Part 3

In technical character, these etchings recall the Spanish etcher Goya, who was also fond of producing a sharp, vivid, emphatic effect by a similar artificial manner of lighting. Not improbably Bega’s etchings may have been known to Goya, and given him a suggestion.

Bega had apparently no tenderness, and little or no interest in

humanity. This deficiency, in one of the Dutch school, and trained in the Dutch tradition, is notable. One has only to turn from his mother and baby sitting by the window (B. 21) to Ostade’s _Child and Doll_, to feel what a difference lies between the two.

Cornelis Dusart was a much later scholar. At Bega’s death he was only a child of four, and he survived Ostade many years, living on till 1704. When Ostade died, he finished his master’s uncompleted pictures, but kept them till his death in his own possession.

Some of Dusart’s etchings, as for instance _The Village Fête_ (B. 16) have a pleasing effect, with well-managed light and shade; but they cannot be compared with the similar pieces by Ostade, whose method is here carried on, but in an inferior manner. Yet he has a vein of his own, a gross, riotous, extravagant vein, with a great fondness for violent action. In the plate called by Bartsch _Le Violon Assis_ (B. 15), which was too large to be reproduced here, his specific qualities appear to great advantage.

One seems to hear an hilarious din merely from looking at it. The fiddler plays with a wild fantastic energy; one peasant accompanies him with crashing tankard and roaring chorus; another sits bent and sullen with his head on his hands. The landlord, with huge frame and round paunch, looks on with twinkling eyes. A woman by the great chimney, on which hangs the notice of a sale of tulips and hyacinths, “Tulpaan en Hyacinthen,” calls a child to her. The roomy background with its beams and rafters, is drawn and lighted with extraordinary skill. As a page of daily life, fresh and vivid, this etching deserves the fullest praise.

Dusart in his later years devoted himself to mezzotint, and produced a great deal in this manner. These engravings, some of which represent in Dusart’s extravagant way, the joy in Holland at the taking of Namur in 1695 by William III., are more interesting historically than artistically. It was not till the middle of next century that mezzotint, the invention of which does not date from much earlier than Dusart’s birth, reached its perfection in the hands of the English engravers.

THE ETCHERS OF LANDSCAPE

I

The seventeenth century, which inaugurated so much that is characteristic in modern art, permitted for the first time the recognition of landscape as a subject worthy for its own sake of painting. And feeling for landscape seems to be almost entirely a modern thing.

Drawings of landscape by Titian and Campagnola among the Italians, and by Dürer among the Germans, had indicated the first beginnings of a preference; and there are a certain number of landscape subjects among the engraved work of the Little Masters. But these are occasional efforts by men whose chief work lay in other lines. In painting no one ventured as yet to concentrate his interest on the landscape, and though men like the Flemish Joachim Patinir evidently cared more for their backgrounds of mountain and river than for the human incidents which relieve them, they had not the courage to cast away compromise and brave authority by omitting the traditional foreground.

Rubens is the first great Northern master who paints landscape with entire and frank abandonment to the subject. The broad prospects and swelling undulations of Flemish country are painted by him with a kind of glory that reflects his large and joyous mind. Lodowyck de Vadder and Lucas van Uden, his contemporaries, etched landscape for the first time in Flanders. But it was in Holland that this line was most abundantly developed. To tranquil, observant natures, such as seem typical of the nation, there was in landscape a strong appeal, a permanent delight. The majority of the Dutch etchers found here their chief material.

II

Earliest, perhaps, of all Dutch landscape painters, and almost certainly earliest among Dutch landscape etchers, is a little known artist, Hercules Seghers. A mystery hangs over him; for though there is documentary evidence in an inventory of 1625 or thereabouts, that he painted a considerable number of landscapes, these pictures have nearly all disappeared. Some, doubtless, may be lurking under other names; one, called a Rembrandt, was discovered some time ago at Florence; one is at Berlin; but this can hardly account for all. We can only guess what they were like from the etchings, which are usually either views

of Holland with vast horizons, or strange visions of wild and mountainous country. Seghers was born in 1589,[3] and died in 1650. A scholar of Gillis van Connincxloo, he was producing work as early as 1607, and from that date to 1630 seems to have been his chief period of activity.[4] His life, like that of several of the Dutch masters, was a long and hopeless struggle against poverty. He is said to have become a drunkard, and to have died from the effects of a fall. Dr. Bredius, judging apparently from his work, thinks that he must have visited the Alps, travelled into Italy, and found a stimulus in the art of Adam Elsheimer. Certainly the rocky landscapes which appear in the etchings could have no archetypes in Holland. But there is so strong a vein of the fantastic in them, that it is difficult to believe they were done from nature, especially when one observes how precise a pencil Seghers uses when he sketches his native country. However, truth to mountain formation is anything but an easy thing to seize; only by incessant training and close observation does the eye acquire it; and to draw rocks imaginatively, that is, with vivid realisation of their essential forms, is scarcely possible to one who has not the work of predecessors to learn from and to surpass, and whose eye has not dwelt upon them from childhood. One may imagine, therefore, that the efforts of a lowlander, to whom mountains must have had something visionary and strange in their aspect, would be halting, laborious, and confused in grappling with such unfamiliar material. The rocks painted by Patinir are a case in point. This may well explain the singular shortcomings of Seghers’ rendering of rocks and mountains. In his attempts to represent floating clouds on the mountain sides he is simply grotesque.

If, then, it was actual scenery that Seghers etched, where is that scenery to be found? It is certainly not the Alps, and though one or two plates suggest the Tyrol, the landscape is most like in character to the Karst district on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. One of the etchings might almost stand for the rock-surrounded plain of Cettinjé, in Montenegro, though to infer that Seghers travelled to so remote a country would be a wild conjecture.

There can be no doubt, on the other hand, of the influence of Elsheimer over Seghers, and through him, over Rembrandt.

In the National Gallery there is a picture by Elsheimer representing _Tobias and the Angel_, in a wooded landscape. This was engraved by Elsheimer’s friend, Count de Goudt, and either from the picture or the engraving,[5] Seghers borrowed the main features of one of his etchings (Fig. 12). The two chief figures have been retained almost unaltered; but their being placed higher up in the picture makes a considerable change in the composition, they have more dignity and significance. The elimination, also, of some rather trivial details, such as the great flowers in the foreground, and the passing figures in the middle distance, make for the same effect. A kind of mystery and solemnity have been added to the landscape, and in fact the impression of the whole is deepened and enlarged. The subject has been fused in Seghers’ mind and has become his own.

At his death, Seghers’ effects, including his etched plates, were sold. Among the buyers of these latter were, apparently, Antoni Waterloo and Rembrandt. Waterloo published some of Seghers’ landscapes with his own, and it has been assumed by Dutuit that these impressions were from the earlier artist’s plates, re-worked. Comparison of one of the original etchings, however, with that published by Waterloo of the same subject, leads the writer to doubt this. The work is entirely different.

Rembrandt, we know from the inventory of his effects taken in 1656, bought six of Seghers’ landscapes, and he also bought the copper on which had been etched the _Tobias and the Angel_. It was re-worked by Rembrandt, and it now appears in Rembrandt’s work as a _Flight into Egypt_.[6] (See Fig. 13.)

The dark wooded landscape remains unaltered, and though the Holy Family and a group of trees now occupy the right hand of the scene, the great wing of the angel is still distinctly to be seen above them, and Tobias’s legs have not been perfectly erased.

Rembrandt, we may be sure, would never have taken another man’s work unless he had found in it a strong appeal to his own nature. And Seghers seems to have been his prototype in landscape. On the one hand, the mysterious, darkly wooded, mountainous visions of Seghers suggest the type of landscape in which Rembrandt set, for instance, his own _Tobias and the Angel_,[7] a type which he was fond of reproducing. On the other hand, Seghers’ love for the vast distances of Holland, crowded plains with broad rivers winding into an infinite horizon, appears again in some of Rembrandt’s etchings, and more notably still in those spacious prospects, “escapes for the mind” as Mr. Pater has called them, of Rembrandt’s pupil, the most truly Dutch and perhaps the greatest, of all the landscape painters of Holland--Philip de Koninck.

To return to Seghers’ etchings. There is something about them which arrests the eye at once, and this is partly due to their peculiar printing. Seghers was a born maker of experiments, and in nearly all his plates sought to get an effect of colour. In fact, it is usually asserted

that he anticipated, by a hundred years, the coloured engravings of Leblond.

Printing in colour from two or more blocks had been practised by wood-engravers long before this time. Burgkmair and Cranach in Germany, Ugo da Carpi and Andrea Andreani in Italy, had produced a number of these “chiaroscuros,” as they are called, with charming effect. This was about the beginning of the sixteenth century. And almost in Seghers’ own time, Hendrik Goltzius, of Haarlem, published some of his best work from coloured wood-blocks.

But in all of these cases, at least two, and often three separate blocks were used, and the colours superimposed on each other. This was also the procedure of Leblond, though he used metal plates and mezzotint.

Seghers, however, employed a single plate only, and his effects are not due to what is usually understood as colour printing. He first prepared his paper with a coat of paint, which formed the ground; in some cases this was a greenish tint. He then etched his subject and printed it in an indigo ink; and in order to procure shading of the same colour, he lightly scratched the parts to be shaded with the dry-point, so that the copper held the ink on its surface. By this simple means he produced an apparently complex effect.[8]

The green tint and dark-blue ink are, of course, only taken as a specimen, for Seghers used various colours. Sometimes the impressions are printed on linen. In one case the etching is printed in white on a brown ground.

Besides views of Dutch plains and of mountain scenery, Seghers also etched trees; not with great success, but with a striving after truth of foliage very rare in his day. Now and then, too, he attempted buildings, and with a real feeling for the romantic, for picturesque beauty, in architecture.

On the whole, we must allow an important place in the history of Dutch landscape to Hercules Seghers. But that must not prevent us from perceiving that it is an historical importance only. Seghers opened up the road, but he achieved no eminent triumph himself. Nor, in spite of his suggestiveness for Rembrandt and De Koninck, does he seem to have exercised any great influence on the landscape etchers who immediately succeeded him.

He has no affinity with the men whose work we must now consider.

III

The two diverging tendencies of Dutch art, that which fed on the Italian tradition and that which clung to the native soil, are both to some extent represented in Seghers.

Leaving for a time the Italianised masters, let us follow the main development of Dutch landscape art, the painters and etchers whom Holland alone inspired.

The first names of note are those of Esaias and Jan van de Velde. Jan was born in 1596, Esaias a few years earlier. Of the former we shall say something later on. He produced a great deal of work, the most remarkable part of which is a number of plates engraved and etched in the manner of Elsheimer. It is by these plates that he is best known, and through them he ranks as one of the Italianised school. As, however, he etched a certain number of purely Dutch landscapes, after the designs probably of his brother, he must also be mentioned here. These landscapes are mostly sets of traditional subjects, such as the sixteenth century loved: _The Four Elements_, _The Four Seasons_, _The Twelve Months_. Always strongly overworked with the burin, these etchings have a somewhat harsh and dry effect. The harshness is especially noticeable in the treatment of foliage. It is as if the artist were striving to reproduce with the etching-needle the manner of line-engraving as employed by the Goltzius school. Failing to secure this he has recourse to the burin to supplement his incomplete success in etching.

Esaias uses the acid in a much franker fashion. A plate of his, which we may take as representative, depicts a whale cast on the shores of Holland, perhaps at Scheveningen, in 1614. A great crowd has assembled on the beach staring at the stranded monster, examining and measuring its vast proportions. The dunes recede in the distance; boats are at anchor in the surf.

The scene is treated with the plainness and sincerity characteristic of Dutch art. And the etching, with its firmly and rather coarsely bitten lines, unsophisticated by the burin, has a solidity and simplicity not without attraction.

Regarded as etching, this is primitive work. Still it is genuine etching, and by one who has perceived that needle and acid demand an employment and an aim different in kind from that of the graver. It is interesting, therefore, to compare this plate with the line-engraving of a similar subject, representing another whale stranded, a few years before, in 1598, by Jacob Matham, the pupil of Goltzius.

With the Van de Veldes it is natural to associate two contemporaries, who with them helped to inaugurate the great age of Dutch art; Pieter

Molyn, the elder, and Jan van Goyen, the latter born in the same year with Jan van de Velde.

Molyn, who was born in London, but was working in Haarlem before 1616, is an artist of real independence. A set of etchings, published in 1626, shows the same qualities that appear in his drawings--firm draughtsmanship, openness and freedom of design, and a fine economy of means. Heaths and moors, a climbing country road with plodding waggon, a wayside inn, such were the simple elements which he translated into always distinguished work. Doubtless to Molyn’s teaching must be attributed something of that fine manner which imparts so much charm to the pictures of Gerard Ter Borch, his pupil.

Dying in 1656, Molyn survived by a few years one who, though not a pupil, came certainly under his influence; Van Goyen. Till lately Van Goyen, perhaps because his works are better known, was supposed to have been Molyn’s teacher, or at least to have given a stimulus to his art. Van Goyen shows more power in his drawings than in his paintings, which are sometimes but little removed from sepia monochromes; and it is a surprise to come, here and there, upon a picture of his which is bright and fresh. The few etchings which he published are undated, but belong, according to Dr. Lippman, to his middle life, 1625-30. They

have not the character of Molyn’s plates, and are far less good as etchings.

Simon de Vlieger, who ranks in date as a younger contemporary of the Van de Veldes and of Molyn, is more successful as an etcher in the few plates which he produced, than any of the early landscape artists. Unhampered by the traditions of the line-engraver, he aims at an effect at once delicate and free. As a painter, he is known almost entirely by sea-pieces, silvery in tone, from which Jan van de Cappelle drew something of his mastery over still effects at sea, mornings of sleepy mist through which the sun breaks palely on the sails of anchored vessels. Like most of the Dutch painters, de Vlieger changed his home several times. Born at Rotterdam in 1600, he was at Delft from 1634 to 1640, and from then till his death, nineteen years later, at Amsterdam. It seems probable that here he gave lessons to the young Willem van de Velde, who was afterwards to be famous as the greatest of Dutch sea-painters, and who died at Greenwich, a Court painter to Charles II.

In his etchings, which are undated, de Vlieger does not attempt the sea; though one (B. 10), a fine piece in its way, is a scene on the sea-beach, with fishermen and their haul. The best of the plates are two Sylvan pieces, _The Wood by the Canal_ (B. 6), and the _Grassy Hill_ (B. 7). The foliage is more sensitively treated than it commonly is by Dutch etchers, and with more approach to delicate truth. There is also a set of animals and poultry; possibly one of the earliest sets of subjects of this kind, which the middle of the century found so popular.

IV

With Allardt van Everdingen (1621-1675) we reach a new element in Dutch landscape. Working under Pieter Molyn at Haarlem, he began by painting marine subjects; and with a view to increasing his knowledge of the sea, took ship on the Baltic. But a storm drove him to Norway; and there for some time, taking advantage of misfortune, he lingered travelling and sketching.

Before 1645, however--that is before he was twenty-five, Everdingen was back in Haarlem. He now began to paint pictures from his Norwegian sketches: and to the Dutch public this northern scenery disclosed a novel charm. Used to wide pastures and ample skies, they found a romantic strangeness in tumbling streams among rocks and pine-forests, where the sky was shut off by mountain slopes.

In 1652 Everdingen removed to Amsterdam, where he remained till his death. Probably his fame had preceded him: at any rate his popularity soon grew great there also, and his canvases were much sought after.

Besides numerous pictures, the Norwegian sketches provided the artist with material for a long series of etchings. Fig. 15 is a very characteristic specimen of them. Without any extraordinary qualities, they have often a genuine charm. The Norwegian landscape is treated with insight into its peculiar features, and though Everdingen fails entirely to suggest the rush and foam of torrents, he makes fine use of the log cabins, rafts, and palings, and etches pines with truth and spirit.

Of a probably later date are the four views of a watering-place, possibly Spa, one of which is here reproduced (Fig. 16). The subject is

interesting, and the handling of the buildings and the groups of people is excellent.

Everdingen was not without humour, which is shown in the long series of illustrations to _Reynard the Fox_. But most readers will probably find the chief interest of the artist to lie in his relations with a greater man, Ruisdael.

V

Though a native of Haarlem, Jacob van Ruisdael produced most of his life’s work at Amsterdam. He is conjectured to have been born about 1625; the precise year has not been discovered. His father Isaak, a frame-maker, had him trained as a surgeon; and it was not till after he had passed a course of surgery that he abandoned the profession for painting, in which he had early shown his gift.

Ruisdael’s first pictures are dated 1646, and his works from that year to 1655, his “early period,” are nearly all views of Haarlem and its neighbourhood. Thoroughly Dutch in character, they have little of that gloomy tone so frequent in the artist’s later time. The beautiful _View of Haarlem_ at the Hague, with its massed clouds and ray of sunshine gliding over the plain, is a perfect example of this early manner.

With Ruisdael’s removal from Haarlem, a great change comes over his art. There seems no doubt that his early Dutch landscapes were not popular. They were perhaps too original. He came to Amsterdam poor and without much reputation, and he found there, established in fame and popularity, Allardt van Everdingen, returned from Norway and now attracting the world of buyers by his pictures of that wild and romantic country. It was in 1652, as we have seen, that Everdingen settled in the city, and three or four years later Ruisdael arrived. He did not become a burgess till 1659, but had probably been already some years in residence before the formal inscription of his name.

From this period dates the lamentable change in Ruisdael’s art. The master, whose native independence is so marked that one is at a loss to name his probable teacher, of his own will and in sheer mortification of spirit at his want of success, forces himself from the meadows and dunes of his delight, and invents, to win the patronage of the rich men of Amsterdam, a Norway of his own. A visit to North Germany, of which there is some evidence, helped his invention. Now begins the long series of waterfalls and pines and torrents so familiar in the picture galleries. It is not on these that Ruisdael’s fame rests; on this ground Everdingen, in spite of his inferior merits as a painter, remains his master. But as the pictures of this period are the most common, the public is apt to identify him with this acquired style in which the true Ruisdael is obscured. For this reason it was a fortunate choice which secured for the National Gallery, two years ago, so exquisite a specimen of the painter at his best as the _Shore at Scheveningen_, No. 1390. The chilly ending of an afternoon, with clouds blowing up and the rain beginning, the vexed movement of shallow water as the rising wind breaks it into short waves, the wetness of the spray-laden atmosphere, are painted with a sensitive subtlety that more modern landscape, with all its triumphs, has not excelled. The mood of feeling here expressed is intimately Ruisdael’s own. Without the brooding melancholy which became oppressively habitual later, which found such grandiose expression in pictures like the famous _Jews’ Burying-place_ at Dresden, there is here a latent sadness that seems to have been bred in the fibre of the man. It seems a kind of expectation of sorrow; the mood that poetry with greater intensity has expressed in some lines of Browning which suggest themselves:

The rain set early in to-night; The sullen wind was soon awake: It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake. I listened, with heart fit to break....