Dutch Baroque (pt. 7)

In 1642, Rembrandt lost his wife (presumably to tuberculosis), and in the following months the artist began the practice of taking long walks in the country alone to help overcome his grief.  During this time he painted The Mill.

This painting once again carries out the invisible emotions in a very visibly symbolic way.  Solitude and loneliness are themes of this work.  A solitary, old windmill stands totally alone in the center of the painting, facing the light but haunted from behind by enveloping dark clouds that foretell death and devastation.  The people in the painting are all weary travelers stopping by the lake to gain refreshment from the water; but is anyone truly ever rejuvenated?  (This is certainly no Fountain of Youth.)  But for all its brooding drama of light and dark shadow and sky, the setting is quite calm and quiet, peaceful and tranquil in a transcendent way that only a person who has ever gone through such deep sentiments of sorrow can understand.

Rembrandt was widely known during this time to be a poor manager of his money.  He was a prodigious spender and collector; he would collect prints, portraits, clothing, and the like for his work, but it eventually led him to becoming broke.  There are stories of his students painting guilders (coins) and putting them on the floor to see if Rembrandt would pick them up.  His first wife—his only wife, I should say—was rather a well-to-do woman, but the only way he could maintain an entitlement to her fortune after she died was to never remarry.  So Rembrandt went on to take mistresses without marrying.  It was known that he was having an affair with his maid in the years following his wife's death because they were having children together before long.  The maid was excommunicated from the Dutch Reformed Church; Rembrandt was not.  This is because Rembrandt had never become a member of the Reformed Church and therefore maintained immunity from the practice of church discipline.  He attended but never joined the church, and it has been argued that this was because Rembrandt was an Arminian.  At first widely successful, the artist's high reputation gradually diminished for these reasons—kind of like how nobody really cares about Tiger Woods anymore because of the recent scandal involving his more disreputable personal life.

Dutch Baroque (pt. 6)

An early painting by Rembrandt (and arguably one of his most enigmatic works) is titled The Artist in His Studio and features Rembrandt himself staring into a large canvas.  This autobiographical piece brings in the stark realism I described earlier.  The room is far from an elegant royal court.  The wood floor is old and has sustained water damage; the paint on the walls is chipping off; the room itself is poorly lit and scantily furnished.  This is hardly an abode, hardly a "studio" at all.  Yet Rembrandt titles it "The Artist…"—not "An Artist…"—"…in His Studio," as if to imply the simple lifestyle and ultimately minimalist technique of not just one artist but in fact all artists.  In this painting the artist himself is mostly hidden in the corner and obscured by shadow.  The most interesting feature (and also the biggest object) of the painting is the canvas.  In a tantalizingly mysterious call, Rembrandt has chosen to turn the canvas from the viewer.  This massive object that takes up the bulk of the frame is turned around so that we cannot see what is painted on it.  Is it a self-portrait? a genre painting? something else?  We don't know, and we'll never know.  So we can never really know what "the artist" (again, representative of all artists) is painting when he produces a work from his studio.  Art has an exclusive relationship with the artist, as intimate and personal as the private life of a married couple.  Outside viewers, the art critics of the day, can never fully enter into the conversation.

Dutch Baroque (pt. 5)

While flattering, Rembrandt's portraits also exhibited a stark realism relatively new to the art world of grandiose, saintly images of idealized bodies in perfect poses.  Rembrandt's self-portraits show him as an awkward-looking weasel of a man with wrinkles on his face and a wart on his nose.  The honesty of such rendering speaks to the values of a man who wanted to paint people as they really are: flawed.  Art will only begin to fully accept this vision of flawed humanity two centuries later with the advent of Modernism.  But early spokesmen, like Rembrandt, Goya, and others who painted non-idealized images (some even downright grotesque) were the precursors to the ensuing trend of the second half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century.  In that sense these artists were very literally ahead of their time.

The thing I personally appreciate the most about Rembrandt's portraiture style is his ability to visibly capture the invisible.  A portrait, if you think about it, is largely a secularized image of an individual.  We are presented with the person's fleshly body, their outer image and appearance; but in such a two-dimensional rendering we certainly cannot tap into the person himself, his thoughts, beliefs, aspirations, and feelings, can we?  Rembrandt is somehow able to.  In his portraits we connect with the individual on a much deeper, emotional, and spiritual sense than other portraitists of previous artistic periods (perhaps with exceptions like da Vinci).  Rembrandt is able to tell us something personal about the sitter in addition to presenting the viewer with that individual's physical qualities.  Like Hals' Laughing Cavalier, emotion and expression of inner thoughts begins to come out more in portrait painting at this time—thanks to the Protestants.

This is the idea in art of the authoritative sincerity of the painter.  I heard this concept lectured on in a certain museum about a year ago, and it may be hard to grasp; however, we must tackle it now.  When Rembrandt paints a self-portrait, we believe that what we see is the reality of Rembrandt's image, whether it be an accurate likeness or not in the terms we would qualify as accuracy—i.e., whether the clef in his chin was really so large, the dimple on his cheek so measured in length, and so forth.  We can forsake this image of Rembrandt as he would appear in the flesh and substitute it with his canvas creation because, under the authoritative, autographed name of the artist himself, his self-portrait is published to be Rembrandt.  It's a step further from mere suspension of disbelief because it becomes the reality itself.  Where one might say that by painting Rembrandt, Rembrandt has "put a little of himself" into the painting, a true art critic might say, "No, no, the painting is Rembrandt."  The abstract soul of the artist is totally infused into the work, having been painted on a literal canvas, making the imaginary real.  Now, the ideas of Rembrandt's portrait, of his intangible character traits and spiritual personality, are transferred from immateriality to physicality in the form of oil paints applied to a tangible canvas.  This painted rendering of Rembrandt has become Rembrandt, the true version of the man (art succeeding the artist).  So, when we look at a Rembrandt self-portrait, we completely believe that we are looking at the true face of the artist as he actually existed in the deeper, hitherto-imperceptible, philosophical vision of Rembrandt as the true soul he was and is evermore.  We look at his soul when we look into the framed painting hanging on the wall in the gallery: it's not just a painting.  At any rate, that is the idea.

Dutch Baroque (pt. 4)

Now we come to Rembrandt.  Rembrandt van Rijn was an enormously successful Dutch painter who specialized in the study of light, shadow, and atmosphere.  He produced a wealth of paintings conducive to a study of the artist's lifelong development into style.  Throughout his entire career, Rembrandt painted portraits of himself as he grew older and more accomplished.  His self-portraits total around 40 paintings and almost as many etchings.

For most of the period of Rembrandt's career in major artistic development his works specialized in the study of light, shadow, and atmosphere.  In this famous painting, titled The Night Watch, a small group of volunteers from the town militia are painted as royal military heroes and aristocrats of only the highest noble rank.  The light falls on certain figures in the middle of the painting but is generally scattered abroad in random rays.  Some figures are plainly visible while others are in shadow.

This painting was produced in 1642, during the period when the artist had peaked as one of the most successful and most sought-after portraitists of his time.  And apart from the biblical and historical paintings that has since earned him the high-class reputation associated with Rembrandt in modern times, in his own day this was what he was most widely known for: portraits.

Dutch Baroque (pt. 3)

Jan Steen, another Dutch painter, produced a prime, exemplary painting of the Protestant Genre painting style in his painting of St. Nicholas Day.  Genre paintings, remember, are scenes from everyday life; so this painting presents a kind of stage picture of a normal event which Dutch viewers of the painting would be familiar with.  "St. Nicholas Day" is Christmas.

In the painting, a Dutch family celebrates Christmas.  A woman on the right points to something outside the frame, perhaps St. Nicholas.  Another boy, who has evidently been naughty this year instead of nice, is unhappy for receiving a switch.  For those of you who don't know, a switch is what the parents used to do before they invented the "spanker"; you'd have to go outside and choose the branch or stick you would be reprimanded with.  Here it's in his shoe.  I was interested to see this tradition going so far back in history, because on Christmas morning my parents still put presents inside our shoes.  The little girl who takes center stage in the painting has emptied her shoe of all its presents and left it on the floor at the bottom.  The grandmother signaling the boy in back of the scene is either issuing him to come out and receive his punishment or else (it has been suggested) has some other gift to cheer up the poor lad.  Interestingly enough, the lines of the chair, the table, and the canopy point to the unhappy boy.  The long cake at the bottom left points to the center.  This painting carries what appears on first look a dizzying construct that causes our eye to look here and there to get the full picture of everything that's going on.

This is a typical Genre painting.  Like real life, the scene is muddled in some confusion, but the situations are not so out-of-the-ordinary that we can't see, with careful inspection, what is going on.  We can identify with easily-conveyed emotions: the girl is happy because she got a present; the boy is crying because he's going to be spanked; etc.  This is the beauty of everyday life that can be enjoyed and celebrated now that Lutheranism has provided a system for belief that allows all men to be saved, even common people and peasants.  Jan Steen seems to almost be suggesting that these people could be saints, they could be believers; and that this is the new face of "religious" art (even though there's nothing religious about it).  In Protestantism, normal people, too, are part of the body of Christ and "the Elect."  This, therefore, is a celebration of the lives of ordinary individuals, with a focus on the somewhat sentimental connections of family and communal affection.  Other than that, it's just a big mess of people all in the same room and probably being very loud.  (Is this what Christmas looks like at your house?  Some things never change, right?)

Dutch Baroque (pt. 2)

Franz Hals was a Dutch portrait painter who reflected the Dutch interest of secular, non-religious images in his artwork; he did not paint saints or biblical figures.  These portraits of "common people" and peasants became more common until the time of the American and French Revolution.  In his portrait paintings he added interest and emotion along with lifelike detail to make the image of an individual look as much like a candid photo as possible.  He used quick, dashing brush strokes to give his works a fresh, just-finished look.  His illusion is to catch an instantaneous expression of character.  His famous work of the Young Man and Woman in an Inn, painted in 1623, beautifully expresses this.  This dashing portrait here is called The Laughing Cavalier, painted in 1624.

This is fun to examine more closely as an optical illusion as well as simply a great painting.  The title can be deceptive.  Is the man really laughing or even smiling?  The ambitious moustache above his lips causes our eye to transfer the curvature of the line to the bottom lip, but if you have a thin pencil, cover the moustache, and look at the painting again you may see a different expression on his face than a smile.  But the cheekbones also have to be taken into account.  The way my teacher described her impression of it was that it is capturing the moment right before someone bursts into a smile or a laugh—you know that nasal noise one makes under a restrained giggle that precedes an open smile.  Hals' paintings often deal with specific human emotions and expressions like that; his interest is in people, everyday common people, not saints or religious figures.  This is the Protestant perspective.

Judith Leyster was also a famous Dutch portrait painter at the time.  Here is a Self-Portrait of her from 1635.

When Louvre officials cleaned a painting thought to be done by Franz Hals, they found the signature of Judith Leyster.  The misconception owes itself to the fact that Leyster's paintings are very similar to Hals'; in fact, she was friends with the artist.  She studied the techniques of many artists and allowed their styles to impact her own.  She implemented Caravaggio's dramatic use of light and dark.  She obviously took inspiration from Hals' portrait of human emotions and expressions as can be seen in such paintings as this famous one by her of the Young Flute Player.

Dutch Baroque (pt. 1)

From the Catholic art of the South we will now transition to the Dutch Baroque art of the North.  It is important to remember that this is the same time period as El Greco, Velàzquez, and Caravaggio, but artists in the North did things differently because of religious distinction.  Flanders in the South was Catholic, while Holland in the North was Protestant after the Reformation.  So, what does Protestant art look like?

Protestant art is naturally going to flow out of Protestant theology.  John Calvin said that Nature and the whole world is the theater for God's glory.  Martin Luther had established the fallibility of the Roman Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences for salvation.  Anybody, he argued, could be saved according to the promises in Scripture.  The Christian-faith Protestantism focused on a personal relationship with God.  No priest was required, no works, and certainly no money was required for a person's salvation but only the staple Lutheran "five solae": salvation was through grace alone by faith alone in Christ alone through Scripture alone to the glory of God alone (sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, sola scriptura, soli Deo Gloria).  The anyman of Europe could be saved and brought into the Kingdom of God through Lutheranism; and, as Calvin said, all of Creation would act as the stage for this divine play of salvation.  This led the Dutch to paint differently than the Flemish and Italian Baroque painters.  The Dutch usually painted secular scenes, whereas the Catholics, as we saw, dealt heavily (and somewhat overbearingly) in religious topics.  In truth, religious paintings were going out of fashion during this time.  The secular scenes that Protestants of the North painted were of their comfortable homes and profitable businesses.  These are often called genre paintings, which are paintings of scenes from everyday life.  The transition is critical: we go from the lives of saints to the lives of ordinary people.  This is secular art.  And, by the way, the word "secular" today has come to earn some very negative connotations towards sinful worldliness or carnality; that is not the meaning of the word in this context.  By secular I mean that the paintings presented nonreligious scenes of contemporary, earthly, day-to-day normality.  Make sense?