Dutch Seventeenth Century Drawings

Dutch Seventeenth Century Drawings

Frederick Wedmore's essay, originally an introduction to the Burlington Club Catalogue of April 1878, surveys Dutch drawings of the Seventeenth Century as works complete and self-sufficient in themselves, not merely studies for later paintings. Wedmore argues that the Dutch School was the first to value immediate impressions for their own sake, producing sketches in oil, water-colour, chalk, bistre, reed pen, and etching that stood as finished possessions for the public rather than preparatory exercises, with artists judging sufficiency of finish rather than quantity of finish. Dutch landscape art, he notes, had no early period of tentative struggle; its first masters, Roghman and Van Goyen, already showed economy of means and decision of hand. Roghman made few pictures but many drawings, twenty-five surviving in the Museum of Rotterdam alone. Van Goyen's large design and tonal gradation let him dispense with colour, earning the admiration of Théodore Rousseau, who held him up as a model to his pupils. Both men travelled, as did Rembrandt's contemporaries generally, yet their art, like Rembrandt's own, remained rooted in native soil until later contact with foreign styles brought a falser ideal. Wedmore characterises the true Dutch period through its leading figures: Van Goyen's river banks and skies, Cuyp's afternoon fields, Adrian van Ostade's move from alehouse vulgarity to cottage charm, Jan Steen's comprehensive knowledge of men, and Rembrandt's steady command of Dutch life and landscape, a style passed to Gerard Dow, Philip de Koningh, and Nicholas Maas. He surveys the centres of this art: Leyden, birthplace of Rembrandt and Van Goyen; The Hague, to which Van Goyen removed; Amsterdam, led by Rembrandt; and Haarlem, favoured for its Guild of St. Luke. Drawing on the Haarlem writer M. van der Willigen's Artistes d'Harlem, he recounts Laurens Van der Winne's list of one hundred and seventy-four painters, the Guild's rules requiring membership to sell pictures, its two annual sales, and the poverty of many painters, including Frans Hals, excused his dues in 1661. Wedmore traces the School's decline in the century's second half, as Both and Berghem's southern-influenced manner won fashionable favour, even converting Rembrandt's friend Jan Six. By the time Cuyp, Wynants, and the young Adrian Van de Velde had died, few landscape painters resisted the new taste; Hobbema alone worked on faithfully, unregarded, and died poor. William Van de Velde and Backhuysen, painters of sea and fleet, had no true successors to their precursor Renier Zeeman. Only "still life" flourished further, through Jan Van Huysum, praised by Balzac, and his kinsman Michael, before giving way to Van Os's vulgar mimicry and Jacob Cats's trivial elaboration, by which point Dutch Art had faded into modern painting. Returning to drawings themselves, Wedmore praises the Dutch mastery of water-colour: sketches attributed to Rembrandt in the British Museum and M. J. De Vos's Amsterdam collection, a pen-and-wash city gate from Seymour Haden's collection on Burlington Club walls, and two Philip De Koningh drawings in orange-browns. He contrasts Rembrandt and De Koningh's tonal use of colour with Berghem's warmer sunlit effects, instancing a drawing from Malcolm of Poltalloch's collection, and credits Adrian van Ostade, working in old age in Amsterdam, with the fullest use of water-colour in interiors, admired in works owned by Malcolm and Cook, with Dusart following him in elaboration but not in felicity. Wedmore closes by noting masters uneven in drawings versus oils, such as Wouvermans, whose red chalk group excels, and Cuyp, whose pleasantness fails to survive in drawing; and by observing how taste shifts across generations, as with Van der Heist's reputation dropping to its proper place, and the qualified appreciation shown for Jan Steen despite the dismissal of Bruges as affording but scanty entertainment to a painter. He laments the resulting loss of unvalued drawings, including sheets by Hobbema, Wynants, Jan Steen, De Hooch, and Metsu, long neglected and likely destroyed.

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1878 · Genre: Art History, Art Criticism, Biography · 3,102 words

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The drawings, the studies, of the Italian Schools, and of all Schools besides, have these sources of interest, always admitted -- they reveal to us, as studies must, the personal thought of the master in his theme, and they may often be identified as preparations for some long recognised picture with whose history we are henceforth to be the better acquainted. But some among the drawings of the Dutch School, though coming late indeed in the procession of the world's Art, are still the earliest to possess for us that different and self-contained interest which belongs to work done for its proper sake, itself realising the intention with which it was begun, and so, in the first form in which it comes down to us, at once final and complete.

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Dutch art · seventeenth century · drawing · landscape · water-color · etching · art history · art criticism · artistic economy · technique · interior · still life

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