DUTCH ETCHERS
OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

By

LAURENCE BINYON
Of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum





LONDON
SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND
NEW YORK, MACMILLAN AND CO.
1895

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DUTCH ETCHERS
OF
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

INTRODUCTION

Since then their vogue has considerably declined. Rembrandt, of whom Bartsch treated in a separate work, is perhaps more admired, more studied than he ever was. His etchings, reproduced in more or less accurate forms, are not only familiar to artists and to students, but, to a certain extent, reach even the general public. But Rembrandt’s glory has obscured the fame of his countrymen and contemporaries. Like Shakespeare by the side of the lesser Elizabethans, he stands forth alone and dazzling, and, though they enjoy a titular renown, they suffer a comparative neglect.

Yet, if Rembrandt is by far the greatest, others are great also. The following pages are designed to serve as a sort of introduction to the more notable among these etchers, in the same way that Mr. Hamerton’s monograph, the first of the present series of the Portfolio, was intended as an introduction to the etched work of Rembrandt.

And first, let us warn the reader who is familiar perhaps with masterpieces like the Christ Healing the Sick and Rembrandt Drawing at a Window, Clement de Jonghe, or The Three Trees, but who is not yet acquainted with the etchings of Ostade and Paul Potter, not to expect too much. Few of these lesser masters approach Rembrandt in the specific qualities of the etcher: he is beyond them all in draughtsmanship, far beyond them in the intensity of his imagination. Yet the best of them must rank high.

It is his immensity of range which marks off Rembrandt, more even than his transcendent powers, from the rest of the Dutch etchers. Not only did his production exceed by far the most prolific among them, but he touched on almost every side of life. Yet he was not the school in epitome, as a hasty enthusiasm might affirm. With all his breadth of sympathy, his insatiable curiosity, he was not quite universal. The life of animals, the growth and beauty of trees, the motion of the sea-waves—none of these attracted Rembrandt deeply. And here, to supplement him, we have the work of men like Potter, Backhuysen, Ruisdael, each developing his peculiar vein.

All of these etchers whom we have to consider are, however, independent of Rembrandt and his influence. The Rembrandt school has been expressly excluded from the present monograph. For, interesting as some of those artists are, the first thought suggested by their work is that it recalls Rembrandt: the second thought, that it is not Rembrandt. It is their relation to their master that interests us rather than any intrinsic excellence of their own.

Only the independent masters, therefore, are exhibited here; and from these groups of etchers several of the greatest names in Dutch art are absent. Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Vermeer of Delft, Hobbema, De Hooch—none of these, so far as we know, has left a single plate. Adriaen Brouwer etched a few; but they afford only the slightest indications of his genius. And Albert Cuyp, who is the author of half a dozen small etchings, showed in this line but little of his skill, and did not apparently pursue it farther.

Yet the quantity of etched plates produced during this period in Holland is immense, and most of the best work was published within the same two or three decades. To take a single year, 1652, Potter’s studies of horses, a set of cattle by Berchem, several plates by Du Jardin, one of the finest pieces of Ostade, La Fileuse, appeared in it; while the year following saw the publication of Adriaen van de Velde’s largest etching, and Ruisdael’s Three Oaks had been issued but three years earlier. Rembrandt’s Tobit Blind is dated 1651, and the Three Crosses 1653. This great fecundity has been necessarily a source of some embarrassment to the writer; and though a number of minor men have been omitted, several etchers have been included, whom for the sake of completeness it was necessary to give some account of, but whom it is hard to make interesting, and about whom enthusiasm is impossible.

II

Treating, as it does, of so considerable a number of masters, the present monograph aims at indicating, as far as space would allow, something of the relations between them, and at tracing the interdependence of the various schools. To have taken the etchers separately and considered their work apart, would have meant the compilation of a tediously crowded catalogue.

But when once the masters are approached from the historical side, it is impossible to treat them simply as etchers. It is as painters that they influenced and were influenced. Consequently some account has had to be taken of them as painters. And since some who produced little, and that little not very remarkable, in etching, are yet of great significance as artists, it has been impossible to treat each man simply on his merits as an etcher. Hence, for instance, much more space has been devoted to Ruisdael than the quality or the amount of his work on copper strictly merits.

The lives of most of these artists have, till recently, rested on a somewhat shifting foundation. Dates of birth and death have fluctuated in various authors with easy rapidity. Of some, even now, nothing certain is known.

But the researches of Dr. van der Willigen, Dr. Bredius, Dr. Hofstede de Groot, and others in the archives of the Dutch cities have proved much, disproved more, and set the whole subject in a clearer light. To Dr. Bredius’ Meisterwerke der königlichen Gemälde-Galerie im Haag, and

still more to his Meisterwerke des Rijks Museum zu Amsterdam, the writer is under special obligation, which he desires most gratefully to acknowledge.

But in spite of many readjustments of chronology, materials for the lives of these artists are singularly meagre. Doubtless their lives were in most cases extremely simple. Many never left their native town, or exchanged it only for a home a few miles off: Haarlem for Amsterdam, or Amsterdam for the Hague. Others made the journey to Italy, or spent some years in France or Germany; but here the journey itself is sometimes only a matter of inference from the painter’s works. Birth, marriage, and death: there is little beyond these, and the dates of their principal productions, to record about many of these men.

Of the whole social life of the Holland of that day we know practically nothing but what its paintings tell us. Had those paintings not survived, what a blank would be left in our conceptions of this country and its history! Most countries that have left us great art have left us also great literature, and each is the complement of the other. The marbles of the Parthenon have not only the enchantment of their incomparable sculpture, but bring to our minds a thousand recollections, gathered in the fields of literature. In a less degree, it is the same with our enjoyment of Italian painting. It is one aspect of the flowering time of the Renaissance, but not the only aspect, nor the only material we have for investigating and realising that movement.

There was, no doubt, a certain amount of literature produced in seventeenth-century Holland; but it does not penetrate beyond Holland. Besides the names of Spinoza and of Grotius, who are great but not in literature proper, not a single author’s name is familiar, nor any book eminent enough to become a classic in translations. And it is certainly not for the sake of the literature that a foreigner learns Dutch. Hence a certain remoteness in our ideas about Holland, although it lies so near us: a remoteness emphasised in England by the general ignorance of the language.

When one looks at a picture by Watteau, one seems to be joining in the conversation of those adorable ladies and their gallants; half instinctively, one seems to divine the witty phrase, the happy compliment that is on the speaker’s lips. But the conversations of Ter Borch and of Metsu are mute and distant. We hear the jovial laughter of Hals, but we cannot divine his jests and oaths. And Van de Velde’s merry skating companies, and Ostade’s tavern-haunting peasants, and the family groups in their gravely furnished rooms, rich with a sober opulence, of De Hooch or of Jan Steen, all, in spite of their human touches and their gaiety, affect us with a kind of haunting silence.

Mr. Pater, in one of the most finished and charming of his Imaginary Portraits, Sebastian van Storck, called up a picture of the social life of these times, very suggestive and delightful; but it was noteworthy, how much of it was merely a reconstruction, in words, of impressions from the contemporary pictures.

After all, however, our ignorance may not cost us much. We judge the painters as painters, and by their works; we are not distracted by

other circumstances about them, and that is an advantage. They may have had theories about painting, but fortunately we do not know them, except by inference from their practice.

And if seventeenth-century Holland has only expressed herself in painting, she has known how to express herself with marvellous fulness. Never before, and never perhaps since, has pictorial art been so universally the speech of a nation; never has it been more various and abundant. Instead of being the handmaid of religion or the adornment of a court, it is now for the first time itself: full-blooded, active, exuberant, scorning nothing, attempting everything. Modern with all the added richness that the modern spirit allows in life and art, it reflects the just pride and joy of a great nation arrived, through incredible struggle and privation, at victory and peace.

Yet more wonderful even than this abundance is the fine tact, the instinctive judgment, which guided such profuse creation.

For in all the great painters of Holland there is the same sure choice of subjects proper to painting, the same sure avoidance of what does not lend itself so much to painting as to some other expression of art. Religious pictures in the old sense, pictures intended for churches, were forbidden by the Protestant spirit. No court existed to patronise the painters. Yet they seemed unconscious of being cut off from any province. In the life around them they found overflowing material, and their choice of subject was invariably simple, never a complex product like the engravings of Dürer, half literary in their interest; never anecdotic or moral. An excellent tradition was begun, which lasted through the century.

Nor was this tradition due to the creative impulse of one man. There was nothing in Holland parallel to the renovation, the re-creation rather, of Flemish art by Rubens. Rembrandt came near the beginning, but he did not start the period. One cannot say precisely how this great tradition began; it seems as if the flowering time came all at once throughout the country, with the mysterious suddenness of spring. Till the seventeenth century, it was Italy from which Dutch artists took their inspiration, but henceforward it is a native impulse. Only men of lesser importance went to paint at Rome, and even then they took there more than they brought away.

III

Considered as etchers, the Dutch masters range themselves somewhat differently.

Only a few, seemingly, realised the specific capacities and limitations of etching: the rest regarded it merely as a method of reproducing their drawings, as an easier kind of engraving. This was probably the conception of those who first applied acid to metal for the purpose of reproducing designs, at the beginning of the sixteenth century: the art had been formerly employed only in the damascening of swords or armour. Albert Dürer is an exception; for, though he did not develop the method far, he saw that it required a different kind of handling from that suitable for the burin; and in his few etched plates the work is freer and more open than that of his line-engravings.

The first men to use etching extensively were the Hopfer family of Augsburg, who produced a great number of prints, chiefly decorative designs.

It was employed in landscape by Altdorfer, Hirschvogel, Lautensack, and others among the Little Masters. But these did little more than

carry on the Nürnberg tradition of engraving, through another medium. They had little or no influence on the Dutchmen.

A new and powerful stimulus, however, was to be given to etching with the beginning of the seventeenth century, by the prolific and famous French artist, Jacques Callot. Born in 1592, Callot produced a great mass of work before his death in 1638, and his etchings, by which alone he is known, had a great popularity in his lifetime. In 1624 he was invited to Brussels by the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, and was commissioned by her to commemorate the Siege of Breda, an event which also occasioned a masterpiece to Velasquez, the famous Lances of Madrid. Callot undoubtedly brought the art into prominence and favour in the Netherlands. Yet of direct influence over either Flemings or Dutchmen, Callot had little or none. His spirit was too essentially French, his method too individual, for him to be imitated by men of such different race and temperament.

In 1627, however, Callot met, at Nancy, Claude Lorraine, and probably instructed him in etching. Claude left Nancy for Italy in the same year, and in the following year etched his first plates. Between 1630 and 1663, he published a considerable number, among them some of exquisite delicacy and beauty. And from these etchings many of the Dutchmen derive their inspiration; and Claude is said to have employed men like Swaneveldt, Andries Both, and Jan Miel for inserting figures in his landscapes.

Another foreign master who exercised a widespread influence over the Dutch etchers was the German, Adam Elsheimer. Traces of this influence pervade the history of Dutch art, as Dr. Bode in his Studien zur Geschichte der hollädndischen Malerei has very fully demonstrated.

Elsheimer etched a few plates; but, with all deference to Dr. Bode’s authority, we find it difficult to attach to them the importance which he gives them. Through the etchings and engravings made from his pictures Elsheimer was undoubtedly a source of inspiration to the Dutchmen, but scarcely through the rare and by no means remarkable plates which he etched himself.

The real importance of Elsheimer, and the secret of his fascination over his contemporaries, lie in his fresh treatment of light and shade. Problems of lighting occupied his contemporaries, Caravaggio and Honthorst, but these devoted their skill chiefly to effects of double lighting and strong contrast; it was the rendering of luminous shadow and subtle tones of twilight that Elsheimer was the first to attack. In this he is a forerunner of Rembrandt, who undoubtedly took suggestions from him, and was helped by him in his own development of chiaroscuro. Rembrandt cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of what Elsheimer had done before him.

But Rembrandt was by no means the only Dutch master who profited by the German’s art. The whole of the Italianised Dutch school at Rome, men like Poelenburg for instance, felt his influence more or less strongly. Nor was he without followers in the native school of landscape painters and etchers in Holland, as we shall see when we come to them.

Elsheimer, in fine, though by no means a great painter, is of considerable historical importance, and the admiration which he excited in his

own day can hardly be over-estimated. So great a man as Rubens admired him so much that he had three of his landscapes on his walls, and made copies from his paintings and designs.

This is the more remarkable, because Rubens rarely occupied himself with the problems that fascinated Elsheimer. And while these problems were of a kind to appeal to etchers, it was not on etching but on line-engraving, an art admitting little scope for subtlety of chiaroscuro, that Rubens cast his potent influence. Without using the burin himself, he employed a number of brilliant engravers to reproduce his designs, just as Raphael had employed Marc Antonio for the like purpose. Even in our day, when public picture-galleries are numerous and the distances between various capitals have so immensely shrunk, the fame of the great painters rests still to a large extent on photographs and engravings from their works; it is easy, therefore, to comprehend of what capital importance it was for masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to secure competent interpreters.

Line-engraving was admirably suited for the reproduction of pictures like those of Rubens, with their large design and flowing sweep. And so potent was Rubens’s example, that etching found in Belgium only a few isolated, and with the single exception of Vandyck, unimportant followers.

In Holland it was just the reverse. Perhaps it was the result of some vital difference in temperament between the Flemings and the Dutchmen, such as caused the one country to embrace the severer, soberer religion of Protestantism, while the other clung to the more ancient creed of Rome, with its strong appeal to the senses; at any rate, it seems characteristic that line-engraving, with its capacity for reproducing qualities of splendour and spacious action, should have found in Antwerp its most effective, various, and brilliant exposition, while the plainer, more self-contained, more intense spirit of the great Dutchmen developed the more personal, intimate, subtle art of etching, as it had never been developed before.

But Dutchmen, no less than Flemings, felt the need for reproducing their designs, and here arose a difficulty. For etching is not, in spite of modern successes, so well adapted to reproduction as line-engraving is.

As we have said, it was only a certain number of the Dutchmen who divined this. Rembrandt, of course, perceived it; and though he spread his fame by working steadily on copper as well as on canvas, he made his etched work independent of his painting and never a simple reproduction of pictures. Lesser men had not the intelligence to do as he did; and many of the artists of whom we shall treat, though they produced fine work on copper, cannot be esteemed true etchers.

We will begin our studies with one who was, beyond dispute, a born etcher, Ostade.

OSTADE AND HIS SCHOOL

Haarlem, M. Vosmaer has said, is in two things like Florence. It is a city of flowers and a city of artists. Its archives show that from an early time the arts flourished and were fostered there. Money was never grudged for fine work in every branch of skilful industry, no less than for good painting and good sculpture. The goldsmith, the potter, the leather-worker, the stone-cutter, could find employment for their powers and remuneration worth their skill. Haarlem was, in fact, a type of those busy and prosperous cities where it seems that art thrives best; for though art and commerce are often supposed to have a natural disagreement, history shows them to have been the most apt companions.

But the city of Dierick Bouts, of Albert van Ouwater, of Jan Scorel, was at the time of Ostade’s birth, in a condition even more favourable for the production of fine work than it had been in the fifteenth and following centuries. In 1573 occurred the famous siege by the Spaniards. Those who had borne the burden of those terrible days were now growing old; but the young generation received and handed on their heroic memories, unembittered by thoughts of loss, suffering, or defeat. And when, in 1609, peace came, and the United Provinces, acknowledged by Spain, turned to enjoy their victorious repose, there was added the sense of triumph to that of trials endured. It was the great time for Holland. Her soldiers were famed as the finest in Europe. Her navy was the most powerful, the best-manned. Her cities grew, and wealth poured into them. A universal well-being pervaded the country, and a spirit of joy and of expansion, like the glow of health, diffused itself in the citizens.

It was natural that art, too, should feel this new influence. And in Haarlem, where the siege had destroyed so much of the old town, and modern buildings of warm red brick had sprung round the vast surviving monument of the middle ages, the Groote Kerk of St. Bavon; in Haarlem especially, a new spirit, intensely modern, began to possess the rising painters. From art which lavished its parade of dexterity on the old mythological fables, handled without heart or meaning, from the smooth and pallid conventionalities of Cornelis Corneliszoon, and the extravagant cleverness of Goltzius, these men turned to the life that was around them. Among them were artists like Jan de Bray, Esaias van de Velde, Dirk and Frans Hals. It was in the studio of Frans Hals that the young Ostade learnt to paint. Already in 1616, Hals had painted his superb group of the civic guard, and was now in the fulness of his extraordinary power. The exuberant joy and energy, the confident sincerity, the swift and certain touch, intimate with realities, that marked Hals, were typical of the country and the time. Life—that is the

absolute necessity for such an artist: for him everything that has life is a possible subject, a possible realm to conquer. A subject that he cannot feel, as well as conceive, his instinct rejects at once. A great pride of life is what characterises Hals’ pictures human life in all its fulness he accepts: unhindered by the shrinkings of more fastidious natures, he enjoys with a robust enjoyment.

It is the same also with Ostade; but the pupil was too individual an artist to repeat his master. Ostade felt, perhaps, that he could never rival those magnificent portrait-groups, and his own preferences, his own gifts, led him to a different choice of subject.

Perhaps some who have seen Ostade’s pictures and found them coarse and ignoble, have imagined the painter of them to be equally coarse and ignoble-looking as his boors. His portrait shows him a man of somewhat severe, keen countenance, in plain attire; a grave man, one would say, with humour lurking in his gravity, as often happens; it is a portrait that might be taken for that of an Englishman of the Commonwealth. Ostade was, in fact, a well-to-do citizen of the middle class. His collection of pictures, sold at his death in 1685, was, as we know from the Haarlem Gazette, extensive; and the fact that it contained two hundred of his own paintings, proves that he was, unlike so many of his compeers, far removed from want.

Of Ostade’s life, apart from his production, we know almost nothing. He was a member of the Oude Schuts, the ancient and honourable Company of Arquebusiers. He was married twice; first, in 1636, to Machtelgen Pietersen, who died in 1642; and again to a second wife, whose name is not known, by whom he had a girl, Johanna Maria. This daughter married a surgeon, Dirk van der Stoel, into whose hands Ostade’s etched plates and proofs passed at his death.

In 1647 and 1661 Ostade is mentioned as a member of the government of the Guild. In 1662, he was dean of the Guild. An incident of his earlier years is of interest, as showing his liberal spirit. In 1642 he joined Salomon Ruysdael, at a meeting of the Guild, in protesting against the policy of protection, which inspired Haarlem Guild, like many others, to oppose the importation of works of art from other towns or their sale in Haarlem.

Ostade seems never to have travelled, like many of his countrymen, beyond the borders of Holland, nor ever to have changed his home, except from one street of Haarlem to another.

He died in 1685.

On an early afternoon of May his body was carried from his house in the Kuis-straat to the Groote Kerk, a little company of his friends following.

II

With most of the Dutch artists, etching was a subordinate accomplishment, and their work on copper is but a less interesting reflection of their work on canvas. This cannot be said of Ostade. As with Rembrandt, his etched work is the complement, rather than a supplement merely, of his painting. To the present writer, indeed, his etchings have more interest than his pictures. The latter are numerous; they may be seen in almost all galleries of importance, and the reader is doubtless familiar with their characteristics. Delightful as they often are, they do not rival those of Adriaen Brouwer, who was by four years Ostade’s senior, and who, though born a Fleming, worked mostly in Holland, and entered Hals’ studio at the same time. There are a few plates attributed to Brouwer; but, if genuine, these show that he never thoroughly mastered the technique of etching; none of them approaches the least successful plates of Ostade. Brouwer as a painter, on the other hand, surpasses beyond question all the painters of peasant life, whether of Holland or of Flanders.

Ostade does not manage paint with the freedom of a great master, but his drawing is always superb. The drawing reproduced (Fig. 3) is a characteristic specimen. It is the end of a game of backgammon. The game is won, but the defeated player refuses to accept his defeat without a careful scrutiny. In the attitudes, the gestures of players and onlookers, everything is vital; the moment is admirably caught.

There is an etching also of a game of backgammon, but it does not directly illustrate the drawing.

Ostade did, however, make use of sketches for his etchings. There is in the British Museum a sketch for The Father of a Family (B. 33). A comparison of this with the etched plate is interesting. There is a certain affinity to Rembrandt in the manner of drawing; less summary and swift, but masterful and free. And, like Rembrandt, Ostade does not use his sketch as a finished thing, and copy it faithfully and minutely. His