Dutch Painting In The Seventeenth Century

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Here is may be well to pause in order to emphasize the fact that these Dutch painters were preoccupied with rendering the manners of their time. This characteristic, which gives their work a lasting historical value, has caused their little pictures of courtyards, interiors, tavern scenes, conversations, toilet-scenes, and the like to be known as ‘genre’ painting, from the French word genre (i.e. manner or style). A few, like Terborch, show us the manner of dress and living of the upper classes; others show us the middle classes, and still more concern themselves with the manners of the peasants and lower classes. Among these last the best known is Jan Steen (1626-79), who is often amusingly satirical in his outlook; other painters of a similar style were Adrian van Ostade (1610-85) and the Fleming David Teniers (1610-90).

These painters may amuse us for the moment, but they do not hold us spellbound as some of the others do. The greatest rival of Terborch was Peter de Hooch or de Hoogh (1629-77), who was only twelve years his junior. De Hooch’s figures may not be so aristocratic as those of Terborch, but they are seen as finely and have their being in the same clear light which both these masters observed and rendered so lovingly. This passion for the rendering of light began to show itself in the paintings of Brouwer; it becomes still more marked in the work of Terborch, and it approaches perfection in the pictures of De Hooch. His chief interest, as the late Sir Walter Armstrong remarked ‘is always absorbed by the one problem, that of capturing and bottling the sunlight.’ How supremely well he succeeded in his object is shown by ‘A Girl Reading’, a masterpiece of interior illumination, in which every object is not only perfectly rendered but keeps its proper distance within the room owing to the painter’s delicately exact notation of the relative degrees of lighting.

In his youth, as Armstrong has pointed out, De Hooch liked the broadest daylight, but with advancing years he preferred ‘merely to suggest the outside sun, as it creeps down tiled passages, through red curtains and half-open shutters.’ An interesting example of De Hooch’s earlier period when he chose the broadest daylight for his scene is the ‘Interior of a Dutch House’. Nothing could be more brilliant or more faithful to Nature than the bright sunlight which streams down on the group near the window. It is instructive to observe here that the standing figure by the fireplace was an afterthought, put in by the artist to improve his design. This woman forms the apex of a triangle of which the wall with the windows forms the base. We know that she was an afterthought because the artist had already painted the black-and-white tiled floor right up to the fireplace before he began the figure, and that it why we can still see the tiling through the woman’s skirt. This correction would not have been visible to De Hooch’s contemporaries, but it is a peculiar property of oil paint that an under-painting, invisible when the paint is fresh, will in time work its way up to the surface. Since De Hooch was consummate craftsman whose handling of pigment approached perfection, the fact that even he has been unable to disguise a correction is a useful lesson to a living painter that he must get his picture right from the start, or otherwise, however clever he may be, his errors will be found out after his death. In De Hooch’s interior, this emergence of what it was endeavored to hide is too trivial and unimportant to affect seriously the beauty and merit of the painting.

Dutch Painting In The Seventeenth Century (continued)