The old masters of Belgium and Holland

Preface

I HAVE just been viewing Rubens and Rembrandt in their own homes, and at the same time the Dutch school in its unchanging frame of agricultural and maritime life, of downs, pastures, huge clouds, and low horizons.

Here are two arts, distinct, perfectly complete, entirely independent of each other, and very brilliant, which require to be studied at once by an historian, a thinker, and a painter. That the work should be properly done requires the union of these three men in one ; and I have nothing in common with the two first, while as to the painter, however a man may have a feeling for distances, he ceases to be one in approaching the least known of the masters of these privileged countries. I shall traverse the museums, but I shall not review them. I shall stop before certain men : I shall not relate their lives, nor catalogue their works, even those preserved by their compatriots. I shall define simply as I

IV PREFACE.

understand them, as fully as I can seize them, certain characteristic sides of their genius or talent. I shall not grapple with too great questions ; I shall avoid profundities and dark places. The art of painting is only the art of expressing the invisible by the visible. Whether its roads be great or small, they are sown with problems which it is permitted to sound for one's self as truths, but which it is well to leave in their darkness as mysteries. I shall only speak concerning certain pictures, of the surprise, the pleasure, the astonishment, and with no less precision of the vexation, which they have caused me. In all this I shall only translate with sincerity the inconsequent sensations of the mere amateur.

I warn you that there will be no method, no course pursued in these studies. You will find here many gaps, preferences, and omissions, without this want of balance detracting at all from the importance or the value of the works of which I may not have spoken. I shall often recall the Louvre, and shall not fear to conduct you thither, that examples may be nearer, and verifications easier. It is possible that some of my opinions may conflict with those generally received. I shall not seek, but I shall not avoid, any revision of ideas which may arise from these disagreements. I entreat you not to see in this any indication of a guerilla spirit, which

PREFACE. V

seeks to distinguish itself by boldness, and which, while travelling the beaten path, would fear to be accused of observing nothing, if it did not judge everything differently from,

others.

To tell the truth, these studies will be only notes, and these notes the disconnected and disproportionate elements of a book to be made in a more special manner than those which have been made up to this time, — a book in which philosophy, ^esthetics, nomenclature, and anecdotes will hold less place and the questions of the craft much greater place.

It should be like a sort of talk about painting, where the painters would recognize their habits, where men of the world would learn to better know painters and painting. For the moment my method will be to forget everything which has been said on this subject ; my aim, to raise questions, to produce a wish to think about them, and to inspire in those who would be capable of rendering us such a service the curiosity to solve them. I call these pages, The Old Masters, as I should speak of the severe or familiar masters of our French tongue, if I were speaking of Pascal, of Bossuet, of La Bruyere, of Voltaire, or of Diderot, — with this difference, that in France there are schools where respect for and study of these masters of style are still maintained, while I scarcely know where in these days the advice is vi PREFACE.

I shall, moreover, suppose that the reader whom I address is enough like me to follow me without too much fatigue, and yet different enough to give me the pleasure of contradicting him, so that I can put some ardor into my attempts to convince him.

Brussels, July 6, 1875.

Contents

PART L — BELGIUM.

Chapter Page

I. The Museum at Brussels 3

Part II. — Holland

I. The Hague and Scheveningen 117

II. Origin and Character of the Dutch School .... 123

III. The Vijver 141

IV. The Subject in Dutch Painting 146

V. Paul Potter 157 viii CONTENTS.

Chapter Page

VI. Terburg, Metzu, and Pieter de Hoogh at the Louvre i6S

VII. RUYSDAEL 183

VIII. CuYP 196

IX. The Influence of Holland upon French Landscape . 203

X. The Anatomical Lecture 218

XI. Frans Hals at Haarlem 224

XII. Amsterdam 235

XIII. The Night Watch 245

XIV. Rembrandt at the Six and Van Loon Galleries. —

Rembrandt at the Louvre 276

XV. The Syndics 292

XVI. Rembrandt 299

PART IIL — BELGIUM.

The Van Eycks and Memling 317

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

RUBENS.

Page

The Descent from the Cross Frontispiece

Christ ascending Calvary 32

The Adoration of the Magi 40

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes 44

The Elevation of the Cross 66

PAUL POTTER.

The Young Bull 162

REMBRANDT.

PART I.

BELGIUM.

THE

OLD MASTERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND.

BELGIUM.

I. The Museum At Brussels

The Brussels Museum has always had much greater value than renown. What injures it in the eyes of people whose minds instinctively take long flights, is its being but two steps from our own frontier, and consequently the first stage in a pilgrimage which conducts to sacred shrines. Van Eyck is at Ghent, Memling at Bruges, Rubens at Antwerp. Brussels possesses as its own none of these great men. She did not witness their birth ; she scarcely saw them paint ; she has neither their ashes nor their masterpieces. A pretence is made of visiting them at home ; but it is elsewhere that they await us. All this gives to this pretty capital the appearance of an empty house, and exposes it to being quite unjustly neglected. It is not known, or it is forgotten, that nowhere in Flanders do the three princes of Flemish painting march with such an escort of painters and able men, who surround them, follow them, precede them, and open for them the gates of history, — disappearing when they enter, but still causing them to enter, Belgium is a magnificent book of art, whose chapters, fortunately for provincial glory, are to be found everywhere, but whose preface is at Brussels, and only at Brussels; and I would say to any one who should be tempted to skip the preface to reach the book, that he makes a mistake, that he opens the book too soon, and that he will read it unprontably. This preface is very fine in itself; it is, moreover, a document whose place nothing supplies. It informs one what is to be seen, prepares for, suggests, explains everything ; setting in order the confusion of proper names, and works which are entangled in the multitude of chapels, where the chance of time has disseminated them, and classing them here without mistake, thanks to the perfect tact which has united and classified them.

It is a kind of list of what artists Belgium has produced up to the time of the modern school, and really a record of what it possesses in its divers places of deposit, museums, churches, convents, hospitals, town halls, and private collections. Possibly she herself scarcely comprehended with exactness the extent of this vast national treasure, the most opulent in the world, except that of Holland, and second only to that of Italy, before she came into possession of these two equally well kept registers, the museums of Antwerp and Brussels. In a word, the history of art in Flanders is capricious, even romantic. At each moment the thread is broken and found again ; one imagines painting lost, gone astray upon the great highways of the world ; it is a little like the Prodigal Son returning when he is no longer expected. If you would have an idea of its adventures, and learn what happened to it during its absence, examine the museum of Brussels ; it will tell you all, with that facility of information which an abridgment can offer, — an abridgment, complete, truthful, and perfectly clear, of a history that has endured for two centuries. I am not speaking merely of the management of the place, which is perfect. Fine rooms, good light, works choice from their beauty, their rarity, or merely for their historical value ; the most ingenious exactitude in determining the value of works coming from abroad, — in fine, a taste, a care, a knowledge, a respect for the things of art, which make to-day of this rich collection a model museum. Understand, it is especially a Flemish museum, which gives it a family interest for Flanders, and for Europe an inestimable value.

In it the Dutch school is scarcely seen ; you scarcely look for it. It would find here habits and beliefs foreign to its own, — mystical, catholic, and pagan, with none of which it would feel at home. Here it would encounter the legends, the ancient history, and the direct or indirect memorials of the dukes of Burgundy, the archdukes of Austria, the Italian dukes, the Pope, Charles V., PhiHp II., that is to say, all the things and all the people that it did not recognize or which it denied, against which it combated for a hundred years, and from which its genius, its instincts, its needs, and consequently its destiny, sharply and violently separated it. Between Moerdyk and Dordrecht there is only the Meuse to pass, but a whole world separates the two frontiers. Antwerp is the antipodes of Amsterdam, and by his good-natured eclecticism and the gay and sociable side of his genius, Rubens is more ready to fraternize with Veronese, Tintoretto, Titian, Correggio, or even with Raphael, than with Rembrandt, his contemporary, but his intractable contradictor.

As to Italian art, it is here only as a reminder. It is an art that is falsified by acclimation, and which alters its very nature in entering Flanders. In perceiving, in the least Flemish part of the gallery, two portraits by Tintoretto, not excellent, much retouched, but typical, one fails to understand them beside the works of Memling, of Martin de Vos, of Van Orley, of Rubens, of Vandyck, even of Antonio Moro. It is the same with Veronese ; he is out of place, his color is faded and bears traces of distemper, his style seems a little cold, his pomp studied and almost affected. The work is, however, a superb one in his finest manner ; it is a fragment of triumphal mythology detached from one of the ceilings of the ducal palace, one of the best ; but Rubens is beside it, and that very thing suiTfices to give to the Venetian Rubens a foreign accent. Which of the two is right ? In listening only to the tongue so excellently spoken by these two men, which is the better, — the correct and learned rhetoric they employ in Venice, or the emphatic, grandiose, and warm incorrectness of the Antwerp speech ? In Venice one inclines to Veronese, but in Flanders Rubens is better understood,

Italian art has that quality common to all strongly constituted arts, that it is at once very cosmopolitan because it has been everywhere, and very haughty because it has been sufficient to itself. It is at home in all Europe except in two countries,

— Belgium, whose spirit it has visibly impregnated without ever mastering it, and Holland, which at first seemed to consult it, and finally did without it ; so that, while it lives on friendly terms with Spain, and reigns in France, where, at least in historical painting, our best painters have been Romans, it encounters in Flanders two or three very great men of lofty and indigenous race, who hold sway, and mean to divide their empire with none.

The history of the relations of these two countries, Italy and Flanders, is curious ; it is long, it is diffuse. Elsewhere it is confusing ; but here, as I have told you, it can be read easily. It begins at Van Eyck, and ends on the day that Rubens left Genoa and returned, bringing with his luggage the cream of Italian lessons, that is, all of it that the art of his country could reasonably support. This history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Flanders forms the medium part and the truly original foundation of this museum.

We enter by the fourteenth century ; we end with the first half of the seventeenth. At the two extremities of this brilliant course we are struck by the same phenomenon, — rare enough in such a little country, — we see an art which was born of itself, on the spot ; and an art which was born again when it was thought to be dead. Van Eyck is recognized in a very fine Adoration of the Magi ; Memling is suggested by certain fine portraits ; and there, at the very end, a hundred and fifty years later, Rubens is perceived ; — each time a sun rises, and then sets with the splendor and the brevity of a beautiful day without a morrow.

8 THE OLD mas: ERS OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND.

While Van Eyck is above the horizon, he casts gleams which reach to the very confines of the modern world ; and it seems as if it were these gleams, that it recognized and which illumined it, that awakened the modern world. Italy is warned of it and comes to Bruges. Thus it was, that from a visit of workmen curious to know what they must do in order to paint well, with brilliancy, with consistency, with ease, with permanence, there began between these two peoples those comings and goings which, however they changed in character and direction, never ceased. Van Eyck is not alone; around him swarm works, — works rather than names. They cannot be well distinguished either among themselves or from the German school : it is a jewel case, a reliquary, a sparkling of precious gems. Imagine a collection of painted jewel work — in which is recognized the hand of the enameller, of the glass-worker, of the engraver, and of the illuminator of psalters ; whose sentiment is grave, whose inspiration is monastic, whose destination is princely ; which show already experienced handling and dazzling effect — in the midst of which Memling remains ever distinct, unique, candid, and delicious, like a flower whose root is unattainable, and which has sent forth no shoots.

After the extinction of this fair dawn, the fading of this lovely twilight, night descended upon the North, and Italy was seen to shine. Quite naturally the North rushed thither. Flanders was at that time at that critical moment in the Hfe of individuals and of peoples when, if they are no longer young, they must ripen ; for when one almost ceases to believe, one must know. Flanders did to Italy what Italy had been doing to antiquity; she turned towards Rome, Florence, Milan, Parma, and Venice, even as Rome and Milan, Florence and Parma, had turned towards Latin Rome and Greece.

The first to go was Mabuse, who went to Italy about 1508 ; then Van Orley, at the latest in 1527; then Floris, then Coxcie, and others followed. For a century there existed on classic ground a Flemish academy, which formed excellent pupils and some good painters ; which came near stifling the Antwerp school by force of culture without greatness of soul, by lessons well or ill learned, and which finally served to sow the unknown. Do we here find the precursors } At least these are the original stock, the intermediaries, the men who study with a will, who desire renown, who are charmed by novelty, tormented by ideal excellence. I cannot say that in this hybrid art everything was of a kind to console for what no longer existed, or to excite hopes of what was coming.

But in any case they all captivate, interest, instruct us, even if we only learn from them to understand one thing, which seems common because so definitely proved, — the renewal of the modern by the ancient world, and the extraordinary gravitation which drew Europe towards the Italian Renascence. The Renascence was produced in the North exactly as it was in the South, with this difference, that at the time we have reached, Italy precedes, Flanders follows ; and while Italy possesses schools of rare culture and noble understanding, Flemish scholars hasten thither.

These scholars, to call them by a name which does honor to their masters, — these disciples, better so named from their enthusiasm and according to their merits, are diverse, and diversely impressed by the spirit which speaks to all of them from afar, and charms them when near, according to their natures. Some of them Italy attracts but does not convert, like Mabuse, who remained Gothic in mind and in execution, and brought back from his excursion only the taste for fine architecture, already preferring palaces to chapels. There are some whom Italy retained and kept, others whom she sent back, freer, more supple, more nervous, even too much inclined towards moving attitudes, like Van Orley ; others she despatched to England, Germany, or France ; and still others returned unrecognizable, notably Floris, whose turbulent and cold manner, irregular style, and thin execution were hailed as an event in the school, and gave him the dangerous honor of forming, it is said, one hundred and fifty pupils.

It is easy to recognize, amidst these deserters, certain rarely obstinate souls who, ingenuous and powerful, remain extraordinarily attached to their native soil, and, ploughing it, discover on the spot something new, — witness Quentin Matsys, the Antwerp blacksmith, who began with the wrought-iron well, still to be seen before the portal of Notre Dame, and later, with the same honest hand, precise and powerful, and the same metal-worker's tool, painted the Banker and his Wife in the Louvre, and the admirable Burial of Christ in the Antwerp Museum.

Without leaving this historical hall of the Brussels Museum, one

THE MUSEUM AT BRUSSELS. • II

might make extensive studies and discover many curiosities. The period comprised between the end of the fifteenth century and the last third of the sixteenth, that which begins after Memling, with Gerard David and the Stuerbouts, and which finishes with the last pupils of Floris, — for instance, Martin de Vos, — is really one of the periods in the school of the North that we can poorly understand from our French museums. Here are found names wholly unknown among us, like Coxcie and Connixloo. We can learn to understand the merit and the transitory value of Floris, and at a glance can define his historical interest ; as to his glory, it will forever astonish, but can be better explained. Bernard van Orley, in spite of all the corruptions of his manner, his mad gesticulations when he grows animated, his theatrical rigidity when he is self-conscious, his faults in drawing, his errors in taste, is revealed to us as an exceptional painter first, by his Trials of Job, and finally, and even more surely, by his portraits. You find in him something Gothic and something Florentine, Mabuse mingled with an imitation Michael Angelo, the anecdotic style in his triptych of Job, his historical style in the triptych of the Virgin weeping over Christ, — in one, the heavy and pasty style, the sombre color, the tiresomeness of a pale rendering of foreign methods ; in the other, the violence and the happy hits of the palette, glittering surfaces, and the glassy brilliancy appropriate to a practitioner from the workshops of Bruges. And yet such is the vigor, the inventive force, and the power of this eccentric and changeful painter, that in spite of his extravagances, he is recognized by an indescribably imposing originality. At Brussels he has some surprising works. Observe that I do not speak to you of Franken, — Ambroise Franken, a pure Fleming of the same epoch, who has nothing in the Brussels Museum, but who figures at Antwerp in an altogether wonderful way, and who, if he is wanting to the series, is at least represented by analogous painters. Observe, too, that I omit those pictures poorly defined and catalogued as nnknozvji masters, — triptychs, portraits of various dates, beginning with the two life-sized figures of Philip the Fair and the Mad Joanna, two works rare from the value attached to them by iconography, charming in their execution, most instructive by their appropriateness. The museum possesses about fifty of these anonymous numbers. No one expressly claims them. They recall certain pictures of better determined origin, sometimes connect and confirm them, make their relationship clearer, and better fill out their genealogical tree.

Consider, moreover, that the primitive Dutch school, that of Haarlem, which is confounded with the Flemish school till the day when Holland ceased to be confounded entirely with Flanders, this first effort of the Netherlands to produce indigenous fruits of painting, is to be seen here, and I pass it by. I will only mention Stuerbout, with his two imposing panels of the Justice of Otho, and Heemeskerke and Mostaert, — Mostaert, a refractory spirit, an aborigine, a gentleman of the household of Margaret of Austria, who painted all the important personages of his time, a genre painter remarkably tinged with history and legend, who in two episodes of the life of St. Benedict represents the interior of a kitchen, and paints for us, as they did a hundred years later, the familiar domestic Hfe of his time, — Heemeskerke, a pure apostle of linear forms, dry, angular, glaring, blackish, who cuts out of hard steel his figures vaguely imitated from Michael Angelo.

It is easy to mistake a Dutchman for a Fleming. At that date it made very little difference on which side of the Meuse a man was born ; what mattered, was to know if such a painter had or had not tasted the troubled waters of the Arno or the Tiber, Had he or had he not visited Italy ? Everything is in that, and nothing can be stranger than this mingling, in large or small doses, of Italian culture and persistent Germanisms, of a foreign tongue and the indelible local accent which characterizes this school of Italo-Flemish mongrels. Journeys are in vain ; something is changed, but the substratum exists. The style is new, movement is to be found in the grouping, a hint of chiaroscuro begins to dawn upon palettes, nudities appear in an art hitherto wholly clothed and costumed according to local fashions, the height of personages increases, the groups are more numerous, the pictures more crowded, fancy mingles with the myths, an unbridled picturesqueness is combined with history ; it is the moment of Last Judgments, satanic and apocalyptic conceptions, and grimacing deviltries. The imagination of the North yields with joyful heart, and gives itself over, in the whimsical or in the terrible, to extravagances which Italian art never suspected.

In the first place, nothing deranges the methodical and tenacious foundation of Flemish genius. Execution remains precise, sharp, minute, and crystalline : the hand remembers having not long since manipulated polished and dense substances ; recalls the chiselling of copper, the enamelling of gold, the melting and coloring of glass. Then gradually the trade changes, the coloring is broken, the tone is divided into lights and shades ; it becomes iridescent, preserves its substance in the folds of stuffs, evaporates and whitens at each salient point. Painting becomes less solid, and color of less consistency, in proportion as it loses the conditions of force and brilliancy which came from its unity ; it is the Florentine method which begins to disorganize the rich and homogeneous Flemish palette. This first ravage well established, the evil makes rapid progress. In spite of the docility with which it follows the Italian teaching, the Flemish spirit is not supple enough to bend entirely to such lessons. It takes what it can, not always the best, and something ever escapes it, — either the method when it tries to seize the style, or the style when it succeeds in approaching the method. After Florence, Rome dominates it, and at the same time Venice. At Venice the influences which it undergoes are singular.

One can hardly perceive that the Flemish painters have studied the Bellini, Giorgione, or Titian. Tintoretto, on the contrary, has visibly impressed them. They find in him something grandiose, a movement, and a muscularity, which tempt them, and a certain transitional coloring, from which that of Veronese will separate itself, and which seems to them more useful to consult for the purpose of discovering the elements of their own. They borrow from him two or three tones, his yellow especially, with the manner of accompanying them. It is to be remarked that in these disconnected imitations there are not only many incoherences, but striking anachronisms.

They adopt more and more the Italian fashion, and yet they wear it ill. An inconsequence, a badly assorted detail, an odd combination of two manners which do not go well together, continue to manifest the rebellious side of the natures of these incorrigible scholars. In the full tide of the Italian decadence, on the eve of the seventeenth century, there are found still among these Italo-Flemings men of the past who seem never to have remarked that the Renascence was over and done. They inhabit Italy, and only follow its evolutions from afar. Whether from inability to understand things, or from native stiffness and obstinacy, there seems to be one side of their minds which resists, and will not be cultivated. An Italo- Fleming is invariably far behind the Italian time of day, which explains why during the life of Rubens his master hardly walked in the steps of Raphael.

While in historical painting some are belated, elsewhere there are some who divine the future, and are in advance. I speak not only of the elder Breughel, the inventor of genre painting, a terrible genius, an original master if ever there was one, father of a school to come, who died without having seen his sons, yet whose sons are his very own. The museum of Brussels makes us recognize an unknown painter of uncertain name, recognized by sobriquets : in Flanders he is called Henri met de Bles, or de Blesse, the man with the tuft ; in Italy, Civetta, because his pictures, now very rare, have an owl in place of a signature. A picture by this Henri de Bles, a Temptation of St. Anthony, is a most unexpected work, with its bottle-green and black-green landscape, its bituminous ground, its sky of light Prussian blue, its audacious and ingenious masses of color, the terrible black, which serves for background to the two nude figures, and its chiaroscuro so boldly obtained with a clear sky. This enigmatic painting, which savors of Italy, and announces what Breughel and Rubens will be later, in their landscapes, reveals a skilful painter, and a man impatient to anticipate the hour.

Of all these painters more or less disacclimated, of all these Rommiists, as they were called on their return into Antwerp society, Italy not only made skilful, copious artists, of great experience, of true knowledge, especially of great aptitude for diffusion and for vulgarizing (I ask their pardon for the word, it being used in its double signification), but she also gave them the taste for multifarious methods. According to the example of their own masters, they became architects and engineers and poets. To-day this fine fire causes a slight smile at the thought of the sincere masters who preceded them, and the inspired master who was to follow them.

They were brave men, who worked for the culture of their time, and unconsciously for the progress of their school. They went away, enriched themselves, and returned home like emigrants whose savings are made with a view to the fatherland. Some of them were very secondary, and local history itself might forget them if they did not all follow each other from father to son, and if genealogy were not in such cases the only means of estimating the utility of those who seek, and of understanding the sudden grandeur of those who find.

To sum up, a school had disappeared, that of Bruges. Aided. by poKtics, war, journeys, and all the active elements which compose the physical and moral character of a people, another school was formed at Antwerp ; ultramontane beliefs inspired it, ultramontane art advised it, princes encouraged it, all national needs called for it. It was at once very active and very undecided, very brilliant, astonishingly fruitful, and almost obscure ; it was metamorphosed from top to bottom, so as to be no longer recognizable, until it arrived at its decisive and final incarnation in a man born to bend to all the needs of his age and of his country, nourished by all schools, and who was the most original expression of his own, that is to say, the most Flemish of all Flemings.

Otho Voenius is placed in the museum of Brussels immediately beside his great pupil. It is towards those two inseparable names that we must tend if we would draw any conclusion from what precedes. They are seen from the whole horizon, the former concealed in the glory of the other ; and if I have not named them twenty times already, you should be grateful for the effort I have made to induce you to expect them.