The reader's guide to the Encyclopaedia Britannica

by Inc. Encyclopaedia Britannica

The realistic vein, which, as we have seen, runs through northern painting, explains to some extent the extraordinary merit in portraiture of Holbein, who represents the culmination of the efforts in this direction of masters like Jan van Eyck and Dürer.... Frans Hals of Haarlem, one of the most brilliant painters of the impressionist school that he did much to found, achieved remarkable success in the artistic grouping of a number of portraits.... As portraitists the other great 17th-century masters fall into two sets, Rembrandt and Velazquez contrasting with Rubens and his pupil Van Dyck.... In the 18th century, though France produced some good limners and Spain Goya, yet on the whole England was the home of the best portraiture. Van Dyck had been in the service of Charles I., and foreign representatives of his style carried on afterwards the tradition of his essentially courtly art, but there existed at the same time a line of native British portraitists of whom the latest and best was Hogarth. One special form of portraiture, the miniature (q.v.), has been characteristically English throughout....

Genre:

Probably the most excellent painters of genre are Ter Borch, Metsu and Brouwer, the two first painters of the life of the upper classes, the last of peasant existence in some of its most unlovely aspects. The pictures of Brouwer are among the most instructive documents of modern painting.... He is best represented in the Munich Pinacotek, from which has been selected fig. 30, Plate IX. Hardly less admirable are Teniers in Flanders; De Hooch, Ver Meer of Delft, Jan Steen, A. van Ostade, in Holland, while in more modern times Hogarth, Chardin, Sir David Wilkie, Meissonier, and a host of others carry the tradition of the work down to our own day (see Table VIII.)....

Landscape and Marine Painting:

Several of the Dutch masters, even before the time of Rembrandt, excelled in the truthful rendering of the scenes and objects of their own simple but eminently paintable country; but it was Rembrandt, with his pupil, de Koningk, and his rival in this department Jacob Ruysdael, who were the first to show how a perfectly natural and unconventional rendering of a stretch of country under a broad expanse of sky might be raised by poetry and ideal feeling to the rank of one of the world’s masterpieces of painting. Great as was Rembrandt in what Bode has called “the landscape of feeling,” the “Haarlem from the Dunes” of Ruysdael (fig. 31, Plate IX.) with some others of this artist’s acknowledged successes, surpass even his achievement.... Among Turner’s chief titles to honour is the fact that he portrayed the sea in all its moods with a knowledge and sympathy that give him a place alone among painters of marine....

Animal Painting:

In Holland, in the 17th century, the animal nature presented itself under the more contemplative aspect of the ruminants in the lush water-meadows. True to their principle of doing everything they attempt in the best possible way, the Dutch paint horses (Cuyp, Wouwerman) and cattle (Cuyp, Adrian Vandevelde, Paul Potter) with canonical perfection, while Hondekoeter delineates live cocks and hens, and Weenix dead hares and moor-fowl, in a way that makes us feel that the last word on such themes has been spoken. There is a large white turkey by Hondekoeter in which the truth of mass and of texture in the full soft plumage is combined with a delicacy in the detail of the airy filaments, that is the despair of the most accomplished modern executant.

But animals have been treated more nobly than when shown in Flemish agitation or in Dutch phlegmatic calm. Leonardo da Vinci was specially famed for his horses, which he may have treated with something of the majesty of Pheidias....

Still-Life Painting:

There is no finer Rembrandt for pictorial quality than the picture in the Louvre representing the carcase of a flayed ox in a flesher’s booth. As illustrating the principle of modern painting this form of the graphic art has a value and importance which in itself it could hardly claim.... The way was prepared for it as has been noticed, by the minute and forcible rendering of accessory objects in the figure-pieces and portraits of the early Flemish masters, of Dürer, and above all of Holbein. The painting of flower and fruit pieces without figure interest by Jan Breughel the younger, who was born in 1601, represents a stage onward, and contemporary with him were several other Dutch and Flemish specialists in this department, among whom Jan David de Heem, born 1603, and the rather older Willem Klaasz Heda may be mentioned. Their subjects sometimes took the form of a luncheon table with vessels, plate, fruit and other eatables; at other times of groups of costly vessels of gold, silver and glass, or of articles used in art or science, such as musical instruments and the like; and it is especially to be noted that the handling stops always short of any illusive reproduction of the actual textures of the objects, while at the same time the differing surfaces of stuffs and metal and glass, of smooth-rinded apples and gnarled lemons, are all most justly rendered.... In this form of painting the French 18th-century artist Chardin, whose impasto was fuller, whose colouring more juicy than those of the Dutch, has achieved imperishable fame (see fig. 33, Plate X.); and the modern French, who understand better than others the technical business of painting, have carried on the fine tradition which has culminated in the work of Vollon. The Germans have also painted still-life to good result, but the comparative weakness in technique of British painters has kept them in this department rather in the background.