English text by Eva Pomice
Pictures courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The mirror is an apt metaphor for paintings by Dutch masters. These works reach across centuries to transfix contemporary viewers with their luminous surfaces and lifelike details. They reflect quotidian experience, the virtues of domestic life and local landscapes. But the precise re-creation of detail in Dutch painting is at the same time a mastery of illusion, and that duality continues to fascinate viewers. Mirrors, after all, both reflect and alter. Jewel-like still life paintings that faithfully capture each flower petal and fold of velvet carry warnings of rot in a curled lemon slice. Boisterous family scenes that display familiar affection and mischief are as staged as a Shakespearean play, and as encoded with moral messages.
“By illuminating an interior world as much as illustrating an exterior one, [Dutch art] … moves back and forth between morals and matter, between the durable and the ephemeral, the concrete and the imaginary, in a way that was peculiarly Netherlandish,” writes historian Simon Schama in his book The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age.
The exhibition In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met showcases some of the museum’s most revered paintings of the Golden Age while challenging assumptions about the canon. “I wanted to have a blend of very iconic, and beloved paintings, like the Vermeers, and the paintings that had long been in storage and would surprise even regular visitors,” says Adam Eaker, Assistant Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The show emphasizes cultural and historical context. It juxtaposes celebrated realist paintings with lesser-known idealizing or classical works.”
The title of the show is taken from a 1642 treatise by Philip Angel, which celebrates painting’s ability to realistically transcribe nature.
The presentation’s 67 works, all from The Met’s permanent collection, are arranged thematically, addressing such concerns as religion, the domestic lives of women, consumer culture, and the influence of Rembrandt’s work on his peers and students. It upends visitors’ preconceptions about the period, demonstrating that naturalism in painting coexisted with classicism and romanticism, and explores various artists’ approaches to the human form.
The show opens with a work by Rembrandt van Rijn, regarded as the greatest artist of the Dutch Golden Age. In Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653), the artist contemplates the fleeting quality of fame. The painting depicts the philosopher dressed in luxurious contemporary clothing and a shimmering gold medallion with the portrait of his patron Alexander the Great. Standing in darkness, his face and robes are illuminated in golden light, his gaze ruminative, as he rests a hand on the head of the poet.
Works by Dutch masters have a long history at the museum. “In the late 19th century, when The Met was founded, Dutch painting enjoyed immense cultural prestige,” Eaker says. “The Met’s early donors also felt connected to the history of New York, which was founded as a Dutch colony in the 17th century.” On display are paintings mainly from Benjamin Altman’s bequest, the Robert Lehman Collection, and the Jack and Belle Linsky Collection.
The exhibition’s thematic arrangement seems to urge us to draw parallels between the world of 17th- century Holland and our own. “I haven’t made those connections explicit, but I do think there’s a lot in common between our society and the Dutch Golden Age,” Eaker says. “I do hope that visitors will find these works relevant to their own lives in the present day.”
The Golden Era spanned the 17th century when the Netherlands had achieved independence from Spain and controlled a maritime global empire, dominating over half of European trade and monopolizing trade with Asia. It was a literate, religiously tolerant and diverse society, experiencing rapid urbanization, due in large part to foreign and domestic immigration. Social status was based on income rather than birth. What some experts consider one of the world’s first modern economies created a booming market for luxury goods, and that wealth is recorded in the luminous paintings of the period.
This artistic blossoming took place in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, and a number of works reflect that transition. In Emanuel de Wittes’s Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft (probably 1650), the church is depicted as a social meeting place: Children play on the base of a column, and a dog urinates on a column. There is no pulpit and the walls are whitewashed, in obedience to a ban on religious images in churches and Calvinist notions of simplicity. But in this playful scene, there is also evidence of a fresh tomb: a stern reminder of mortality.
At a time of social mobility, portraits featured members of the mercantile class and are embedded with clues to status. In The Van Moerkerken Family (1653–54), Gerard ter Borch the Younger tenderly depicts a father, mother, and small son, the parents dressed in elegant black clothing from previous Spanish rule. The wife is positioned on the left, underscoring her status as the mother of a male heir. The husband holds a gleaming pocket watch, simultaneously a symbol of wealth and status as well as a warning of mortality.
The Dutch were proud of their cultivated land, reclaimed from watery terrain. Landscape painting was elevated as a genre; the term itself comes from the Dutch “landschap.” In Wheat Fields (1670) by Jacob van Ruisdael, clouds with dark undersides rise up over a wide-angle view of grain fields, a glimpse of sea on the far left. The dramatic work naturalistically depicts the Dutch countryside, yet there is majesty in the image that suggests providence at work. Frans Post’s A Brazilian Landscape (1650) reveals a nostalgia for colonial power and a darker side of the Dutch narrative.
Women as subjects and artists are featured prominently in the exhibition. The newly restored A Vase of Flowers (1716) by Margareta Haverman is one of two known works by the artist in existence. The lush painting is of an opulent bouquet of tulips, calendula, poppies, and other flowers that could not possibly bloom in the same season. Insects rendered in minute detail crawl up stems and petals. Haverman was innovative in her use of Prussian blue and Naples yellow, pigments new to artists in the Netherlands at the time.
Johannes Vermeer’s iconic Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1662) was the artist’s first to enter an American public collection. The image is one of serene stillness and harmony: A woman in a blue dress and white headpiece rests one hand on an open window, light falling on her forearm, and holds a pitcher with the other. The gold-plated pitcher and basin and Persian carpet suggest prosperity. The viewer glimpses the sanctity of a private moment, intimate but distant.
When confronted with domestic disorder, the Dutch still use the proverb “as messy as a Steen painting.” Jan Steen’s The Dissolute Household 1663–64) comically depicts family members engaging in a litany of moral transgressions: mischievous boys torment a sleeping woman, a husband flirts with the maid, a Bible is trampled underfoot. Hanging overhead, a basket of sticks and a plague rattle warn of a dire fate to come.
One of the presentation’s high points is Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from 1660, restored for the exhibition. The removal of layers of synthetic varnish applied in the 1950s reveal the subtlety of his colors and the vigor of his brush strokes. He was 54 at the time it was painted, and his straightforward gaze and face scored with lines convey the mastery of the artist, as well as some of the woes he had experienced at this point in his life: bankruptcy and the loss of both a wife and son.
Paintings came out of storage for the exhibition, including Apollo and Aurora (1671) by Gerard de Lairesse. Perhaps stung by Rembrandt’s portrait of him, showing his features ravaged by syphilis, De Lairesse became a fierce opponent of his rival’s uncompromising realism. His sumptuous depiction of deities with youthful features reflects classical ideals of beauty, sharply diverging from the naturalistic style we now associate with Dutch painting.
With their surface richness and encoded messages, these works present a complex and nuanced narrative of the Dutch artistic tradition, and the diverse and dynamic culture they arose from. Says Eaker: “People are drawn to realism and scenes of everyday life, but also the way those aspects are ennobled or transformed by the signature styles of artists like Rembrandt or Vermeer.”
