Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [187]
Dutch art | The Golden Age |
Portraits
Predictably enough, the ruling bourgeoisie of the United Provinces was keen to record and celebrate its success, and consequently portraiture was a reliable way for a young painter to make a living. Michiel Jansz Miereveld (1567–1641), court painter to Frederick Henry of Orange-Nassau in Den Haag, was the first real portraitist of the Dutch Republic, but it wasn’t long before his stiff and rather conservative figures were superseded by the more spontaneous renderings of Frans Hals (1585–1666). Hals is perhaps best known for his “corporation pictures” – group portraits of the Dutch civil guard regiments that had been formed in most of the larger towns during the war with Spain, but subsequently became social clubs. These large group pieces demanded superlative technique, since the painter had to create a collection of individual portraits while retaining a sense of the group, and accord prominence based on the relative importance of the sitters and the size of the payment each had made. Hals was particularly good at this, using innovative lighting effects, arranging his sitters subtly, and putting all the elements together in a fluid and dynamic composition. He also painted many individual portraits, making the ability to capture fleeting and telling expressions his trademark; his pictures of children are particularly sensitive. Later in life, however, his work became darker and more akin to Rembrandt’s, spurred – it is conjectured – by his penury.
Jan Cornelisz Verspronck (1597–1662) and Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613–70) were the other great Haarlem portraitists after Frans Hals – Verspronck recognizable by the smooth, shiny glow he always gave to his sitters’ faces, van der Helst by a competent but unadventurous style. Of the two, van der Helst was the more popular, influencing a number of later painters and leaving Haarlem as a young man to begin a solidly successful career as portrait painter to Amsterdam’s upper crust.
Dutch art | The Golden Age | Portraits |
Rembrandt the portraitist
With poet and statesman Constantijn Huygens acting as his agent, Rembrandt was given more lucrative jobs, and in 1634 the artist married Saskia van Ulenborch, daughter of the burgomaster of Leeuwarden and quite a catch for a relatively humble artist. His self-portraits from this period show the confident face of security – on top of things and quite sure of where he’s going.
Rembrandt would not always be the darling of the Amsterdam burghers, but his fall from grace was still some way off when he painted The Night Watch(see "Room 12"), a group portrait often – but inaccurately – associated with the artist’s decline in popularity. Indeed, although Rembrandt’s fluent arrangement of his subjects was totally original, there’s no evidence that the military company who commissioned the painting was anything but pleased with the result. More likely culprits are the artist’s later pieces, whose obscure lighting and psychological insights took the conservative Amsterdam merchants by surprise – and his personal irascibility. Whatever the reason, his patrons were certainly not sufficiently enthusiastic about his later work to support both his taste for art collecting and his expensive house on Jodenbreestraat, the result being that Rembrandt was declared bankrupt in 1656. Rembrandt died thirteen years later, a broken and embittered old man – as his last self-portraits show. Throughout his career he maintained a large studio, and his influence pervaded the next generation of Dutch painters. Some – Dou and