The Musée Condé, rich in works collected by Duc d’Aumale Henri d’Orléans (1822–97), is devoting its autumn season to prints from Holland’s Golden Century, the seventeenth. This century really began in 1581 and ended in 1702. We might expect the greatest name from the period, Rembrandt, to dominate the offerings, but in “Beyond Rembrandt: Prints from the Dutch Golden Century” (through February 24, 2024) the artist is only represented once. Absent as well are the era’s other two big names, Johannes Vermeer and Frans Hals. “Beyond Rembrandt” greatly expands our vision of this century, revealing many artists otherwise forgotten in the shadows of these giants.
Many of the names applied to art movements were coined long after the movements ended. The term “Post-Impressionism” is an invention of the twentieth century, “Baroque” one of the eighteenth. But the Dutch Golden Century is unusual in that those working during the period created and adopted the moniker. The Dutch had good reason for this pride. Kenneth Clark, in his 1949 Landscape into Art, wrote that “seventeenth-century Holland was the great, we may say, heroic epoch of the bourgeoisie.” The country named itself the United Provinces of the Netherlands after claiming independence from Spain in 1581, though Spain didn’t acknowledge the dissenting province’s independence until 1648. South of the United Provinces, the Spanish Netherlands, which became Belgium in the nineteenth century, remained loyal to the Spanish crown. Religious differences were key to the conflict, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands being Catholic and Holland mostly Protestant. For most of the first half of the seventeenth century, the two regions remained in a state of war with occasional truces, notably from 1609 to 1621. Despite this strife, the first half of the century also saw the arrival of Antwerp’s greatest artists, including Anthony Van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens, as well as the painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens.
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The independent Dutch proved to be highly industrious, even during wartime; a seafaring people, they sailed on every ocean, reaping riches all over the globe. Holland was the center of the world. The exhibition includes Zeeman’s View of an Amsterdam Canal (ca. 1659–62), full of ships tall and short, which gives an idea of what thriving Amsterdam was like. The Netherlands already had a brilliant tradition of artistry, rivaling Italy during the Renaissance, and during this century the newly freed people looked to their painters to depict them and their country. Though, as Kenneth Clark observed, they didn’t always reward their brightest stars: they enriched the now comparatively minor Gerrit Dou while allowing Frans Hals to end up in the poorhouse, Rembrandt to go bankrupt, and Jacob van Ruisdael to starve.
The prints in this exhibition, all black-and-white even though color was possible, show what life was like in Holland during the Golden Century. Kenneth Clark noted that the Dutch art of the period “reflected the desire to see portrayed recognizable experience.” We thus have a more exact sense of everyday life in seventeenth-century Holland than we do anywhere of else from the same time. Though most of the public’s familiarity with this time revolves around Rembrandt, the artist himself thrived because he was in the midst of other great artists. Genius, though it is lonely, cannot truly flourish in isolation. (Perhaps this is why our time, isolated as it is, is also so artistically barren.) These artists “beyond” Rembrandt were essential to his success.
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Art in the early years of the century was often mannerist, as exemplified by the prints of Hendrick Goltzius. The exhibition opens with his burin portrayals of soldiers in the war against Spain: we see the province’s commander in Gerrit de Jong (1583), an elongated standard-bearer in The Standard Bearer, Turned to Left (1587), and an infantry captain with a belly like a goose in The Captain of the Infantry (1587). Though Van Dyck traveled and worked in the Spanish Netherlands and Genoa, and, famously, at Charles I’s court, his work is featured in the show too. His Portrait of Lucas Vorsterman (1630–41) is a startling portrayal of his friend, also an engraver, who helped Van Dyck find his way as an artist when the two were apprentices in Rubens’s studio. Vorsterman, who had his fair share of difficulties as well as a violent falling out with Rubens, looks nervous in this picture; his wavy hair is wild, his eyes excited. His hand clutches his cloak for reassurance. Nevertheless, he survived Van Dyck, his junior by four years, by several decades. The exhibition also includes a joint engraving by Van Dyck and Vorsterman, Titian and His Mistress (1630–40), showing the Venetian master, by then in his eighties and small, longing for and leaning against his voluptuous mistress, who seems to be a hill for the old man to scale.
Hendrik Goudt of Utrecht was famous for continuing the work of the Frankfurt-born Adam Elsheimer, with whom Goudt worked in Rome and whose innovative approach to light and shade influenced Rembrandt. Ceres Mocked (1610), Goudt’s version after Elsheimer, is a shadowy nighttime vision. Pieter Brueghel, a century earlier, had popularized among painters depictions of kermesses, fairs, as in Constantijn Daniel van Renesse’s Village Fair with Charlatans (ca. 1636–50), a picturesque scene showing two figures on stage backed by impressive ruins. Two sellers of rat poison can be seen among the crowd. In busy port cities like Antwerp and Amsterdam, rats were potent spreaders of disease. Cornelis Visscher gives a brilliant picture of another of these salesmen in The Rat Poison Merchant (1655), depicting a self-assured traveling salesman, fur hat on his head, flanked by his young, nervous-looking assistant. He holds aloft a wooden cage of dangling dead vermin. The two vendors, meanwhile, are vividly alive.
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Jacob van Ruisdael was the greatest seventeenth-century Dutch master of landscape, and his etching The Travelers (1650–51) is typical of his style, showing a tangling forest under a gray, rainy sky. One can almost feel the sea wind that makes the trees bend and the pattering raindrops falling on the marsh. Ferdinand Bol was creatively educated in Rembrandt’s studio, and he was close enough in style and subject to the master that it is not always clear what work belongs to which artist. Bol’s 1651 engraving Woman with a Pear shows a figure in a window, a familiar pose in Netherlandish painting of the time. The woman seems to invite the viewer to eat the pear, which may indicate that she is a prostitute.
As is always the case with Musée Condé, this selection is exquisitely presented. It provides a pleasant way to discover or further explore many of Rembrandt’s often-neglected contemporaries. They are worth enjoying in their own right and on their own terms.