In this chapter

• Self-portrait Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburgh
• Self-portrait painting old couple Herman van Vollenhoven
• A young artist painting a voluptuous model Arnold Houbraken
• Paulus van Spijk and his wife Anna Louise van der Meulen Johannes Janson
• Hilly landscape with cattle, sheep and a herdsman Johannes Janson
• The drawing lesson of Anna Charlotte Didier de Boncour Willem Bartel van der Kooi
• Self-portrait with wife and son Hendrik Jan van Amerom
• The museum guard Augustus Allebé
• The exhibition Augustus Allebé

The art world

For half the period covered by this exhibition, the Dutch world of painting searched for its identity abroad or in the past. Or both at once. 'I'm now properly French,' wrote the young Dutch painter Gerard Bilders in 1860 to his patron Johannes Kneppelhout, 'but in being properly French I am properly Dutch, since the great French artists of today have a lot in common with the great Dutch ones of the past'.¹ He was absolutely right. The Barbizon artists he so admired were in their turn worshippers of the Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painters.

Bilders's paradox shows us a Dutch art world unsure of where it stands: there was greatness in Dutch art, but where was it? The masterpieces of the golden age were the glory of Dresden, Paris and London. The inspiration that they gave off made the reputations of German painters of daily life, French painters of landscape and English portraitists. And who were the most successful Dutch painters of the nineteenth century? Ary Scheffer, a lion of Paris society, and Laurens Alma-Tadema of London. Even the unsuccessful Vincent van Gogh felt he had to go to France to find himself.

It was one of the times when the recurrent Dutch complaint hung heavy in the air: how can our tiny country, tucked away in a corner between Germany and France, with England on one side of our sea and Russia on the other, ever amount to anything in the world?

What made it all the more painful was that Bilders and his contemporaries were looking backwards across a period when there was so much promise in the air. After the Napoleonic Wars the Kingdom of the Netherlands had been called into being, a grand country comprising Holland and Belgium, under the son of the last Dutch stadholder, the first King of the Netherlands. He and his son, Willem I and Willem II, were interested in art; they patronized living artists, donated to campaigns to raise monuments to dead ones, and collected on their own; Willem n even designed and built a museum for his collection, the Gothic Hall in The Hague. However, the days of Great Netherlandish grandeur were numbered. The Belgians revolted in 1830, and in 1848 the prerogatives of the king were sharply curtailed. The leader of the Liberal Party, which now set the tone in political life, is quoted as having said: 'Art is no concern of the state's.' (In fact, the circumstances under which he said this make the statement less damning than it sounds, but it nonetheless became one of those quotations that give the outraged a battlecry.)

Preceding the Kingdom of the Netherlands, there were no Netherlands at all, for a brief period. Napoleon had incorporated the Dutch state into France, as eight distant northern départements. The French influence on the art life of the country was far-reaching in the extreme. On the positive side we can count the institution of an Academy for art education, which proved to be a major permanent contribution. But for as long as Napoleon ruled Europe (and his brother Louis Napoleon ruled Holland), the negative aspect of being a French province was far more apparent: the French simply carted off to Paris the major art treasures of the Netherlands. It took a lot of doing at and after the Council of Vienna to get them back. In fact, the most recent catalogues of collections like the Royal Picture Gallery and the National Print Room still contain lists of objects which were never retrieved from France after 1815.

To a latter nineteenth-century Dutch art lover looking backwards across these periods of unreal imperial pretension, the eighteenth century must have looked pretty much like a blank. How could it have been otherwise, if he found his eighteenth-century counterparts also looking over their shoulders at the past? The artists took the terms of their creativity from their forebears of a century before, and the collectors, agreeing with them, bought old art first and new art last.

The only museum in the country was the collection of the last stadholder of the Republic, Willem v. In 1773 he bought a building across the street from the seat of the government, refurbished the upper story as one long gallery, filled it from floor to ceiling with paintings and opened it to the public. There were a few burghers with collections that rivalled the stadholder's, and who installed them in cabinets where they held private salons.

It was in these same circles – the court at The Hague and a handful of art-loving patricians in the large cities – that living artists would find their patrons. The sharp distinction between collectors of modern art and old masters which is characteristic of the twentieth century had not yet come into being.

Interestingly, despite French cultural supremacy, the collectors of Holland bought nearly only works by Dutch artists. In the stadholder's gallery there were 130 paintings by Dutch masters as against five by Frenchmen.² The foreign paintings that were collected here in the eighteenth century were almost all sold abroad afterwards. The Amsterdam merchant Gerrit Braamcamp, for instance, owned 33 paintings by French and Italian artists; none of them, as far as we know, is still in Holland. For that matter, even of his 235 Dutch paintings, today only thirteen are in Dutch museums, as compared to seven in the Louvre, to name only the largest of the foreign heirs to the collection.³

The strongest feature of the Dutch art world in the eighteenth century, as these figures reveal, was trading and exporting art. The town of Amsterdam ran auctions, through the orphans' court, which were to become the model for art sales throughout Europe. And the strongest part of the market in those auctions, by far, was the sale to foreign dealers of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, for steadily rising prices.

Among all the uncertainties and shifts of taste and judgment in the history of art, one of the great constants has been the popularity of Dutch painting of the seventeenth century. The praise of the Golden Age and the high worth put on its best products weighed heavily on Dutch artists of later periods. If they themselves were not measuring the value of their work against that of Rembrandt, Jan Steen and Jacob van Ruysdael, others were. And the later generations seldom came out "well in the comparison. Whereas in the 1600s collectors were willing to pay as much for a new painting as for an old one, in the following century, a small sample reveals, contemporary work had dropped to about two-thirds the price of old art.⁴

The seventeenth century saw the rise of the specialties which still represent old Dutch art to many people: still-life, landscape, townscape, genre painting, church painting and so forth. In the course of the century, the new specialties gained ground at the expense of biblical and historical subjects, while the older specialty of portraiture held a fairly constant share of painterly production.

The vigour of the art scene in the seventeenth century did not assure painters of a good income. Fierce competition, chronic overproduction and the instability of the market caused serious financial difficulties. As a result of these factors, and the easy appeal of so much Dutch art, thousands of Dutch paintings went across the borders, and hundreds of painters as well, many of them permanently.

In the sixteenth century, the opposite situation prevailed. The 1570s and '80s saw the influx into Holland of hundreds of immigrant artists from the southern Netherlands, among the tens of thousands of Flemish Protestants seeking refuge from Spanish oppression. It was this massive injection of talent that gave the Dutch world of painting the volume and quality it needed to take over the leading position in northern European art that had been held in earlier centuries by Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent. Those centres were large-scale exporters of art, and their foreign contacts were now available to the Dutch. This helped to establish the world-wide reputation that Dutch art still enjoys.

The immigrant artists even brought part of their home market with them – entire tribes of cultured Flemings who settled in the same cities of the north as did the artists. In some basic respects, then, the art world that was the lasting pride of the Dutch Golden Age was actually Flemish. It was the misfortune of Flanders that its Spanish masters drove out some of the most talented people in the country, just as, under different circumstances, they expelled the Jews from their own country a century earlier. The Flemish influence in Holland, which is only beginning to be understood, helped give Holland the cultural radiance of the Golden Age.

A hundred years later the Netherlands received a new wave of immigrants from the south – French Huguenots who moved to Holland in 1685 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. With the memory still alive of the great boon of Flemish immigration in the 1580s, many Dutch cities opened their doors wide to the French Protestants. However, the wonder was not repeated. Most Huguenots who were active in the arts continued to think of themselves as Frenchmen, regarding their Dutch basis as an exile. Whatever fresh cultural stimuli they experienced benefitted France in the first place, through the immense intellectual traffic that developed between the Huguenots in Holland and their contacts in the home country.

Throughout the rest of our period, Holland was left unshaken by any great demographic shifts. It could be argued that this robbed the culture of elan, and led it to look across the border and into the past for clues to its own value.

1. Bilders 1974, p. 70.
2. Brenninkmeyer- de Rooij 1977.
3. Bille 1961.
4. These figures are based on a comparison of the prices paid for works from the Braamcamp collection in 1771 (Bille 1961) and the valuations put on the stock of the major Amsterdam art dealer Johannes de Renialme upon his death in 1657 (Bredius 1915-1921, vol. I, pp.230-239).