Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [188]
Dutch art | The Golden Age | Portraits |
Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol and Carel Fabritius
Govert Flinck (1615–60) was perhaps Rembrandt’s most faithful follower, and he was, ironically enough, given the job of decorating Amsterdam’s new Town Hall after his teacher had been passed over. Unluckily for him, Flinck died before he could execute his designs and Rembrandt took over, but although the latter’s Conspiracy of Julius Civilis was installed in 1662, it was discarded a year later (see "Rembrandt"). The early work of Ferdinand Bol (1616–80) was also heavily influenced by Rembrandt, so much so that for centuries art historians couldn’t tell the two apart, though Bol’s later paintings are readily distinguishable, blandly elegant portraits which proved very popular with the wealthy. At the age of 53, Bol married a wealthy widow and promptly hung up his brush – perhaps he knew just how emotionally tacky his work had become. Most of the pitifully slim extant work of Carel Fabritius (1622–54) was portraiture, but he too died young, before he could properly realize his promise as perhaps the most gifted of all Rembrandt’s students. Generally regarded as the teacher of Vermeer, he forms a link between the two masters, combining Rembrandt’s technique with his own practice of painting figures against a dark background, prefiguring the lighting and colouring of Vermeer.
Dutch art | The Golden Age |
Landscapes
Aside from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose depictions of his native surroundings make him the first true Low Countries landscape painter, Gillis van Coninxloo (1544–1607) stands out as the earliest Dutch landscapist. He imbued his native scenery with elements of fantasy, painting the richly wooded views he had seen on his travels around Europe as backdrops to biblical scenes. In the early seventeenth century, Hercules Seghers (1590–1638), apprenticed to Coninxloo, carried on his mentor’s style of depicting forested and mountainous landscapes, some real, others not; his work is scarce but is believed to have had considerable influence on the landscape work of Rembrandt himself. Esaias van der Velde’s (1591–1632) quaint and unpretentious scenes show the first real affinity with the Dutch countryside, but while his influence was likewise considerable, he was soon overshadowed by his pupil Jan van Goyen (1596–1656). A remarkable painter, who belongs to the so-called “tonal phase” of Dutch landscape painting, van Goyen’s early pictures were highly coloured and close to those of his teacher, but it didn’t take him long to develop a marked touch of his own, using tones of green, brown and grey to lend everything a characteristic translucent haze. His paintings are, above all, of nature, and if he included figures it was just for the sake of scale. A long-neglected artist, van Goyen only received recognition with the arrival of the Impressionists, when his fluid and rapid brushwork was at last fully appreciated.
Another “tonal” painter, Haarlem’s Salomon van Ruysdael (1600–70) was also directly affected by Esaias van der Velde, and his simple and atmospheric, though not terribly adventurous, landscapes were for a long time consistently confused with those of van Goyen. More esteemed is his nephew, Jacob van Ruysdael (1628–82), generally considered the greatest of all Dutch landscapists, whose fastidiously observed views of quiet flatlands dominated by stormy skies were to influence European landscapists right up to the nineteenth century. John Constable, certainly, acknowledged a debt to him. Ruysdael’s foremost pupil was Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), who followed the master faithfully, sometimes even painting the same views as in his Avenue at Middelharnis.
Dutch art | The Golden Age | Landscapes |
The Italianizers
Nicholas Berchem (1620–83) and Jan Both (1618–52) were the “Italianizers” of Dutch landscapes. They studied in Rome, taking back to the Netherlands rich, golden views of the world, full of steep gorges and hills,