Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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Lord Arundel desired to have an Arundel family portrait painted for him
by Rubens. The Earl was rather given to having Arundel family portraits,
for there are no less than three in which he figures. One by Van Somer,
in which the hero is pointing somewhat comically with his truncheon to
the statues of his collection in the background, and the last one
projected by Van Dyck, but executed by an inferior artist, in which
various family pieces of armour, swords, and shields, worn at Flodden,
or belonging to the poet Earl of Surrey, are introduced in the hands of
the sons of the family.

But it is with Rubens' 'Arundel Family,' which, we must remember, ranks
second in English family pictures, that we have to do. Thomas, Earl of
Arundel, and the Lady Alathea,[24] are under a portico with twisted
columns, like those in Raphael's cartoons; a rich curtain, and a
landscape with a large mansion are seen beyond. The Countess is seated
in a chair of state, with one hand on the head of a white greyhound; she
wears a black satin gown, laced ruff, gold bracelets, and pearl
necklace. Her hair is light, and decked with pearls and plumes. The Earl
stands behind with a hand on her chair. His head is uncovered, the short
hair inclining to grey; the whiskers and beard pointed. His vest is
olive-coloured, and he has a brown mantle lined with crimson over the
shoulders beneath his ruff. There is a little boy--Earl Thomas's
grandson, Philip Howard, afterwards Cardinal Howard, in crimson velvet,
trimmed with gold lace, and a dwarf on the other side of the dog, with
one hand on its back.

Among other masterpieces of Rubens, including the 'Straw Hat,' which
are in the National Gallery, there are the 'Rape of the Sabines,' and
the landscape 'Autumn,' which has a view of his country chateau, de
Stein, near Mechlin. In Dulwich Gallery there is an interesting portrait
by Rubens of an elderly lady in a great Spanish ruff, which is believed
to be the portrait of his mother.

Rembrandt Van Rhyn is said to have been born near Leyden about 1606 or
1608, for there is a doubt as to the exact date. His father was a miller
or maltster, and there is a theory that Rembrandt acquired some of his
effects of light and shade from the impressions made upon him during his
life in the mill. He was a pupil at the Latin school of Leyden, and a
scholar in studios both at Leyden and Amsterdam.

In 1630, when Rembrandt was a mere lad, he seems to have settled in
Amsterdam, and married there in 1634, when he was six or eight and
twenty years of age, a young Dutchwoman possessed of a considerable
fortune, which, in case of her death and of Rembrandt's re-marriage, was
to pass to her children, a provision that in the end wrought Rembrandt's
ruin. The troubles of his country in the painter's time rendered his
prices comparatively small and precarious, and Rembrandt, like Rubens,
without Rubens' wealth, was eager in making an art collection and
surrounding himself with those very forms of beauty in the great Italian
masters' works, in the appreciation of which the Dutch master--judged by
his own works--might have been reckoned deficient.

Rembrandt's wife died after eight years of marriage, and left him with
one surviving son, Titus, and Rembrandt, having re-married, was called
upon to give up the lad's inheritance. This call, together with the
expenditure of the sums which Rembrandt had lavished on his collection,
was too heavy upon funds never very ample, and the painter, after
struggling with his difficulties, became a bankrupt in 1656. His son
took possession of Rembrandt's house, and from the sale of the
painter's art collection and other resources eventually recovered his
mother's fortune, but Rembrandt himself never rose above the misery,
degradation, and poverty of this period. He lived thirteen years longer,
but it was in obscurity--out of which the only records which reach us,
are stories of miserly habits acquired too late to serve their purpose,
a desperate resort to low company dating from his first wife's death,
and his gradual downfall.

Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of
light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.

It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I
add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt
painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and
stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows
are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded
by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double
chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. He has two rows of a
chain across his doublet, and one hand thrust beneath the cloak hanging
across his breast.

Rembrandt's great merits were his strong truthfulness, and his almost
equally powerful sense of a peculiar kind of picturesqueness. It seems
as if the German weirdness perceptible in Albrecht Duerer had in
Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective
Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark
days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight
in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at
Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by
fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat
grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of
the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is
this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good
painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather
under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness
of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in
that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and
alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise
prosaic, coarse, and sometimes vulgar Dutch men and women, that we have
coined a new word to express the charm, and speak of groups and
incidents being _Rembrandtesque_, as we speak of their being
picturesque.

Rembrandt did not always leave the vague thrill of doubt, terror, or
even horror, which he sought to produce, to imagination working in the
mysterious depths of his shadows. A very famous picture of his is 'Dr
Deeman (an anatomist) demonstrating from a dead subject.' In another
picture a man stealing from the gloom is in the act of stabbing in the
back the unconscious man in the foreground.[25] Rembrandt's originality
is as undoubted as his ability, and he was as great in etching as in
painting. His defect as a painter was the frequent absence of any
evidence in his work of a sense of refinement, grace, or even beauty;
this can be said of him who spent means not his own on gathering
together images of beauty and grace produced by the pencils and brushes
of others. Many of Rembrandt's pictures are in the galleries of
Amsterdam and the Hague, and we have many in London. The National
Gallery has several examples, including two of Rembrandt's portraits.

Passing over Van Dyck, whom I reserve, as I have reserved Holbein, to
class among the foreign painters resident in or closely connected with
England, I come to the Teniers--father and son. David the elder was born
at Antwerp in 1582, and David the younger also at Antwerp, in 1610.
David the younger is decidedly the more eminent painter, though the
works of the father are often mistaken for those of the son. The two
Teniers' class of subjects was the same, being ordinarily 'fairs,
markets, peasants' merry-makings, beer-houses, guard rooms.'

David the younger had great popularity, was court painter to the
Archduke of Austria, and earned such an independence, that he bought for
himself a chateau at the village of Perck, not very far from the Chateau
de Stein of Rubens, with whom David Teniers was on terms of friendly
intimacy. There Teniers, like his great associate, lived in the utmost
state and bounty, entertaining the noblest of the land. David Teniers
married twice, his first wife being the daughter of one of a family of
Flemish painters, who were known, according to their respective
proclivities in art, by the names of Peasant Breughel, Velvet Breughel,
and Hell Breughel. Teniers had many children.

The elder Teniers died at Antwerp in 1649; the younger died at Brussels,
and was buried at Perck, in 1694.

The distinction of the Teniers was the extreme fidelity and cleverness
with which they copied (but did not explain) the life they knew--the
homeliest, humblest aspect of life. They brought out with marvellous
accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of
poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even
coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who
ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the
Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to
those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking
that underlying strain of life, the mere rugged genuineness of the
Teniers' work recommends itself, and is not without its own pathos;
while to very many superficial observers the simple homeliness of the
life which the Teniers chose to represent, prevents the observers from
missing what should be present in every life. Men and women are only
conscious of the defect when the painters wander, now and then, into
higher spheres and into sacred subjects, and there is the unavoidable
recoil from gross blindness. I have taken the Teniers as the
representatives of a numerous school of Flemish and Dutch artists, whose
works abound in this country. David Teniers the younger appears at his
best, several times, in Dulwich Gallery and the National Gallery.

Philip Wouverman was born at Haarlem in 1620. He was the son of a
painter, able, but unrecognized in his own day. Philip Wouverman found
few patrons, disposed of his pictures by hard bargains to dealers, was
tempted by his want of success to abjure his art, and even went so far,
according to tradition, as to burn his studies and sketches, in order to
prevent his son pursuing the career which had been to him a career of
bitter disappointment. He died at Haarlem, 1668, when he was no more
than forty-eight years of age. Yet some nine hundred paintings bear
(many of them falsely) Wouverman's name.

With all the truth and excellent execution of his contemporaries and
countrymen', Philip Wouverman, who had, as he thought, missed his mark,
had something which those successful men lacked--he had not only a
feeling for grace, but a touch of sentiment. His scenes are commonly
'road-side inns, hunts, fights;' but along with an inclination to adopt
a higher class of actors--knights and ladies, instead of peasants--there
is a more refined treatment and a dash of tenderness and melancholy--the
last possibly born of his own disastrous fortunes. In his love of horses
and dogs, as adjuncts to his groups, he had as great a fondness for a
special white horse, as Paul Potter had for black and white cattle.

Albert Cuyp was born at Dort in 1605. He was a brewer by trade, and only
painted as an amateur. In spite of this, he was a great landscape
painter, and has given delight to thousands by his power of expressing
his own love of nature. Little is known of Cuyp's life, and the date of
his death is uncertain, farther than it was later than 1638.

In affected enthusiasm, Cuyp has been called the Dutch Claude, but in
reality, Cuyp surpassed, Claude in some respects. The distinction, which
Mr Ruskin draws between them, is that, while Claude, in the sense of
beauty, is the superior to Cuyp, in the sense of truth Claude is the
inferior. Besides Cuyp's landscapes, he painted portraits, and what is
called 'still life' (dead game, fruit or flower pieces, etc.), but Cuyp's
triumph was found in his skies, with their 'clearness and coolness,' and
in 'expressions of yellow sunlight.' Mr Ruskin admits, while he is
proceeding to censure Cuyp, parts might be chosen out of the good
pictures of Cuyp which have never been equalled in art.' On another
occasion, Mr Ruskin has this passage full of dry humour in reference to
Cuyp:

'Again, look at the large Cuyp in Dulwich Gallery, which Mr Hazlitt
considers "finest in the world," and of which he very complimentarily
says, "the tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple
light of the hills" have an effect ought to have apologized before now
for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with
terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to
observe, the other day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet
more gratifying information that he was "juicy;" and it is now happily
discovered that Cuyp is "downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this
first-rate Cuyp is very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say
about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky. We may see for
ourselves Cuyp's lovely landscapes both in the National Gallery and at
Dulwich.

Paul Potter was born at Enkhuysen, in North Holland, in 1625, and was
the son of a painter. Paul Potter settled, while still very young, at
the Hague as an animal painter, and died in his thirtieth year, in 1654.
His career, which was thus brief, had promised to be very successful,
and he had established his fame, while no more than twenty-two years of
age, by painting for Prince Maurice of Nassau that which continues his
most renowned, though probably not his best picture, his 'Young Bull,'
for some time in the Louvre, now restored to the painter's native
country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is
considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse,
representation of animal life in the main figure; but Paul Potter's
later pictures, especially his smaller pictures of pastures with cattle
feeding, having fine colouring and fine treatment of light, are now
regarded as equally good in their essential excellences, and of wider
scope. Paul Potter etched as well as painted. There is no example of
Paul Potter in the National Gallery.

Jan David de Heem[26] and his son Cornelius, the father born in 1603,
the son in 1630, and Maria Von Oesterwyck, the elder man's pupil, were
eminent Flemish and Dutch flower and fruit painters. The gorgeous bloom
and mellow ripeness in some of the flower and fruit pieces of Flemish
and Dutch painters, like those I have mentioned, are beyond description.
I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well
represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how,
as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they
are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted
and less lavishly-blossoming English flowers; so these Flemish and Dutch
full blown flower pieces have not a trace of the sentiment which modern
flower painters cannot help seeking, with good result or bad result, to
introduce into every tuft of primroses or of violets, if not into every
cluster of grapes and bunch of cherries.

From a fact which I have already mentioned, that so many Flemish and
Dutch pictures, which we may often come across, are in England, I am
sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to
other famous painters of these schools or school, for they merge into
one, to Snyders, Jan Steen, Gerard Dow, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde,
etc., etc.




CHAPTER IX.

SPANISH ART--VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660--MURILLO, 1618-1682.


Spanish art, from its dawn to the time of Velasquez, had been of a
'severely devotional character,' austere and formal; and although one
man did not work a revolution by his independent example, he did
something to humanize and widen art. In the rich city of Seville in
1599, Diego Rodriguez, de Silva y Velasquez,--and not, as he is
incorrectly called, Diego Velasquez de Silva, was born, and, according
to an Andalusian fashion, took his mother's name of Velasquez, while his
father was of the Portuguese house de Silva. Velasquez was gently born,
though his father was in no higher position than that of a lawyer in
Seville.

The painter was well educated, though, according to his English
biographer (Sir W. Stirling Maxwell), 'he was still more diligent in
drawing on his grammars and copybooks than in turning them to their
legitimate use.' The lad's evident bent induced his father to painter.
He studied in two different Spanish studios, and married the daughter of
his second master, whom the talents, assiduity, and good qualities of
Velasquez had already strongly attached to the young painter.

From the first, Velasquez struck out what was then a new line in Spanish
art. He gave himself up to the materialistic studies, to which the
Flemish and Dutch painters were prone, painting diligently 'still life'
in every form, taking his living subjects from the streets and
way-sides, and keeping a peasant lad as an apprentice, 'who served him
for a study in different actions and postures (sometimes crying,
sometimes laughing), till Velasquez had grappled with every variety of
expression.' The result of those studies was Velasquez's famous picture
of the 'Aguador,' or water-carrier of Seville, which was carried off by
Joseph Buonaparte in his flight from Spain, taken in his carriage at
Vittoria, and finally presented by Ferdinand VII, of Spain, as a
grateful offering to the Duke of Wellington, in whose gallery at Apsley
House the picture remains. 'It is a composition of three figures,' Sir
W. Stirling Maxwell writes; 'a sunburnt way-worn seller of water,
dressed in a tattered brown jerkin, with his huge earthen jars, and two
lads, one of whom receives a sparkling glass of the pure element, whilst
his companion quenches his thirst from a pipkin. The execution of the
heads and all the details is perfect; and the ragged trader dispensing a
few maravidi's worth of his simple stock, maintains, during the
transaction, a grave dignity of deportment, highly Spanish and
characteristic, and worthy of an emperor pledging a great vassal in
Tokay.'

Just such a group may still be seen, or was to be seen till very lately,
in the quaint streets of Seville. I have read an anecdote of Velasquez
and this picture, which is quite probable, though I cannot vouch for
its accuracy. It is said that, while painting the water-carrier day
after day, when he had been engaged with his work for several hours,
Velasquez found himself vexed by perceiving, as it were, the effect of a
shadow cast by some of the drapery. Small flaw as it might have been, it
appeared to him to interfere with and spoil the picture. Again and
again, in endeavouring to do away with this 'shadow,' Velasquez undid
portions of his work, and had to repeat them next day, but always,
towards the end of his task, the invidious shadow stole upon his vision.
At last a friend, who was present and full of admiration for the
picture, heard Velasquez exclaim, 'That shadow again!' and saw him seize
a brush and prepare to dash it across the canvas. The friend
remonstrated, besought, and by main force held back the painter, and at
last induced him to leave the picture untouched till next day, when
Velasquez discovered, to his great relief, that the shadow had been in
his own wearied young eyes, and not in his admirable representation of
the 'Water-carrier.'

Velasquez was in Madrid in 1623, when he was in his twenty-fifth year,
and having been introduced by the Prime Minister, Olivares, to the King
of Spain, Philip IV., a king who was only known to smile once or twice
in his lifetime, whose government was careless and blundering, but who
had the reputation of being a man of some intelligence and very
considerable taste,--Velasquez was received into the king's service with
a monthly salary of twenty ducats, and employed to paint the royal
portrait.

From the time that he became court painter, Velasquez was largely
occupied in painting portraits of members of the royal family, with
special repetitions of the likeness of his most Catholic Majesty. With
Velasquez's first portrait of Philip in armour, mounted on an Andalusian
charger, the king was so pleased, that he permitted the picture to be
publicly exhibited, amidst the plaudits of the spectators, in front of
the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. Nor was the exhibition a
barren honour to the painter, for the king not only 'talked of
collecting and in future Velasquez should have the monopoly of the royal
countenance,' he paid three hundred ducats for the picture.

About this time our own Charles I., then Prince of Wales, went in his
incognito of Charles Smith to Madrid on his romantic adventure of
seeking to woo and win, personally, the Infanta of Spain, and Velasquez
is said to have gained Charles's notice, and to have at least begun a
portrait of him. If it were ever completed it has been lost, a
misfortune which has caused spurious pictures, purporting to be the real
work, to be offered to the public. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell holds, with
great show of truth, that this visit of Charles to Madrid, when its
altars were 'glowing' with the pictures of Titian, confirmed the unhappy
king's taste for art.

In 1628 Rubens came to Madrid as an envoy from the governess of the
Netherlands, and the two painters, who had many points in common, and
who had already corresponded, became fast friends. By the advice of
Rubens, Velasquez was induced to put into execution his cherished
desire of visiting Italy, the king granting his favourite painter leave
of absence, the continuance of his salary, and a special sum for his
expenses.

Velasquez went to Venice first, and afterwards to Rome, where he was
offered, and declined, a suite of apartments in the Vatican, asking only
free access to the papal galleries. There he copied many portions of
Michael Angelo's 'Last Judgment'--not a hundred years old, and 'yet
undimmed by the morning and evening incense of centuries,' and portions
of the frescoes of Raphael. At Rome Velasquez found there before him,
Domenichino, Guido Reni, alternating 'between the excitements of the
gaming table and the sweet creations of his smooth flowing pencil;'
'Nicolas Poussin, an adventurer fresh from his Norman village; and
Claude Gelee, a pastry-cook's runaway apprentice from Lorraine.'[27]
Velasquez remained a year in Rome. Besides his studies he painted three
original pictures, one of them, 'Joseph's Coat,' well known among the
painter's comparatively rare religious works, and now in the Escurial.
In this picture his biographer acknowledges, that 'choosing rather to
display his unrivalled skill in delineating vulgar forms than to risk
his reputation in the pursuit of a more refined and idealized style,'
Velasquez's 'Hebrew patriarchs are swineherds of Estramadura or
shepherds of the Sierra Morena.'

From Rome Velasquez proceeded to Naples, where he was enabled by his
prudence and forbearance to face without injury the disgraceful 'reign
of terror' which the Neapolitan artists had established in the south of
Italy. The Neapolitan artists more than any other Italian artists are
believed to have influenced Velasquez's style.

In 1639 Velasquez painted his principal religious work, 'The
Crucifixion,' for the nunnery of San Placido in Madrid, a painting in
which his power has triumphed successfully over his halting imagination.

With regard to the many court groups which Velasquez was constantly
taking, I may quote Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's amusing paragraph about a
curious variety of human beings in the Court Gallery. 'The Alcazar of
Madrid abounded with dwarfs in the days of Philip IV., who was very fond
of having them about him, and collected curious specimens of the race,
like other rarities. The Queen of Spain's gallery is, in consequence,
rich in portraits of these little monsters, executed by Velasquez. They
are, for the most part, very ugly, displaying, sometimes in an extreme
degree, the deformities peculiar to their stunted growth. Maria Barbola,
immortalized by a place in one of Velasquez's most celebrated pictures,
was a little dame about three feet and a half in height, with the head
and shoulders of a large woman, and a countenance much underjawed, and
almost ferocious in expression. Her companion, Nicolasito Pertusano,
although better proportioned than the lady, and of a more amicable
aspect, was very inferior in elegance as a royal plaything to his
contemporary, the valiant Sir Geoffrey Hudson; or his successor in the
next reign, the pretty Luisillo of Queen Louisa of Orleans. Velasquez
painted many portraits of these little creatures, generally seated on
the ground; and there is a large picture in the Louvre representing two
of them leading by a cord a great spotted hound, to which they bear the
same proportion that men of the usual size bear to a horse.'

In 1648 Velasquez again visited Italy, sent by the king this time to
collect works of art for the royal galleries and the academy about to be
founded. Velasquez went by Genoa, Milan, Venice (buying there chiefly
the works of Tintoret), and Parma, to Rome and Naples, returning to
Rome. At Rome Velasquez painted his splendidly characteristic portrait
of the Pope Innocent X., 'a man of coarse features and surly expression,
and perhaps the ugliest of all the successors of St Peter.'

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