Art

The 17th century was the undisputed Golden Age of Dutch art. During this busy time, artists were blessed with wealthy patrons whose support allowed them to give free reign to their talents. Art held a cherished place in the hearts of average Dutch citizens, too, as Peter Mundy, who traveled to Amsterdam in 1640, observed: "Many times blacksmiths and cobblers will have some picture or other by their forge and in their stall. Such is the general notion, inclination, and delight that these country natives have to paintings." The Dutch were particularly fond of pictures that depicted their world: landscapes, seascapes, domestic scenes, portraits, and still lifes. The art of this period remains some of the greatest ever created.

One of the finest landscape painters of all time was Jacob van Ruysdael (1628-82), who depicted cornfields, windmills, and forest scenes, along with his famous views of Haarlem. In some of his works the human figure is very small, and in others it does not appear at all; instead the artist typically devoted two-thirds of the canvas to the vast skies filled with the moody clouds that float over the flat Dutch terrain.

Frans Hals (1581-1666), the undisputed leader of the Haarlem school, specialized in portraiture. The relaxed relationship between the artist and his subject in his paintings was a great departure from the formal masks of Renaissance portraits. With the lightness of his brushstrokes, Hals was able to convey an immediacy and intimacy. He not only produced perceptive psychological portraits, but had a genius for comic characters -- he showed men and women as they are and as a little less than they are in such works as Malle Babbe (1650). Hals excelled in producing group portraits, such as The Archers of St. Aidan. He carefully planned and balanced the directions of pose, gesture, and glance, but his alla prima brushwork (direct laying-down of a pigment) makes these public images appear as spontaneous reportage. It's worth visiting the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem to study his techniques.

One of the geniuses of Western art was Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-69). This highly prolific and influential artist had a dramatic life filled with success and personal tragedy. Rembrandt was a master at showing the soul and inner life of humankind, in both his portraits and illustrations of biblical stories. His most famous work, the group portrait known as The Night Watch (1642), is on view in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Rembrandt's use of lights and darks was influenced by Caravaggio, like Hals and Van Honthorst before him, but was much more refined. For him, the values of light and dark gradually and softly blended together; although his paintings probably lose some of the drama of chiaroscuro, they achieve a more truthful appearance. The light that falls upon a face in a Rembrandt portrait is mysterious yet revealing of character. His series of religious paintings and prints are highly personal and human in spirit. The overall stillness of his religious work reflects an inner contemplation. He depicted Christ as a humble and gentle Nazarene, with a loving and melancholy expression. Rembrandt's religious prints (etchings) were a major source of income during his lifetime.

A spirituality reigns over his self-portraits as well; Rembrandt did about 60 of these during his lifetime. The Self-Portrait with Saskia shows the artist with his wife during prosperous times, when he was often commissioned by wealthy merchants to do portraits. But later self-portraits show his transition from an optimist to an old man worn down by care and anxiety. At the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam -- which has been restored to much the way it was when the artist lived and worked there -- you can see the above self-portrait along with some 250 etchings.

In his later years, while at the height of his artistic powers, Rembrandt's work was judged too personal and eccentric by his contemporaries. Many considered him to be a tasteless painter obsessed with the ugly and ignorant of color; this was the prevailing opinion until the 19th century, when Rembrandt's genius was reevaluated.

Perhaps the best known of the "Little Dutch Masters," who restricted themselves to one type of painting, such as portraiture, is Jan Vermeer (1632-75) of Delft. The main subjects of Vermeer's work are the activities and pleasures of simple home life. Vermeer placed the figure(s) at the center of his paintings, and typically used the background space to convey a feeling of stability and serenity. Vermeer excelled at reproducing the lighting of his interior scenes. Art historians know that Vermeer made use of mirrors and the camera obscura, an early camera, as compositional aids. His paintings give a wonderful illusion of three-dimensionality: As light -- usually afternoon sunshine pouring in through an open window -- moves across the picture plane, it caresses and modifies all the colors.

If Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) had not failed as a missionary in the Borinage mining region of Belgium, he might not have turned to painting and become the greatest Dutch artist of the 19th century. The Potato Eaters (1885) was van Gogh's first masterpiece. This rough, crudely painted work shows a group of peasants gathered around the table for their evening meal after a long day of manual labor. Gone are the traditional beauty and serenity of earlier Dutch genre painting.

After the death of his father, Vincent traveled first to Antwerp and then to Paris to join his brother, Theo. In Paris he discovered and adopted the rich, brilliant color palette of the Impressionists. Through Theo, an art dealer, Vincent met Paul Gauguin, and the two had many conversations on the expressive power of pure color. Van Gogh developed a thick brushwork -- with a textilelike texture -- that complemented his intense color schemes.

In 1888, Vincent traveled to Arles in Provence, where he was dazzled by the Mediterranean sun. His favorite color, yellow, which signified love to him, dominated landscapes such as Wheatfield with a Reaper (1889). For the next 2 years, he remained in the south of France, painting at a frenetic pace in between bouts of madness. In The Night Café (1888), the red walls and green ceiling combine with a sickly yellow lamplight to give an oppressive air to this billiard-hall scene. (With red and green, Vincent wrote, he tried to represent "those terrible things, men's passions.") We see the halos around the lights swirl as if we, like some of the patrons slumped over at their tables, have had too much to drink. Perhaps his best-known nightscape is The Starry Night (1889); with its whirling starlight, Vincent's turbulent universe is filled with personal anxiety and fear.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has more than 200 of his paintings -- including all those named above -- presented to Holland by Theo's wife and son with the provision that they not leave Vincent's native land. Vincent sold only one painting in his lifetime (Theo sold it), but he did "sell" others, to pay for food, drink, and lodgings -- and maybe some went for a song.

Before Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) became an originator of De Stijl (or neoplasticism), he painted windmills, cows, and meadows. His Impressionistic masterpiece, The Red Tree (1909) -- which looks as though it's bursting into flame against a background of blue -- marked a turning point in his career. He had always said that when he discovered his true personality, he would drop one of the two a's in his surname (originally Mondriaan), and this was the first canvas he signed as Mondrian.

With Theo van Doesburg, Mondrian began a magazine in 1917 entitled De Stijl (The Style) in which he expounded the principles of neoplasticism: a simplification of forms or, in other words, a purified abstraction; an art that would be derived "not from exterior vision but from interior life." In part, this movement was an outgrowth of and reaction against the cubist work of Picasso and Braque, which Mondrian had seen while he lived in Paris from 1912 to 1914.

The geometric painters of the De Stijl school attempted a "controllable precision." Their basic form was the rectangle -- with horizontal and vertical accents at right angles. Their basic colors were the primaries -- red, blue, and yellow -- along with black and white. In works like his 1936 Composition in Blue, Yellow, and Black (Gemeentemuseum Den Haag), no part of the picture plane is more important than any other; with its design, Mondrian achieves an equilibrium but does not succumb to a mechanical uniformity.

Mondrian suppressed the use of curves and the color green in his later work because, he said, these reminded him of nature. But it's ironic to note that to support himself Mondrian had to paint flowers on porcelain for much of his life. In 1940, Mondrian moved to New York, which he loved, to escape the war in Europe. In the evenings he would take walks around the Art Deco Rockefeller Center; the geometry of the lighted windows reminded him of his paintings. Mondrian's last paintings were lively abstract representations of New York, like Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) (MoMA, New York) and Victory Boogie Woogie (1944, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag).