The Dutch Interior
January 2–30, 2005
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibitions Gerard
ter Borch and Rembrandt's
Late Religious Portraits
Overview
Seventeenth-century Holland was one of the most extraordinary nations in Europe. Nominally, it was ruled by representatives of the Orange dynasty, an aristocratic line that had spearheaded the struggle of the nation for independence from the Habsburg-controlled Southern Netherlands. Yet the political, economic, religious, and cultural life of this Protestant republic was governed by its prosperous merchant class.
With much of their wealth dependent on trade with neighboring or far-off lands, the Dutch burghers were accustomed to dialoguing with numerous, often competing parties. At the same time, as inhabitants of some of the most densely urbanized cities of Europe, they were also remarkably accepting of the different "voices" within their community, whether in terms of social class or religious belief.
The spirit of tolerance and negotiation extended to artistic developments. In no other European country during the seventeenth century did so many artists work for so many different patrons and explore a greater range of pictorial genres, from the most elevated themes to the humblest subject matters, such as still lifes and scenes of everyday life. An appreciation for different subjects and styles, as well as for individual interpretations and points of view, became the artistic currency of the day.
This series of lectures addresses the interest of artists, as well as patrons, in exploring the realm between public and private life, between the "exterior" and "interior," between socially determined roles and individual identity. This theme in Dutch painting is presented in a variety of genres, from representations of quiet domestic spaces where a woman might be attending to her motherly duties or a man might be absorbed in writing a letter, to portraits that exude a sense of authority and individuality, even when the beholder knows that the subject cannot be identified beyond the moniker "apostle" or "man in an oriental costume."
Each speaker investigates the question of "interiority" from a particular perspective. Rodney Nevitt addresses the quintessentially private theme of love and its representations throughout the seventeenth century, from more socially codified scenes of courtship rituals, toward those that highlight the complexity of individuals' emotions. Stephanie S. Dickey considers the manner in which artists of the period balanced the "public" and the "private" realms in the genre of portraiture: the ways in which a portrait could express readily identifiable social qualities through the pose, bearing, gesture, and dress of the sitter, and at the same time represent an unmistakable physical likeness endowed with an individual character.
H. Perry Chapman focuses her presentation on the artist's studio, particularly with the relationship between the public persona and the inner self. She argues that while most of the treatments of this subject, whether as self-portraits or in ostensibly more neutral scenes of artists at work, achieve a deceptively lifelike quality, they are thoroughly imbued with art-theoretical ideas about the role of the painter and the nature of his artistic creations. Mariët Westermann focuses her attention on narrative ambiguities in scenes of daily life, a pictorial strategy that draws the beholder into the represented event, yet never allows for a full disclosure of its meaning.
The series concludes with two lectures focusing on Rembrandt van Rijn, a painter synonymous with the idea of the private self. Ernst van de Wetering discusses the late style of this master, inviting us to contemplate the individuality of his fluid brushstrokes and the highly expressive textures of his pictorial creations. Arthur K. Wheelock discusses the interpretive challenges in Rembrandt's late portraits, which are, paradoxically, born out of the very quality that earned this master undivided praise even during his lifetime — his exceptional portrayal of the inner workings of the soul of the sitter
January 2
Love and the Private Sphere in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting
H. Rodney Nevitt, Jr.
The courting activities of upper-class youth form an important theme in Dutch genre painting in the seventeenth century — from the elegant garden parties of the early part of the century by artists such as Esaias van de Velde to the quite different imagery that developed after midcentury in the paintings of Gerard ter Borch, Johannes Vermeer, and others, which depict smaller numbers of figures in more private, domestic settings. The latter paintings, it is often noted, seem to imply narratives, albeit vaguely defined, in which the depicted characters interact with one another.
The imagery of love in the earlier pictures is by no means less semantically or emotionally complex, nor is it completely devoid of narrative. A close reading of Esaias van de Velde's paintings and prints in the context of contemporary Dutch love songs allows us to identify various levels of narrative meaning in the images: for example, the shy young man tongue-tied in the presence of his beloved, or the melancholic lover at the party who is separated from the object of his desire. But these "private" emotional moments are imbedded in the otherwise public gatherings of youth. In the second half of the century, as such moments become much more emphatically the main subject of the images, a new visual language for genre painting emerges.
Whereas love songs evoke the world of the garden parties as an idealized setting for the courting activities of highborn youth, other kinds of contemporary literary texts, such as plays and prose romances, shed light on the love scenes from the second half of the century. Both of these genres describe the courting activities of young men and women as enacted in domestic settings. In these texts, lovers send covert letters to one another, contend with meddling parents who try to control their choice of marriage partner, and use servants as crucial go-betweens to communicate with their beloved. Such literary texts offer insight into how contemporary viewers might have understood the paintings of Ter Borch and Vermeer, as well as the implicit tension between courtship and the domestic world in which its narratives play out.
Further analogies can be drawn between the new mode of genre painting and the prose romance, an increasingly popular literary type in the Netherlands in the second half of the seventeenth century that likewise seems concerned with the intimate emotions of characters who possess (more so than those of the song texts) a past and a future, and who therefore embody a more concrete experience of love unfolding in time.
H. Rodney Nevitt Jr. is associate professor of art history at the University of Houston. He received his PhD in fine arts from Harvard University in 1992. His book, Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Holland, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. He is also the author of several articles, including studies of Vermeer ("Vermeer on the Question of Love," The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer, 2001) and Rembrandt ("Bridal Decorum and Dangerous Looks: Rembrandt’s Wedding Feast of Samson," in Rethinking Rembrandt, 2002).
January 9
Noises and Silences in Dutch Paintings of Manners
Mariët Westermann, director, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
January 16
Portraits and Personalities
Stephanie S. Dickey,associate professor of art history, Herron
School of Art, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
Seventeenth-century travelers to Holland often remarked on the Dutch passion for collecting pictures: town houses and farm cottages were hung with landscapes, still lifes, biblical narratives, and comic scenes of everyday life. Within this lively market, portraits held a special place, especially among the prosperous middle class. The reason, then as now, is that portraiture has both aesthetic and instinctive appeal. From infancy, we are fascinated by the human face, particularly by the faces of those we love. Just as we assemble photograph albums today, Dutch families sought to surround themselves with images of people important to them. Artists such as Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Gerard ter Borch responded with portraits of unprecedented variety and inventiveness. From the innocent child clutching her first handbag to the distinguished elder statesman at work, the citizens of Holland's Golden Age come alive for us in paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints.
Literary sources show that viewers assessed these images for the accuracy with which they represented not only physical appearance, but also social status and personal character. Through pictorial devices ranging from evocative lighting to pensive poses, artists strove to capture the ineffable blend of personality, mood, and demeanor that constitutes human individuality. Rembrandt, above all, mastered the subtle clues of glance and gesture that portray not just the actions of the body, but the interior life of the soul. This effort reflected a new cultural climate in which writers, philosophers, and scientists avidly contemplated the workings of the human spirit. Among the most famous of these inquiring minds was René Descartes, who devised his famous aphorism, "I think therefore I am," while walking the streets of Rembrandt's Amsterdam.
At the same time, playwrights, poets, and novelists were becoming adept at creating fictional characters whose moral and emotional dilemmas vividly paralleled or satirized real life experiences and states of mind. Here, too, Dutch artists responded with a new pictorial type: paintings in which a single figure stands alone, often in picturesque costume, lost in thought or engaging the viewer with a provocative smile. These playful character studies, called tronies (faces) in Dutch inventories, seem designed to provoke awareness of the complex, changeable nature of the self. Nowhere is this perception more evident than in Rembrandt's late works, including the fictive portraits of saints that are the subject of the National Gallery's forthcoming exhibition Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits. With acute sensitivity to nuances of pose and expression, Rembrandt blurred the boundary between portraiture and imagination. His figure studies, whether of paying customers, hired models, family members, or his own rugged face, create pictorial personalities of exceptional depth and intimacy. This lecture examines Rembrandt's unique contribution to the genre of portraiture in the context of the rich visual culture to which he belonged.
January 23
Inside the Artist's Studio
H. Perry Chapman, professor of art history, University of Delaware
Pictures of the artist in the studio flourished as never before in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Many of the same painters who turned to representing the familiar world naturalistically—in landscapes, genre scenes, portraits and the like—also depicted the painter's studio as a scene from daily life. For painters, these images of the schilderkamer (painter's room), the mundane Dutch term for studio, were a means to both conceptualize and advertise their art. For collectors and art lovers, the studio scene fed a growing fascination with the creative artist, which was also evident in the vogue for self-portraits and biographies of painters. This presentation looks inside the artist's studio—via numerous pictorial representations—to see what can be gleaned about artistic practice and theory in seventeenth-century Holland. It argues that, however true to life in appearance, the images of the studio initiated by Rembrandt's Artist in His Studio and culminating in Vermeer's Art of Painting are more imaginary than real.
The Dutch studio scene drew on and transformed pictorial tradition. Since the fifteenth century, pictures of artists had served as vehicles for painters to convey their ideas about their art and practice. In the earliest representations, painters appeared in elevated historical guises, either as the evangelist Luke painting his miraculous vision of Mary and the infant Jesus, or as famous painters from antiquity such as Apelles, painter to Alexander the Great. In general, as an aspect of the Renaissance elevation of painting to a liberal art, the pictorial rendering of an artist's studio was invariably an art-theoretical allegory.
Dutch painters, with Rembrandt at the fore, overthrew the previous two centuries' notions of the studio, rejecting historical guises and idealized settings for an astonishing range of seemingly direct, true-to-life images of the painter at work. However, the studio's dual functions as a private, even secret, workshop and the place where artistic production was enacted for public display precluded revealing too much of the nitty-gritty of artistic practice. Instead, images of the studio served to showcase an artist's particular talent. Rembrandt's shabby, humble studio, in which the painter confronts his painting alone, heralded the psychological intensity of his portraits and history paintings. Adriaen van Ostade, who specialized in scenes of peasant life, created the most dilapidated studio image of all, as if the painter of peasants must be a peasant himself. Gerard Dou, Rembrandt's pupil, refined the pointedly ordinary studio by injecting erudite allegories of the arts. Jan Steen advertised his comic bent by poking fun at allegorical pretensions and rendering the ideal love of art as earthly desire. Vermeer represented the studio as an elegant domestic interior, much like the settings of his genre pictures. Despite their look of the real, Dutch studio scenes are more about imagining and branding than giving the viewer a behind-the-scenes tour.
January 30
Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits
Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., curator of northern baroque paintings,
National Gallery of Art
Rembrandt van Rijn's depictions of religious figures from the late 1650s and early 1660s are among the most remarkable paintings by this Dutch master. Executed shortly after his financial crises of the mid-1650s, and when his expressive style of painting was no longer in demand by Amsterdam's elite, these half-length portrayals of Christ, the Virgin Mary, apostles, evangelists, monks, and other religious personalities reflect his profound understanding of both their human and iconic character. Rembrandt based most of these images on figure studies painted from life, freely adapting the physical and emotional characteristics of his models to convey spiritual qualities he associated with these personages. Some of Rembrandt's religious images, however, also appear to be portraits of specific persons in the guise of biblical figures, a form of portrait historié.
For over eighty years, scholars have postulated that Rembrandt created many of these religious portraits as part of a series, or more than one series, of apostles and evangelists. This lecture will address this hypothesis, which has never been tested because the relevant paintings, numbering about fifteen or sixteen, belong to collections from around the world. These paintings have been brought together for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, where their stylistic and thematic relationships can be carefully assessed.
Many questions exist about these paintings for which answers are difficult to find. No known commission exists for any of these works. Rembrandt never wrote a word about them, nor did he provide any reasons for focusing so much attention, at this stage of his career, on figures that devoted their lives to spiritual goals. Rembrandt's religious beliefs and the ways in which they influenced his powerfully humanistic representations of these characters are little understood. Similarly, it is difficult to determine the extent to which Rembrandt's personal crises of the 1650s led him to identify with the spiritual struggles of the apostles he depicted, in particular the apostle Paul.
Unlike traditional series of apostles and evangelists, which are uniform in size and concept, Rembrandt's religious portraits differ slightly from each other. Some paintings have similar dimensions, but not all. Some are broadly executed, some less so; some figures have attributes, and others do not. Moreover, some apostles appear more than once, while others not at all. Thus, although these works share so many qualities, we should probably not think of them as having been part of a preconceived, overarching series, but part of a continuing exploration of the spiritual essence of religious figures struggling with their faith.
Rembrandt’s Late Style
Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt Research Project