Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.
It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. He has two rows of a chain across his doublet, and one hand thrust beneath the cloak hanging across his breast.
Rembrandt's great merits were his strong truthfulness, and his almost equally powerful sense of a peculiar kind of picturesqueness. It seems as if the German weirdness perceptible in Albrecht Dürer had in Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise prosaic, coarse, and sometimes vulgar Dutch men and women, that we have coined a new word to express the charm, and speak of groups and incidents being Rembrandtesque, as we speak of their being picturesque.
Rembrandt did not always leave the vague thrill of doubt, terror, or even horror, which he sought to produce, to imagination working in the mysterious depths of his shadows. A very famous picture of his is 'Dr Deeman (an anatomist) demonstrating from a dead subject.' In another picture a man stealing from the gloom is in the act of stabbing in the back the unconscious man in the foreground. [25] Rembrandt's originality is as undoubted as his ability, and he was as great in etching as in painting. His defect as a painter was the frequent absence of any evidence in his work of a sense of refinement, grace, or even beauty; this can be said of him who spent means not his own on gathering together images of beauty and grace produced by the pencils and brushes of others. Many of Rembrandt's pictures are in the galleries of Amsterdam and the Hague, and we have many in London. The National Gallery has several examples, including two of Rembrandt's portraits.
Passing over Van Dyck, whom I reserve, as I have reserved Holbein, to class among the foreign painters resident in or closely connected with England, I come to the Teniers—father and son. David the elder was born at Antwerp in 1582, and David the younger also at Antwerp, in 1610. David the younger is decidedly the more eminent painter, though the works of the father are often mistaken for those of the son. The two Teniers' class of subjects was the same, being ordinarily 'fairs, markets, peasants' merry-makings, beer-houses, guard rooms.'
David the younger had great popularity, was court painter to the Archduke of Austria, and earned such an independence, that he bought for himself a château at the village of Perck, not very far from the Château de Stein of Rubens, with whom David Teniers was on terms of friendly intimacy. There Teniers, like his great associate, lived in the utmost state and bounty, entertaining the noblest of the land. David Teniers married twice, his first wife being the daughter of one of a family of Flemish painters, who were known, according to their respective proclivities in art, by the names of Peasant Breughel, Velvet Breughel, and Hell Breughel. Teniers had many children.
The elder Teniers died at Antwerp in 1649; the younger died at Brussels, and was buried at Perck, in 1694.
The distinction of the Teniers was the extreme fidelity and cleverness with which they copied (but did not explain) the life they knew—the homeliest, humblest aspect of life. They brought out with marvellous accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking that underlying strain of life, the mere rugged genuineness of the Teniers' work recommends itself, and is not without its own pathos; while to very many superficial observers the simple homeliness of the life which the Teniers chose to represent, prevents the observers from missing what should be present in every life. Men and women are only conscious of the defect when the painters wander, now and then, into higher spheres and into sacred subjects, and there is the unavoidable recoil from gross blindness. I have taken the Teniers as the representatives of a numerous school of Flemish and Dutch artists, whose works abound in this country. David Teniers the younger appears at his best, several times, in Dulwich Gallery and the National Gallery.
Philip Wouverman was born at Haarlem in 1620. He was the son of a painter, able, but unrecognized in his own day. Philip Wouverman found few patrons, disposed of his pictures by hard bargains to dealers, was tempted by his want of success to abjure his art, and even went so far, according to tradition, as to burn his studies and sketches, in order to prevent his son pursuing the career which had been to him a career of bitter disappointment. He died at Haarlem, 1668, when he was no more than forty-eight years of age. Yet some nine hundred paintings bear (many of them falsely) Wouverman's name.
With all the truth and excellent execution of his contemporaries and countrymen', Philip Wouverman, who had, as he thought, missed his mark, had something which those successful men lacked—he had not only a feeling for grace, but a touch of sentiment. His scenes are commonly 'road-side inns, hunts, fights;' but along with an inclination to adopt a higher class of actors—knights and ladies, instead of peasants—there is a more refined treatment and a dash of tenderness and melancholy—the last possibly born of his own disastrous fortunes. In his love of horses and dogs, as adjuncts to his groups, he had as great a fondness for a special white horse, as Paul Potter had for black and white cattle.