In this chapter

• Ensign of the Orange Company of the St. Sebastian civic guard Evert Crijnsz. van der Maes
• The departure of Frederick V, elector of the Palatinate Adam Willaerts
• The explosion of the powder magazine in Delft, 1654 Egbert van der Poel
• The recapture of Coevorden by the States army, 1672 Pieter Wouwerman
• Battle at sea Willem van de Velde the Younger
• Portraits of colonel and captains of the Oranje-Friesland regiment Bernardus Accama
• General Daendels taking leave in Maarssen of Lt.-Col. Kraijenhoff Egbert van Drielst, Adriaan de Lelie
• The Rapenburg, Leiden, after the explosion, 1807 Carel Lodewijk Hansen, Jacob Smies
• The bombardment of Algiers and the firing of the Algerian fleet, 1816 Maritinus Schouman
• Lt. Jan van Speyk detonating the powder keg Jacobus Schoemaker Doyer
• Allans, enfants de la patrie Ary Scheffer

Fig. 7

Otto van Veen
Distributing bread and herring in Leiden, 1574. Panel, 40 × 59.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

Deeds of glory, acts of God

When Jan Vos wished to recommend the art of painting to the burgomasters of Amsterdam for their patronage, he did not tell them how beautiful their new town hall would be with pictures on the walls. Instead, he reminded them in an epic poem entitled The Struggle of Nature and Death, or The Triumph of Painting of the mortality of human flesh and the longevity of art: ars longa, vita brevis. If they wanted to be remembered after they were gone, they should have themselves and their deeds recorded in paint. For millennia, this simple truth, conveyed persuasively to susceptible ears, has helped artists tap one of their largest sources of income.

In the art of painting, the urge for immortality benefitted two kinds of specialty in particular: portraiture, of course, and history painting. Preserving a record of one's personal appearance, perhaps dignified with uniform, signs of honour or office, house and family, has seemed to many people worth the price of a portrait. Whether the Dutch take the record for portraits per capita I do not know, but they are certainly a contender.

While a portrait may include attributes referring to particular moments in a person's life, it was not customary to dedicate entire paintings to such events. Pictures of weddings, private celebrations, triumphs in business or career, are as good as unknown in Holland. In that area the painter came far behind the silversmith, who would often be called upon to make inscribed beakers or plates commemorating landmarks in the lives of private people.

Not that painters were shut out altogether from this area of the market: a newly-wed couple, or the father of a bride, may have commissioned or received as a gift a painting of the wedding of Alexander the Great and Roxane, or the meeting of Isaac and Rebecca; a grand banquet may have been commemorated with the purchase of a painting of the feast of the gods; a merchant who made a fortune in spices from the east may have hung a painting of Jupiter bringing the Asian princess Europa to the west. By doing so, they would be taking advantage of a code that allowed people to flaunt their best moments without seeming vain.

Even civic and national events, commemorated in paint as well as in silver, were seldom depicted directly. They too were subsumed under time-honoured prototypes. The paintings that the burgomasters of Amsterdam finally did order for the town hall, for example, evoked the Dutch revolt against Spain in the form of scenes from Tacitus's description of the revolt of the Batavians against Rome. Even the idea to do so was derived from an earlier example. In 1612, Otto van Veen painted a series of such scenes which were sold to the States General by his brother Pieter, who held a high government position. To us, this indirectness may seem like evasiveness, a flight from facts into phrases. But to poets, painters and audiences of the time the parallels between present and past added resonance to the events of their own day.

There were exceptions to this rule. Some contemporary occurrences did merit undisguised representation on their own. Sieges and battles were often painted in a repertorial mode. The lifting of the siege of Leiden in 1574 became a popular motif (fig.7). Famous disasters and natural prodigies too were immortalized with a nearly documentary precision, as were unique events of state: the signing and celebration of the Treaty of Münster, the arrivals and departures of deposed rulers. Between them these few categories account for nearly all non-allegorical Dutch paintings of contemporary events.

One can try to look for a principle underlying these exceptions. Perhaps certain events appealed so strongly to the imagination that viewers insisted on authentic particulars rather than rhetorical commentary on the higher significance of things. Or could it be that the death in battles and disasters of people one knew seemed to demand more direct commemoration than was possible within the prevailing conventions? Perhaps questions of that kind will someday be answerable in such terms, if the 'history of mentalities' is ever applied with sufficient insight to the Dutch Republic. In the meanwhile, we have to be content with more prosaic suggestions.

The painting of sieges, for example, is related to a branch of art one could call military-artistic intelligence. The attics of the Musée des Invalides in Paris, the former officer training school of the French army, are still full of scale models of fortified cities and their natural surroundings. The military value of such material speaks for itself. The Dutch stadholders too were great believers in visual presentation. Maurits commissioned an illustrated manual for the use of the musket and pike which remained of value for two centuries, and his brother Frederik Hendrik liked all of his officers to be able to draw.

Membership in the military often inspired the understandable urge to be painted in one's uniform. The impulse seized groups as well as individuals, professional soldiers as well as members of the civic guard. The splendid ensign of the Orange company of the Hague civic guard (cat.nr.37) was a burgher who spent his days practicing some trade or profession. Yet when he had his portrait painted, he chose to show himself not as a civilian but as the part-time soldier he also was. Apparently, soldiering takes precedence over other kinds of work in the self-image of the portrait sitter.

It would be a mistake, however, to place too much emphasis on the personal and psychological aspects of military portraiture. Convention and tradition too played a role of great importance. The family traditions of the nobility, for example, demanded that each successive male title-holder leave a portrait of himself in uniform for the gallery of ancestors in the family castle. This was the kind of tradition that exerted a mighty appeal on wealthy burghers as well. We know of an Amsterdam family of guardsmen, the Soops, in which the father and both of his sons had themselves painted in uniform (by Frans Hals and Rembrandt, no less).¹

Conventions also guided the commissions for group portraits of military bodies. Those familiar images of guardsmen at banquets or other special occasions nearly all portray the same few bodies of the civic guard of Amsterdam, Haarlem and a few other cities of Holland, in the period 1550-1650. There are no such paintings of professional soldiers. The existing examples were made in the period when the civic guard was enjoying its greatest glory. The companies were composed of the leading citizens, and in the absence of representative government, they were the closest thing in many a city to a constituency of burghers. In Amsterdam, they thrived on the legendary events of the Alteration of 1578, when the newly formed companies of Calvinist guardsmen selected the members of the fresh town council. With the end of the Eighty Years War, the civic guard lost its unique importance, and the painting of group portraits came to a sudden end. A gallery of officers' portraits such as that of the twenty-four officers of the Orange-Friesland Regiment, all painted in the one year of 1731 (seenrs.42-51), adds up to a group portrait of sorts. The overall effect of a wall of individual portraits, however, is purely decorative. No attempt is made to create the dramatic fiction of the seventeenth-century examples.

Engagements on land fought by the Dutch Republic tended to be battles of patience, which appealed to the popular imagination only if they looked like they were heading for a climax, and didn't last too long. Battles at sea were much more apt to raise temperatures to fever pitch. This was partly due to their dramatic structure: they were over in a few days if not hours, and nearly always were decisive. But there was another reason as well. The States army was a mixed group of professional soldiers from all over Europe, with few ties to the citizenry at large. Many of the officers were noblemen who, even if they were Netherlanders, spoke French in preference to Dutch. The sailors of the Dutch navy, on the other hand, came mostly from the backstreets of the cities of Holland, and the officers from their canals. On shore leave, they told stories about their experiences that brought the harbors of Ceylon and the Caribbean closer to home than the army camps of Drenthe and Zeeland. The admirals of the Dutch fleets, some of whose exploits were thrillingly indistinguishable from those of pirate kings, were deified as army commanders never were. In the words of a popular pamphlet, it was easier, in the Dutch Republic, to recruit a thousand sailors than a hundred soldiers.²

More or less the same ratio governed the market in paintings of sea versus land battles, of admirals versus generals. The leading specialists in military marine painting, artists like Willem van de Velde the older and younger (cat.nr.41) and Ludolf Backhuysen, were always in demand. The van de Veldes were actually able to work alternately for the Dutch and English governments during the Anglo-Dutch Wars.

The registration of unusual day-to-day occurrences in art of a journalistic cast was not unknown in Holland, but it was generally confined to printmaking. There were a few kinds of natural prodigies which were always sure to draw a crowd of draughtsmen: stranded whales, broken dykes, plants of miraculous shape or size, fires, extreme frost; the kind of story which is still irresistible to the editors of television news programmes. The draughtsmen's sketches would be published quickly as prints or illustrations of broadsheets, but seldom did they make it into paint.

One kind of disaster which did become a small-scale painting specialty of its own was the explosion in a city. Two in particular: that of the powder magazine in Delft in 1654 (cat.nr.39) and of a powder barge in Leiden in 1807 (cat.nr. 53). Of all the wonderful and terrible things that happened in Holland in those centuries, those two stuck out as particularly memorable, and paintable.

On February 5, 1831 an incident took place which combined several of the above-mentioned ingredients for immortality in art, and which indeed did not fail to provide Dutch culture with a fetishistic new image. It occurred during the only fighting waged by the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the lowlands between the Battle of Waterloo against the French in 1815 and the invasion of the Germans in May 1940: the Ten Days Campaign against the Belgians, who had launched an uprising to gain independence from the Kingdom. The young, orphaned, lieutenant at sea Jan Carel Josephus van Speyk, unable to save the gunboat he was commanding, blew it sky-high rather than allow it to be taken. His patriotic sacrifice did not have to become a symbol – it was one, even in his mind, before it happened. Two months before his death, he wrote in a letter to his niece: 'In the mean-while I must tell you (and I hope you will take me at my word) that the boat will be blown up, with powder, me and all, before becoming an infamous Brabander or being surrendered. I would rather be a Klaassen than a Deine.' The 'Klaassen' to whom the future hero was referring was the seventeenth-century vice-admiral Reinier Claasse, who in 1606 had blown up his ship rather than be taken by the Spaniards, while 'Deine' was a Dutch officer who in 1830 had deserted to Belgium.³

Van Speyk's prefabricated martyrdom was commemorated with phenomenal intensity. The details of his death were rehearsed, debated and glorified for years to come. In 1834, the collector Adriaan van der Hoop commissioned an authentic depiction of van Speyk's last moments from Jacobus Schoemaker Doyer (cat.nr. 55). The artist based his depiction on the reports of a survivor, but was not able to keep his mind free of existing models, any more than was van Speyk himself.

1. Van Eeghen 1971.
2. Boxer 1965, p. 80.
3. Exhib. cat. Het vaderlandschgevoel, p. 192, nr.65. De Leeuw 1985, p. 17, refers to another prototype. In the play by M. Westerman, Marco Bozzaris of de Grieken, produced in Amsterdam in 1824, the hero, a Greek revolutionary leader, blows himself and his men up to avoid capture by the Turks.