M. L.
FRANS HALS. By Gerald S. Davies, M.A. George Bell and Sons.
On comparing the number of monographs that have appeared on other than Dutch artists with that of books in our possession treating of Dutch painters, we see that the latter have been allotted but a scanty measure in literature; indeed, one may go further and say that during the past twenty years, excepting Rembrandt and a few other great masters, no extensive and comprehensive work has been written on the old Dutch painters. For this neglect a very well-founded reason exists: the native art historians of the Netherlands are still collecting materials, and cannot as yet think of writing exhaustive books concerning their great masters; for they are much too well aware of the vast gaps that are still to be found in their knowledge. This is so in the case, among others, of Frans Hals, and it will remain so for many years to come; we must needs wait until all the records are accessible before being able to arrive at a definite knowledge of Hals’s personality. ¶ Mr. Davies has been deterred by no such considerations; he not only, with a ready pen, describes Hals’s life and works, but, thanks to the spacious manner in which he conceives his subject, finds occasion to indulge in digressions on old Dutch conditions, art and so forth, which might undoubtedly possess an interest for English readers if they were correct, but that, unfortunately, is far from being always the case. ¶ After treating in his first two chapters of the ‘Rise of a National Art’ and ‘Holland and its Art in the Seventeenth Century’ the author collects the few known facts concerning Hals’s life in Chapter III, and endeavours to draw a conclusion touching his personality. We quite admit that legend may have represented Hals as being a more dissolute man than he actually was. Nevertheless, one who ill-treated his wife as he did can really not have had any particularly aristocratic manners. It would be better for us to say that we do not know enough about his life to be able to white-wash it of the few disagreeable facts that have been handed down to us. There can be no doubt, however, that he was a Bohemian, as Mr. Davies rightly characterizes him. ¶ The following chapters are devoted entirely to Hals’s artistic career and works; those preserved at Haarlem of course occupying a great place. The description of these is a lively one, and is evidently based upon a repeated examination. There are a good index, bibliography, useful indications such as the approximate dates of Hals’s life and of his principal paintings, etc. In a word, the writer has industriously brought together all that he has been able to ascertain touching his subject from books and pictures. But there is one matter in which Mr. Davies has not succeeded, and that is the producing of a critical work. It is true that he himself expressly says this as regards the catalogue,[45] but he constantly makes the same mistakes in the text itself. This is an exceedingly dangerous standpoint; for, thanks to it, so soon as one sets to work on a scientific basis, one finds him, for instance, describing two pictures (Illustrations Nos. 1 and 54) as Portraits of the Painter which do not represent Hals at all, while, again, the Portrait of Admiral de Ruyter (Illustration No. 55) is not a picture of that admiral. ¶ In the same way, the catalogue—which, from the very nature of the standpoint of the writer, is incomplete—contains childish mistakes, which are due to a lack of adequate critical knowledge. For to say of the Hille Bobbe with a young man smoking behind her, merely that it is ‘generally recognized as the work of F. Hals the son’ surely denotes an excess of caution, considering that it is established beyond all doubt that this picture was, in fact, painted by the son, and therefore it ought not to have been included in the catalogue. Some of the paintings in English collections which we missed in the catalogue we were fortunate enough to find mentioned in the ‘List of Pictures which have appeared ... in the Winter Exhibitions ... at Burlington House,’ which is inserted after the ‘List of Works.’ But these data are also, we regret to say, uncritical. We also searched the catalogue in vain for the oldest dated portrait by Frans Hals, namely, that of Scriverius, dated 1613, which forms part of the Warneck Collection in Paris, although it is mentioned by the author on pp. 27, 29, 84, and 96 of the text. Again, we find no mention of the delightful Portrait of a Man[46] in the Van Lynden collection, at present lent to the Mauritshuis at the Hague, nor of various other pieces.[47] As regards the drawings, there is no doubt whatever that the drawing in the British Museum is an original Hals. There are more of this sort, and we are sorry not to find them mentioned in Mr. Davies’s book. ¶ We must deliver ourselves of one or two further remarks, not from any love of fault-finding, but to remove mistaken ideas. The picture mentioned on p. 22, which is traditionally, and by Mr. Davies, supposed to represent Hals’s workshop, was painted by Michiel Sweerts, and has nothing to do with Hals’s workshop. Nor is what the author observes touching Hals’s manner of painting (p. 124) quite correct. Hals slowly perfected his technique, proceeding along a road which is quite easily traced. It is true that he underpainted a considerable number of his pictures, but there are also many, very many indeed, which he finished at once, in the wet paint, without the least underpainting. One of the best examples of the latter is the Portrait of a Man, in Lord Spencer’s collection, which is at present in the Guildhall Exhibition. ¶ Mr. Davies’s book has been very handsomely printed and produced, and is filled with mostly satisfactory illustrations. It is to be regretted that the contents of the book are not more worthy of its format; as a critical guide to the art of Frans Hals it is wholly untrustworthy.
W. M.
PERIODICALS
GAZETTE DES BEAUX ARTS.—The April number opens with an article by M. Salomon Reinach, in which he brings to light a great unknown miniaturist whom he identifies with the painter Simon Marmion, known as the author of the altarpiece of St. Bertin, now in the castle of Wied. Of this magnificent and little-known work the National Gallery possesses two fragments representing a chorus of angels rejoicing at the birth of the saint and two angels carrying his soul up to heaven, a strange and imaginative composition, in which the ridge of a roof cutting into the base of the composition gives an effect of supernatural strangeness. The manuscript in which the miniatures in question occur is in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, and has remained till now unnoticed. It is in the main the French compilation entitled the ‘Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denys,’ but the history is continued with extracts from various historians to the beginning of the reign of Charles V. It contains fifteen full-page miniatures which are of quite extraordinary merit, and which may be by Simon Marmion. The smaller miniatures are by another hand, and are distinctly inferior. The most interesting of the miniatures is the title-page representing Fillastre, Abbot of St. Bertin, offering the Grandes Chroniques to Philippe le Bon of Burgundy, by whose side stands the aged Chancellor Rollin; behind stand three figures, among which M. Reinach recognizes the youthful Charles the Bold and the Grand Bâtard. The heads are admirably rendered, and show that Marmion, if it be indeed he, must be reckoned as one of the great masters of portraiture of a school in which portraiture attained to the utmost perfection. The landscapes are, however, scarcely less remarkable. They do not, of course, rise quite to the height of imaginative realism shown in the Hubert van Eyck miniatures published by M. Durrieu, but they are conceived in a similar vein and executed with absolute mastery. If M. Reinach’s conjecture is correct, and it rests on a number of subsidiary proofs besides the likeness of style to the Wied altarpiece, he has done a great service in bringing to light the work of a great artist whose reputation as a miniaturist was such that his name was coupled with that of Fouquet in the eulogies of contemporary poets. Marmion was born at Amiens about 1420. In 1454 he was at Lille employed by the Duke of Burgundy, but he seems to have worked chiefly at Valenciennes. His style shows the influence of the Van Eycks, and still more of Van der Weyden. But there is, we think, in his manner of composition, and in the freedom of his fancy, something which distinguishes him from the pure Flemish painters, something which is due to his French origin and early training. ¶ The next article by M. Casimir Stryienski is concerned with French art of a very different kind. There exist a number of catalogues of the early exhibitions of the Salon, illustrated throughout with minute sketches by Gabriel de St. Aubin. The author has had the idea of reconstructing by the aid of one of these catalogues the Salon of 1761, and discussing the subsequent history of the various works. Many of these are quite lost, and survive only in St. Aubin’s marvellous sketches. Delicate as St. Aubin’s more serious work is, as a tour de force nothing could equal the dexterity of these minute notes. Between two lines of the catalogue he will insert a whole row of sketches, in which not only the composition but some suggestion of the chiaroscuro of the originals is given. Many of the works of Vien, J. B. M. Pierre, Vanloo, and Hallé make a more pleasing impression when interpreted thus than the originals can have done. ¶ M. André Michel, who carries on the work inaugurated by the genius of Courajod, commences a series of articles on the acquisitions made by his department of the Louvre. The finest of these came from Courajod’s collection, and include a wooden crucifix of the twelfth century, in which we can trace the first germs of the new sentiment for life and dramatic expressiveness working in the old hieratic formula. The exquisite statue of a man of the thirteenth century, also in wood, shows the new art arrived already at perfect command of the means of expression, but still restrained by a reminiscence of earlier schematic treatment. This and the stone statue of St. Geneviève show French sculpture at a point which it has never surpassed. The fifteenth and sixteenth century sculptures which have been added to the national collection, though of great beauty, have nothing of the supreme sense of design of the earlier work. ¶ M. F. de Mely publishes two sarcophagi with figures in relief discovered at Carthage. In spite of Greek and Egyptian influences the author considers that at least one of the figures, that of the priestess, bears the impress of a special racial type, and he considers that this and the Elche head taken together give us an idea of a distinctively Punic ideal type. M. Pierre Gusman describes, without adding anything very new, the Villa Madama, and M. André Pascal begins an account of the eighteenth century sculptor Pierre Julien.
In the May number Monsieur Gaston Migeon, who has done much towards the classification of Mahommedan copper work, writes on the Exhibition of Mahommedan Art recently held at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in the Pavillon de Marson. Several remarkable specimens of copper work are reproduced, perhaps the most interesting being that lent by M. Sarre which is supposed to date from the first years of the Hegira, and to be of Sassanian workmanship. Some fourteenth-century Persian velvets and tissues of singularly fine and naturalistic design are also figured, as well as two splendid Indo-Persian miniatures from the collection of M. Bing. ¶ In his second and concluding article on the acquisition of the department of sculpture in the Louvre, M. André Michel describes a remarkable polychrome wooden statue of the beginning of the sixteenth century belonging to the Franconian school. In this the author finds the influence of Albert Dürer. It is certainly a more deliberate and scientific work of art than the majority of Franconian sculptures of the period. Several works by Houdon, Deseine and Clodion are also described and reproduced. The prints of the Dutuit Collection are described in a brilliant and humorous article by M. Henri Bouchot, in which he concerns himself more with the collector than the collection, which is in fact rather remarkable for the number of prints of ascertained pedigree than for its artistic character. M. Pascal completes in this number his study of Pierre Julien.
JAHRBUCH DER KUNSTHISTORISCHEN SAMMLUNGEN DES ALLERHÖCHSTEN KAISERHAUSES. Band XXIII, Heft 5.—The present fascicule is devoted entirely to researches by Herr Julius von Schlosser on ‘Artistic Tradition in the late Middle Ages.’ Under this title the author brings together several separate researches; the connexion between them lies in their illustration of the contrast between mediaeval art with its direct visual symbolizing of ideas and the Renaissance and modern habits of actual imitation of natural forms. ¶ The first of his researches is concerned with a large illuminated parchment, too large to have formed part of a book and probably meant to be framed and hung on a wall. It depicts in the centre the Nativity, around which, in a large number of medallions enclosed in late Gothic scrollwork, are represented the various analogies by which the immaculate conception was rendered credible. It is an early example of the ‘Defensorium inviolatae virginitatis beatae Mariae,’ in which the miracle is rendered plausible by a record of all the miraculous things in nature. The origin and propagation of this popular form of doctrinal exegesis is discussed. The author of the ‘Defensorium,’ Franciscus of Retz, was a Dominican, and professed theology in the University of Vienna from 1385 to 1411. The earliest illustrated version is the manuscript of Frater Antonius of Tegernsee of 1459, and the work was published as a block-book as early as 1470. The best-known is Eysenhut’s block-book of 1471, of which the British Museum possesses a copy. In the early sixteenth century it was published also in a French translation at Rouen, but it was most popular in Bavaria and Austria. The parchment picture of the Vienna Hofmuseum, which forms the subject of these researches, is, the author considers, by an Austrian artist of the latter half of the fifteenth century. ¶ Of greater artistic merit are the small folding tablets of the Vienna Hofmuseum, in which are depicted a series of men and animals which served as patterns for artists. There are, for instance, the heads of Christ, the Virgin, and St. John, in poses which show that they would serve for a Crucifixion; there is the Veronica, and a number of varied types which experience and tradition showed were likely to be useful to an artist. It is certainly a striking example of the essentially practical methods of artistic production at a time when painting was an actual necessity, and when, therefore, the picture was of more importance than the artist’s personality. This work belongs to about the year 1400. ¶ Another artist’s pattern-book discussed by Herr von Schlosser, though this has already been published in part, is that used by the miniaturists of a Rhenish monastery, now in the Hofbibliothek at Vienna. This contains, besides initials and borders, the traditional receipts for various animals both real and fabulous. This the author compares with Villars de Honnecourt’s famous sketch-book and the similar pattern-book of Stephen of Urach in Munich. Villars de Honnecourt, however earlier in date, had indeed much more than a merely practical aim in view. He had already begun those researches into the laws of proportion and harmony in natural form which later on absorbed Leonardo da Vinci and Dürer. ¶ Herr von Schlosser aptly concludes this part of his researches by a reproduction of an Attic vase in Berlin, on which is represented the workshop of a vase maker with the pattern receipts for gods and animals hanging on the wall. ¶ Finally, in an appendix, Herr von Schlosser discusses Giusto of Padua’s frescoes of the virtues in the Eremitani at Padua, which have recently been relieved in part of their covering of whitewash. He reproduces the two best preserved figures. Here again the question is of the rôle played by a traditional pattern-book, for there exist similar representations of the virtues in manuscripts at Florence and Vienna, while recently Signor Venturi has acquired for the national collection at Rome another version, which he considers is Giusto of Padua’s own sketch-book and the model for the frescoes. Herr von Schlosser shows, we think conclusively, that this is of later origin by a belated Giottesque of the early fifteenth century, while he brings forward as the original of the whole series a MS. at Chantilly by Bartolommeo de’ Bartoli, executed in all probability between 1353 and 1356 in Bologna.
REPERTORIUM FÜR KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT. 1903. Part II.—Constantin Winterberg continues his minute analysis of Albert Dürer’s theory of the proportions of the figure. In this article he deals with the second book, and shows how Dürer freed himself increasingly from the traditional mediaeval canon and sought to establish his theory on inductive lines. ¶ Mr. Campbell Dodgson publishes a transcript of David de Necker’s preface to the Landsknechts, from which it appears that the original drawings were by Hans Burkmair, Christopher Amberger, and Jörg Breu, and were engraved by Jost de Necker, David’s father. This settles a much-disputed point, and shows that Beham, to whom a number of the originals were ascribed, must be excluded altogether. ¶ Count Luigi Manzoni writes on the stained glass in Perugia in the quattrocento, and in particular on the great window in S. Domenico, which he ascribes in part to Fra Bartolommeo di Pietro Accomandati, who appears to have worked in stained glass already in the fourteenth century at a time when most Italian towns were forced to employ foreigners for such work. The greater part of the window was executed, according to the author, in the second half of the fifteenth century, and by the painter Benedetto Bonfigli. ¶ In this number Dr. Friedländer concludes his notices of the Bruges Exhibition. He deals with Albert Cornelis, an artist who was first recognized by Mr. James Weale, and with Jan Provost, with regard to whom he follows M. G. Hulin. He agrees therefore in giving to the artist, Mr. Sutton-Nelthorpe’s Legend of St. Francis. More surprising is his suggestion that the Madonna, lent by Madame André under the name of Van Eyck, which was reproduced in the April number of The Burlington Magazine, is a youthful work of Jan Provost. With regard to Jan van Eeckele, the author maintains a sceptical attitude. He supposes the signature J.V.E. attached to certain works to be forgeries intended for Jan Van Eyck. After discussing the works of the later Flemish and Dutch artists, Dr. Friedländer discourses on the works which are not of purely Flemish origin. Among them the most interesting was the so-called Antonello da Messina, lent by Baron d’Albenas, representing the Pietà. This, following M. Hulin, Dr. Friedländer gives to a French artist, and dates about 1470. The mixture of Italian and Flemish influence in this work is, we think, of quite a different kind from that found in French works of the period.
RASSEGNA D’ARTE.—To the April number M. George le Brun contributes an enthusiastic, though by no means exaggerated, appreciation of the elder Breughel, ‘the only artist of his time who knew how to withstand the enchantments of the Italian masters,’ though he too travelled in Italy. Signor Enrico Cavilia calls attention to the imposing ruins of the basilica at Squillace which he ascribes to about the year 600. If this is accurate it becomes, after St. Abbondio at Como, the earliest example of a basilica in the form of a Latin cross. This important example of early Christian architecture has been little noticed hitherto. Signor Rivoira, for example, makes no mention of it. ¶ A small piece of stuff with a woven pattern of figures, rabbits, birds, and ornamental intreccie, which was found at Modena in 1900, forms the subject of an article by Isabella Errera. This has hitherto been supposed to be of Byzantine workmanship, but the author by comparison with other pieces of similar design and workmanship ascribes it to Arab workmen under Byzantine influence.