Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 2, 1909.djvu/18

 2 AELBERT CUYP SECT. the Groote Kerk in 1675-76, and a member of the high court ("hooge vierschaar") from 1680 to 1682. Cuyp died in 1691, and was buried on November 7 of that year in the Augustinian church at Dordrecht. Cuyp's social position and his good fortune in money matters probably gave rise to the legend that he only painted for love. The fact is that he was a painter by profession and painted for money. But his art was really influenced by his worldly circumstances, both for good and for ill. It was influenced for good in so far that the artist's inner self, his genuine and heartfelt delight in nature, and especially in the beauties of his native /-landscape and its denizens, could find full and undisturbed expression. ( That emotion is clearly visible in his works, and makes the mature examples of which there is a very considerable number wholly excep- tional creations, full of purely artistic vigour and a profound love of natural beauty. ^ These qualities constitute a Dutch landscape, the like of which we should seek in vain among the works of other masters. Thus Cuyp is an important figure in the history of Dutch landscape-painting, although in its development he took an entirely independent line. On the other hand, Cuyp may often have been constrained by his distinguished friends to attack problems which from an artistic point of view can only be solved with extreme difficulty. In equestrian portraits, sporting and hunting scenes, and the like, we may see even to-day how the ablest painters often fail. Cuyp would not, or could not, decline such commissions, though he probably did not undertake them with any enthusiasm. This accounts for the quantity of fatiguing work which was imposed on the popular artist. He was often compelled to adopt a sketchy style, and for this reason a large number of his pictures do not even confirm his old reputation in the sale-room. These mediocre works represent the master's art in the most frequented galleries on the Continent. But in the collections that are less well known, in England and more recently in America also, Cuyp appears in a very different light. His golden landscapes, flooded with sunshine and full of air, there draw all eyes. The thick green pastures beside streams crowded with boats, under seemingly illimitable skies in which great clouds float in a peculiar way usually the dark body of the cloud is surrounded by sunlit edges, producing a very characteristic effect which we associate with Cuyp's name and the sturdy cattle, which are artistically grouped and yet most naturally rendered, bear witness to the beauty of the Dordrecht landscape, and the air and sun of Holland. Such themes rejoiced the painter's heart, and the pictures that he produced in these moods arouse in the sensitive observer similar feelings of joy and gratitude and delight in life. It may be noted, in passing, that Cuyp usually introduces cows of a warm brown colour into his landscapes a fact that influences their general tone. On Dutch pastures to-day the cattle are almost all black and white. Cuyp's artistic relations with Van Goyen have already been mentioned. Van Groyen's example must have very soon stimulated the younger man, who was at heart a landscape painter. The landscapes which Cuyp painted under Van Goyen's influence are yellowish in tone and curiously unattractive in their subjects, representing as they do the dunes and heaths of Holknd, with very slight relief, as a rule, in the shape of figures or