Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [70]
The paintings of Pieter de Hooch (1629–84) are less symbolic – more exercises in lighting – but they’re as good a visual guide to the everyday life and habits of the seventeenth-century Dutch bourgeoisie as you’ll find – as evidenced by his Interior with Women beside a Linen Basket, showing the women of the house changing the linen while a series of doorways reveals the canal bank in the background; and his curious A Mother’s Duty in which the mother is delousing the child’s head.
Room 10 also exhibits several works by Jan Steen (1625–79). Steen’s Feast of St Nicholas, with its squabbling children, makes the festival a celebration of disorderly greed, while the drunken waywardness of his Merry Family and Family Scene verge on the anarchic. Steen knew his bourgeois audience well; his caricatures of the proletariat blend humour with moral condemnation – or at least condescension – a mixture perfectly designed to suit their tastes. The artist was also capable of more subtle works, a famous example being his Woman at her Toilet, which is full of associations, referring to sexual pleasures just had or about to be taken; for example, the woman is shown putting on a stocking in a conspicuous manner, the point being that the Dutch word for stocking, kous, is also a slang word for a woman’s genitalia.
By contrast, in Room 11, Willem van de Velde II’s (1633–1707) preoccupations were nautical, his canvases celebrating either the might of the Dutch navy or the seaworthiness of the merchant marine, as in the churning seas of the superbly executed Gust of Wind, whose counterpoint is to be found in the calm waters and gunfire of The Cannon Shot.
The Museum Quarter and the Vondelpark | Museumplein | The Rijksmuseum | Rooms 10 and 11 |
Rembrandt’s progress
Born in Leiden to a family of millers, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) picked up his first artistic tips as an apprentice to Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam in the early 1620s. It was here that the artist developed a penchant for mythological and religious subjects. After his apprenticeship, in around 1625, Rembrandt went back to Leiden to establish himself as an independent master painter and, this achieved, some six years later he returned to Amsterdam, where he was to stay for the rest of his life.
In the early 1630s Rembrandt concentrated on portrait painting, churning out dozens of pictures of the burghers of his day, a profitable business that made him both well-to-do and well known. In 1634 he married Saskia van Uylenburgh and five years later the couple moved into a smart house on Jodenbreestraat, now the Rembrandthuis museum. All seemed well, and certainly Rembrandt’s portraits of his wife are tender and loving, but these years were marred by the death of all but one of his children in infancy, the sole survivor being his much-loved Titus (1641–68).
In 1642 Rembrandt produced what has become his most celebrated painting, The Night Watch, but thereafter his career went into decline, essentially because he forsook portraiture to focus on increasingly sombre and introspective religious works. Traditionally, Rembrandt’s change of artistic direction has been linked to the death of Saskia in 1642, but although it is certainly true that the artist was grief-stricken, he was also facing increased competition from a new batch of portrait artists, primarily Bartholomeus van der Helst, Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck. Whatever the reason, there were few takers for Rembrandt’s religious works and he made matters worse by refusing to adjust his spending. The crunch came in 1656, when he was formally declared insolvent, and four years later he was obliged to sell his house and goods, moving to much humbler premises in the Jordaan (see "Bloemgracht"). By this time, he had