How Art Rose With The Dutch Republic

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Rembrandt had had his fun, and now came the time to pay. Already money was beginning to be scarce, and his popularity as a portrait-painter was beginning to wane. In the year Saskia died Rembrandt had completed his great picture, the ‘Sortie’ or ‘Night Watch’ which though today the most popular of all his works and universally ranked among his greatest achievements, almost destroyed the contemporary reputation of the painter and began that decline of his fortunes which ended in his bankruptcy.

The subject of this picture is explicitly stated in an inscription on the back of an old copy of it in water color which is in a private collection in Holland: ‘The young Laird of Purmerlandt (Frans Banning Cocq) in his capacity as Captain gives to his Lieutenant, the Laird of Vlaerdingen, the command to march out his burgher company.’ This amply justifies the more correct title of ‘The Sortie,’ but the purpose and hour of this ‘going out’ of a company of civic militia are not easy to define. In the eighteenth century it was assumed to be a nocturnal watch turning out on its rounds by artificial light, hence the French name for the picture ‘Ronde de Nuit,’ which has been anglicised as ‘The Night Watch’. But as Prof Baldwin Brown of Edinburgh University justly pointed out, the time is ‘certainly the day and not the night. The shadow of the captain’s outstretched hand and arm is thrown by the sun upon the yellow dress of the second in command, and it is easy to see by the relative positions of object, and shadow that the sun is still pretty high in the heavens.’

Before we too hastily condemn those who condemned this splendid picture, we must put ourselves in their position. To see what Captain Banning Cocq and his friends expected we should turn back and look at Hal’s portrait group of the Guild of Archers. They expected to be painted like that, and Rembrandt painted them like this! In point of fact, Rembrandt did not paint them, he painted the scene. Hals shows a collection of individual officers, each of whom is clearly seen and recognizable. Rembrandt shows a patrol many of whose members are lost in shadow and unable to be identified. As a picture Rembrandt’s work has splendid qualities of drama, lighting, and movement which we cannot find in the Hals; but Captain Banning Cocq and his friends did not want to see these qualities, they wanted to see themselves. Rembrandt had painted a great picture, but he had dealt a heavy blow to human vanity, and his contemporaries could not forgive him.

It must be admitted that Rembrandt was wilful and wayward. He would go his own way, and he was only justified by the greatness of his genius. He was, as Dr Muther has said, ‘the first artist who, in the modern sense, did not execute commissions, but expressed his own thoughts. The emotions which moved his inmost being were the only things which he expressed on canvas. He does not seem to think that anyone is listening to him, but only speaks with himself; he is anxious, not to be understood by others, but only to express his moods and feelings.’

An interesting example of the liberties Rembrandt took with his nominal subject will be found in the Wallace Collection. The picture now known as ‘The Centurion Cornelius’ used to be called ‘The Unmerciful Sevant,’ and commentators explained that the figure in the turban and red robe was Christ, and enlarged on the displeasure shown in his face and the guilt and fear of the Unrighteous Servant, whom they took to be the central of the three figures to the right. Then a mezzotint by James Ward, published in 1800, was discovered. The red-robed figure proved to be Cornelius, in no way ‘displeased,’ while the remaining three figures are ‘two of his household servants, and a devout soldier of them that waited on him continually’ (Acts x.7). This widely-spread error shows how easy it is to misread pictures if they are approached with preconceived ideas. The misunderstanding, of course, has been brought about by Rembrandt’s fondness for oriental splendor, which led him to put Roman centurion in Asiatic costume! It is not ‘correct’ in the way that Alma-Tadema’s classical scenes are; but real greatness in art does not depend on accuracy of antiquarian details—however praiseworthy this may be—but on largeness of conception, noble design, and splendid color.

How Art Rose With The Dutch Republic (continued)