Pioneers of Dutch Art

from:
Hans Koningsberger
The World of Vermeer: 1632-1675
New York, 1967, pp. 73-79

Jan Vermeer and his contemporaries were in the last generation of Dutch painters who produced the brilliant art of the 17th Century. Before them came a group of artists who pioneered in developing the extraordinary skills that were the glory of the Golden Age.

The first great figure of these early years was Frans Hals. His parents settled in Haarlem in 1591 when Hals was about 10, and here he spent his long and immensely active life; here he died in 1666. His first group portrait--one of those for which he is so famous--was done in 1616. The Officers of the Archers of St. George (see right) shows a banquet of the dashing members of a unit of the civic guard. In it the essence of his mature style, his free technique of rapid, easy brushstrokes--is already evident. For Hals this technique was not an end in itself but was a means of achieving an effect of effortlessness and spontaneity that was to change the very nature of portrait painting. (Almost 300 years later Vincent van Gogh expressed particular admiration for Hals's "way of stating the subject right away in one sweep.")

Hals's subjects shed the traditional, almost frozen, dignity of people sitting far portraits; instead, they are caught in a quick movement, in a moment of thought, in an ephemeral instant of laughter. Thus the painter penetrates deeply into their real personalities. Brushstroke fits next to brushstroke, color is neighbor to different color without transition; there is no trace of drawing here--this is pure painting. But the effortlessness is only apparent, for nothing would be further from the truth than to imagine Frans Hals looking at his subject and then dashing down his paint (see right) without any additional thought. Close inspection of his work discloses a superb balance, a fine structure; it is Hals's virtuosity which makes it all seem so simple.

Like so many other Dutch painters, Hals found it paid to specialize. Though he showed great versatility in his work; his most reliable source of income was his large group portraits. Twelve of these have survived. They are striking for the genius with which the artist managed to satisfy his vain customers without sacrificing his integrity as a painter.

The most famous of these are the last two he painted; they show the Board of Governors (see right) and the Board of Governesses of the Haarlem Old Men's Almshouse. Hals painted these at the end of his life; when he was over 80, and they show a remarkable perception and wisdom. They are virtually in monochrome; there is only the black of the costumes, the white lace collars and the light on the faces; in the painting of the women there is just one touch of red on the pages of a book on a table in the foreground. It must be either the Bible or the accounts book of the Board, and the viewer feels that both these books were equally sacred in that place. These severe old men and women of the Board are shown so convincingly and with such simplicity, their loneliness and aloneness shining through so mysteriously, that it is not hard, looking at them, to understand why Hals earned a place among the great masters.

When he painted these last portraits--and indeed until his death--Hals was actually living on a few guilders a week voted to him by these same Governors and Governesses, his more than 50 years of work as a painter having failed to provide him with anything far his old age. For Hals in his personal life was nearly as undisciplined and exuberant as some of the boisterous soldiers and cavaliers he painted. A good number of the contemporary references to Hals come from the police records of Haarlem, which indicate he had an unquenchable enthusiasm far drinking and carousing. He had two wives and at least 12 children (the total is uncertain), and, though he was well thought of as an artist and received many commissions, he could never stay out of debt for long. When he finally died in his mid-eighties, he was a pauper, but he was given an honorable funeral in a Haarlem church.

However poorly Hals managed his private affairs, his artistic genius stayed intact to the end. He had an enormous influence on his colleagues and his pupils during these many years of work, and his painting not only lit the way brilliantly for the Dutch Golden Age, but was fresh and dynamic enough to be especially admired 200 years later by another band of pioneering artists, the Impressionists.

While Hals painted in Haarlem, a group of artists were marking a new course in Utrecht, a major town of the central Netherlands. These were the first Dutch painters to feel the impact of the Italian artistic revolution sparked by Caravaggio. Most of them had studied in Rome and there they were greatly influenced by Caravaggio's emphasis on reality--a reality that was set off dramatically, even theatrically, by bold colors, strong highlights and deep shadows. The painters of Utrecht took this style with them back to Holland, and it might be said that historically they were less important for their own paintings than for the influence they had on other Dutch painters--including, ultimately, Vermeer. Gerrit van Honthorst, who lived between 1590 and 1656, was the chief liaison between Caravaggism and the painters of Holland. Although Caravaggio died about the time Honthorst arrived in Rome, the great Italian's principles were still being hotly debated and widely emulated. Honthorst quickly absorbed the message. He painted many night scenes of banquets and concerts, paying strict attention to realistic detail, using the definite colors that had marked Caravaggio's early works and showing a fascination for the lighting effects cast by torches and candles.

Honthorst retuned to Utrecht in 1621, and a painting such as his Procuress, done in 1625 when he was at the peak of his powers, shows how completely he had assimilated the two traditions of Holland and Italy. It is an intimate scene showing a young man flirting with a laughing girl while the procuress, an old crone, urges her on. The scene was to be painted many times by painters coming after Honthorst and is typical of Dutch genre painting; but Honthorst treats it in an Italianate manner, giving it a theatrical setting, dramatically lit by a candle in the direct tradition of Caravaggio. Pictures such as this, as well as many showing joyous musicians, children or soldiers, introduced into the market place of Dutch art a new element of elegance combined with down-to-earth subject matter and made Honthorst fashionable overnight. An urbane, gregarious man, he became a favorite of King Charles I of England and of the Princes of Orange at The Hague; eventually he relinquished his position as an innovator of serious art, but ensured his financial position when he turned to executing decorative paintings on the walls and ceilings of royal palaces and mansions.

A slightly older but less influential Utrecht colleague whose career closely paralleled Honthorst's was Hendrick Terbrugghen, bom in 1588. Terbrugghen preceded Honthorst to Rome by a few years and he, too, spent about a decade there before returning to contribute to the popularity of Caravaggism at home. Like Honthorst, Terbrugghen painted musicians, boys smoking, girls of easy virtue, all rendered in rich textures and colors. In demonstrating that no theme was too humble or trivial for theartist, the two painters, along with other members of the Utrecht School, contributed much to the secularization that was a dominant tendency of early 17th Century Dutch art.

But in many respects, Terbrugghen was very different from his fashionable associate. Deeply absorbed in his work, Terbrugghen was a retiring man who shunned the popularity Honthorst thrived on; records reveal only one instance when Terbrugghen painted a picture on commission. Artistically he was more refined than Honthorst. As he matured, Terbrugghen turned away from the brilliant, almost harsh colors of Italian painting and adopted a subtler, more subdued palette, while his rendering of the subject matter became gentler and more introspective. Indeed, his artistry was such that today he is considered the most accomplished painter of Utrecht. Even in his own day, though less famous than Honthorst, he enjoyed a considerable reputation. Rubens so admired his work that the great Flemish painter visited Terbrugghen's studio in Utrecht in 1627.

A third Utrecht painter is worth mentioning here not so much for his artistic merit, which today is judged to have been less than that of his better-known contemporaries, but because of an intriguing link between him and Vermeer. Dirck van Baburen, like other Utrecht artists, had gone to Rome and absorbed the Caravaggesque style. Like many other artists he painted several pictures on the theme of the procuress. Curiously, one of these paintings appears in the background of two of Vermeer's masterpieces: the Lady Seated at a Virginal and The Concert. In each case Vermeer changed the original's composition to suit his needs, but in each case his model was clearly the same Baburen Procuress.

Practically nothing is known of Vermeer's working habits and his own artistic taste, and it is tantalizing to speculate on why he should have twice picked this painting to include in his own pictures. Did he feel an affinity with Baburen's work? Did he find this particular Procuress among all the others especially well rendered? Or did he own the Baburen in his capacity as art dealer and simply use it as a thrifty expedient? From this distance in time little can be decided about the puzzle except that Vermeer's. choice of the painting as a model indicates he must have had at least a professional admiration far the Utrecht artist. The rise of Dutch landscape painting came at about the same rime the School of Utrecht was flourishing, and the Dutch painters' fascination with the look of their land was to last throughout the Golden Age. It reached its finest expression, perhaps, in the work of Vermeer's contemporaries, but some of the earlier landscapists were masters in their own right: Hendrick Avercamp, Hercules Seghers, Jan van Goyen and Simon de Vlieger.