St. Nicholas/Volume 32/Number 5/How to Study Pictures
How to Study Pictures.
By Charles H. Caffin.
A series of articles for the older girls and boys who read “St. Nicholas.”
Fifth Paper
Comparing Van Dyck with Frans Hals.
When the Emperor Charles V abdicated, in 1553, he allotted Austria and Germany to Ferdinand I, and Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip II. The rule of Spain was in one way beneficial to the Netherlands or Low Countries (Holland and Belgium), since it opened to them the trade with the New World and the West Indies. Antwerp rose to greatness. “No city except Paris,” says Mr. Motley, “surpassed it in population or in commercial splendour. The city itself was the most beautiful in Europe. Placed upon a plain along the bank of the Scheldt, shaped like a bent bow with the river for its string, it enclosed within its walls some of the most splendid edifices in Christendom. The stately Exchange, where five thousand merchants daily congregated, and many other famous buildings were all establishments which it would have been difficult to rival in any other part of the globe.”
Such it was before the “Spanish Fury,” when the Duke of Alva arrived with ten thousand Spanish veterans for the purpose of stamping out the Reformed faith. Then the people rose under William the Silent, and the war for independence was begun. In 1579, by an agreement at Utrecht, the seven northern provinces united for mutual defense. Antwerp, however, though not in the League of United Provinces, became a focus point of the struggle, and in 1585 capitulated to the Duke of Parma,
Thirty-one years later the English ambassador paid a visit to the place, and wrote home to a friend: “This great city is a great desert, for in the whole time we spent there I could never sett my eyes in the whole length of the streete uppon 49 persons at once; I never mett coach nor saw man on horseback; none of our own companie (though both were worke dayes) saw one pennieworth of ware either in shops or in streetes bought or solde. Two walking pedlars and one ballad seller will carry as much on their backs at once, as was in that royall exchange either above or below.”
When Philip II died, in 1598, Spain was exhausted almost to prostration, and his successor was glad to conclude an armistice of twelve years with the United Provinces. But at its conclusion war was resumed, and it was not until 1648 that, by the peace of Westphalia, the independence of Holland was finally assured.
Meanwhile, during those seventy years of conflict, in which a new nation was in the forming, a new art had been born. While the country was fighting for its Liberties a number of painters came to manhood whose work was of such originality as to constitute a new school of painting: “the last,” as Fromentin says, “of the great schools.”
Across the Scheldt, in Antwerp, Rubens was in the prime of his pawers (among his retinue of pupils was Van Dyck); but though his fame must have crossed to the Dutch, his influence did not. That people, stubborn against foreign domination, was stubbornly fashioning a kind of art of its own. Bent upon independence, its artists, too, were independent of Rubens, of the great Italian traditions, of everything but what concerned themselves. A nation of burghers, busy with war and commerce, they developed out of their own lives, their love of country, and their pride in themselves, a new art.
In one word, it was an art of portraiture. It began with the painting of portraits, and then proceeded to the painting of landscapes and of the outdoor and indoor occupations of the people,and to the painting of still lite—all with such simple intention to represent the thing as they saw it, and with such fidelity to the truth, that the whole range of their subjects may be classed as portraiture. Instead of being grand, it Was intimate and sincere.
The first of the great men was Frans Hals, whom we are here comparing with Van Dyck.
“Portrait of a Woman.” by Frans Hals
There is a story related by Houbraken, which mayor may not be true, that Van Dyck, passing through Haarlem, where Hals lived,[1] sent a messenger to seek him out and tell him that a stranger wished to see him, and on Hals putting in an appearance asked him to paint his portrait, adding, however, that he had only two hours to spare for the sitting. Hals finished the portrait in that time, whereupon his sitter, observing that it seemed an easy matter to paint a portrait, requested that he be allowed to try to paint the artist. Hals soon recognized that his visitor was well skilled in the materials he was using. Great, however, was his surprise when he beheld the performance. He immediately embraced the stranger, at the same time crying out: “You are Van Dyck! No one but he could do what you have just now done!”
“Portrait of Marie Louise von Tassis.” by Van Dyck
Assuming the story to be true, how interesting it would be if the two portraits existed, that one might see what Frans Hals, accustomed ta the heavier type of the Dutch burghers, made of the delicately refined features of Van Dyck, and how the latter, who always gave an air of aristocratic elegance to his portraits, acquitted himself with the bluff, jovial Hals, who was as much at home in a tavern as in a studio. For no two men could be more different, both in their points of view and in their methods, though they were alike in this one particular—that each was a most facile and skilful painter.
Let us turn to the two portraits which are very characteristic examples of these. two masters. First of all, notice the hands. We have learned, in an earlier article, that hands are very expressive of character. In good portraits there is always a oneness of feeling and character between the hands and the head. Hals was a master in this respect. There is also an absolute oneness in the expression of the hand and that of the face in the Van Dyck, even to the curl of the forefinger, which echoes the curious, slanting glance of the eyes.
But we know that it was Van Dyck’s habit to make a rapid study of his sitters in black and white chalk upon gray paper, and to hand it to his assistants for them to paint the figure in its clothes, which were sent to the studio for that purpose, after which he retouched their work and painted in the head and hands; so we feel a suspicion that Van Dyck may have been as much interested in illustrating his own ideas of elegance and refinement as in reproducing the actual characteristics of his sitters.
We hardly feel this in the “Portrait of a Woman” by Hals. Of the fact that the woman looked in the flesh just as he has represented her on the canvas we are as sure as if we had looked over his shoulder and watched her grow beneath his brush. He has put in nothing but what he saw, and left out nothing that could complete the lifelike truth of the picture.
Looking at the “Portrait of Marie Louise von Tassis” by Van Dyck we cease to wonder if Marie Louise were really like this. Her portrait is merely an exquisitely beautiful picture. And then again we turn to the Hals, and again we have forgotten that it is a portrait. It is a woman that we face—a stout, wholesome Dutchwoman, whose husband had a hand in the shaping of the new republic, who was the mother of sons who fought in the long struggle for freedom. Those hands!—one loves them; strong, coarse hands that have done their share in the work of life, now folded so unaffectedly in the calm and peace of living which right well-doing has won. When you look at them, and, still more, when you read their fuller story in that high, broad forehead, with the strong, big skull beneath it, indicating steadiness of purpose; in the wide-apart eyes; in that resolute nose with its lines of energy; and in the firm, kindly, wise mouth, you realize how it was that Holland, having by its energy and patience set a barrier to the ocean, could keep at bay the power of Spain, and achieve for itself, after long waiting, liberty of life and thought.
This portrait, while serving as a record of a woman who actually lived, is more than that: it is a type of the race to which she belonged. It is a type, too, of the whole school of Dutch painting—and, moreover, such a marvel of painting!
The Dutchmen of the seventeenth century, having abandoned the large field of decorative composition, settled down in the small space of their canvases to a perfection of craftsmanship that has never been surpassed in modern art. From the standpoint of pure painting, they formed a school of great painters; differing among themselves, but alike in being consummate masters of the brush.
Hals set his figures in clear light, so that the modeling is not accomplished by shadows, but by the degree of light which each surface of the flesh or costume reflects. In this respect he worked like Velasquez, but in a broader way. He distributed the lights and painted in the colors in great masses, each mass containing its exact quantity of light; and so great was his skill in the rendering of values, that he could make a flat tone give the suggestion of modeling. Thus, in the uninterrupted, flat white tone of this woman's ruff we scarcely note the absence of lines indicating the folds of muslin.
Compare the treatment of the ruff in Van Dyck’s portrait—indeed, the explicit way in which the whole of the elaborate costume is rendered. Nothing is left to suggestion: everything is told with painstaking fidelity. The contrast of the Hals portrait offers an instructive example of what painters mean by the word “breadth,” and a lesson, also, in the effect of breadth on our imagination; for we get from the broad simplicity of this portrait a strong invigoration, from the other a pleasant fascination. Yet, while we miss the breadth in the Van Dyck, do not let us overlook the freedom with which it is painted, so that there is nothing small or niggling in all these details; they are drawn together, like the drops of water of a fountain, into one splendid burst of elegance.
In the Van Dyck, however, the character of the woman is considerably smothered. Perhaps it was the case that she herself had little character—that she was simply a fine lady of fashion; or it may be that that aspect of her was the only one that interested the artist. He seems to have been particularly impressed with her eyes, which indicate at least a trait of character; and in a very subtle way he has made the attitude of the figure and the gesture of the hands and head correspond to it. So, in a limited way, the picture is representative of a type.
Hals, on the other hand, never fixed upon any particular trait or feature. He broadly surveyed all the externals of his sitter, and represented them as a whole; and with such clear seeing that, although he never penetrated into the mind of his subject, as we shall find Rembrandt did, he got at its heart, and in his straightforward characterization of what he saw, suggested that character lay beneath it.
In this respect his work is very like the man himself. He must have had fine qualities of mind, else how could he have seen things so simply and completely, and rendered them with such force and expression, inventing for the purpose a method of his own, which, as we have seen, was distinguished by placing his subject in the clear light and by working largely in flat tones? To get at the essential facts of a subject and to set them forth rapidly and precisely, so that all may understand them, represents great mental power, and places Hals in the front rank of painters. Yet, as a man, he allowed himself to appear to the world an idle fellow, overgiven to jollification, and so shiftless that in his old age he was dependent upon the city government for support. That he received it, however, and that his creditors were lenient with him seem to show that his contemporaries recognized a greatness behind his intemperance and improvidence; and when, in his eighty-second year, he died, he was buried beneath the choir of the Church of St. Bavon in Haarlem.
In great contrast to Hals’s mode of living was Van Dyck’s. He was early accustomed to Rubens’s sumptuous establishment, and when he visited Italy, with letters of introduction from his master, he lived in the palaces of his patrons, himself adopting such an elegant ostentation that he was spoken of as “the cavalier painter.” After his return to Antwerp his patrons belonged to the rich and noble class, and his own style of living was modeled on theirs; so that when at length, in 1632, he received the appointment of court painter to Charles I of England, he maintained an almost princely establishment, and his house at Blackfriars was the resort of fashion. The last two years of his life were spent in traveling on the Continent with his young wife, the daughter of Lord Gowry, Lord Ruthven’s son. His health, however, had been broken by excess of work, and he returned to London to die. He was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
He painted, in his younger days, many altar-pieces, “full of a touching religious feeling and enthusiasm"; but his fame rests mainly upon his portraits. In these he invented a style of elegance and refinement which became a model for the artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, corresponding, as it did, with the genteel luxuriousness of the court life of the period.
On the other hand, during the later century, Hals was thought little of, even in Holland, whose artists forsook the traditions of their own school and went astray after the Italian “grand” style. It was not until well on in the nineteenth century that artists, returning to the truth of nature, discovered that Hals had been one of the greatest seers of the truth and one of its most skilful interpreters. Now he is honored for these qualities, and also because, out of all the Dutch pictures of the seventeenth century now so much admired, his are the most characteristic of the Dutch race and of Dutch art.
- ↑ Hals was born in Antwerp, whither his family moved for a time in consequence of the war. They seem to have returned to Haarlem about 1607.