Van Dyck (Flemish: 1599-1641). See 49.
Painted by Van Dyck from the large picture by Rubens at Mechlin, for an engraver to work from. "One of the too numerous brown sketches in the manner of the Flemish School, which seem to me rather done for the sake of wiping the brush clean than of painting anything. There is no colour in it, and no light and shade;—but a certain quantity of bitumen is rubbed about so as to slip more or less greasily into the shape of figures; and one of St. John's (or St. James's) legs is suddenly terminated by a wriggle of white across it, to signify that he is standing in the sea" (Art of England, p. 44). Ruskin notices the picture as an example of the art which was assailed by the Pre-Raphaelites. A word-picture of the same scene in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, with its literal and close realisation, will be found in Modern Painters, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. iv. § 16.
685. SHOWERY WEATHER.
Meindert Hobbema (Dutch: 1638-1709).
Hobbema, who disputes with Ruysdael the place of best Dutch landscape painter, was a friend of the latter, and perhaps his pupil: certainly works of the two are sometimes remarkably alike. Thus it has been pointed out that Hobbema's No. 996 shows the influence of Ruysdael, whilst Ruysdael's No. 986 recalls Hobbema's. Often, too, they painted the same country; compare e.g. No. 986 with Hobbema's No. 832. Like Ruysdael, too, Hobbema was a painter without honour in his own country, and nine-tenths of his known works are in England, where he was first appreciated, and where he was the means of influencing many of our landscape painters, notably Nasmyth. His pictures were often ascribed to other painters, now considered greatly his inferiors, in order to obtain better prices. It has been remarked as a curious fact that until the middle of the eighteenth century no engraver thought it worth while to reproduce any of Hobbema's pictures; and Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Tour in Holland (1781) makes no reference to Hobbema, though he must have seen some of his pictures. Even a hundred years ago they were not much sought after; now they are more valued than those of any landscape painter and fetch very large prices at auctions. Recently one of them sold for as much as £8820. This appreciation is due in part to the fact that Hobbemas are very rare; the known works by him number hardly more than a hundred. Of Hobbema's life very little is recorded. His name (like that of Alma Tadema) betokens Frisian origin. His birthplace is unknown, but he appears to have been born at Amsterdam, and to have been the scholar of Jacob Ruysdael in landscape painting. Ruysdael was the witness at his marriage. This was in 1668. In the same year he was appointed one of the sworn gaugers for the excise of the town. "Thus, a century before Burns, fortune played upon one of the greatest of landscape painters the same trick that she played in his case upon the most spontaneous of poets." Hobbema was not the only painter of his time who had to eke out a bare subsistence by employment more lucrative than the production of masterpieces. Salomon van Ruysdael was also a frame-maker; Van Goyen speculated in houses, picture-dealing, and tulips; and Jan Steen was an innkeeper. The coincidence of Hobbema's marriage and his appointment as gauger of wines and oil was not by chance. The archives throw a curious light upon the public morals of Amsterdam at the time of its greatest prosperity. By a deed executed in the month of his marriage, Hobbema admits that he owes his appointment to the influence of a companion of his wife, like her a servant in the employment of the burgomaster, and in consideration of this he agrees to pay her, so long as he holds the place, an annual sum of 250 florins. Posterity owes this servant of the burgomaster a grudge, for after taking up the appointment, Hobbema scarcely painted any more. The post cannot, however, have been lucrative, for he died in evil circumstances—in a house directly opposite to that in which Rembrandt had died forty years before. The painter of works, any one of which is now worth a small fortune to its possessor, was buried in a pauper's grave.
In spite of the resemblance to Ruysdael above noted, Hobbema's best and most characteristic works are quite distinct. Ruysdael is the painter of the solitude of nature, of rocks and waterfalls; Hobbema of the Dutch "fields with dwellings sprinkled o'er." The pervading tone of Ruysdael is dark and sombre; that of Hobbema is drowsy and still. A second characteristic of Hobbema is his fondness for oak foliage, and a certain "nigglingness" in his execution of it. See e.g. 832, 833. "They (Hobbema and Both) can paint oak leafage faithfully, but do not know where to stop, and by doing too much, lose the truth of all, lose the very truth of detail at which they aim, for all their minute work only gives two leaves to nature's twenty. They are evidently incapable of even thinking of a tree, much more of drawing it, except leaf by leaf; they have no notion nor sense of simplicity, mass, or obscurity, and when they come to distance, where it is totally impossible that leaves should be separately seen, being incapable of conceiving or rendering the grand and quiet forms of truth, they are reduced to paint their bushes with dots and touches expressive of leaves three feet broad each." "No word," Ruskin elsewhere adds, "has been more harmfully misused than that ugly one of 'niggling.' I should be glad if it were entirely banished from service and record. The only essential question about drawing is whether it be right or wrong; that it be small or large, swift or slow, is a matter of convenience only. But so far as the word may be legitimately used at all, it belongs especially to such execution as this of Hobbema's—execution which substitutes, on whatever scale, a mechanical trick or habit of hand for true drawing of known or intended forms." A second objection to Hobbema's method may be mentioned besides its "trickiness." His "niggling" touch is extended from the foreground to objects farther off, and thus "a middle distance of Hobbema involves a contradiction in terms; it states a distance by perspective, which it contradicts by distinctness of detail" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 17, sec. vi. ch. i. § 22; vol. v. pt. vi. ch. v. § 6). In spite, however, of such defects, the works of Hobbema have an enduring charm for their incisiveness of touch, and warmth of light. He had not Ruysdael's variety nor his depth of poetic feeling. The forest glade and the watermill are almost all he paints. But these he paints so firmly and decisively that they live for ever, and upon them he casts a warm and golden tone which never fails to please.
686. THE VIRGIN AND CHILD.
Hans Memlinc (Early Flemish: 1430-1494).
It is only in the Hospital of St. John at Bruges that the art of this exquisite painter can be properly studied. There, as among the Fra Angelicos at San Marco in Florence and the Giottos at the Arena in Padua, one may see the great works of a mediæval painter in the very surroundings which first produced them. (Copies of some of Memlinc's works at Bruges and elsewhere are included in the Arundel Society's collection.) The Hospital is, as it were, a shrine of Memlinc. Around this fact legends grew. In one of the pictures, it was said, a portrait of the artist might be discovered; on the sculptured ornaments of a porch enframing one of its subjects, an incident of the master's life might be traced,—his danger as he lay senseless in the street, his rescue as charitable people carried his body to the hospital. It came to be told how the great artist began life as a soldier who went to the wars under Charles the Bold, and came back riddled with wounds from the field of Nancy. Wandering homeward in a disabled state in 1477, he fainted in the streets of Bruges, and was cured by the Hospitallers. Unknown to them and a stranger to Bruges, he gave tangible proofs of his skill to the brethren of St. John, and showed his gratitude by refusing payment for a picture he had painted. Unfortunately all this is a myth. Of his real life little is known, but it is enough to refute the legends that for so long passed current. In 1477 he was under contract to furnish an altar-piece for the guild chapel of the booksellers of Bruges; this picture, preserved under the name of the "Seven Griefs of Mary," is now one of the principal treasures of the Gallery of Turin. His many pictures for the Hospitallers were painted in 1479 and 1480. He was born at Mayence on the Rhine. His name (which should not be spelt Memling) was probably derived from the town of Memmelinck (now Medenblik) in the north-east of Holland, to which place his family presumably belonged. He is known from the town records to have been settled in Bruges in his own house in 1479. He must have been a citizen of some wealth, for in the next year he was one of those who contributed to a loan raised by Maximilian of Austria to push hostilities against France. In 1487 he lost his wife. In 1494 he died, his children being still minors, and was buried in the Church of St. Giles (see a document cited in the Athenæum of 2nd February 1889).
This is all that documentary evidence has disclosed about Memlinc's life. If the evidence of his pictures may be taken, his life must have been gentle and peaceful. For Memlinc's place in the history of art is among the leaders of the "Purist" School (see under 663). He was, we may say, the Fra Angelico of Flanders. In technique he used the methods perfected by the Van Eycks. "In drawing a comparison between Memlinc and his predecessors and contemporaries,[165] he is found inferior to John Van Eyck in power of colour and chiaroscuro, as well as in searching portraiture; to Van der Weyden in dramatic force; to Dierick Bouts and Gheeraert David in beauty and finish of landscape" (Weale's monograph on Memlinc, published by the Arundel Society). But Memlinc had a sentiment and an ideal of his own to which none of his Flemish contemporaries attained. "Van Eyck saw with his eye, Memlinc begins to see with his spirit. The one copied and imitated; the other copies, imitates,—and transfigures. Van Eyck, without any thought of an ideal, reproduced the virile types which passed before his eyes. Memlinc dreams as he looks, chooses what is most lovable and delicate in human forms, and creates above all as his feminine type a choice being who was unknown before his time, and has disappeared since. They are women, but women seen according to the tender predilections of a spirit in love with grace, nobility, beauty." Memlinc's men, on the other hand, do not compare advantageously with Van Eyck's. There is more vigour in the latter, more framework, more muscle, more blood. "Memlinc's art is very human, but there is in it no trace of the villainies and atrocities of his time. His ideal is his own. It foreshadowed perhaps the Bellinis, the Botticellis, the Peruginos, but not Leonardo, nor the Tuscans, nor the Romans of the Renaissance. Imagine in the midst of the horror of the century a privileged spot, a sort of angelic retreat where the passions are silenced and troubles cease, where men pray and worship, where physical and moral deformities are transfigured, where new sentiments come into being and sweet usages grow up like the lilies: imagine this and you will have an idea of the unique soul of Memlinc and of the miracle which he works in his pictures" (Fromentin: Les Maitres d'Autrefois).
In front is a portrait of the donor of the picture. On the Virgin's left is St. George with the dragon—not a very dreadful dragon, either—"they do not hurt or destroy" in the peaceful gardens that Memlinc fancied. Notice how the peaceful idea is continued in the man returning to his pleasant home in the background to the left. The Virgin herself is typical of the feminine idea in early Flemish art. "It must be borne in mind that the people of the fifteenth century still lived in an age when the language of symbols was rich and widely understood.... The high forehead of the Virgin and wide arching brows tell of her intellectual power, her rich long hair figures forth the fulness of her life, her slim figure and tiny mouth symbolise her purity, her mild eyes with their drooping eyelids discover her devoutness, her bent head speaks of humility. The supreme and evident virtue which reigns in all these Madonnas is an absolute purity of heart" (Conway's Early Flemish Painters, pp. 109, 110).