Monday, July 18, 2016

17th-century Paintings from the Netherlands

Jan Pynas
Aaron transforming the Nile into Blood
1610
Rijksmuseum

"Pharoah and his sorcerers look on in dismay as Aaron strikes the Nile with his staff, transforming the waters into blood and killing the fish. Pharoah is still not swayed, however, as his magicians duplicate this feat with false magic. (Exodus 7:20-22)"

– pararphrase supplied by the Morgan Library, New York

Meindert Hobbema
Woodland Road
ca. 1670
Metropolitan Museum of Art
 
Hendrick ter Brugghen
The Philosopher Heraclitus
1628
Rijksmuseum

Rembrandt
Conspiracy of the Batavians
ca. 1661-62
Rijksmuseum

Rembrandt
Self-portrait
ca. 1628
Rijksmuseum

"Well, if you think about the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, and if you analyze it, you will see that there are hardly any eye sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. ... There is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image."

 the painter Francis Bacon quoted by arts journalist David Sylvester, 1980

Philips Wouwerman
Leaving an Inn
ca. 1660
Prado

Philips Wouwerman
Cavalry Attack
ca. 1650-55
Prado

Denis Diderot needed more than a year to compose his critical evaluation of the Salon of 1767 (reprinted in translation by Yale University Press in 1995). The English edition runs to 344 pages, a fact I could verify when I checked the index to that volume. This index confirmed my own recollection that Diderot frequently referred to the now-forgotten Dutch landscape and genre painter Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668). On seven different occasions in the Salon of 1767 Diderot invokes Wouwerman (aleady dead for a century). He does this whenever he wishes to bestow particular praise on one of his own contemporaries for the handling of atmosphere, and in particular for the depiction of suspended clouds or mist.

Philips Wouwerman
Rabbit Hunting
ca. 1665
Prado

Philips Wouwerman
Landscape with Sandy Path
ca. 1655
Rijksmuseum

Philips Wouwerman
A Stop at an Inn
ca. 1655-58
Prado

Philips Wouwerman
Departure with Falcons
ca. 1665
Prado

Gerard de Lairesse
Apollo and Aurora
1671
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gerard de Lairesse
Bacchus and Ariadne
ca. 1680
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Dutch artist Gerard de Lairesse painted the original full-size version of his Bacchus and Ariadne (above) for Soestdijk Palace, home of the stadtholder Willem III (who would become King of England after the forced abdication of James II in 1688). Gerard de Lairesse also produced a reduced copy (below) of the same picture. It meandered for centuries from owner to owner in the Netherlands before settling fairly recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Gerard de Lairesse
Bacchus and Ariadne
ca. 1680-82
Philadelphia Museum of Art