Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [39]
DUTCH BAROQUE
Though Holland shared its southern border with Flanders, culturally and politically the two countries could not have been more different. While Flanders was dominated by the monarchy and the Catholic Church, Holland, or The Netherlands, was an independent, democratic, Protestant country. Religious art was forbidden in the severe, whitewashed churches and the usual sources of patronage — the church, royal court, and nobility — were gone. The result was a democratizing of art in both subject matter and ownership.
Artists, for the first time, were left to the mercy of the marketplace. Fortunately, the prosperous middle class had a mania for art collecting. One visitor to Amsterdam in 1640 noted, “As For the art off Painting and the affection off the people to Pictures, I think none other goe beeyond them, ... All in generalle striving to adorne their houses with costly pieces.” Demand for paintings was constant. Even butchers, bakers, and blacksmiths bought paintings to decorate their shops.
Such enthusiasm produced a bounty of high-quality art and huge numbers of artists that specialized in specific subjects such as still lifes, seascapes, interiors, or animals. In the seventeenth century, there were more than 500 painters in Holland working in still life alone.
Dutch art flourished from 1610 to 1670. Its style was realistic, its subject matter commonplace. But what made its creators more than just skilled technicians was their ability to capture the play of light on different surfaces and to suggest texture — from matte to luminous — by the way light was absorbed or reflected. Most of these Dutch painters, a fairly conservative crew, are referred to as the Little Dutchmen, to distinguish them from the three great masters, Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, who went beyond technical excellence to true originality.
STILL LIFE. As a genre of painting, the still life began in the post-Reformation Netherlands. Although the form was considered inferior elsewhere, the seventeenth century was the peak period of Dutch still life painting, with artists achieving extraordinary realism in portraying domestic objects. Often still lifes were emblematic, as in “vanitas” paintings, with symbols like a skull or smoking candle representing the transience of all life.
THE STILL LIFE
Dutch still life masters who pioneered the form as a separate genre were interested in how light reflected off different surfaces. Heda’s “Still Life” counterpoints the dull gleam of pewter against the sheen of silver or crystal.
In the eighteenth century, the French pointer Chardin spread the still life art form to the south by concentrating on humble objects. Nineteenth-century pointers like Corot, Courbet, and Manet used still life to examine objects’ aesthetic qualities. Cézanne, the Cubists, and the Fauves employed the still life to experiment with structure and color, while Italian painter Morandi concentrated almost exclusively on still lifes. A photo-realist style of trompe l’oeil painting arose in the United States beginning with the Peale brothers’ still lifes, followed by the lifelike “deceptions” of Harnett and Peto, up to contemporary painters like Audrey Flack.
Heda, “Still Life,” c.1636, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
LANDSCAPE. Before the Baroque era, landscape views were little more than background for whatever was going on in the front of the picture. The Dutch established landscape as deserving of its own artistic treatment. In contrast to France, where Poussin and Claude focused on an idealized nature, the great Dutch