Seventeenth- Century Dutch Painting and Modern Literature

Introduction

Seventeenth-century Dutch painting is best known for its landscapes, its interiors filled with ordinary people focused on their daily chores, its still life with flowers and fruits, with simple or precious objects. It is widely known that artists of this era also depicted religious and mythological scenes, but these still evoke less interest, especially in museum exhibitions. It seems natural that emphasis is placed on what distinguishes Dutch painting from the art of other countries.¹

In the summarizing considerations from the first volume of Musées de la Hollande, Théophile Thoré-Bürger underlines that the seventeenth-century Dutch school was “original and entirely distinct from all others, including the Flemish school.”² According to Thoré-Bürger, this uniqueness is reflected in the depiction of the Dutch people’s life in its everyday aspects, which results in ignoring the great themes:

Ah! It is no longer mystical art, shrouded in old superstitions, mythological art, resurrecting old symbols, princely or aristocratic art, and – as a consequence – extraordinary art, devoted exclusively to glorifying the rulers of the human species. It is no longer the art of pontiffs and kings, gods and heroes. Raphael worked for Julius II and Leo X, Titian for Charles V and Francis I; Rubens also worked for Archduke Albrecht and the kings of Spain, the French Medici, and Charles I of England. Although Rembrandt and Duches worked exceptionally for the Netherlands and humanity.³

In the introduction to the catalog Gods, Saints and Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt, Albert Blankert indicates we have a nineteenth-century realistic vision of Dutch Golden Age painting as a faithful reflection of reality depicting, houses, inns, landscapes, objects, images of burghers. According to Blankert, those responsible for shaping such a stereotypical approach to Dutch school were French critics, namely Thoré-Bürger, Eugène Fromentin, and Dutch historian Johan Huizing, whose views were very much embedded in the nineteenth-century paradigm of thinking about this art.⁴ Blankert emphasizes that the modern viewpoint, according to which Rembrandt’s historical paintings were an exception in the seventeenth-century Dutch painting, would have surprised contemporary artists.⁵ Blankert tries to prove that this position contradicts seventeenth-century aesthetic theories, in which history painting was regarded as the highest form of art.⁶

Jan Białostocki is of a similar opinion,⁷ stressing that in the second half of the twentieth century, art historians began a consistent process of re-evaluating the very one-sided, nineteenth-century interpretation of Dutch painting of the seventeenth century, to which the exhibition Gods, Saints and Heroes contributed. However, such an approach is mainly visible in the specialized approaches of scholars. A de-heroized vision of the Dutch Golden Age created by the French and later developed and strengthened by Huizinga permanently dominated general consciousness. He argues that

Our national culture is bourgeois in every sense you can legitimately attach to that word. The bourgeois conception of life is shared by all classes or groups of our people – urban and rural, property-owning or not. It was from a bourgeois dislike of interference with their affairs that our forefathers rose up against Spain.. … It was a bourgeois atmosphere that was responsible for our unmartial spirit and our commercial propensities. Bourgeois life explains the lack of revolutionary passion in our people and why the even tenor of our national life remained almost unruffled by the high wind of great ideas.⁸

Clearly inspired by Huizinga’s theses, in his essay “The Nonheroic Subject,” Zbigniew Herbert emphasizes that the Dutch are distinguished by a “peculiar predilection for scenes from everyday life.” As Herbert writes, seventeenth-century painters avoid “war subject that exalt patriotic feelings” (SLB 108). As Herbert suggests, the reason behind it is the inherent love of freedom, which does not need to be fought for, only cherished:

Freedom – so many treatises were written about it that it became a pale, abstract concept. But for the Dutch it was some- thing as simple as breathing, looking, and touching objects. It did not need to be defined or beautified. This is why there is no division in their art between what is great and what is small, what is important and unimportant, elevated and ordinary. They painted apples and the portraits of fabric shop- keepers, pewter plates and tulips, with such patience and such love that the images of other worlds and noisy tales about earthly triumphs fade in comparison (SLB 117–118).

Arent van Nieukerken disagrees with this interpretation and claims that the reasons behind the Dutch freedom uprisings in the seventeenth century were religious, thus strongly ideological. To answer the question of what prompted Herbert to this interpretation, we need to search in his “Polishness.” Herbert assumes that “the supposed lack of an ideology motivating a long-lasting defensive war was the main attraction for an observer from a thoroughly ideologized society, one seeking the basis for its existence in historical events.”⁹ Nieukerken writes that instead of elevating history, Herbert proposes a “heroization of the everyday.”¹⁰ Therefore, Herbert’s vision of the Dutch Golden Age is incomplete and “nineteenth-century” in its character. Van Nieukerken explains why this interpretation is one-sided:

When evaluating … the aesthetic value of the works of seventeenth-century painters, we apply completely “anachronistic” criteria: we are most impressed by Ruysdael, Seghers, the late Frans Hals, and Rembrandt – alleged realism, together with fantastic landscapes and unconventional biblical and historical scenes. What is seemingly common and unambiguous is juxtaposed with brave attempts to break the decorum dictated by the high style. It may seem that the representative classicism of the time cannot be compatible with the “true” spirit of the Dutch artists and poets.¹¹

Antoni Ziemba is of a similar opinion. In his book Nowe dzieci Izraela. Stary Testament w kulturze holenderskiej XVII wieku (New Children of Israel: The Old Testament in the Dutch Culture of the Seventeenth Century), Ziemba tries to re-evaluate Herbert’s thesis on the “non-heroism” of contemporary art:

Fascinated with the culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, Herbert writes astonished: “Dutch painting speaks many languages, talks about the affairs of earth and sky, and lacks only one thing: the apotheosis of its own history, the immortalization of moments of defeat and glory.”¹² I would like to believe that this book will show that it was different, that Dutch culture clearly expressed the aspirations of the Dutch people.¹³

Neither Dutch literary scholars nor Polish art historians will find in Polish twentieth-century writers allies in the battle for the necessary revision of the image of Dutch Golden Age painting. Interpretations of historical works appear in Polish literature much less frequently than descriptions of works that are the apotheosis of everyday life. The works most often mentioned in this context are Rembrandt’s paintings; and so, the nineteenth-century stereotype repeats.