Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century/Introductory

CHAPTER I

Introductory

The seventeenth century bequeathed to the eighteenth three painters all of whom and two in particular heralded the spirit of the new age in matters of conception, colour and execution. The greatest of the three, Jacob de Wit, who was called the Rubens of his time, is esteemed as an historical painter he executed a part of the Orange Room at the House in the Wood and is world-famous for his painted bas-reliefs, the so-called witjes, in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam and elsewhere. These not only excel as extraordinary imitations of marble, to which De Wit owes his popularity, but the natural attitudes and grouping of the cherubs prove him to be, without a doubt, the greatest Dutch decorative artist of the eighteenth century. The second was Jan M. Quinckhard, who, as Van der Willigen says, "was a very good, yes, we venture to say, in many respects an excellent portrait-painter; he was particularly fortunate in his likenesses, his drawing was accurate, his brushwork good and his colouring soft and delicate." He, like De Wit, belongs entirely to the eighteenth century in ideas and his work did little to contribute towards the transition of the painted portrait from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. The same may be said of the third painter, Cornelis Troost, who, in spite of certain drawings that remind us of the seventeenth century and, in particular, of the somewhat artificial elegance of Nicolaas Maes, was essentially a man of his time. All his work in various mediums is too strongly imbued with the eighteenth-century spirit to permit us to regard him as a result or consequence of the previous century. Not that he can have troubled much about the matter, for abundant fame was his portion, so much so that he was known, in his day, as the Dutch Hogarth, a comparison which, like most of its kind, contained but a minimum of truth.

If, nevertheless, we insist upon considering these three painters as offshoots of our great century, then we must needs add that they were the last effort of an exhausted soil. The art of painting declined into the art of decoration or scene-painting, the painter's workshop was transformed into the tapestry-factory. The minute, concentrated charm of our so-called little masters expanded itself into painted hangings; the stately portraits of the time degenerated, with few exceptions, into the pale, powdered pastels that seemed deliberately designed for the representation of the caricatural periwig.

Still, if only for the reason that the eighteenth century contains the predecessors or, at any rate, the teachers of the painters of the nineteenth century, it is well worth while to consider these decoration-painters from another point of view than that of the applied art which owed its prosperity to the luxury of the merchant-princes of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Middelburg. For not only had the best of these decoration-painters learnt their art as real painters and merely altered the character of their productions in obedience to the whims of the day: most of them did paint or draw landscapes or portraits and prove that they had it in their power to satisfy a demand for real painting, should it ever arise. For instance, in the Fodor Museum in Amsterdam, certain drawings by the tapestry-painter and manufacturer, Jacob Cats, display a strength, an old-Dutch quality, an originality which we should hardly have expected to find in those days. This Jacob Cats was born in 1741 at Altona and came with his parents, at an early age, to Amsterdam, where he achieved considerable success with both his hangings and drawings; and, although the tapestries are no longer easy to find, his drawings go to show that he lacked the affectation, if not the prolixity, that clung to many of those painters, especially towards the end of the century. They are very pleasantly executed, were greatly esteemed in their day and still fetch good prices under the hammer. Cats died 1799.

Another tapestry-painter of note is Hendrik Meijer, born in Amsterdam in 1737, who also drew landscapes in body-colour, sap-colour and Indian ink.

His Scheveningen Beach, a picture that formed part of the Des Tombe collection at the Hague, is said to have been his master-piece and to be preferable in many respects to a sea-piece by Schotel. From our point of view, however, this painter's chief claim to importance lies in the fact that he was the teacher of various nineteenth-century artists. He died in London in 1793.



A Family Group - R. Jelgerhuis (The property of Mrs. Nijhof-Cool, Scheveningen)

Aart Schouman, an eighteenth-century painter living at Dordrecht, preserved the seventeenth-century traditions more intrinsically, in so far as externals were concerned, and continued to paint corporation-pieces, which, if they cannot be reckoned among the finest of their kind, are at least able to hold their own. The fact is that many of these painters retained the arrangement of the old masters and copied them so industriously, often in water-colour or pastel, that they ended by making their style their own and frequently lapsed into contenting themselves with the production of but slightly altered copies. It is even said that Boymans, the famous collector, was induced to buy an interior by Laqui, one of those painters, under the impression that he was purchasing a Gerard Dou. We may take it, then, that these painters were still connected by a fine thread with the landscape-painters of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, so great were the demands of decoration-painting upon their strength and energy, that they had sunk remarkably low in the matter of portrait-painting. And yet portraits were asked for not only by the princes and the aristocracy, but also by the well-to-do middle class. The tapestry-painters produced a number of small family-portraits, mostly naive and weak, although occasionally distinguished by a certain delicacy of conception. In addition to Adriaan de Lelie, Jean Auguste Daiwaille and others, part of whose work comes within the nineteenth century, and a few miniature-painters, of whom Temminck was one of the foremost, portraits were executed, for the greater part, by travelling portrait-painters, including Rienk Jelgerhuis, who has no fewer than 7,763 standing to his credit. Or, again, people would sit for their portraits in the course of the endless journeys which it was at that time their custom to take. This applied especially to miniatures, which were painted, so as to be easily portable, in lockets, on watch-keys, rings or snuff-boxes. And, although these were affected by the general decline, they sometimes displayed a daintiness of draughtsmanship, a softness of colouring and, above all, a certain "distinction" to which few of the larger portraits of the time can lay claim.

The French painters who frequented the luxurious Courts of the Bourbons or who followed in the wake of Napoleon and had more orders within the limits of the empire than they were able to execute were much too busy to visit less favoured countries on the chance of picking up commissions for portraits. The case was the same with the great English painters; so that this branch of industrial art was reserved, for the most part, for the Germans. Their portraits were stiff and expressionless. The grouping of the small family-portraits, usually in pastel, suggested the traditional semi-circle in which Molière is played at the Théâtre Français. They seemed, however, to give pleasure to the purchasers; and, to tell the truth, on looking into these unpretentious little family-groups, we find that they present a more general family-resemblance and are more lifelike than most of the photographic portraits of thirty years ago.

H. R. H. Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, consort of William V., Stadtholder of the Netherlands - J. F. A. Tischbein (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

The two principal portrait-painters who came from foreign countries at the end of the eighteenth century were Tischbein and Hodges. Johann Friedrich August Tischbein, although born at Maastricht in 1750, belonged entirely to the German school. He was one of the few younger men who escaped the prevailing classicism of his time. His preference for portrait-painting drove him to foreign Courts; and for fourteen years he painted at the Hague, at the Court of the Stadtholder and his family. He was a competent and pleasant painter, who reproduced the powdered wigs and the features of his sitters in a refined manner. His portraits of women are of value for our time; and the many pictures which he painted of Wilhelmina of Prussia, the consort of William V., with her powdered hair, vivacious features and the fine colouring of the green dresses, in which he excelled, are in good taste on the whole.

He was famed for the naturalness of his ideas, but, as times were, was unable to exercise any influence upon the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century, with its sensibility, its gallantry, its powder, patches and pastels, had retreated before the harshness of the heroic emotions, decked in classic garb, with which David opened the nineteenth. Tischbein died in 1812.

The other, Charles Howard Hodges (1764-1837), was a painter of greater importance, a man of excellent gifts, whose portraits strike one at once by their elegance, their bright colouring and their supple, if somewhat weak workmanship. Kramm, in his Lives and Works of the Dutch and Flemish Painters, praises him for the subtle manner in which he flattered his sitters. To us he is the portrait-painter of the Empire period; and, although, at a later date, he painted King William I., he also gave us the portraits of Grand pensionary Schimmelpenninck and of Mrs. Ziesenis-Wattier, the famous actress of the time. If he is not to be compared with the great English portrait-painters of the eighteenth century, the fact remains that he possessed something of their taste and especially something of the supple method, the easy, fluent modelling that so greatly distinguished Sir Thomas Lawrence. Hodges was a member of the commission which, after the restoration of Dutch independence, brought back from Paris the paintings that had been taken from us by the French.

Mrs. Fraser - C. H. Hodges (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

It must needs arouse surprise that this portrait-painter did not become the head of a school in his day. True, his talent was distinguished rather than powerful; but, indeed, the polish and refinement of his work are not be despised, especially when we consider at what a low ebb our fortunes then were. His chief pupil was Cornelis Kruseman, who failed to acquire or, at least, to retain his bright colouring, his supple and natural draughtsmanship or his qualities of distinction. Nevertheless, Hodges may have exercised an indirect influence upon his contemporaries. For instance, we find in Pieneman's Battle of Waterloo a cast of features which seems related to those which Hodges portrayed. On the other hand, this may be simply the English type; for Pieneman painted portraits for this picture in England. Perhaps J. A. Kruseman, Cornelis Kruseman's kinsman and pupil, preserved more of Hodges' characteristics than any one else.

England, the land of the poets, was at that time rejoicing in a school of painting which, although mainly based upon the old Dutchmen and Italians, had recently, under Reynolds and Gainsborough, developed into a purely English school. Followed the passionate figure of the poet-painter William Blake, who stood at the entrance to a new century in which Constable and Turner wrought their artistic revolution. Germany had found in Beethoven the loftiest expression of her period of musical creation, an expression which was so brilliantly to influence the whole of the musical and also of the pictorial life of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Germany was celebrating the heyday of her civilization in the little States where, amid this general budding of great minds, Goethe introduced the experimental novel into literature, Novalis wrote his Hymns to Night and Heine, a little later, proclaimed the eternity of romance, while in the art of painting, overshadowed by the theories of Winckelmann, she was able to point to his disciple Anton Rafaël Mengs and the fortunately more independent Chodowiecki. In Spain, the country where great painters appear like meteors, Goya had opened a new era. In France, weary of the carnage that had marked her Revolution, David, the man of iron ability, after glorifying the Republic under Robespierre, called into being, on the ruins of the eighteenth century, an imperial art which came to maturity under Napoleon and became the foundation of a school of painting that kept France at the head of the artistic world for well-nigh a century.

To us, who had lost our liberty, our independence, our strength and who possessed so very little in the domain of art, the beginning of the nineteenth century brought nothing but humiliation upon humiliation. Our national existence appeared to be wiped out. We were without power of action or, consequently, of reaction. True, the seventeenth century had borne fruit in such superabundance that two successive centuries have not sufficed to make us realize it fully. The soil had exhausted itself in producing the miraculous figure of Rembrandt, the epitome of all latent, conscious and unconscious forces, of all the instincts of a people, of the gospel of a nation rejuvenated by its newly-acquired liberty; of Rembrandt, in whom for us the seventeenth century is personified and incarnate. And a long period of rest was needed before the soil would once more become fertile and produce an artist, a dreamer whose genius should fall like a ray of light into a scientific age.