Part 4

For such a nature who would predict happiness? Fortune satisfied that inborn melancholy to the full. The years brought increasing poverty, and the cares of providing for himself and for his father wore the artist down. The autumn of 1681 found him ill and helpless; so helpless that the religious community to which he belonged, the sect of Mennonites, procured admission for him to their almshouse at Haarlem. There he lingered till the next spring. In March he was buried in St. Bavon’s.

VI

Ruisdael’s etchings are but twelve, or perhaps thirteen, in number; only seven being catalogued by Bartsch. Their fewness shows, what their technical qualities confirm, that the artist neither had great aptitude for this method of expression nor cared to pursue his experiments in it far. They all belong to his earliest period. One, the _Three Oaks_ (B. 6), is dated 1649, and it is difficult to assign any of the others, except possibly the _Cornfield_, to a later date.

Of the four large plates, the one which Bartsch calls _Les Voyageurs_ (B. 4), is decidedly the most interesting. It is a forest scene, wild and intricate, with water running or standing in pools among the great roots of the oak which occupies the centre and of the beech which fills the left. The two figures are passing in the middle distance, where the wood is clearer. It is a remnant, perhaps, of that vast forest which at one time covered the whole of Holland. Ruisdael’s strong feeling for old trees, for the solitude of forests, densely branching and mysterious, inspires him here; and one has only to turn to the facile etchers of sylvan scenery, Waterloo or Swanevelt, or Van der Cabel, to realise the difference between the man who feels what he cannot perfectly master and the man who has perfect mastery of a facile formula. Ruisdael never succeeded in finding a quite satisfactory convention for foliage in etched line; but his continual feeling after truth of rendering, his sensitiveness, to which the forms of branch and leaf are always fresh and wonderful, make his work always interesting.

The three other large plates (B. 1-3) are less successful handlings of the same kind of subject. Though the first, _The Little Bridge_, is not a forest scene, and represents a decayed old farm-building, it is penetrated with the same feeling for picturesque, moss-grown antiquity and neglected solitude. The _Three Oaks_ are etched with truth and strength, but they do not rival the grandeur of the oak in the larger plate. The _Cornfield_ (Fig. 17) is sunny and pleasant.

There are two states of the four large plates, and many of the _Three Oaks_ and the _Cornfield_. As the later states are by far the more common, it is well to be warned that the plates have been retouched, and, in the writer’s opinion, certainly not by Ruisdael. In the first three a pudding-shaped cloud, with hard, bulging edges (what a satire on this consummate master of clouds!) has been inserted, and in all there is fresh work, sometimes adding to the effect of the plate, but still suggesting an alien hand.

Ruisdael’s etching is little more than an illustration of his painting; criticism, therefore, of the one must deal to a certain extent with the other.

Ruisdael’s great fame rests, perhaps, as much on his historical importance as on his actual merit. With Hobbema he prepared the way for Crome and Constable, and through them for Rousseau and the landscape of modern France. But, taken on his own merits, he is a considerable figure. Were it not for the fatiguing series of unpersuasive waterfalls, which too often represent him, his real qualities would have more chance of making themselves felt. When on his own ground he is

more various, more subtle, altogether finer than Hobbema, except when Hobbema is at his very best, as in the severely charming _Avenue of Middleharnis_. Hobbema often fails to convince, because he has not sufficiently felt his subject; and so he will paint a grand sky with the wind moving great clouds across it, but when he comes to the trees of his foreground he forgets his sky, and paints the branches in a breathlessly stiff atmosphere, without the suggestion of a wind. The resulting effect is a perplexing heaviness. Ruisdael betrays the same defect in his later pictures; what else could one expect from one condemned to produce unrealities for a market? But in his good period he always shows an impressible imagination, and his materials are fused by the feeling in which he steeps them. His sense for the beauty of trees is profound, though rather limited in its range. He was lacking in the consummate style of Crome, and would never have achieved the largeness and reticent power of a picture like the English master’s _Avenue at Chapel Fields_. But for skies, for clouds, he has an eye more true, a love more comprehensive, than those of any who had gone before him, than those of many who were to follow him. He piles his clouds in mountainous glory, “trailing” their shadows over the wide country, till the level pastures of Holland grow in “visionary majesties” like the grandest mountains of Norway. This gives us all the more reason to deplore the absence of any attempt to deal with clouds in the etchings, still more the presence of those inflated shapes inserted by a stupid publisher.

VII

Though an important figure in the history of landscape painting, Ruisdael did not strongly influence the contemporary etchers of landscape. Hobbema, his famous scholar, did not, so far as we know, etch at all. A few etchers, however, felt Ruisdael’s stimulus more or less: Van Beresteyn, who was working at Haarlem in 1644, and produced some etchings somewhat in the manner of Ruisdael’s _Cornfield_, but with a mannered treatment of trees: H. Naiwincx, who handled a delicate point, and etched a set of graceful plates of woodland and river: and Adriaen Verboom, who in his two or three etchings is perhaps more successful in treatment of trees than any of the Dutchmen.

But more celebrated than any of these is Antoni Waterloo.

His etchings, to which alone he owes his reputation, are considerably over a hundred in number; and as the subjects are monotonous, they soon become tedious. Groups of trees by a roadside, or a fringe of wood alone occupy Waterloo’s needle. Now and then, as in B. 28, the touch is light and the effect pleasant: but having once found a formula, Waterloo is content to repeat it. His foliage is hard and heavy.

Roelant Roghman (1597-1686), though most of his plates are nominally topographical, shows more feeling, if less skill. One set of plates by him illustrates the Dutch postal system between the mother country and the East Indies, and has therefore an historical interest.

But Roghman’s chief claim on our concern is that he was the faithful and beloved friend of Rembrandt. His etchings, however, show no trace of Rembrandt’s influence; and he was by ten years the elder man.

Like Seghers and like Ruisdael, Roghman was neglected and miserable in his life, and died in an almshouse. One of his landscapes is in the National Gallery.

VIII

The illustration on page 51 (Fig. 18) is from an etching which represents a certain province of Dutch art, handled by several of the painters with much success, but scarcely touched by the etchers.

Of this group, to whom architecture, whether in the spacious and austere interiors of the Dutch churches, or the squares and ruddy brick house-fronts of the towns, was the chief preoccupation, Jan van der Heyden is the most famous and the best. He is also the one among them who has etched. The illustration, though much reduced, gives a fairly good idea of his work. Master of a precise and patient pencil, Van der Heyden is not content till he has drawn in every brick, every stone. And the marvel is, that in spite of his method, he contrives to convey a certain spirit of largeness into his design. In fact, though so minute in detail, he seems always to have kept his eye on the whole. A pleasant temperate warmth of colour pervades his pictures, the kind of light which on certain days suffuses old brick walls, as if dyed in the sunshine of many summers: and that exquisite order, the almost extravagant cleanliness of Dutch households, makes itself felt in these glimpses of tree-bordered canals, and of trim house-fronts with their well-proportioned windows.

Much of this colour persists even in the black and white of an etching like that reproduced. It is the day after a fire, and a little crowd of neighbours is gathered to look on the burnt remnant of the house. How

excellently are the groups and figures depicted! This is not true etcher’s work; but it is very skilful work, very good work, of its kind.

Neither Van der Heyden, nor any of the Dutch painters of architecture, realised the capacity of outlines in stone or brick, attended by their circumstance of light and shadow, to impress the imagination, to stir emotion, as Méryon was to do later. But their work, by its soberness and firm simplicity, wins us. In its own way, and in its own degree, it will always give pleasure.

IX

From Holland, the first naval power in Europe of the seventeenth century, a love of the sea and an expression of it in art were naturally to be expected: and among the several fine painters who now for the first time made the sea their subject, two at least, Reynier Zeeman and Ludolph Backhuysen, have left some admirable etchings. Simon de Vlieger painted, but did not etch marine subjects; of Jan van de Capelle only three indifferent plates are known; and Willem van de Velde did not etch at all.

Zeeman’s real name was Nooms; but his love of the sea procured him early the name which he adopts on all his plates. He travelled much, but worked chiefly at Amsterdam, where probably he was born in 1623.

Zeeman’s etchings are nearly all in sets, representing views of Amsterdam, different kinds of Dutch shipping, and naval battles. They passed through the hands of several publishers, who, we may conjecture, commissioned him to do them: and they were evidently popular. Such work, nominally and primarily intended to serve a literary rather than a pictorial purpose, suffers in consequence. The artist has had to choose his subjects with a view to those whose interest was not in the etcher as etcher, but in his knowledge of ships and skill in depicting them.

Yet Zeeman has managed to serve art as well as history. Ships, with their ordered intricacy of rigging and their mysterious beauty, have an endless fascination for him: for it is shipping, rather than the sea itself, which he loves. And his ships are etched with an admirable feeling, a simple and effective handling of the bitten lines. His men of war move with royal stateliness; and the battle-pieces have something of the magnificence one imagines in the old sea-fights. Equally good in their way are plates like the fishing boats (Fig. 19) setting out at morning over the still sea, bathed in a wash of limpid air and sunshine. Only in his clouds does Zeeman completely fail. Historically, too, these prints are interesting. Here, with patriotic pride, Zeeman is fond of showing the English ship of the line or frigate, with her sails riddled, conquered at last, and with the Dutch tricolour hoisted over the St. George’s Cross. Nothing could more

vividly bring home to Englishmen the powerful position of Holland at the time.

Backhuysen’s etchings are later than Zeeman’s, being all produced in 1701, when the artist was seventy years old,[9] and seven years before his death at Amsterdam. A pupil of Everdingen, he had soon risen to fame and was employed or sought after by many foreign princes, including the Tsar Peter the Great; and from over much production his work suffered.

The etchings, however, though produced so late in life, are neither languid nor feeble. In freshness and vivacity they excel Backhuysen’s drawings. It is the same with Zeeman: probably because the etching-needle has so much more capacity for giving the crispness of foam and the sharp lights of running waves, than pencil and sepia. No one, till Turner came, succeeded at all in painting the mass and weight of water as the tides move it in deep seas; but the easily agitated, breezy motion of the shallow Dutch waters is often suggested with a pleasant freshness by Backhuysen. The best of the etchings is that of the ship under sail, crushing the water under her bows into foam.

X

So far, we have considered only the native school of landscape artists, who took their subjects from Holland and its borders. But towards the end of the sixteenth century there was established in Rome a group of painters from the Netherlands, to which each succeeding generation added new members, whether they settled there for life or stayed only for a few years.

Belonging to this group are a certain number of etchers, deriving originally, in more or less degree, from Elsheimer, and receiving a second and more powerful stimulus from the art of Claude.

Jan van de Velde,[10] it seems probable, spent some years of his manhood in Italy, and perhaps worked under Elsheimer himself. At any rate, a number of his plates are entirely in Elsheimer’s manner. These are so heavily overworked with the burin that they must count rather as line-engravings than as etchings. The burin plays, indeed, a more or less important part in all Jan van de Velde’s prints.

One set, illustrating the story of Tobias, was etched from designs by Moses van Uytenbroeck, an artist who also published a number of plates of his own. Here again is an instance of the traditional chronology being at fault. Uytenbroeck’s birth is usually given as 1600. But Bode has pointed out that there are engravings after his work by an artist who died in 1612. The date must therefore be put back several years. Uytenbroeck is perhaps the nearest to Elsheimer of all his followers. The relation of the figures to the landscape, the curious human types, with their rather stolid, plain faces and heavy gestures, the treatment of Italian landscape, all are intimately akin to the German master’s art.

Elsheimer’s influence still persists strongly in Cornelis Poelenburg, one of the most popular of the Dutch artists in Rome, whose small, smoothly glowing pictures of grottoes and bathing nymphs are familiar in every

gallery. Poelenburg did not etch himself, but his friend Jan Gerritz Bronchorst etched from his paintings and in his style, though with less grace and elegance. We find here the beginnings of that school of landscape, “Arcadian” as Bode calls it, which so soon received its fullest and most perfect expression in the large and tranquil art of Claude.

Pieter de Laer, of whose etchings of animals we shall say something in the next chapter, etched one landscape at least in the delicate soft manner of that master. And with him maybe associated Bartolomeus Breenbergh, who lived in Rome from his twenty-first to his twenty-eighth year, 1620-1627. He was married at Amsterdam in 1633 and died there in 1659 or earlier; but was at Rome again in the interval, during which he published (1640) a set of very attractive little prints. Fig. 20 is an example of his work.

The same delicate, fine needle, and the same preference for the picturesque, characterise the earlier etchings of Thomas Wyck. Later he adopted a freer, broader style, and worked on a larger scale, but with less success.

But the most conspicuous and important of this group is Jan Both. Like Poelenburg, he was a man of Utrecht, where he was born in 1610 and where he died in 1652. His portrait, taken in his later days at home, is that of a stout, grave burgher. Quite young he left the studio of his master Bloemart and travelled through France to Rome. There the soft sunshine of Claude fascinated him and he began to follow in the footsteps of that famous painter.

Every one knows the landscapes of Both, their smooth, rather insipid grace, their premeditated balance of composition, their elegant monotony. It is certain that they were popular in Holland, whither they were brought in ships from Italy to adorn the walls of wealthy buyers. Probably in that day such painting of placid sunshine was a new thing; what we perceive to be a surface acquaintance with Nature savoured almost of intimacy; and doubtless Both’s pretty and monotonous conventions had then a permanent charm.

In his etchings, Both’s weaknesses do not appear so strongly. And, wisely, he did not produce many. Had there been more they would, beyond doubt, have been precisely similar to what we have; and from mere fatigue at their monotony one would have rated them below their worth.

As it is, the ten landscapes after his own designs are more than enough to reveal Both’s great limitations. Yet they are few enough for us to enjoy them. For, after all, they are attractive and accomplished etchings. From Claude, Both had learned how to produce, with a nice management of the acid, an exquisite softness in his distances. The atmosphere is limpid and bathed in sunshine, and the foregrounds are suggested with that light touch and selection of detail which are first requisites in an etching.

Here, again, it is only fair to the artist to judge him by the early states of his work. The ruled lines defacing the sky which they are meant to constitute, were added in the second state by the publisher. Of that there can be little doubt. Unfortunately, Both’s first states are extremely rare.

Both’s pupil, Willem de Heusch, approaches if he does not rival his master. He is not independent enough, however, to merit special notice.

Herman van Swanevelt, another artist whose birth-date must be put further back than the traditional 1620,[11] lived on to 1690, when he died at Rome. His etchings are more considerable in number than in merit. He began the school of reminiscences from Claude and Titian’s landscapes which lingered on through paler and paler repetitions into the eighteenth century, in the sad facility of Genoels and Van der Cabel and Glauber. Never was art more bloodless and apathetic than in these degenerate spoilers of a fine tradition.

THE ETCHERS OF PASTORAL

I

While landscape thus occupied the talent of so many Dutch painters, a certain number struck out a branch apart, choosing subjects that may briefly be called pastoral. For these men the foreground of cattle, the goatherd or the shepherd with his flock, was of greater interest than the background of often quite conventional scenery. Sometimes two or more painters collaborated, and one painted the landscape while another put in the animals.

And as in painting, so in etching. A certain group of men etched nothing but animals, with now and then a landscape. Of these the chief are Paul Potter, Claes Berchem, Adriaen van de Velde, Karel du Jardin.

This love of the domestic animals for their own sake in art seems native and almost peculiar to Holland.

Many painters before this time had shown a remarkable love of animals. From Benozzo Gozzoli to Bassano, individuals among the Italian masters had introduced their favourites, wherever opportunity offered, into sacred and historical compositions. And among the elder contemporaries of the Dutchmen, Rubens, Snyders, and Velasquez had painted dogs and horses as only they could paint them. But it is mainly in hunting pieces, as servants or companions of man, that these painters introduce animals; cattle and sheep do not interest them.

It is the same with the great engravers who preceded the seventeenth-century etchers. Dürer was undoubtedly very fond of animals and engraved them frequently. And that singular master of the fifteenth century, whose name we do not know, but who is generally called the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet from the fact that by far the fullest collection of his prints is at Amsterdam, engraved dogs and horses with a freedom and a vivacity which Dürer never attained, and which were in that period of Northern art unique. This master was long thought a Dutchman, but the type of his faces, among other considerations, marks him as a Swabian artist.

Yet in none of these men appears anything like the peculiar feeling which in Potter, for instance, strikes so strong a note. The glory and

excitement of the chase, so magnificently put on canvas by Rubens, the relish of the boar’s savage fury as the hounds hurl themselves at him, are absolutely alien to that brooding intentness, as alert to catch every curve in the attitude of cattle rising or lying down, as subtle to penetrate to their mysterious non-human existence, so distant and aloof, pervading the Dutchman’s art. It is a mood which fuses the mind into the life it watches, till the delight of cool running water to the cattle, as they plunge in from the hot fields, is as intimately felt as the joy of battle in their charging hounds, which is merely reflected human feeling, is felt by the painters of the hunt.

Thus, while in Flanders painters and etchers like Jan Fyt carried on in their animal pieces the tradition of Rubens and Snyders, a totally different mode of animal painting and etching was springing up in Holland.

“Pastoral,” it is most convenient to call it; but it is not pastoral in the same sense that the word has come to have, as applied to certain types of poetry, whether the _Idylls_ of Theocritus or the _Eclogues_ of Virgil. There, as with the early painters of animals, the human interest is the preoccupying interest; and the poet sings of the peasant’s life in the fields, his industries, his pleasures, his loves and quarrels, either from native love and knowledge of that life, or in a desire no less genuine, if expressed through forms of more or less artificial colouring and outline, for the real simplicity of the country. It is the herdsman, not his herd, that is the pastoral poet’s theme.

Now, for the first time, the artist disengages himself from the point of view of man, and effaces himself before the dumb life he contemplates.

Already, in the engravings of Lucas van Leyden, who, by his early maturity and his early death, his gentle nature and his exquisite skill, seems to stand as a prototype of Paul Potter--a kind of foreshadowing of this attitude appears. But not till the seventeenth century does the vein begin to be developed. Then, by rapid degrees, not through any single influence, but communicated imperceptibly as if “in the air,” the tradition grows.

II

Moses van Uytenbroeck and Claes Moeyart, whose etchings in the style of Elsheimer were mentioned earlier, both produced a certain number of purely pastoral plates. Of Uytenbroeck, we have a set of groups of animals with backgrounds of Campagna landscape, which seem to date from early in the century. And in the later manner of Moeyart, dated 1638, is a group of cattle, sheep, and goats, under shady trees, in a conventional landscape but with an unidealised Dutch herdsman. Neither of these men etched cattle with much knowledge or spirit, though Moeyart was an artist of many-sided talent, and painted pictures that are excellent in their way.

Considerably better is an etching by Jan Gerritz Bleecker, also dated 1638. It is a group of cattle with a cowherd piping, conceived in the pastoral vein of Potter’s _Shepherd_. Here, already, the interest of the artist begins to centre on the animals.