Rembrandt’s house at Amsterdam (page [54]) is an able achievement, sober and dignified. The walls are built of ochre-coloured bricks, with stone used for the dressings. The date of 1606 appears on the upper storey. It has no gabled front, but a projecting cornice and pediment make division between the roof and wall surface. Above are two dormers placed in balanced order; while the roof, steeply rising and hipped and having a chimney at each end of the ridge, completes the studied arrangement. So far the work is in the style of the Renaissance, and it is only by the windows below that earlier influences are recalled: but the two themes are so well blended as to be perfectly harmonious. The net result is simple and reasonable and by no means lacking in scholarship. Very different is the Guild Hall at Zwolle (page [55]), erected thirty-five years earlier. Its too fussy elaboration is in sharp contrast with the comparative restraint of Rembrandt’s house, just mentioned. Classicism was applied without the Classic spirit and with little understanding of its real import. The general effect is rich and complex, but the composition lacks breadth and is overladen with ornament. Some of the details disclose good craftsmanship, notably the frieze which runs across the entire front at the first floor level, carved with cupids on horseback, old men with tridents, satyrs and flowing foliage, and broken at intervals by lion-heads worked on the bases of the pilasters. At the second storey is a Doric frieze, with sculptured circular ornaments and heads of bulls appearing in the metopes between the triglyphs. The gable, mediæval in feeling, is curly in outline; it is further complicated by the introduction of reclining satyrs and lascivious demi-gods that quaintly break the skyline. The designer evidently proposed to himself the Italian ideal, but did not grasp the meaning or refinement of it. Many details came to be used in a similar way, such, for instance, as those shown from Dordrecht (page [50]) and Flushing (page [56]), but, although often of admirable workmanship, they were never coherent parts of a self-evolved whole.
“THE LETTER.” from an oil painting by JOHANNES VERMEER.
(In the Ryks Museum, Amsterdam.)
VELSEN, NORTH HOLLAND
SPAARWOUDE, NORTH HOLLAND
A house of somewhat unusual appearance is that in the Voorstraat at Dordrecht, dated 1626 and illustrated on page [57]. At the top is an open arcade constructed wholly in bricks, with the exception of the stones upon which the arches rest. The brick walls are relieved by stonework, while projecting pilasters separate the large lead-glazed and shuttered windows.
Houses that depended upon dormers for their controlling architectural idea were common in the seventeenth century. The front wall is usually only one storey high and the dormers rise from it at the line of the eaves. When the frontage is wide and the building long and low, as is the case at Kampen (page [59]), these features—shaped and carved and fundamentally valuable in lighting the rooms of the roof—show with good effect. A smaller house in the same town, given on page [58], has a single dormer only. It contributes the necessary interest to what would otherwise be a very dull effort of building. On the frieze at its base is a carved stone representation of the Nativity, while below appears the inscription “IN BETHLEHEM 1631.”