of Amsterdam that the streets and public places were so thronged “that the scene looked like a fair to end in one day”; and did not Descartes write in 1631, when he resided in Amsterdam, that nobody noticed him because he was the only non-tradesman in Amsterdam amidst a trading population, attentive to its profits. This reveals the bustling of the great commercial centre. The facts have nothing astonishing in them if we realise that Holland's commercial ships numbered half of the world's trading-fleet and that Amsterdam harboured most of them.[3] No wonder that, in such a [pg 153] town, life was intense and that its strong pulsation was felt everywhere: in crowded streets and quays, in numerous offices and warehouses, on the large exchange, around the Public Weighing Houses, in the shops and market-places, etc. The ease and self-contentment with which the Dutch were so often reproached at the time of the French Revolution, were then unknown; on the contrary all was enterprise, action, and movement. A salutary freshness of spirit was favoured by the variety of people crowding in this centre: the hospitality shown to people of various religions, from the busy Jews, to the refugees of Antwerp and Flanders, created a rivalry of interests, benefiting trade in general.
To this animation caused by commerce we must add the life brought into the town's thoroughfares by the people's domestic and social existence, which was in those days much more out-of-doors than it is now, just as there was also a much less marked separation between the various classes: housewives going to the markets, children playing in the streets, families reposing in or before their open street-doors, people of the lower classes seeking in the street what their narrow and close dwellings could not give them, travellers being seen off at the harbourside or on the canal-quays, costermongers praising their wares. There was, for example, the daily fishmarket behind the Dam, Amsterdam's central [pg 154] square, of which the poet Brederode has left us such vivid pictures, bringing to our ears all the bargaining, shouting, and quarrelling of former days; there were numerous other markets necessitated, not only by the town's trade, but by its every-day needs: the weekly market for butter and cheese, which until 1669 enlivened the Dam, where now electric cars circulate and a much less-varied traffic passes by; the apple- and fruit-market on the Singel, opposite the house where Rembrandt's only son Titus passed the few months of his married life; the flower-market, where the middleclass people found the cheap floral decorations for their often gloomy interiors: the meat-market in the Nes: the Monday's market, on the Singel, of small furniture and kitchen-utensils: the vegetable- and peat-market on the Prinsengracht, etc. That all good housewives, even those of middle and upper classes, made it a rule to frequent these markets is revealed to us not only by contemporary pictures but also by a passage in one of Huygens's letters to the Prince of Orange, in which this refined diplomat from The Hague expresses his astonishment at seeing the wife of Admiral de Ruyter go daily to market « le panier au bras. »
Plate 24. The Star of the Kings. Children before a street door on Epiphany-evening. After the drawing by Rembrandt, in the British Museum, London. Salting Bequest.
All these thousands of people, business-men, workmen, housewives, small traders, went about in comparatively simple dresses, in which the black and discreet colours predominated. Against this sober background, the multi-coloured garments of the numerous strangers from over-seas were set off sharply: those of the Levantines, Persians, Poles, and others, who congregated in this international mart. What was said of the citizens' dress does not imply that luxurious costumes were unknown in Amsterdam; the younger people of course donned lighter [pg 156] and more elegant clothes, and married ladies at home knew very well how to charm the eyes of their visitors. Gradually, as Amsterdam's wealth increased, the upper classes became more luxurious, and towards the end of Rembrandt's life we see a complete change effected: we may say that when the architects preferably imitated the Italian Palladio or the French Mansart, and when the feebler painters followed the degenerating taste of the public,— then the leading classes took to French fashions, and wigs came into use. Rembrandt's pictures show us sufficiently that he kept aloof from this deplorable but fated change, and we must imagine him moving within the classes which remained loyal to the solid habits of the first period of his life in Amsterdam.
Mingling with this traffic we find the children amusing themselves, venting their love of ridicule and, above all things, fighting, in those parts from which they were later on banished on account of a more regular education, or because of certain districts turning into exclusive shop- or office-quarters. Their playfulness fell again and again into wild excesses, which forced the magistrate to pass prohibitive laws, in order to protect citizens from injury and damage. Add to this the great number of beggars, peasant-people, many of them, impoverished by the wars, bohemians, highwaymen, remnants of army-trains, all flocking to the great centre in the hope of finding assistance, strolling musicians, quacksalvers and mountebanks at market time ([plate 26]), periodic parades of gaily-dressed civic guards. Add to this the fairs, and we shall have completed in our imagination a scene which is of the liveliest, and certainly of a far greater charm and variety than our present more monotonous and regulated existence. Rembrandt's [pg 157]