Albert Cuyp was born at Dort in 1605. He was a brewer by trade, and only painted as an amateur. In spite of this, he was a great landscape painter, and has given delight to thousands by his power of expressing his own love of nature. Little is known of Cuyp's life, and the date of his death is uncertain, farther than it was later than 1638.
In affected enthusiasm, Cuyp has been called the Dutch Claude, but in reality, Cuyp surpassed, Claude in some respects. The distinction, which Mr Ruskin draws between them, is that, while Claude, in the sense of beauty, is the superior to Cuyp, in the sense of truth Claude is the inferior. Besides Cuyp's landscapes, he painted portraits, and what is called 'still life' (dead game, fruit or flower pieces, &c.), but Cuyp's triumph was found in his skies, with their 'clearness and coolness,' and in 'expressions of yellow sunlight.' Mr Ruskin admits, while he is proceeding to censure Cuyp, parts might be chosen out of the good pictures of Cuyp which have never been equalled in art.' On another occasion, Mr Ruskin has this passage full of dry humour in reference to Cuyp:
'Again, look at the large Cuyp in Dulwich Gallery, which Mr Hazlitt considers "finest in the world," and of which he very complimentarily says, "the tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple light of the hills" have an effect like down on an unripe nectarine!" I ought to have apologized before now for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to observe, the other day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet more gratifying information that he was "juicy;" and it is now happily discovered that Cuyp is "downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this first-rate Cuyp is very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky. We may see for ourselves Cuyp's lovely landscapes both in the National Gallery and at Dulwich.
Paul Potter was born at Enkhuysen, in North Holland, in 1625, and was the son of a painter. Paul Potter settled, while still very young, at the Hague as an animal painter, and died in his thirtieth year, in 1654. His career, which was thus brief, had promised to be very successful, and he had established his fame, while no more than twenty-two years of age, by painting for Prince Maurice of Nassau that which continues his most renowned, though probably not his best picture, his 'Young Bull,' for some time in the Louvre, now restored to the painter's native country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse, representation of animal life in the main figure; but Paul Potter's later pictures, especially his smaller pictures of pastures with cattle feeding, having fine colouring and fine treatment of light, are now regarded as equally good in their essential excellences, and of wider scope. Paul Potter etched as well as painted. There is no example of Paul Potter in the National Gallery.
Jan David de Heem [26] and his son Cornelius, the father born in 1603, the son in 1630, and Maria Von Oesterwyck, the elder man's pupil, were eminent Flemish and Dutch flower and fruit painters. The gorgeous bloom and mellow ripeness in some of the flower and fruit pieces of Flemish and Dutch painters, like those I have mentioned, are beyond description. I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how, as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted and less lavishly-blossoming English flowers; so these Flemish and Dutch full blown flower pieces have not a trace of the sentiment which modern flower painters cannot help seeking, with good result or bad result, to introduce into every tuft of primroses or of violets, if not into every cluster of grapes and bunch of cherries.
From a fact which I have already mentioned, that so many Flemish and Dutch pictures, which we may often come across, are in England, I am sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to other famous painters of these schools or school, for they merge into one, to Snyders, Jan Steen, Gerard Dow, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde, &c., &c.
CHAPTER IX.
SPANISH ART—VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660—MURILLO, 1618-1682.
Spanish art, from its dawn to the time of Velasquez, had been of a 'severely devotional character,' austere and formal; and although one man did not work a revolution by his independent example, he did something to humanize and widen art. In the rich city of Seville in 1599, Diego Rodriguez, de Silva y Velasquez,—and not, as he is incorrectly called, Diego Velasquez de Silva, was born, and, according to an Andalusian fashion, took his mother's name of Velasquez, while his father was of the Portuguese house de Silva. Velasquez was gently born, though his father was in no higher position than that of a lawyer in Seville.