Dutch Art Helps Shape the Western World’s View of Itself
By James D. Balestrieri
The six themes that comprise Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, an exhibition on view April 19th through July 14th at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, convey a complex story of a very small nation-state that grew rapidly into an empire whose reach circumnavigated the globe.
Willem Kalf, Still Life with Fruit in a Wanli Bowl, 1664, oil on canvas.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, promised gift of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, in support of the Center for Netherlandish Art. Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
It is a story of the transition from a local, feudal, agricultural world to a world based in trade that saw a more open exchange of peoples, goods, and ideas as new avenues to political and economic power. Fleets of merchant ships and investors brought luxury products such as Asian porcelains, textiles, and papers—at great risk and to great profit—to the Netherlands. Yet power came at a significant cost to other peoples across the oceans who were enslaved to provide newly desirable commodities like sugar and tobacco.
At the same time, though, the rise of the Dutch Republic and its dominance through the 17th century led to an incredible proliferation of the arts at home, one whose legacy is nowhere more evident than in visual culture. The first line from Christopher D.M. Atkins’s “Centering the Global,” an essay in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, paints the picture: “Scholars estimate that as many as five million paintings were produced in that period, a truly remarkable number for a geographic area that is about the size of the state of Maine.”
It’s worth taking a moment to recall how the Dutch Republic came to be. After years of war with their Spanish Hapsburg rulers, who were Catholic, the Northern Netherlands seceded and became the Protestant Dutch Republic. Antwerp had been the center of maritime activity in the Low Countries; however, a Dutch blockade and the promise of new opportunities in Amsterdam, the principal port in the new Dutch Republic, led to a great migration that saw the formation of Jewish and free Black communities as well as socio-economic openings for women. At home, the Dutch Republic established strong Baltic Sea fisheries and transformed the lowland landscape into rich, arable tracts through an ingenious system of dams and dikes that operates to this day. Abroad, the new nation founded two powerful corporations (and, indeed, the very idea of a corporation)—the Dutch East India Company and the West India Company—whose ships plied the seven seas, creating colonies in the Americas, including New York’s predecessor, New Amsterdam, and securing exclusive trading rights with Japan from an island off the city of Nagasaki.
This background is necessary if we are to understand not only the wealth that flowed through the Dutch Republic but also the desires of a new mercantile class that was creating a culture tabula rasa, as it were, free from the weight of hereditary aristocracy. The six themes of the exhibition—The World at Home, The World Beyond, Amsterdam as a Cosmopolitan Hub, Global Citizens, Celebrating the Familiar, and Conspicuous Consumption—all speak to a people and place that were aware of themselves, their newness, and their meteoric rise to power on a stage that was only just becoming truly global.
Jan Josephsz. van Goyen, The Beach at Egmond aan Zee, 1653, oil on panel.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, 30.2019.
As opposed to earlier European arts that found their highest expressions in religious depictions, the arts of the Dutch Republic are perhaps the world’s first civic celebrations, celebrations of the “self” of a people. Every work in Dutch Art in a Global Age, instead of saying, “Look to God,” says, “Look at us.” The human supplants the divine. In the arts, portraiture blooms and the self-portrait becomes something between a revelation and an advertisement. “Moreover,” as Atkins continues in his catalogue essay cited above, “Dutch artists developed the independent genres of landscapes, still lifes, and contemporary fictions based on seemingly everyday life.” That Dutch art of this period is still so fascinating to us is, in part, because this notion of civic celebration comes down to us as a chronicle. We continue to learn a great deal about the origins of contemporary Western society from the origin story of the Dutch Republic and the stupendous number of objects that have survived to tell that story.
This is, of course, the time of Vermeer, of Rembrandt, of Frans Hals. It is also the time of the first artists’ ateliers, galleries, and the idea of clients as well as patrons.
Imagine artist Maria Schalcken standing in front of Self-Portrait in Her Studio (c. 1680). Imagine her pointing at this painting—of herself, or, perhaps, her “self”—a painting of her pointing at a landscape she is painting. How modern this is! Because we know her name, we are already light years past Virginia Woolf’s assertion that “For most of history, anonymous was a woman.” Schalcken turns to us, throws a look over shoulder and points to her work, saying, “I did this. Look at it.” But then, also, saying, “I did this. Look at me.” Then, take in the other elements in the painting—the deftly handled draperies, the gossamer lace. shadows, light, flesh tones, volume. The skull and the bust in the background let the viewer know that Schalcken can do still lifes as well, especially the “vanitas” pieces that were so popular at the time. Self-Portrait in Her Studio is both a celebration and an advertisement. In fact, women artists made names for themselves in the genre of the still life, as evidenced by Rachel Ruysch’s Still Life with Flowers (1709).
The still life created interesting challenges for artists, and in this new, human-centered society, the senses came of age. Still life artists sought to show off their ability to paint exotic luxury goods such as the delicate, translucent porcelain in Willem Kalf’s 1664 painting Still Life with Fruit in a Wanli Bowl, which contrasts with the peeled fruit you can almost smell, taste, and feel.
In addition to a ready market for still lifes and landscapes, artists like Schalcken and Rembrandt, as well as hosts of others, such as Eglon van der Neer, would have chased and cherished portrait commissions. Van der Neer’s Portrait of a Man and Woman in a Refined Interior (1665–1667) offers insight into the mindset associated with the new wealth in the Dutch Republic. Surrounded by a sumptuous décor—including a textile table covering from the East, gilded panels and alabaster columns on either side of the fireplace, along with a painting that might already have been an “Old Master” above the mantel—the couple themselves are dressed in black and white, the colors of Protestant austerity. They are satisfied, yet restrained, letting the room and the objects in it speak for them.
Frans Post, Landscape with Ruins in Olinda, 1663, oil on panel.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, in support of the Center for Netherlandish Art, 2021.707.
But it is in the landscape that the 17th-century Dutch artists made their most lasting impact. Even the very word—“landscape”—has a Dutch etymology that is utterly remarkable, one that writer Robert Macfarlane, in his marvelous book of walks and words, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), describes beautifully in the following note that appears on Page 255: “ʽLandscape’ is a late-sixteenth-century (1598) anglicization of the Dutch word landschap, which had originally meant a ‘unit or tract of land’, but which in the course of the 1500s had become so strongly associated with the Dutch school of landscape painting that at the point of its anglicization its primary meaning was ‘a painterly depiction of scenery’: it was not used to mean physical landscape until 1725.” In other words, our modern term “landscape” referred to art before it described the places art might depict. Amazing. Seen in this way, landscape resides in the imagination—not as a place human beings see, but a place we can yearn for, traverse, lose ourselves in, or, on the other hand, as a place we might transform, subdue, and own. Human beings, thus, project desire onto the natural world, which becomes a medium we sculpt and shape, both in our minds and to our ends.
Frans Post’s Landscape with Ruins in Olinda (1663) presents a seemingly tranquil scene of Black women and men on a sugar plantation in Dutch Brazil. The structural ruins themselves were almost certainly left behind by the Portuguese, suggesting the succession of one colonial power over another. The painting’s bucolic appearance, not surprisingly, masks the harsh reality. Cabins in the distance would have housed enslaved Africans who would have faced terrible conditions in the dangerous process of sugar extraction and frequent violence at the hands of overseers. Post’s shaping of the landscape into an Arcadian paradise demonstrates this difference between landscape imagined and landscape in reality.
Eglon van der Neer, Portrait of a Man and Woman in a Refined Interior, 1665–1667, oil on panel.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Seth K. Sweetser Fund, 41.935.
By contrast, Hendrick Avercamp’s Skaters on a Frozen River (c. 1610–1615) practically inaugurates a sub-genre of genre painting—the skating scene. For all of the various depictions of real places in Dutch landscape, many have a touch of the ideal. Avercamp’s scene, for example, is an amalgam: a made-up place and moment, one that appears to be meant to show the bustle of commerce and leisure in a way that defies the ice and, by extension, nature herself.
Of all the marvelous works in the exhibition, Esaias van de Velde’s An Elegant Company in a Garden (1614) epitomizes every theme. Part landscape, part still life, filled with portraits, it is a genre scene in which wealth is both on display and being consumed conspicuously. The partygoers play on and dine on; then they view the splendid objects that have been brought out into the garden for this very occasion. Two or three notice us and look back quite frankly, but with some mischief, while those who serve them do so silently, keeping to themselves.
Indeed, it’s a party anyone would want to attend, just as Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is an exhibition anyone should want to visit—and savor.