Old world masters in new world collections

The picture is an oil painting on panel (36 × 30 inches), and is signed with the monogram F. H.

The Laughing Mandolin Player belonged to the Capello Collection, Amsterdam, from which it was sold in 1767, and then it passed to Count Bonde, Stockholm; to Jules Porges, Paris; to the late Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, Waddeston Manor, England; and to M. A. Veil-Picard, Paris.

A MUSIC PARTY.

Here are six figures in the reception bedroom of a prosperous merchant or citizen. The dominant note of the apartment is red. The floor is paved with square blocks of marble. The primary interest of the picture is in the group on the left, consisting of two fashionably dressed gentlemen and an elegantly attired lady at a table over which is spread an Oriental “table-carpet.” The lady, dressed in a scarlet skirt, an old-gold overskirt and bodice and a deep white lace collar, is looking at the spectator and singing from a piece of music which she is holding in her left hand, her right being raised as if to beat time. Standing near her and smilingly accompanying her in her song is a young gentleman with long hair and wearing a white jacket and a broad-brimmed hat. With his right hand he is holding a long funnel-shaped glass partly filled with wine. Seated opposite and looking intently at the lady is a middle-aged gentleman with long hair and yellow jacket, holding a flageolet with both hands, and apparently waiting for the note at which he may join in the accompaniment. On the table are the flageolet player’s high-crowned hat with red feathers, an open book of music and a glass. In the background are standing figures of a lady and gentleman in conversation, and near-by is an attendant in brown dress holding a wine-jar in his left hand and abstractedly looking out of the window. In the background is a bed enclosed with curtains. Two windows to left and right open on to a garden, a portion of which, adorned with statues, is seen through an open doorway on the extreme right.

The picture, oil on a panel (24 × 28 inches), was formerly in the Collections of Edmund Higginson of Saltmarshe Castle, England, 1846; George H. Morland, Esq., London, a well-known amateur, a descendant of George Morland, the artist, 1863; and Albert Levy, London, 1874.

Pieter de Hoogh (or Hooch) is thought to have been born in Rotterdam. Little is known of his life. He seems to have been a servant in his early years employed by Justus de la Grange and to have lived in Delft, in Leiden and in The Hague. In some way he learned to paint; some authorities say he studied under Rembrandt’s pupil Carel Fabritius, Houbraken says he was a fellow-student with Jacob Ochtevelt under Nicholaes Berchem. In 1653 Pieter de Hoogh became a member of the Guild of Painters in Delft and he married in that city and lived there Until 1664. Next he is living in The Hague and after that in Amsterdam. Pieter de Hoogh is ranked as one of the best of the “Little Dutch Masters.” His pictures show a particularly fine mastery in the action of light. He almost invariably opens a door in the background leading into a garden or into an adjoining room. He groups his figures interestingly and tells his simple story in paint graphically and convincingly. His architecture is always remarkably fine and his drawing is second to none.

Pieter de Hoogh was neglected for many years, but to-day he is deeply appreciated. Burger says he never saw any picture by de Hoogh that was not of the first rank: “Sometimes he paints interiors—people are playing cards, or having a family concert, or reading, or drinking, or conversing. Sometimes he paints exteriors; and then the painter introduces us to domestic occupations and the innocent recreations of private life, as, for instance, a servant washing linen in a backyard, or cleaning fish, or plucking fowl, or perhaps there are ladies and their cavaliers playing at bowls in a garden with trim gravelled walks.

“When he paints interiors this artist rarely neglects to show, on the right or left, doors opening on a staircase or revealing a leafy alley, or the trees along a quay, so that his pictures always seem to be the antechamber of another picture. In this characteristic style of de Hoogh when the interior of the apartment is moderately lighted the sun shines outside. Pieter de Hoogh seems to have been in Rembrandt’s secrets.”

THE LACE-MAKER.

This delightful picture on panel (17¾ × 15½ inches) was only discovered in 1926. On its exhibition at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1926–1927 in Berlin, Dr. Wilhelm Bode wrote: “I consider it a genuine, perfect, and very characteristic work of Jan Vermeer of Delft. Not only has it the true Vermeer charm as to the lighting and coloring, but at the same time there is an extraordinary fascination in the expression of the face, still half that of a child.” Dr. Max J. Friedländer also pronounced it “a genuine and highly characteristic work by Vermeer of Delft.”

The young girl is seen at half-length with her head turned towards the observer and her eyes looking straight out of the picture. She is busy making lace on a pillow, or cushion, which is supported on a frame with two upright posts. In her left hand she is holding a bobbin. Her costume is a yellow jacket, or bodice, with broad white collar and broad white cuffs. Her brown hair, arranged very simply, is adorned with a tiny knot of blue ribbon. The handsome pear-shaped pearls in her ears proclaim that she is in more than affluent circumstances and that she is a young Dutch lady of some position, making lace for her pleasure and not to earn a living. At her left elbow is a blue cushion and a large pewter dish.

The Lace-Maker is in every way a picture of charm and one of the most thoroughly attractive that Vermeer ever produced.

When it came to light in 1926 it was cordially welcomed. Seymour de Ricci published a long article under the title of Le Quarante-et-Unième Vermeer in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (December, 1927), which says in part:

“Seated, with her work on her knees and her bobbins in her hand, she stops in her occupation for a moment to look at the spectator. On the right, upon the corner of a table, covered with an Oriental rug, a flat dish of pewter and a blue cushion ornamented with three rows of gold braid and two gold tassels—that is the entire subject of the picture!

“It needed the consummate art of a Vermeer to produce with this slender material such a veritable chef-d’œuvre. Many painters would doubtless have tried to place this fresh figure in a striking setting. A Gerard Dou would have framed her in a window; a Metsu would have surrounded her with furniture; and a Pieter de Hoogh would have felt compelled to let us see through an open door into the next room, or into a bright flower garden. The bolder and much greater painter, Vermeer, places his model before a white wall, the plaster of which in the course of two centuries has combined ivory reflections with the pearly gray of clouds in springtime. Upon the clearness of this wall this youthful figure stands out with striking clarity: the faint rosy tints of the complexion, the whiteness of the broad flat collar and cuffs and the bright yellow of the bodice form a scale of colors that are juxtaposed with singular frankness and boldness. It is only in the flesh tints that the painter allows himself to bring the model into relief: in everything else he shows an affection for flat surfaces and flat tints. His touch is so light that in places—noticeably in the whites—each stroke of the brush has left its trace. The artist has proceeded by circular blots juxtaposed, announcing therefore a technique which certain French artists pretend to have discovered at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

“In everything here Vermeer the colorist takes precedence of Vermeer the draughtsman. There is not a line in the entire picture,—nothing but the juxtaposition of color-tones. A magnifying glass is impotent to make us discover the bridge of the nose, the profile of the cheek or the fingers. The eyebrows are barely indicated, the brown hair is treated in large luminous masses, and even the bobbins which to the naked eye seem to be drawn with such punctilious exactitude are merely indicated, but with such correctness and such prodigious skillfulness of touch that the illusion of the detail is most complete, even for the instructed spectator.

“In this charming composition, the greatest of Dutch colorists has taken pleasure in playing the entire scale of his favorite colors. In the brown masses of the hair he has placed a tiny blue ribbon, echoing the large blue surface of the cushion. On the other hand, on this same cushion three rows of dark yellow braid echo the bright ochre of the bodice. In the very centre of the picture the cherry red of the little smiling mouth throws a note more brilliant than the artist dared to place on the rose cheeks of his model white with the reflections from the large starched collar. All the lower part of the picture is in deep half-light which is brightened by the red and blue tones of the table-carpet and the luminous reflections of the pewter dish. The curious observer will notice that the painter was not afraid to change the centre of his composition towards the right, indifferent to the traditions of its accepted place, just as he was to the methods of his fore-runners with regard to the use of color.

“It has been attempted more than once to elucidate the mystery of the technical methods to which is due the incredible luminosity of Vermeer’s pictures. It has even been thought that he painted on a groundwork of some very bright color; but it has been correctly remarked that such a groundwork—if he had employed it—would at the end of two centuries have become visible under the painting and would have necessarily assimilated the colors. Others have suggested a preliminary preparation of water colors or gum. But, in truth, we are perfectly ignorant of how this amazing and incontestable result has been attained. This newly discovered picture reveals nothing to us relative to Vermeer’s technique, and although the painting is so lightly done and of so thin a coating, it has taken on its surface something of the hardness and brilliance of porcelain; and fine crackles have broken all through this suggesting the paste of porcelain.

The Lace-Maker was in the Collection of Harold R. Wright, Esq., of London, before it passed to the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon.

Jan Vermeer of Delft (1632–1675) was a pupil of Carel Fabritius, who was a pupil of Rembrandt—consequently Vermeer had the best training. Lemke’s eulogy is worth reading:

“Vermeer was a painter of the light and sun school; and this was his chief study—to catch and hold fast the moment. What Frans Hals did for the physiognomy, grasping the flying moment in an incomparable manner with winks, smiles, leers, gesticulation, etc., and fixing it in paint, Vermeer as a landscape painter, delighted to do for the sunshine. He shows its rays streaming into a room, or the play of light and shadow when the light with the moving air falls through heavy foliage against a bright house and paints it with rays of light and shade. Unlike the moment of Rembrandt and Ruisdael, which is fixed for all eternity, with Vermeer the moment vibrates in the light. The shadows lose their sharp outlines and the fine brush-work suggests the living change and play of the light. Rembrandt paints light in darkness and lets it glow in the dark or streaming into it, or in a broad flood of brilliance; but Vermeer prefers to set darkness or twilight against the light.”