National Gallery of Art

Biography

Gerard Dou, considered the founder of the Dutch school of fijnschilderij [fine painting], was born in Leiden on April 7, 1613, the son of the glassmaker and engraver Douwe Jansz. and Marytje Jansdr. van Rosenburg. According to Orlers (see person bibliography), Dou received his first artistic instruction from his father in the art of glass engraving. He was an apprentice with the copper engraver Bartholomeus Dolendo for a year and a half, beginning in 1622 at the young age of nine, and then trained with the glass painter Pieter Couwenhorn for two years. As he was a member of the glaziers' guild from 1625 to 1627, it is tempting to make a connection between this youthful career and the smooth, shiny surface effects characteristic of his later panel paintings.

On 14 February 1628 Dou began his apprenticeship with Rembrandt van Rijn, which seems to have lasted until the master moved to Amsterdam some three or four years later. At the time he entered Rembrandt's workshop Dou was not quite fifteen years old and Rembrandt was only twenty-one. Although there are no dated works by Dou from this period, a number of his pictures are so close in style to those of his teacher that they must undoubtedly have been painted at this time. Indeed, early works by Dou have at times been attributed to Rembrandt himself, a confusion in part due to the extent to which Dou and Rembrandt shared subjects and models during these years.

Dou painted a wide range of subjects, including genre scenes, history paintings, still lifes, portraits, and--unusually for a seventeenth-century Dutch painter--nudes. He also began painting candlelit genre scenes during the 1650s. His fame rests, however, on the meticulously painted, small genre scenes that make up a large portion of his oeuvre. These typically depict one or two figures engaging in some kind of domestic activity, either in an interior or else looking out over a windowsill--a compositional device that Dou was chiefly responsible for popularizing. Many of these works are also open to a considerable degree of symbolic interpretation, containing numerous, if sometimes ambiguous, visual references to well-known contemporary proverbs or emblems.

Dou had remarkable success. From his own lifetime until late in the nineteenth century, Dou's work was considered one of the crowning achievements of Dutch art, and his pictures consistently fetched higher prices than those of Rembrandt. By 1648, when he is recorded as one of the founder-members of the Leiden Guild of St. Luke, his pictures commanded some of the highest prices of their day, and he had already gained a remarkable international reputation. Pieter Spiering, the agent in The Hague of Queen Christina of Sweden, apparently paid 1,000 guilders per year to secure for his Queen first refusal of whatever Dou produced, and in 1660 the States General of the Netherlands included several painting by Dou amongst their gifts to Charles II of England on the occasion of his restoration to the throne. The king subsequently invited the artist to travel to England and work at the royal court, an invitation Dou did not accept.

It seems that Dou hardly ever left his native Leiden, where his work was clearly just as greatly appreciated as it was in the royal courts of Europe. In 1641 the mayor of Leiden, J. J. Orlers, wrote admiringly of Dou's technique in his general description of the city, Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden, and in 1665 a local collector, Johan de Bye, rented a room in which he exhibited twenty-seven of the artist's paintings, one of the first recorded occasions of an exhibition devoted to the works of a single painter.

A factor in Dou's enduring fame must be the human fascination for the products of extremely painstaking and skillful labor. The time that went into the creation of Dou's minutely detailed works is legendary: one anecdote relates how, when complimented on the patience with which he had painted a tiny broom the size of a fingernail, he replied that he still had three days' work to do on it, and he is also said to have spent five days on the underpainting of a single hand in a portrait. Since he charged six guilders an hour for his services as a portrait painter, it is hardly surprising that these do not constitute a large proportion of his oeuvre.

Dou never married, and was buried in the Pieterskerk at Leiden on 9 February 1675. His pupils included Godfried Schalcken (1634-1706) and Frans van Mieris (1635-1681), as well as a number of less well-known painters such as his nephew Domenicus van Tol (c. 1635-1676), Abraham de Pape (c. 1621-1666), Carel de Moor (1656-1738), and Godfried Matthijs Naiveu (1647-c. 1721). [This is an edited version of the artist's biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]

Bibliography

1641

Orlers, Jan Janszn. Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden. 2nd. ed. Leiden, 1641.

1706

De Piles, Roger. The Art of Painting and the Lives of the Painters. London, 1706. (Translated from Abrégé de la vie des peintres.... Paris, 1699. 2nd ed., Paris, 1715.)

1753

Houbraken 1753, 2:1-3.

1829

Smith, John. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters. 9 vols. London, 1829-1842: 1(1829):1-47.

1902

Martin, Willem. Gerard Dou. Translated by Clara Bell. London, 1902.

1907

Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century.... 8 vols., translated from the German edition. London, 1907-1917: 1(1907):337-470.

1911

Martin, Willem. Gérard Dou, sa vie et son oeuvre: Etude sur la peinture hollandaise et les marchands au dix-septième siècle. Paris, 1911.

1913

Martin, Willem. Gerard Dou: des Meisters Gemälde in 247 Abbildungen. Klassiker der Kunst in Gesamtausgaben, 24. Stuttgart and Berlin, 1913.

1980

Artemis Group. Ten Paintings by Gerard Dou, 1613-1675. Exh. cat. David Carrit Limited, London, 1980.

1983

Sumowski, Werner. Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler. 5 vols. Landau i.d. Pfalz, 1983: 1:498-607; 5:3088-3089.

1984

Philadelphia 1984, 181-188.

1988

Sluijter, Eric J., Marlies Enklaar, and Paul Nieuwenhuizen. Leidse Fijnschilders: van Gerrit Dou tot Frans van Mieris de Jonge 1630-1760. Exh. cat. Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden. Zwolle, 1988: 96-115.

1989

Hecht, Pieter. De Hollandse fijn schilders: Van Gerard Dou tot Adriaen van der Werff. Exh. cat. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Amsterdam, Maarssen, and The Hague, 1989: 23-64.

1992

MacLaren, Neil. National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School 1600-1900. Revised and expanded by Christopher Brown. London, 1992: 105.

1995

Wheelock, Jr., Arthur K. Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1995: 56-57.

2000

Baer, Ronni, et al. Gerrit Dou, 1613-1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000.