CHAPTER VI

TAVERN SIGNS IN ART--ESPECIALLY IN PICTURES BY THE DUTCH MASTERS

“Als de vien es in der man dan is de wiesheid in de kan.”

Carlyle once complained that the artists preferred to paint “Corregiosities,” creations of their own fancy, instead of representing the historic events of their own times. Only the Dutch painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in so far as they keep clear of the Italian influence, may justly be called true historical painters, certainly with greater reason than the school of historical painting in the nineteenth century, which tried to reconstruct events of epochs long past with the antiquarian help of old armor, swords, costumes, and the like. We will find, therefore, in the works of the Dutch masters the truest historical documents for our modest sphere of investigation.

While Greek art reflected, as in a pure mirror, the harmony of worldly and religious life in Hellas, the mediæval art essentially served religious ideas, but in giving them a visible form used the worldly elements of contemporary costume and architecture. Great artists like Giotto, whose merits the proud words on his tombstone characterize, “Ille ego sum per quem pinctura extincta revixit,” proved themselves the best historians, because they possessed, besides deep religious concentration, the gift of true observation, thus introducing in their works valuable information about the life of their own time.

Not until the dawn of the Renaissance had freed the worldly spirit from ecclesiastical shackles did men imbued with a deep-rooted love of their country, like the Venetian Vittore Carpaccio, or the Florentine Benozzo Gozzoli, give us true pictures of home life. Out of the solemn walls of churches and cloisters they lead us into the animated and picturesque life of the streets, which were not, as some authors try to make us believe, above all the scene of wild and unbridled passions, but which we might compare with arteries filled with the red and healthy blood of social life. In his frescoes from the life of St. Augustine in San Gimignano, Benozzo shows us how parents present their little boy to the “magistro grammatice” in the street in front of the open schoolroom. Little Augustine, crossing his arms over his breast in an attitude of deference, looks rather inquisitively at his future master, while in the parents’ faces we read the earnest hope that the son will make “ultra modum” great progress, and never deserve such shameful public punishment as we see administered to the little good-for-nothing on the right side of the picture. But we do not observe a schoolmaster sign hung out, such as have come down to us from the German sixteenth century. The Italian painter still delights, above all, in the architectural beauty of his native city. In the same way Carpaccio shows us the piazzas and canals of his beloved Venice in the splendor of processions, solemn receptions of foreign ambassadors, and the like, decorated with flags and Oriental carpets. The humble inn of the people does not yet attract the eye of the artist, who delights in the elegance of palaces and the grandeur of public buildings.

The early artists of the Netherlands, too, represent the street, not filled with the noisy, everyday life of the people, but as a quiet stage, on which the holy procession of saints solemnly move, as in Memling’s picture of St. Ursula’s arrival in Rome. In quiet, elegant rooms the noble donors kneel before the holy virgin, saints unite in a “santa conversazione,” far from the world. Here and there only a window looks out on a tiny landscape, with rivers and bridges, roads, and fortified towns on distant hills, beyond which our “Wanderlust” draws us. This little section of nature slowly grows larger, the narrow limitations of architecture fall; crowned only with the glorious light of heaven, Mary sits in the open green fields, which give good pasture to the tired donkey. Thus Jan van Scorel has painted the holy family in a charming picture of the collection Rath in Pest. Out of pious seclusion the way leads into free nature, to meadows and brooks, to clattering mills, and finally, for a rest after the long walk, to the peasant’s inn.

Even earlier, before the Dutch painters, a pupil of Dürer, Hans Sebald Beham, one of the “godless painters of Nuremberg,” who were exiled from their native town on account of socialistic tendencies, has taken us along this road. In one of his larger engravings he pictures the different stages of a rustic wedding, and for the first time shows us the signboard, hanging on a long stick, from a dormer window of the tavern. We might date the painted sign from the invention of oil painting on wooden panels by the brothers Van Eyck, an art which was introduced in Italy through Antonello da Messina as late as 1473. The signs of earlier date we have to imagine as either sculptures, closely united with the architecture of the house, or as mural paintings such as we still see to-day in Stein-on-the-Rhine, for instance, on the house “Zum Ochsen.”

Master Dürer himself once hung out the little tablet with his famous monogram as a tavern sign over the fantastic ruin, in which he places the birth of Christ in his beautiful engraving of the year 1504, proud to have prepared such a cozy inn for Our Lady and her God-given Child.

But the whole wealth of signs, from the natural simple form of the speaking sign to the most elaborate examples of signs painted or artfully wrought in iron, reveals itself to us later in the realistic pictures of the Dutch painters.

The earliest representation of a speaking sign, where the merchandise itself is still hung out, I have seen in a woodcut illustrating a book printed in Augsburg in 1536: “Hie hebt an das Concilium zu Constanz.”

It is a baker’s sign: large “brezels” on a wooden stick, a primitive precursor of the artful baker’s sign we observe in Jan Steen’s charming picture “The baker Arent Oostwaard” in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. In more modern times the real merchandise is sometimes supplanted by an imitation of the different loafs in wood and neatly painted in natural colors, such as we see in an amusing sign from Borgo San Dalmazzo, a picturesque mountain town near Cuneo in northern Italy.

A similar evolution may be noted in other trade signs: first the real boots, and later a copy in wood, painted red if possible; first the big pitcher and the shining tin tankard decorated with fresh foliage, later the imitation in a wreath of iron leaves. Everywhere in the tavern and kermess scenes painted by Dutch masters, we see real pitchers and tankards hanging over the doors as speaking signs inviting the peasants to enter and partake of a refreshing drink. In northern Germany the “Krug” (pitcher) was so popular as a sign that the landlord was called after it, “Krüger,” to this day a widely spread family name.

Unfortunately the Dutch artists loved the interior of the tavern still better than its façade, otherwise we should find still more of the old signs in their pictures. Jan Steen, a genius in the art of living as well as in the art of painting, was a brewer’s son and occasionally he played the landlord himself, in 1654, in the tavern “Zur Schlange,” and in 1656 “In der Roskam,” both in Delft. In his latter days, when he had returned to his birthplace, Leyden, where he once was enrolled as a student of the university, he obtained a license from the city fathers “de neringh van openbare herbergh.” Who could deny æsthetic influence to tavern rooms bedecked with genuine Steens? Other artists like Brouwer paid their tavern debts in pictures, and thus created an artistic atmosphere in which young artists like Steen himself felt most naturally at ease.

In a picture in Brussels, “The Assembly of the Rhetoricians,” the president of a debating society reads the prize poem to the peasantry assembled outside a tavern, the speaking sign of which, pitcher and tankard, is hanging out on a large oaken branch. More frequent than this bush is the wreath--known to us already as a sign in antiquity--surrounding the jolly pitcher as we see it in Du Jardin’s sunny picture “The Trumpeter before a Tavern,” in Amsterdam.

David Teniers gives the preference to the half moon and rarely omits to place a pitcher above the signboard. Sometimes he decorates his moon tavern with the escutcheon of Austria and the imperial eagle; for instance, in a picture in Vienna. In his great painting in the Louvre we see a mail-stage-driver’s horn, a kind of hunting-horn, although the master, who died in 1690, did not live to see the mail-coach introduced.

In the representations, then so popular, of corporations assembled at festive meals, we sometimes remark in the background, through an open window, the stately guild-houses crowned with their signs; the little lamb with the flag, for instance, in Bartholomæus van der Helst’s superb banquet of the city guard in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. But perhaps no other artist has given us a more vivid impression of the beauty of the street with its various glittering signs than the brothers Berkheyden in the picture of which we reproduce a section in our Frontispiece. The street itself has been the painter’s real object, the play of light and shade on its various architectural features fascinates him more than the people passing through it, who once acted the principal rôle and are now treated as mere accessories valuable for accenting the perspective of the picture. Gerrit Berkheyden has painted the same market-place of Harlem again in his sunny picture of 1674 in the London National Gallery, but this time the street, gayly decorated with signs, is more distant and lost in shadow.

Fifty years later Hogarth gave us a picture of London streets and their fantastic signs, but not in the Dutch spirit of naïve truthfulness. There is hardly an engraving among his numerous productions representing a street scene, without a tavern sign. All forms are represented, the detached signpost characteristic of England, such as the “Adam and Eve” sign on the large engraving “The March to Finchley,” or the sign of “The Sun” hung out on a bracket in his engraving of “The Day,” dated 1738; again, a painted board, fastened against the wall, as we see it over the door of the Bell Tavern, in one of his earliest prints dated 1731 in the cycle “A Harlot’s Progress.” In the same plate we notice over another tavern door a large chessboard, familiar to us from the old Roman taverns. Usually this cubistic pattern decorates the signpost standing in front of the alehouse, as seen in our design of the sign-painter from the engraving “The Day.” Hogarth’s sarcastic mind was inclined anyway to distort life’s pictures like a comic mirror, and it will be difficult to determine how much further he has caricatured the actual signs he saw in the streets of London which, themselves, were very often the creations of a cartoonist. Most of his signs seem true copies from life; others, like the barber sign in the engraving “The Night,” or the above-mentioned “Good Eating,” I am inclined to think exaggerations or fanciful inventions, although, to be sure, the carved frame around the gruesome pitcher of St. John the Baptist’s head shows a distinct historic style, somewhat plainer and of more recent date than the richly carved Renaissance frame of the Adam and Eve signboard.

While to Hogarth the sign seemed to be an excellent medium wherewith to increase the bitterness of his satire, the German romantic artists of the nineteenth century, Moritz von Schwind and Spitzweg, loved to introduce it in their pictures as a fairy element. The golden pattern of a star sign is woven into the soft lines of their compositions: “The Farewell,” by Spitzweg, and the famous “Wedding Journey,” by Schwind, in the Schack Gallery at Munich. A friendly star is twinkling over both the lovers who part with tears, and those who are starting upon their journey in the dewy morning of life.