In this chapter

• Rienk van Cammingha Adriaen van Cronenburgh
• A monk squeezing the breast of a nun Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem
• Portrait sketch of Burgomaster Abraham Boom, Cornelisz. Thomas de Keyser
• Four governors of the Musketeers practice range Bartholomeus van der Helst
• Gerard Pietersz. Hulft Govert Flinck
• The Dam, Amsterdam, with the old town hall, in the snow Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraten
• The fire in the old town hall, Amsterdam Gerrit Lundens
• The town hall of Amsterdam Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde
• Joost Christoffer van Bevervoorde, Judith van Coevorden and her son Roelof Koets
• The main hall of the Binnenhof, The Hague Hendrik Pothoven

Government

The two earliest artists represented in this exhibition are Adriaen van Cronenburgh, who was active between 1552 and 1590, and Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburgh, who was born in 1537 and died in 1614. Both men were not only painters but also government officials. Van Cronenburgh was the secretary of a district in Friesland called Tietjerksteradeel, and van Swanenburgh was councilman and burgomaster of Leiden. A number of his sons were city officials, some were artists, and at least one was both. Van Cronenburgh painted portraits of the Frisian nobility, who were still the local rulers in his time, and van Swanenburgh designed stained glass for public buildings in Leiden and worked for township bodies such as the drapers' guild (fig. 2).

The combination of professions was not unusual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In all parts of the country, at all levels of government, one comes across painters in office. Some of the better known examples are Aelbert Cuyp, who was a member of the High Court of South Holland for three years, and Gerard Terborch, who was on the town council of Zwolle.¹ Many more came from patrician families or married into them.

It would be a mistake to think that the public offices held by these artists were bestowed on them in recognition of their creative gifts. In general, political office in the Netherlands was reserved for the members of patrician families. Not even success in trade was enough in itself. The richest merchants of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the Trips, were kept out of public office for half a century after moving to the city, until they managed to marry into one of the right Amsterdam families. No, we must assume that the artists gained their posts as a result firstly of family connections, secondly of social status, and thirdly of political ability (or submissiveness).

Most of the painters with government positions worked for their political masters or institutions over which they exercised control. Nowadays, an artist serving even on an advisory committee, let alone a legislative body, would be disqualified for such commissions. Were any sixteenth- or seventeenth-century eyebrows raised by these conflicts of interest? It is hard to say. No indignant outcries against artist-politicians who gave themselves commissions paid for out of tax money have been recorded. We might observe, however, that public offices held by painters did not become part of their artistic biographies. The first Dutch book of artists' lives – Het schilder-boeck, the Painter's book, by Carel van Mander – was written around the turn of the seventeenth century. In it, the author described and glorified the careers of the painters of antiquity, of Renaissance Italy and of northern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although van Mander was a writer who was quick to exaggerate the successes of his colleagues, he shows a notable disinterest in the political careers of artists, even going so far as to omit from his book altogether the artists who reached the highest stations in non-artistic life. His close contemporary, the Leiden burgomaster van Swanenburgh, for example, is mentioned only in the appendix, as the teacher of Otto van Veen. The omission was noticed with wonderment by van Mander's eighteenth-century successor Arnold Houbraken, and by others since. The question is of a kind that cannot be answered satisfactorily: 'Why did Carel van Mander not describe the career of this or that particular artist?' The answer I used to prefer, in the case of van Swanenburgh, was: 'Because van Mander felt that Isaac Claesz. used his political influence in Leiden to benefit only himself and his family, and crowded out van Mander and the rest of his colleagues.' But that explanation does not account for van Mander's omission of all mention of the political dimension in painters' lives. When he writes of Pieter van Veen, well on his way to political prominence in The Hague and Leiden, all van Mander said of him was that he was an astonishingly good painter, and that all agreed it was a pity he did not turn to art full-time. I find myself, therefore, tending towards some new kind of explanation, such as: 'Van Mander did not wish to draw attention to the kind of artistic successes attained by means of family ties or political influence.' He was a pedagogue, and preferred to project a picture of young artists discovering their talent and developing it by keeping their noses to the grindstone. When they are rewarded with prestigious commissions, it should be for their artistic attainments, not for their connections.

That is not the same thing as saying that an artist should not seek the favour of the powers that be. On the contrary - if van Mander's book has a message, it is that the arts need the support of rulers, governments, holders of high office and wealthy individuals. 'If the art of painting lacked such noble admirers, that art and its skilled practitioners would be reckoned among the gross handicrafts and handcraftsmen respectively, relegated in dishonour and contempt to the ignorant, uncomprehending commoners.' The great social and economic aim of the artist was to rise above that level once and for all. And the way to achieve it was to have one's patrons not among 'uncomprehending commoners' but among 'noble admirers' of painting.

One form of patronage which could be solicited rather easily was the commissioning of portraits. By the sixteenth century, the wealthier Dutch burghers as well as the nobility were in the habit of hanging family portraits on the walls. This continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in this period about one in five of the paintings in Dutch homes was a portrait. There were also increasing numbers of miniature portraits being made and worn.

In an age such as our own, when many people have photographic portraits of themselves and their family on mantlepieces, desktops and in their wallets, this phenomenon does not seem to require special explanation. A more specifically Dutch tradition was the painting of group portraits of the members of certain civic bodies. We all have such pictures engraved in our mind's eye, thanks to the fame of the examples painted by Rembrandt and Frans Hals. Rembrandt painted four group portraits, of Amsterdam burghers: two of members of the surgeons' guild, attending anatomy lectures; one of a civic guard company, the Nightwatch; and one of the sampling officials of the drapers' guild. Hals painted nine: one Amsterdam civic guard company (actually, he only painted half of it – it was finished by the Amsterdam artist Pieter Codde); five Haarlem companies; and three of the governors and governesses of a home for the aged and a hospital in Haarlem.

However, none of these depicted ruling bodies. In fact, very few Dutch group portraits do. Most of them are of civic-guard companies (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), guild boards (sixteenth and seventeenth) and the governors of charitable, medical and penal institutions (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries). The members of these bodies came from good families, but most of them never rose higher in the political hierarchy than the position in which we see them in the painted group.

When it came to official portraiture, the aristocracy remained better customers than burgher functionaries. We are used to thinking of the old Dutch state as a burgher republic, but in the longer line of history, the Republic was a passing episode of just over two hundred years, sandwiched between centuries of rule by feudal masters and modern royalty. And even in the intervening period, the Dutch nobility fared better as a class than is generally thought. In some provinces, it was even still represented in government as an estate. What is perhaps more to the point is that successful families of burgher patricians began early on to aspire to the condition of nobility. They would buy or marry titles, sometimes adopting embarrassingly transparent historical fictions to lend credence to their claims of ancient lineage.

And of course there was always the House of Orange, which, even as office-holders in a Republic, was royal enough for the stadholders and their consorts to be painted in hundreds of state portraits. Some of these images were entrusted to true court portraitists, such as the Swiss-born Benjamin Samuel Bolomey, who worked for Stadholder Willem v.

The reputation of being a court painter also helped an artist sell his work to the lower nobility and bourgeoisie, like any other 'purveyor to His Majesty.' The glow emanating from the throne or the burgomaster's seat (in Dutch one speaks of the 'cushion') would reflect on artists who painted the dignitaries who sat on them.

There is a fascinating difference between the two groups: the painters who had political positions of their own, and those who were dependent on the favour of the great. The first kind enjoyed a status in society which was higher than that of a mere painter; their work as artists could only lower them in the eyes of their contemporaries, not raise them. In fact, many of them stopped painting once they had achieved high office.

Those who lacked independent status, however, had nothing higher to expect from life than recognition as artists. They worked harder, and, as a group, were the ones who set a shining example for aspiring youngsters to follow.

If painting the portraits of the mighty was a second-rate specialty that could be practiced by nearly anyone, there were other kinds of official commissions which carried more prestige and security from competition. By mastering complex subjects from literature, history and the Bible, an artist could automatically leave his brothers behind him. He who did so would find himself in a smaller, more select category than the masses of portraitists. Such 'paintings with a college education' were considered more than just another specialty. They were the sum of all specialties, and elevated the art of painting to a higher spiritual status. The ability to create good 'history paintings,' as they were called, made one eligible for another form of security: the respectful patronage of princes and governments.

Most of the works ordered by official bodies were of that kind, and were of a predictable nature. Altarpieces for churches or chapels, exemplary scenes of civic leadership and the administration of justice for town halls and courts of law; allegories of trade for guilds (see cat. nr.32) and so forth.

Aside from such obvious examples, however, every once in a while one runs across a commission of a completely different nature, a painting one would never think of as official. One of the most intriguing puzzles of this kind is the Monk squeezing the breast of a nun (cat.nr. 11).

In 1591, the town of Haarlem bought the canvas from one of the most important painters in the city, Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, to be hung in the Prinsenhof, the Prince's Court. This was where the Prince of Orange would stay when he visited the city, and it was therefore an important public building.

The purchase of the painting was part of a combined order. The much larger work paid for at the same time was a monumental panel showing the Massacre of the Innocents, the slaughter of all two-year-old Jewish boys ordered by King Herod in the year 2, for the well-known reason. The new painting, nine by eight feet, was ordered by the city as a centrepiece for two wings painted nearly half a century earlier by Maerten van Heemskerk for the chapel of the drapers' guild in the main church of Haarlem, St. Bavo's.

During the siege of Haarlem at the start of the Eighty Years War, the panels were removed from the church, and in 1581 they became township property. Ten years later followed the decision to install them, with a new central panel by Cornelis, in the Prince's Court, a former monastery which had been confiscated from the Dominicans and given to the city in compensation for losses suffered during the Spanish siege. The bloody choice of the subject has been interpreted as a reference to the cruelty of the enemy.

But why did the township order the Monk and nun from Cornelis at the same time? One seemingly plausible answer is that the painting was intended to serve as a demonstration of the corruption of monastic life in the Catholic past. A kind of justification for seizing the building. If that theory is correct, the man and woman would be enjoying illicit sex as well as fruit and wine.

However, the opposite explanation has also been advanced: that the painting is a proof of purity. There was a Haarlem legend concerning a nun who was falsely accused of having borne a child in secret. To test the charge, a monk squeezed her breasts to see if milk would flow from them. Instead, they produced wine, the symbol of the eucharist. If that is the subject of the painting, then the figures are not in the throes of sexual excitement at all, but are participants in a solemn mystery.

The confiscation and refurbishing of the Prinsenhof provided the occasion for hanging up old paintings by Haarlem masters and ordering a few new ones. The construction of a completely new official building was often the motor behind truly large-scale commissions for paintings. The palaces of Frederik Hendrik, for instance, were decorated with hundreds of paintings, many of them commissioned or purchased from living Dutch artists.

The most prominent piece of civic architecture to arise in Holland in the seventeenth century was the new town hall of Amsterdam, built between 1648 and 1655 on the Dam, the square in the center of town that gave Amsterdam (the Dam on the Amstel) its name. The building was intended from the start as a showpiece of Amsterdam grandeur, to which all the arts contributed their share. Architects, sculptors, painters and poets devoted their talents over a period of decades to create a fitting seat and symbol for the city government. In those days, to borrow a phrase applied in the 1960s to the great multinational concerns, Amsterdam had global reach. Decisions taken on the Dam affected not only the fates of European nations, but also, through the East and West India Companies, the daily life of say a shopkeeper in Ceylon, a coolie in Batavia, a prostitute in Nagasaki, a tribe of Iroquois Indians.

Not much effort had to be expended to convince the burgomasters that the arts could enhance their status. They convinced themselves, as it were, when they observed the effects of the public festivities held in the city streets from time to time from the 1630s through the 1650s. Like many rulers throughout history, they thrilled to the sight of a vast public admiring the symbols of their greatness. They also liked the idea that works of art could outlive them, and proclaim their glory to the future.

One of the official poets of the city, Jan Vos, addressed these lines to the leading burgomaster, Cornelis de Graeff:

Tired old Time, now pining for his rest, Was cast
by Painting in a form so fresh That Death,
consumer of all human flesh, Could not destroy it,
through he tried his best.²

The lines are from an epic poem whose main function seems to have been to recommend for city commissions a group of Amsterdam painters who were Vos's friends.

Most artists in Amsterdam rose to the challenge enthusiastically, but there were always cynics on the sidelines who liked to remind people that the marriage of art and politics had its sordid side. One of them was the satirical poet Mattheus Gansneb Tengnagel, who wrote this squib when the plans for the new town hall were first announced in 1640:

On the town hall to be

Wealth the boss and art the slave unite To
build a Temple to God-given right.³

As Tengnagel sees it, the artists were flunkies helping their masters build a monument to their own divine right to rule. If there was any poet in Amsterdam who would recognize the phenomenon when he saw it, it would be Tengnagel. His father Jan had been portrait painter to some of the most important politicians in Amsterdam before he was appointed deputy sheriff and abandoned painting.

During the building of the new town hall, the old one, a venerable medieval landmark, burned down by accident before it could be demolished (cat. nrs. 15, 16). Amsterdam was shocked into an attack of civic nostalgia. One of the paintings hung in the burgomasters' chamber of the new building was a 'portrait' of the old one by the greatest specialist of the day, Pieter Saenredam. The building was also decorated generously with allegories of good government from the Bible and the classics, and with a monumental series on the revolt of the Batavians, the forefathers of the Dutch, against the Romans.

Then, of course, there were the paintings of the new building itself, dozens if not hundreds of them. The one by Gerrit Berckheide (cat.nr. 17) shows it after completion, a magnificent monument of modernity in its classical details and structure.

It was two hundred and thirty years before a larger building than the town hall was erected in Amsterdam - the Rijksmuseum. If the art of painting was an appendage to the building of the town hall, it was the main reason for building the Rijksmuseum. However, the art hung in the town hall was made by living masters, and that in the Rijksmuseum mainly by dead ones, including the same masters who worked for the burgomasters in the 1650s.

In The Hague, paintings were displayed in transformed palaces and private galleries. The Mauritshuis, built in the 1640s for Johan Maurits, the stadholder's nephew, was bought by the State in 1820 to house the newly founded Royal Gallery of Paintings. And in 1840, King Willem II, an amateur architect, built a Gothic Hall (in the English Perpendicular Style) for the display of his own collection of old masters. At the time, he said that he intended to put up another Hall for his modern paintings, but he never did get around to it.

1. The artist-officeholders I have come across so far are, by province:
   
   Friesland: Jacobus Sibrand Mancadam (Franeker and Leeuwarden); Adriaen van Cronenburgh (Tietjerksteradeel); Willem Bartel van der Kooi (Achtkarspelen).
   
   Holland: Gillis Anthonisz. Beth and Jan Tengnagel (Amsterdam); Aelbert Cuyp (Dordrecht); Jacob van der Ulft and Hendrik Verschuring (Gorinchem); Pieter van Veen, Seger Crijnsz. van der Maes and Dirk van der Lisse (The Hague); Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburg, Pieter van Veen and Jan Adriaensz. van Staveren (Leiden); Jacob Lois (Rotterdam); Gijsbert Sibilla (Weesp).
   
   Overijssel: Gerard ter Borch (Zwolle).
   
   Utrecht: Paulus Moreelse (Utrecht).
   
   Zeeland: Dirck van Delen (Arnemuiden).
   
   
2. Vos 1653, p.30.
3. 'Op het Toekomende Raedhuis. De Rijkdom, en de konst, die meester, deeze knecht,/Zijn uit op Tempelbouw voor 't Goddelijke recht.' Tengnagel 1969, p. 292.