 CHAPTER VII. THE RENOUSANCE IN VENICE. THE BOOK OF ART FOR YOUNG PEOPLE by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway. The paintings discussed in this chapter are The Golden Age by Giorgione and St. George Destroying the Dragon by Tintoretto. CHAPTER VII. THE RENOUSANCE IN VENICE. A visit to Venice is one of the joys which perhaps few of us have yet experienced. But whether we have been there or not, we all know that the very sound of her name is enchanting for those who are fresh from her magic, her sunrises and sunsets unmatched for colour and her streets for silence. The Venetians were a proud and successful people, wealthier by virtue of their great sea trade than the citizens of Florence or of any other town in Italy. Their foremost men lived in great high-roomed palaces, richly furnished and decorated with pictures of a sumptuous pageantry. But the Venetians were not merely a luxurious people. The poetry of the lagoons and the glory of the sunset skies imparted to their lives the wealth of a rare romance. Even in Venice to-day, now that the steamers have spoiled the peace of the canals and the old orange-winged sailing-boats no longer crowd against the keys, the dreamy atmosphere of the city retains its spell. Few artists ever felt and expressed this atmosphere better than Giorgione, the painter of the first of our Venetian pictures. He was one of the great artists of the Renaissance who died young, ten years before Raphael, but their greatness is scarcely comparable. Like Raphael, Giorgione was precocious, but unlike him he painted in a style of his own that from the very beginning owed little to anyone else. He saw beauty in his own way, and was not impelled to see it differently by coming into contact with other artists, however great. Unlike Raphael he was not a great master of the art of composition. In the little picture before us the grouping of the figures is not what may be called inevitable, like that in the night's dream. It seems as though one day when Giorgione was musing on the beauties of the world and the blemishes of life, even in Venice, he thought of some far-off time beyond the dawn of history when all men lived in peace. The ancient Greeks called this perfect time the golden age of the world. In many ways their idea of it tallies with the description of the Garden of Eden, and they were always contrasting it with the Iron Age in which they thought they lived, as the Hebrews contrasted the life of Adam and Eve in the Garden with their own. As the fancy flashed across Giorgione's mind, perchance he saw some just king of whom his subjects felt no fear seated upon a throne like this. A dreamy youth plays soft music to him, and another hands him flowers and fruit. Books lie strewn upon the steps, and a child stands in a reverent attitude before him. Wild and domestic animals live together in harmony. The ground is carpeted with flowers. All is peaceful. Such a subject suited the temperament of Giorgione, and he painted it in the romantic mood in which it was conceived. Everything could be further from everyday life than this little scene. It has the unlabored look that suits such an improvised subject. Of course no one knows for certain that this is a picture of the golden age, and you may make up any story you like about it for yourselves. That is one of the charms of the picture. It has been said that the throned one is celebrating his birthday, and that his little heir is reciting him a birthday ode accompanied by music. You may believe this if you like, but how do you then account for the leopard and the peacock living in such harmony together? Giorgione painted a few sacred pictures and many mythological scenes, besides several very beautiful portraits of dreamy-looking poets and noblemen. But even when he illustrated some well-known tale, he did not care to seize upon the dramatic moment that gives the crisis of the story, as Giotto would have done, and as the painter of our next picture does. His action did not attract him. Whatever the subject, if it were possible to group the figures together at a moment when they were beautifully doing nothing, he did so. But he liked still more to paint ideal scenes from his own fancy, where young people sit in easy attitudes upon the grass, conversing for an instant in the intervals of the music they make upon pipes and guitar. He was the first artist, so far as I know, to paint these half-real, half-imaginary scenes of which our picture may be one. In all of them landscape bears an important part, and in some the background has become the picture and completely subordinated the figures. In this little golden age the landscape is quiet in tone, tinged with melancholy, romantic, to suit the mood of the figures. Its coloring, though rich, is subdued more like the tints of autumn than the fresh hues of spring. Venetians excelled in their treatment of color. They lived in an uncommon world of it. Giorgio Ne saw his picture in his mind's eye as a blaze of rich color. He did not see the figures sharply outlined against a remote background, as are the three in Raphael's night's dream. That does not mean that Raphael, like the artist of the Richard II diptych, failed to make his figures look solid, but that he saw beauty most in the outlines of the body and the curves of the drapery, irrespective of color, whereas to Giorgio Ne's eye outline was nothing without color and light and shade. The body of the king upon the throne in our picture is masked against the background, but there is no definite outline to divide it from the tree behind. In this respect Giorgio Ne was curiously modern for his date, as we shall see in pictures of a still later time. Giorgio Ne was only thirty-three years old when he died of the plague in 1510, the same year as Botticelli. His master, Giovanni Bellini, who was born in 1428, outlived him by six years, and the great Titian, his fellow pupil in the studio of Bellini, lived another half-century or more. Titian in many ways summed up all that was greatest in Venetian art. His pictures have less romance than those of Giorgio Ne, except during the short space of time when he painted under the spell of his brother-artist. It is extremely difficult to distinguish then between Titian's early and Giorgio Ne's late work. Titian perhaps had the greater intellect. Giorgio Ne's pictures vary according to his mood, while Titian's express a less changeable personality. In spite of his youth Giorgio Ne made a profound impression upon all the artists of his time. They did not copy his designs, but the beauty of his pictures made them look at the world with his romantic eyes and paint in his dreamy mood. It was almost as though Giorgio Ne had absorbed the romance of Venice into his pictures so that for a time no Venetian painter could express Venetian romance except in Giorgio Ne's way. But in 1518, eight years after Giorgio Ne's death, another great innovating master was born at Venice, Tintorette by his name, who in his turn opened new visions of the world to the artists of his day. While painting in the rest of Italy was becoming manored and sentimental, lacking in power and originality, Tintorette in Venice was creating masterpieces with a very fury of invention and a corresponding swiftness of hand. He was his own chief teacher. Outside his studio he wrote upon a sign to inform or attract pupils. The design of Michelangelo and the colouring of Titian. Profound study of the works of these two masters is manifest in his own. Like Michelangelo, he worked passionately rather than with the sober competence of Titian. His thronging visions, his multitudinous and often vast canvases are a surpassing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures. His mere output was marvellous and much of it on a grandiose scale. He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before, but each, as he treated it, was a new thing. Centuries of tradition governed the arrangement of such subjects as the crucifixion and the last judgment, so that even the free painters of the Renaissance had deviated but little from it. In Tintoret, the freedom of the Renaissance reached its height. For him, tradition had no fetters. When he painted a picture of paradise for the Doge's palace, it measured eighty-four by thirty-four feet and contained literally hundreds of figures. His imagination was so prolific that he seems never to have repeated a figure. New forms, new postures, new groupings flowed from his brush in exhaust-less multitude. It is necessary to go to Venice to see Tintoret's most famous works, still remaining upon the walls of the churches and buildings for which they were painted, or in which they have been brought together. But the National Gallery is fortunate in possessing one relatively small canvas of his which shows some of his finest qualities. The subject of St. George slaying the dragon was not a new one. It had been painted by Raphael and by several of the earlier Venetian painters, but Tintoret's treatment of it was all his own. In the earlier pictures, the princess, for whose sake St. George fights the dragon, was a little figure in the background fleeing in terror. St. George occupied the chief place, as he does upon the back of our gold sovereigns, where the princess has been left out altogether. Tintoret makes her flee, but she is running towards the spectator, and so in her flight stands out the most conspicuous figure. One of the victims that the dragon has slain lies behind her. In the distance St. George fights with all his might against the powers of evil, whilst the splendor of God blazes in the sky. There is a vividness and power about the picture that proclaims the hand of Tintoret. In contrast to Giorgione, he liked to paint figures in motion, yet he was as typical an outcome of Venetian romance as the earlier painter. Nothing could be more like a fairytale than this picture. It was no listless dreamer that painted it, but one with a gorgeous imagination, and yet a full knowledge of the world enabling him to give substance to his visions. Tintoret's stormy landscapes are as beautiful in their way as Giorgione's dreamy ones, and each carries out the mood of the rest of the picture. This one is full of power, mystery, and romance. Tintoret had modelled his colouring upon Titian, and was by nature a great colourist, but too often he used bad materials that have turned black with the lapse of years. In this picture you see his colour as it was meant to be, rich and boldly harmonious. The vivid red and blue of the princess's clothes are a daring combination with a brilliant green of the landscape, but Tintoret knew what he was doing, and the result is superb. With his death in 1594 the best of Venetian painting came to an end. There were as many excellent painters in the fairy city as there had been in Florence, contemporaries of Giovanni Bellini, who in his early years worked in close companionship with Montaigne, his brother-in-law, as well as contemporaries of Titian and Tintoret. The painter Varnese, for instance, died a few years before Tintoret. For pomp and pageantry his great canvases are eminent. Standing in some room of the Doge's palace, decorated entirely by his hand, we are carried back to the time when Venice was queen of the seas, unrivaled for magnificence and wealth. He was the master of ceremonies before whom other painters of pomps and vanities pale. This coloring is what all these Venetian painters had in common. We see it in the early days when Venetian art was struggling into existence. In her art, as in her skies and waters, we are overwhelmed by a vision of color unsurpassed. We have now touched on a few prominent points in the history of painting in Italy, from its early rise in Florence with Giotto, through its period of widespread excellence in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, when Raphael, Giorgione, Michelangelo, and Leonardo were all painting masterpieces in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan at the same moment, to its final blaze of sunset grandeur in Venice. It is time to return to the north of Europe. In the next chapter we will try to gain a few glimpses of the progress of painting in Germany, Holland, Flanders, and our own country. End of Chapter 7, read by Karish Allenberg, www.kray.org, on March 21, 2008, in San Diego, California. Chapter 8, The Renaissance in the North. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethelconway and Sir Martin Conway. The painting discussed in this chapter is the portrait of Edward, Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VI, by Hans Holbein. Chapter 8, The Renaissance in the North. The Renaissance involved a change of outlook towards the whole world, which could not long remain confined to Italy. There were then, as now, roads over the passes of the Alps, by which merchants and scholars were continually travelling from Italy through Germany and Flanders to England, communicating to the northern countries whatever changes of thought stirred in the south. In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the awakening took a different form. We find a different quality in the art of the north. Italian spontaneity and childlike joy is absent, so too the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy. You remember how the successors of the Van Eyck's in Flanders painted excellent portraits and small, carefully studied pictures of scriptural events in wonderful detail. They were a strictly practical people whose painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery and architecture was marvelously minute and voracious, but they were not a handsome race and their models for saints and virgins seemed to have been the people that came handiest and by no means the best looking. Thus the figures in their pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of vigor, truth and skill. When Flemings began to make tours in Italy and saw the pictures of Raphael, in whom Grace was native, they fell in love with his work and returned to Flanders to try and paint as he did. But to them Grace was not God-given, and in their attempt to achieve it their pictures became sentimental and postured, and the naive simplicity and everyday truth, so attractive in the works of the earlier school, perished. The influence of the Van Eyck's had not been confined to Flanders. Artists in Germany had been profoundly affected. They learnt the new technique of painting from the pupils of the Van Eyck's in the fifteenth century. Like them, too, they discarded gold backgrounds and tried to paint men and women as they really looked, instead of in the old conventional fashion of the Middle Ages. Schools of painting grew up in several of the more important German towns, till towards the end of the fifteenth century two German artists were born, Albert Dürer at Nuremberg in 1471, and Hans Holbein the Younger at Augsburg in 1497, who deserved to rank with the greatest painters of the time in any country. Dürer is commonly regarded as the most typically German of artists, though his father was Hungarian, and as a matter of fact he stands very much alone. His pictures and engravings are long, long thoughts. Every inch of the surface is weighted with meaning. His cast of mind indeed was more that of a philosopher than that of an artist. In a drawing which Dürer made of himself in the looking glass at the age of thirteen, we see a thoughtful little face gazing out upon the world with questioning eyes. Already the delicacy of the lines is striking, and the hair so beautifully finished that we can anticipate the later artist whose pictures are remarkable for so surprising a wealth of detail. The characteristics of the Flemish school, carefulness of workmanship and indifference to the physical beauty of the model, to which the Italians were so sensitive, continued in his work. For thoroughness his portraits can be compared with those of John Van Eyck. In the National Gallery his father lives again for us in a picture of wonderful power and insight. Dürer was akin to Leonardo in the desire for more and yet more knowledge. Like him he wrote treatises on fortifications, human proportions, geometry and perspective, and filled his sketch books with studies of plants, animals, and natural scenery. His eager mind employed itself with the whys and wherefores of things, not satisfied with the simple pleasure that sight bestows. In his engravings, even more than in his pictures, we ponder the hidden meanings. We are not content to look and rejoice in beauty, though there is much to charm the eye. These problems were the problems of life as well as the problems of art. The other great artist of Germany, Hans Holbein the Younger, was the son of Hans Holbein the Elder, a much esteemed painter in Augsburg. This town was on the principal trade route between Northern Italy and the North Sea, so that Venetians and Milanese were constantly passing through and bringing to it much wealth and news of the luxury of their own Southern life. As a result, the citizens of Augsburg dressed more expensively and decorated their houses more lavishly than did the citizens of any other town in Germany. After a boyhood and youth spent at Augsburg, Holbein removed to Basel. He was a designer of wood engravings and Goldsmith's work and of architectural decoration, besides being a painter. In those days of change in South Germany, artists had to be willing to turn their hands to any kind of work they could get to do. North of the Alps, where the Reformation was upsetting old habits, an artist's life was far from being easy. Reformers made bonfires of sacred pictures and sculptured wooden altar pieces. Indeed, the Reformation was a cruel blow to artists, for it took away church patronage and made them dependent for employment upon merchants and princes. Except at courts or in great mercantile towns, they ferried extremely ill. Altar pieces were rarely wanted, and there were no more legends of saints to be painted upon the walls of churches. The demand for portraiture, on the other hand, was increasing, whilst the growth of printing created a new field for design in the preparation of woodcuts for the illustration of books. Thus it came to pass that the printer Froben, at Basel, was one of the young Holbein's chief patrons. We find him designing a wonderful series of illustrations of the Dance of Death, as well as drawing another set to illustrate the Praise of Folly, written by Erasmus, who was then living in Basel and frequenting the House of Froben. Erasmus was a typical scholar of the 16th century, belonging rather to civilized society as a whole, than to any one country. He moved about Europe from one centre of learning to another, alike at home in educated circles in England, Flanders, and Germany. He had lived for some time in England, and knew that there were men there with wealth who would employ a good painter to paint their portraits, if they could find one. Erasmus himself sat to Holbein and sent the finished portrait as a present to his friend Sir Thomas Moore, Lord Chancellor of England. In England, owing to the effects of the Wars of the Roses, good painters no longer existed. A century of neglect had destroyed English painting. Henry VIII, therefore, had to look to foreign lands for his court painter, and where was he to come from? France was the nearest country, but the French King was in the same predicament as Henry. He obtained his painters from Italy, and at one time secured the services of Leonardo Da Vinci. But Italy was a long way off, and it would suit Henry better to get a painter from Flanders or Germany if it were possible. So Erasmus advised Holbein to go to England, and gave him a letter to Sir Thomas Moore. On this first visit in 1526 he painted the portraits of Moore and his whole family, and of many other distinguished men. But it was not till his second visit in 1532 that he became Henry VIII's court painter. In this capacity he had to decorate the walls of the King's palaces, design the pageantry of the royal processions, and paint the portraits of the King's family. Although Holbein could do and did do anything that was demanded of him, what he liked best was to paint portraits. Romantic subjects, such as the fight of Saint George and the Dragon, or an idol of the Golden Age, little suited the artistic leanings of a German. To a German or a Fleming the world of facts meant more than the world of imagination. The painting of men and women as they looked in everyday life was more congenial to them than the painting of saints and imaginary princesses. But how unimportant seems all talk of contrasting imagination and reality when we see them fused together in this charming portrait of Edward, the child prince of Wales. It belongs to the end of the year 1538, when he was just fifteen months old, and the imagination of Holbein equipped him with the orb of sovereignty in the guise of a baby's rattle. It is in the coupling of distant kingship and present babyhood that the painter works his magic and reveals his charm. If you recall for a moment what you know of Henry VIII, his masterful pride, his magnificence, his determination to do and have exactly what he wanted, you will understand that his demands upon his court painter for a portrait of his only son and heir must have been high. No one could say enough about this wonderful child to please Henry, for all that was said in praise of him redounded to the glory of his father. The following is a translation of the Latin poem beneath the picture. Child, of thy father's virtues be thou heir, since none on earth with him may well compare. Hardly to him might heaven yield a son by whom his father's fame should be outdone, so if thou equal such a mighty sire, no higher can the hopes of man aspire. If thou surpass him, thou shalt honour'd be, or all that ruled before, or shall rule after thee. Injustice be it said that the little Edward VI was of an extraordinary precocity. When he was eight years old he wrote to Archbishop Cranmer in Latin. When he was nine he knew four books of Cato by heart, as well as much of the Bible. To show you the way in which royal infants were treated in those days, we read that at the time this picture was painted, the little prince had a household of his own, consisting of a lady mistress, a nurse, rockers for his cradle, a chamberlain, vice chamberlain, steward, controller, almaner, and dean. It is hard to believe that the child is only fifteen months old, so erect is the attitude, so intelligent the face. The clothes are sumptuous. A piece of stuff similar in material and designed to the sleeve exists today in a museum in Brussels. In the best sense Holbein was the most Italian of the Germans, for in him, as in the gifted Italian, Grace was innate. He may have paid a brief visit to Italy, but he never lived there for any length of time, nor did he try to paint like an Italian, as some northern artists unhappily tried to do. The German merits, solidity, boldness, detailed finish, and grasp of character he possessed in a high degree, but he combined them with a beauty of line, delicacy of modelling, and richness of colour almost southern. His pictures appeal more to the eye and less to the mind, than do those of Dürer. Where Dürer sought to instruct, Holbein was content to please, but like a German he spared no pains. He painted the stuff and the necklace, the globe and the feather, with the finish of an artist who was before all things a good workman. Observe how delicately the chubby little fingers are drawn. Holbein's detailed treatment of the accessories of a portrait is only less than the care expended in depicting the face. He studied faces, and his portraits, one may almost say, are at once images of, and commentaries on, the people they depict. Thus his gallery of pictures of Henry and his contemporaries show us at once the reflection of them as in a mirror, and the vision of them as beheld by a singularly discerning and experienced eye, that not only saw, but comprehended. This is the more remarkable because Holbein was not always able to paint and finish his portraits in the presence of the living model, as painters insist on doing nowadays. His sitters were generally busy men who granted him but one sitting, so that his method was to make a drawing of the head in red chalk, and to write upon the margin notes of anything he particularly wanted to remember. Afterwards he painted the head from the drawing, but had the actual clothes and jewels sent to him to work from. In the Royal Collection at Windsor there are a number of these portrait drawings of great interest to us, since many of the portraits painted from them have been lost. As a record of remarkable people of that day they are invaluable, for in a few powerful strokes Holbein could set down the likeness of any face. But when he came to paint the portrait he was not satisfied with a mere likeness. He painted to his habit as he lived. Erasmus is shown reading in his study, the merchant in his office surrounded by the tokens of his business, and Henry VIII standing firmly with his legs wide apart as if bestriding a hemisphere. But I think that you will like this fine portrait of the infant prince best of all, and that is why I have chosen it, in preference to a likeness of any of the statesmen, scholars, queens, and courtiers who played a great part in their world, but are not half so charming to look upon as little Prince Edward. And of Chapter VIII, read by Kara Schallenberg, on April 21st, 2008, in San Diego, California. Chapter IX Rembrandt This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway. The painting discussed in this chapter is A Man in Armour by Rembrandt. Chapter IX Rembrandt After the death of Holbein, artists in the north of Europe passed through troublesome times till the end of the sixteenth century. France and the Netherlands were devastated by wars. You may remember that the Netherlands had belonged in the fifteenth century to the Dukes of Burgundy. Through the marriage of the only daughter of the last Duke, these territories passed into the possession of the King of Spain, who remained a Catholic, whilst the northern portion of the Netherlands became sturdily Protestant. Their struggle under the leadership of William the Silent against the Yoke of Spain is one of the stirring pages of history. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, seven of the northern states of the Netherlands, of which Holland was the chief, had emerged as practically independent. The southern portion of the Netherlands, including the old province of Flanders, remained Catholic and was governed by a Spanish prince who held his court at Brussels. When peace came at last, there was a remarkable outburst of painting in each of the two countries. Rubens was the master painter in Flanders. Of him and of his pupil Van Dyke, we shall hear more in the next chapter. In Holland there was a yet more widespread activity. Indomitable perseverance had been needed for so small a country to throw off the rule of a great power like Spain. The long struggle seems to have called into being a kindred spirit, manifesting itself in every branch of the national life. Dutch merchants, Dutch fishermen, and Dutch colonizers made themselves felt as a force throughout the world. The spirit by which Dutchmen achieved political success was preeminent in the qualities which brought them to the front rank in art. There were literally hundreds of painters in Holland, few of them bad. That does not mean that all Dutchmen had the magical power of vision belonging to the greatest artists, the power that transforms the objects of daily view into things of rare beauty, or the imagination of a tintoret that creates and depicts scenes undreamt of before by man. Many painted the things around them as they looked to a commonplace mind, with no glamour and no transforming touch. When we see their pictures, our eyes are not opened to new effects. We continue to see and to feel as we did before, but we admire the honest work, the pleasant colour, and the efficiency of the painters. In default of Raphael's, Georgione's, and Titian's, we should be pleased to hang upon our walls works such as those. But, towering above the other artists of Holland, great and small, was one Dutchman, Rembrandt, who holds his own with the greatest of the world. He was born in 1606, the son of a miller at Leiden, who gave him the best teaching there to be had. Soon he became a good painter of likenesses, and orders for portraits began to stream in upon him from the citizens of his native town. These he executed well, but his heart was not wrapped up, in the portrayal of character as John Van Eyck's had been. Neither was it in the drawing of delicate and beautiful lines that he wished to excel, as did Holbein and Raphael. He was the dramatist of painting, a man who would rather paint some one person ten times over in the character of somebody else, high priest, king, warrior, or buffoon, than once thoroughly in his own. But when people ordered portraits of themselves they wanted good likenesses, and Rembrandt was happy to supply them. At first it was only when he was working at home to please himself that he indulged his picturesque gift. He painted his father, his mother, and himself over and over again, but in each picture he tried some experiment with expression, or a new pose, or a strange effect of lighting, transforming the general aspect of the original. His own face did as well as any other to experiment with. None could be offended with the result, and it was always to be had without paying a model's price for the sitting. Thus all through his life, from twenty-two to sixty-three, we can follow the growth of his art with the transformation of his body in the long series of pictures of his single self. More than any artist that had gone before him, he Rembrandt was fascinated by the problem of light. The brightest patch of white on a canvas will look black if you hold it up against the sky. How, then, can the fire of sunshine be depicted at all? Experience shows that it can only be suggested by contrast with shadows almost black. But absolutely black shadows would not be beautiful. Fancy a picture in which the shadows were as black as well-polished boots. Rembrandt had to figure out how to make his dark shadows rich, and how to make a picture in which shadow predominated a beautiful thing in itself, a thing that would decorate a wall as well as depict the chosen subject. That was no easy problem, and he had to solve it for himself. It was his life's work. He applied his new idea in the painting of portraits and in subject pictures, chiefly illustrative of dramatic incidents in Bible history, for the same quality in him that made him love the flare of light made him also love the dramatic in life. Rembrandt's mother was a Protestant, who brought up her son with a thorough knowledge of the scripture stories, and it was the Bible that remained to the end of his life one of the few books he had in his house. The dramatic situations that he loved were there in plenty. Over and over again he painted the nativity of Christ. Sometimes the baby is in a tiny Dutch cradle with its face just peeping out, and the shepherds adoring it by candlelight. Often he painted scenes from the Old Testament, such as Isaac, Blessing Esau, and Jacob, who are shown as two little Dutch children. Simeon receiving the infant Christ in the temple is a favourite subject because of the varied effects that could be produced by the gloom of the church and the light on the figure of the High Priest. These, and many other beautiful pictures, were studies painted for the increase of the artist's own knowledge, not orders from citizens of Laidon or of Amsterdam, to which capital he moved in 1630. At the same time he was coming more and more into demand as a portrait painter. These were days in which he made money fast and spent it faster. He had a craving to surround himself with beautiful works of art and beautiful objects of all kinds that should take him away from the dunes and canals into a world of romance within his own house. He disliked the stiff Dutch clothes and the great starched white ruffs worn by the women of the day. He had to paint them in his portraits, but when he painted his beautiful wife Saskia, she is decked in embroideries and soft shimmering stuffs. Wonderful clasps and brooches fasten her clothes. Her hair is dressed with gold chains and great strings of pearls hang from her neck and arms. Rembrandt makes the light sparkle on the diamonds and glimmer on the pearls. Sometimes he adorns her with flowers and paints her as flora. Again she is fastening a jewel in her hair and Rembrandt himself stands by with a rope of pearls for her to don. All these jewels and rich materials belonged to him. He also bought antique marbles, pictures by Giorgione and Titian, engravings by Durer, and four volumes of Raphael's drawings, besides many other beautiful works of art. These were splendid years, years in which he was valued by his contemporaries for the work he did for them, and years in which every picture he painted for himself gave him fresh experience. A picture of the anatomy class of a famous physician had been among the first with which Rembrandt made a great public success. Every face in it, and there were eight living faces, was a masterpiece of portraiture. And all were fitly grouped and united in the rapt attention with which they followed the demonstration of their teacher. In 1642 he received in order to paint a large picture of one of the companies of the city guard of Amsterdam. According to the custom of the day each person portrayed in the picture contributed his equal share towards the cost of the whole, and in return expected his place in it to be as conspicuous as that of anybody else. Such groups were common in Holland in the seventeenth century. The towns were proud of their newly won liberties, and the town dignitaries liked to see themselves painted in a group to perpetuate remembrance of their tenure of office. But Rembrandt knew that it was inartistic to give each and every person in the large group an equal or nearly equal prominence, although such was the custom to which even Franz Hals's brush had yielded full compliance. For his magnificent picture of the city guard Rembrandt chose the moment when the drums had just been sounded as an order for the men to form into line behind their chief officers march forth. They are coming out from a dark building into the full sunshine of the street, all in a bustle, some look at their firearms, some lift their lances, and some cock their guns. The sunshine falls full upon the captain and the lieutenant beside him, but the background is so dark that several of the seventeenth figures are almost lost to view. A few of the heads are turned in such a way that only half the face is seen, and no doubt, as likeness as some of them were deficient. Rembrandt was not thinking of the seventeenth men individually. He conceived the picture as a whole, with its strong light and shade, the picturesque crossing lines of the lances, and the natural array of the figures. By wise acres the picture was said to represent a scene at night, lit by torchlight, and was actually called the Night Watch, though the shadow of the captain's hand is of the size of the hand itself, and not greater, being cast by the sun. Later generations have valued it as one of the unsurpassed pictures in the world, but it is said that contemporary Dutch feeling waxed high against Rembrandt for having dealt in this supremely artistic manner, with an order for seventeen portraits, and that he suffered severely in consequence. Certainly he had fewer orders. The prosperous class abandoned him. His pictures remained unsold, and his revenue dwindled. Rembrandt was thirty-six years of age, and at the very height of his powers, at the time of the failure of this, his greatest picture. His mature style of painting continued to displease his contemporaries, who preferred the work of less innovating artists, who painted good likenesses smoothly. Every year his treatment became rougher and bolder. He transformed portraits of stolid Dutch burgamasters into pictures of fantastic beauty. But the likeness suffered, and the burgamasters were dissatisfied. Their conservative taste preferred the smooth surface and minute treatment of detail which had been traditional in the Low Countries since the days of the Van Eyck's. Year after year more of their patronage was transferred to other painters who pandered to their preferences, and had less of the genius that forced Rembrandt to work out his own ideal, whether it brought him prosperity or ruin. These painters flourished, while Rembrandt sank into ever greater disrepute. It is certain, too, that he had been almost childishly reckless in expenditure on artistic and beautiful things which were unnecessary to his art and beyond his means, although those for a while had been abundant. At the time of the failure of the Night Watch his wife Saskia died, leaving him their little son Titus, a beautiful child. Through ever-darkening days for the next fifteen years he continued to paint with increasing power. It is to this later period that our picture of the man in armour belongs. The picture is not a portrait, but rather a study of light upon armour. No man came to Rembrandt and asked to be painted like that, but Rembrandt saw in his mind's eye a great effect, a fine nightly face beneath a shadowing helmet and set off against a somber background. A picture such as this is a work of the imagination in the same sense as the Saint George and the Dragon of Tintorette. It was an effect that only Rembrandt could see, painted, as only he could paint it. The strongest light falls upon the breastplate, the next strongest upon the helmet, and the earring is there to catch another gleam. When you look at the picture closely you can see that the lights are laid on. We might almost say buttered on, with thick white paint. More than once Rembrandt painted armour for the sake of the effects of light. In one of the portraits of himself he wears a helmet and he painted his brother similarly adorned. A picture of a person wearing the same armour as in the Glasgow picture is in St. Petersburg, but the figure is turned in a slightly different direction and reflects the light differently. It is called Pallas Athene and was no doubt painted at the same time as ours, but the person, whether named Pallas Athene or Knight, was but a peg upon which to hang the armour for the sake of the light shining on it. Rembrandt was a typical Dutch worker all his life. Besides the great number of pictures that have come down to us we have about three thousand of his drawings and his etchings are very numerous and fine. I wonder if you know how prints are made? They are broadly speaking two different processes. You can take a block of wood and cut away the substance around the lines of the design. Then when you cover with ink the raised surface of wood that is left and press the paper upon it the design prints off in black where the ink is but the paper remains white where the hollows are. This is the method called wood cutting which is still in use for book illustrations. In the other process the design is plowed into a metal plate, the lines being made deep enough to hold ink and varying in width according to the strength desired in the print. You then fill the grooves with ink wiping the flat surface clean so that when the paper is pressed against the plate and into the furrows the lines print black out of the furrows and the rest remains white. There are several ways of making these furrows in a metal plate but the chief are two. The first is to plow into the metal with a sharp steel instrument called a burin. The second is to bite them out with an acid. This is the process of etching with which Rembrandt did his matchless work. He varnished a copper plate with black varnish. With a needle he scratched upon it his design which looked light where the needle had revealed the copper. Then the whole plate was put into a bath of acid which ate away the metal and so bit into the lines but had no effect upon the varnish. When he wanted the lines to be blacker in certain places he had to varnish the whole rest of the plate again and put it back into the bath of acid. The lines that had been subjected to the second biting were deeper than those that had been bitten only once. The number of plates etched by Rembrandt was great. At least two hundred. Some say four hundred. Their subjects are very various. Momentary impressions of picturesque figures, scriptural scenes, portraits, groups of common people, landscapes and whatever happened to engage the artist's fancy for an etching can be very quickly done and is well suited to record a fleeting impression. Thousands of the prints still exist and even some of the original plates in a very worn down condition. In spite of the quantity and quality of Rembrandt's work he was unable to recover his prosperity. He had moved into a fine house when he married Saskia and was never able to pay off the debts contracted at that time. Things went from bad to worse until at last in 1656 when Rembrandt was fifty he was declared bankrupt and everything he possessed in the world was sold. We have an inventory of the gorgeous pictures, the armor, the sculptures, and the jewels and dresses that had belonged to Saskia. His son Titus retained a little of his mother's money and set up as an art dealer in order to help his father. It is a truly dreary scene yet Rembrandt still continued to paint because painting was to him the very breath of life. He painted Titus over and over again looking like a young prince. In these later years the portraits of himself increase in number as if because of the lack of other models. When we see him old, haggard, and poor in his worn brown painting clothes it hardly seems possible that he can be the same Rembrandt as the gay, frolicking man in a plumed hat holding out the pearls for Saskia. In his old age he received one more large order from a group of six drapers of Amsterdam for their portraits. It has been said that the lesson of the miscalled Night Watch had been branded into his soul by misfortune. What is certain is that while in this picture he purposely returned to the triumphs of portraiture of his youth he did not give up the artistic ideals of his middle life. He gave his sitters an equal importance in position and lighting and at the same time painted a picture artistically satisfying. Not one of the six men could have had any fault to find with the way in which he was portrayed. Each looks equally prominent in vivid life. Yet they are not a row of six individual men, but an organic group held together you hardly know how. At last you realize that all but one are looking at you. You are the unifying center that brings the whole picture together, the bond without which, metaphorically speaking, it would fall to pieces. This picture of six men in plain black clothes and black hats sitting around a table is by some considered the culmination of Rembrandt's art. It shows that in spite of misfortune and failure his ardor for new artistic achievement remained with him to the end. In 1662 Rembrandt seems to have paid a brief and unnoticed visit to England. If Charles II had heard of him and made him his court painter we might have had an unrivaled series of portraits of court beauties by his hand instead of by that of Sir Peter Lelley. As it was a hasty sketch of old St. Paul's Cathedral, four years before it was burnt down, is the sole trace left of his visit. The story of his old age is dreary. Even Titus died a few months before his father, leaving him alone in the world. In the autumn of 1669 he himself passed away, leaving behind him his painting clothes, his paint brushes, and nothing else, save a name destined to an immortality which his contemporaries little foresaw. All else had gone, his wife, his child, his treasures, and his early vogue among the Dutchmen of his time. The last picture of all was a portrait of himself in the same attitude as his first, but disillusioned and tragic with furrowed lines and white hair. No one cared whether he died or not, and it is recorded that after his death pictures by him could be bought for six pence. Thus ended the life of one of the world's supremely great painters. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway. The paintings discussed in this chapter are An Interior from the Picture by Peter de Hoog and Landscape with Cattle from the Picture by Kup. Chapter 10 Peter de Hoog and Kup Let us now turn from the splendid gloom of Rembrandt's Night in Armor to delight in this beautiful little interior of a Dutch house by Peter de Hoog. Still you see the prepossession for light, but for more tempered rays and softer shadows. The sunshine is diffused by the yellow curtains throughout the room. The old lady need not fear its revelations to be sure, for it is holland. She knows that the whole house has been duly scrubbed with soap and water. Dust and dirt are banished. It is a cloudless day and dry underfoot, otherwise the little boy would have worn clogs over his shoes, and you might see them outside. Mud on the polished stones of the passage would have ruffled the housewife's calm. As it is, we can see she has had no worries this morning. She has donned her fresh red dress and clean white apron, and will soon be seated to prepare the vegetables and fruit that are being brought her. Perhaps they are present from the old lady in the house over the way, who from her front door watches the child delivering the gift. It is a domestic scene that you might witness in any of the old towns of holland to this day. The insides and outsides of the houses are still scrubbed with soap and water. Rows of clogs stand outside the front doors on muddy days. The women wear the same bright colored gowns fully gathered round the waist, with the cleanest of white aprons. Their faces are placid and unruffled as they pursue the even tenor of their way. This atmosphere of Dutch life, peaceful, home-loving, and competent, is rendered by Peter de Hoek in most of his pictures. It is not the atmosphere of Rembrandt's art, yet he never could have painted thus except for Rembrandt. The same love of sunlight and shadows prevailed with Peter de Hoek, and it was no less the aim of his art to attain mastery over the painting of light, but light diffused and reflected. He loved to show the sunlight shining through some colored substance, such as this yellow curtain, which scatters its brightness and lets it fall more evenly throughout the room. He never painted such extreme contrasts as make manifest Rembrandt's power. Rembrandt's light had been so vivid that it seemed to overwhelm colors in a dazzling brilliancy. Peter de Hoek's lights are just strong enough to reveal the colors in a milder illumination. In our picture the sunshine diffused by the yellow curtains mingles with the red of the woman's dress and creates a rich orange. Little does she know how well her dress looks, but it was only after incessant study of the way in which Rembrandt had mastered the whole range from light to dark that Peter de Hoek became able to paint as he did within his narrower scale, abridged at both extremes. Begin with the room, then the passage, then the farther hall, then the highway open to the unseen sky above, then the house front beyond it, and the hall beyond the lady in the neighboring doorway. There are at least four distinct distances in this picture, each differently lighted, and the several effects worked out with scrupulous, painstaking fidelity. It is worth your while, with your own eyes rather than with many words of mind, to search out on the original all these beautifully varied gradations. In many of his pictures one part is lighted from the sunlit street and another from a closed court. Sometimes his figures stand in an open courtyard, whilst behind is a paved passage leading into the house. All his subjects are of the domestic Dutch life of the 17th century, but the arrangement in rooms, passages, courtyards, and enclosed gardens admitted of much variation. We never feel that the range of subjects is limited, for the light transforms each into a scene of that poetic beauty, which it was Peter de Hoog's great gift to discern, enjoy, and record. The painting is delicate and finished, meant to be seen from near at hand. It is always the room that interests him, as much as the people in it. The painting of the window with its little coats of arms, transparent yet diffusing the light, is exquisitely done. A chair with the cushion upon it, just like that, occurs again and again in his pictures, the cushion being used as a welcome bit of color in the scheme. Most of all the floors, whether paved with stone as in this picture, or with brick as in the courtyards, are painted with the delightful, precise care that the fanatics gave to their accessories. In Peter de Hoog's vision of the world there is the same appreciation of the objects of daily use as was displayed by the 15th century Flemish painters whenever their sacred subjects gave them opportunity. In the 17th century it was more congenial to the Flemish and Dutch temperament to paint their own country, and domestic scenes from their own lives, than pictures of devotion. Other artists, besides Peter de Hoog, painted people in their own houses. In the pictures of Terborg, ladies in satin dresses play the spinet and the guitar. Jan Steen depicted peasants reveling on their holidays, or in taverns. Peter de Hoog was the painter of middle-class life, and discovered in its circumstances, likewise, a bounding romance. The Dutchman of the 17th century loved his house and his garden, and every inch of the country in which he lived, rescued as it had been from invasions by armies and the sea. Many painters never left Holland, and found beauty enough there to fill well-spent lives in painting its flatness beneath overarching clear or clouded skies. Although the earlier Flemings had had a great love of landscape, they had not conceived it as a subject suitable for a whole picture, but only for a background. In the 16th century the figures gradually get smaller and less important, and towards the end of the century disappear. As the song says, a very different thing by far is painting a landscape background and painting a whole landscape picture. Before the end of the century Rubens painted some wonderful landscapes, and he was soon followed by a great number of very fine landscape painters in Holland. Kiep was one of many. In a Dutch landscape we cannot expect the rich coloring of Italy. The coloring of Holland is low-toned, and tender gradations lead away to the low and level horizon. The canals are sluggish and gray, and the clouds often heavy and dark. We saw how the brilliant skies and pearly buildings of Venice made Venetian painters the gayest colorists of the world. So the Dutch painters took their sober scale of landscape coloring as it was dictated to them by the infinitely varied yet sombre loveliness of their own land. In the great flat expanses of field, intersected by canals and dotted with windmills, the red brick roof of a water mill may look loud, like an aggressive hat. But the shadows cast by the clouds change every moment, and in flat country where there is less to arrest the eye the changes of tone are more marked. In an etching Rembrandt could leave a piece of white paper for the spot of highest sunlight and carry out all the gradations of tone in black and white until he reached the spot of darkest shadow. A painted landscape he indicated in the same way by varying shades of dull brown. In all of them you seem to feel the interposition of the air between you and the distant horizon at which you are looking. What else is there? At each point in the picture the air modifies the distinctness with which you can see the objects. This consciousness of air in a picture of low horizon is a very difficult thing to describe and explain. We know when it is there and when it is not. It has to be seen to be enjoyed and recorded. Holbein painted Edward the Sixth standing, so to speak, in a vacuum. Every line of his face is sharply defined. In real life air softens all lines so that even the edge of a nose in profile is not actually seen as a sharp outline. The figures in Richard II's picture stand in the most exhausted vacuum, but Hubert van Eyck had already begun to render the vision or illusion of air in his Three Marys. In this respect he had learnt more than the early painters of the Italian Renaissance, but Raphael and the Venetians, especially Giorgione and Titian, sometimes bathed their figures in a luminous golden atmosphere with the sun shining through it. The Dutch painters carried this still further, particularly in their pictures of interiors and landscapes. It is the atmosphere in the rooms that makes Peter de Hoog's portrayal of interior so wonderful. In our little picture the light coming through the window makes the air almost golden. When this painting of air and tone is set forth by the exquisite color of Peter de Hoog, you see this kind of Dutch achievement at its best. Coupes' love of sunshine is rare among Dutch landscape painters. He suffuses his skies with a golden haze that bathes his kin and kind alike in evening light. In our picture you can feel the great height of the sky and the depth of the air between the foreground and the horizon. The rendering of space is excellent, but Coupes has not been content with the features of his native Holland. He has put an imaginary mountain in the distance and a great hill in the foreground. It is certainly not a view that Coupes ever saw in Holland with his own eyes. He thought that the mountain's upright lines were good to break the flatness, and the finished composition, if beautiful, is its own excuse for being. Rembrandt is an exception to all rules, but most of the Dutch painters did not allow themselves these excursions within their studios to foreign scenes. They faithfully depicted their own flat country as they saw it, and added neither hills nor mountains. But they varied the lighting to express their own moods. Ruistel's somber tone befits the man who struggled with poverty all his life and died in a hospital penniless. Coupes is always sunny. In his pictures, cattle browse at their ease and Shepard's lounge contented on the grass. He was a painter of portraits and of figure subjects as well as of landscapes, and his little groups of men and cattle are always beautifully drawn. Ruistel, Habema, and many others were landscape painters only, and some had their figures put in by other artists. Often they did without them, but in the landscapes of Coupes, cows generally occupy the prominent position. The black and white cow in our picture is a fine creature, and nothing could be more harmonious in color than the brown cow and the brown jacket of the herdsmen. There were some painters in Holland in the seventeenth century who made animals their chief study. There, too, for it had been rare to introduce them into pictures, except as symbols, like the Lion of St. Jerome, or where the story implied them, or in allegorical pictures, such as the Golden Age. But at this later time animals had their share in the increased interest that was taken in the things of daily life, and they were painted for their handsome sakes, as Landseer painted them in England fifty years ago. Thus the seventeenth century in Holland shows an enlargement in the scope of subjects for painting. Devotional pictures were becoming rare, but illustrations, sacred and secular, portraits, groups, interiors, and landscapes were produced in great numbers. Dutch painters outnumbered those of Flanders, but among the latter were at least two of the highest eminence, Rubens, and Van Dyke, and to these we will next direct our attention. End of Chapter 10, read on April 28, 2008, in San Diego, California. Chapter 11 Van Dyke This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway. The painting discussed in this chapter is William II of Orange by Van Dyke. Chapter 9 Van Dyke The great painter Rubens lived at Antwerp, a town about as near to Amsterdam as Dover is to London, yet despite the proximity of Flanders and Holland, their religion, politics, social life, and art were very different in the 17th century as we have already seen. Rubens was a painter of the prosperous and ruling classes. He was employed by his own sovereign, by the King of Spain, by Marie de Medici, Queen of France, and by Charles I of England. His remarkable social and intellectual gifts caused him to be employed also as an ambassador, and he was sent on a diplomatic errand to Spain, but even then his leisure hours were occupied in copying the Fineticians in the King's Palace. One day he was noticed by a Spanish noble who said to him, Does my lord occupy his spare time in painting? No, said Rubens. The painter sometimes amuses himself with diplomacy. In his life, as in his art, he was exuberant, and absurd anecdote of the time is good enough to show that. Some people who went to visit him in his studio at Antwerp wrote afterwards that they found him hard at work at a picture, whilst at the same time he was dictating a letter, and someone else was reading aloud a Latin work. When the visitors arrived he answered all their questions without leaving off any of those three occupations. We must not all hope to match Rubens. Rubens's great ceremonial paintings, containing numerous figures and commemorating historical scenes in honor of his royal patrons, were executed by his own hands, or by the hands he taught and guided with great skill and speed. He painted also beautiful portraits of his wife and family, and pictures of his own medieval castle, which he restored and inhabited during the last years of his life, with views of the country stretching out in all directions. He liked comfortable life and comfortable-looking people. He painted his own wives as often as Rembrandt painted Saskia. Both were plump enough to make our memories recur with pleasure to the slenderer figures preferred by Botticelli and the painters of his school. To accomplish the great mass of historic, symbolic, and ceremonial painting that still crowds the walls of the galleries of Europe, Rubens needed many assistants and pupils, but only one of them, Van Dyck, rose to the highest rank as a painter. He was a Fleming by birth, and worked in the studio at Antwerp for several years as an assistant of Rubens. Then he went to Italy to learn from the great pictures of the Italian Renaissance, as so many northern artists wished to do. It has been said that the works of Titian influenced his youthful mind the most. Van Dyck spent three years in Genoa, where he was employed by those foremost in its life to paint their portraits. Many of these superb canvases have been dispersed to enrich the galleries of both hemispheres, public and private, but the proud, handsome semblances of some of his sitters, dressed in rich velvet, pearls, and lace, looked down upon us still from the bare walls of their once magnificent palaces, with that grand air for which the eye and the brush of Van Dyck have long remained unrivaled. When he returned to Flanders from Italy, he had attained a style of painting entirely his own, and very different from that of his great master Rubens. The William II of Orange picture is an excellent example of Van Dyck's work. The child is a prince. We know it as plainly as if Van Dyck had spoken the word before unveiling his canvas. His erect attitude, his dignified bearing, his perfect self-possession and ease, show that he has been trained in a high school of manners. But there is also something in the delicate oval of the face, the well-cut nose and mouth, and the graceful growth of the hair that speak of refined breeding. Distinction is the key note of the picture. This little prince had in his veins the blood of William the Silent and became the father of our William III. Poor human nature is too easily envious, and some deny the reality, in fact, of the distinction, the grace of Van Dyck's portrayed men and women. Nevertheless, Van Dyck's vision, guiding his brush, was as rare an endowment as Envy is a common one, and has higher authority to show us what to look for, to see, and to enjoy. Van Dyck was the first painter who taught people how they ought to look, to befit an admirer's view of their aristocratic rank. His portraits thus expressed the social position of the sitter, as well as the individual character. Although this has been an aim of portrait painters in modern times, when they have been painting people of rank, it was less usual in the seventeenth century. There was hardly scope enough in Antwerp for two great painters, such as Rubens and Van Dyck, so in 1632 Van Dyck left Flanders, and settled permanently in England, as court painter to Charles I. All his life Charles had been an enthusiastic collector of works of art. Born with a fine natural taste, he had improved it by study, until Rubens could say of him, The Prince of Wales is the best amateur of painting of all the princes in the world. He has demanded my portrait with such insistence that he has overcome my modesty, although it does not seem to me fitting to send it to a prince of his importance. Two of our pictures, the Richard II Dyck and the Edward VI of Holbein, were in his collection, besides many we have mentioned, such as Holbein's Erasmus, Raphael's cartoons, and Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar. Before Charles came to the throne he had gone to Spain to woo the daughter of Philip III. The magnificent titions in the palace at Madrid exhorted such admiration from the prince that Philip felt it incumbent upon him as a host and a Spaniard to offer some of them to Charles. Charles sent his own painter to copy the rest. He kept agents all over Europe to buy for him, and spent thousands of pounds in salaries and presents to the artists at his court. As in the time of Henry VIII there were still no first-rate English painters. James I had employed a Fleming and an inferior Dutchman whom Charles retained in his service for a time. Then he experimented with a second-rate Italian artist who painted some ceilings which still exist at Hampton Court. Rubens was too much in demand at other courts for Charles to have his exclusive service, but the courtly Van Dyke was a painter after his own heart. For the first time he had found an artist who satisfied his taste, and Van Dyke a court in which he could paint distinction to his heart's content. Charles would have squandered money on him if he had then had it to squander. As it was he paid him far less than he had paid his inferior predecessors, but Van Dyke continued to paint for him to the end, and by Heaven's mercy died himself before the crash came, which overthrew Charles and scattered his collection. Between the years of 1632 and 1642 Van Dyke painted a great number of portraits of the King. It is from these that we obtain our vivid idea of the first Charles's gentleness and refinement. He has a sad look, as though the world were too much for him, and he had fallen upon evil days. We can see him year by year looking sadder, but Van Dyke makes the sadness only emphasize the distinction. Queen Henrietta Maria was painted even more often than the King. She is always dressed in some bright, shimmering satin, sometimes in yellow, like the sleeve of William II's dress, sometimes in the purest white. She looks very lovely in the pictures, but lovelier still are the groups of her children. Even James II was once a bewitching little creature in frocks, with a skull-cap on his head. His sister Mary aged six in a lace dress, with her hands folded in front of her, looks very good and grown up. When she became older, though not even then really grown up, she married the William of Orange of our picture. He came from Holland, and stayed at the English court as a boy of twelve, and it was then that Van Dyke painted this portrait of him. Later on, when they were married, Van Dyke painted them together, but William was older, and looked a little less beautiful, and Mary had lost the charm of her babyhood. With all her royal dignity and solemnity she is a perfect child in these pictures. Refined people, loving art, have grown so fond of the Van Dyke children, that often when they wish their own to look particularly bewitching at some festivity, they dress them in the costumes of the little Mary and Elizabeth Stewart, and revive the skull-caps and the lace dresses for a fresh enjoyment. Van Dyke's patrons in England, other than the King, were mostly noble men and courtiers. They lived in the great houses which had been built in many parts of the country during the reigns of Elizabeth and her successors. The rooms were spacious, with high walls that could well hold the large canvases of Van Dyke. Sometimes a special gallery was built to contain the family portraits, and Van Dyke received a commission to paint them all. Often several copies of the same picture were ordered at one time to be sent as presents to friends and relations. Usually the artist painted but one himself, the rest were copies by his assistants. Van Dyke's portraits were designed to suit great houses. In a small room, which a portrait by Holbein would have decorated nobly, a canvas by Van Dyke would have been overpowering. In spite of the fact that the expressions on the faces are often intimate and appealing, domesticity is not the mark of his art. In Van Dyke's picture of our air of fame, the white linen, the yellow satin, and the armour please us as befitting the lovely face. There is a glimmer of light on the armour, but you see how different is Van Dyke's treatment of it from Rembrandt's. Van Dyke painted it as an article of dress in due subordination to the face, not as an opportunity for reflecting light and becoming the most important thing in the picture. We have seen how Rembrandt, Peter de Hoek, Kup, Rubens, and Van Dyke were all contemporaries, born within an area of ground smaller far than England. Yet the range of their subjects were widely different, and each painter gave his individuality full play. The desires of the public were not stereotyped and fixed, as they had been when all alike wanted their religious aspirations expressed in art. The patrons of that epoch had various likings, as we have today, and the painter developed along the lines most congenial to himself. Unless he could make people like what he enjoyed painting, he could not make a living. If they had no eyes to learn to see, he might remain unappreciated, like Rembrandt, until long after his death. Yet Van Dyke's portraits were popular. People could scarcely help enjoying an art that showed them off to such advantage. Having found a style that suited him, he adhered to it consistently, thenceforward making but few experiments. This little picture before us is an admirable example of the gentle, poetic grace and refinement always recalled to the memory by the name of Van Dyke. So long as men prized the aspect of distinction, which he was the first northern painter to express in paint, Van Dyke's reputation will endure. End of Chapter 11, read by Kara Schallenberg on July 24, 2008, in San Diego, California. Chapter 12 Velazquez This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway The painting discussed in this chapter is Don Balthazar Carlos by Velazquez. Chapter 12, Velazquez During the years in which Van Dyke was painting his beautiful portraits of the royal family of England, another painter, Velazquez, was immortalizing another royal family in the faraway country of Spain. Cut off by the great mountains of the Pyrenees from the rest of Europe, Spain did not rank among the foremost powers until after the discovery of America had brought wealth to her from the gold mines of Mexico and Peru. In the sixteenth century the king of Spain's dominions, actual or virtual, covered a great part of Western Europe, accepting England and France. Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands owned the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. His son was Philip II of Spain, the husband of our Queen Mary of England, and his great-grandson was King Philip IV, the patron of Velazquez, as Charles I was of Van Dyke. It is the little son of Philip IV, Don Balthazar Carlos, whose portrait is before us, as manly and sturdy looking a little fellow as ever bestowed a pony. He was but six years old when Velazquez painted the picture here reproduced. Certainly he was not fettered and cramped and prevented from taking exercise like his little sisters. The princesses of Spain were dressed in wide skirts, spread out over hoops and hiding their feet from the time they could walk. The tops of the dresses were as stiff as corsilets, and one wonders how the little girls were able to move at all. As they grew older the hoops became wider and wider until in one picture of a grown-up princess the skirts are broader than the whole height of her body. Stringent court etiquette forbade a princess to let her feet be seen, but so odd may such conventions be that it was nevertheless thought correct for the queen to ride on horseback astride. It is from the canvases of Velazquez that we know the Spanish royal family and the aspect of the court of Philip IV as though we had lived there ourselves. The painter was born in the south of Spain in the same year as Van Dyke, and seven years earlier than Rembrandt. To paint the portrait of his sovereign was the ambition of the young artist. When his years were but twenty-four the opportunity arrived, and Philip was so pleased with the picture that he took the young man into his household, and said that no one else should ever be allowed to paint his portrait. Velazquez welcomed with gratified joy the prospect of that lifelong proximity, although neither his earnings nor his station at all matched the service he rendered to his sovereign. As the years went on he was paid a little better, but his days and hours were more and more taken up with duties at court, and his salary was always in arrears. He could not even reserve his own private time for his art, but as he waxed higher in the estimation of the king, the supervision of court ceremonies entrusted to him as an honour deprived him of leisure, and at last brought his life prematurely to a close. From the time when Velazquez entered the service of the king he painted exclusively for the court. We have eight portraits by him of Philip IV and five of the little Don Carlos, besides many others of the queens and princesses. We can follow the growth of his art in the portraits of Philip IV, as we can follow that of Rembrandt in portraits of himself. But while Rembrandt might make of the same person, himself, or another model a dozen different people, so that it mattered little who the model was, Velazquez was concerned with a different problem. In the seventeenth century almost any good painter could draw his models correctly, but Velazquez reproduced the living aspect of a man as no one else had done. We have already spoken of the feeling of atmosphere that Cupid and Peter de Hoek were able to bring into their pictures. Velazquez, knowing little or nothing of the contemporary Dutchman, worked at the same art problems all his life, and at last mastered the atmosphere problem completely, whether it was the air of a closed room in the dark palace of Philip, or the air of the open country as in our picture. In this there is no bright light except upon the face of the little prince. It is dark and gloomy weather, but if on such a day you were to see the canvas in the open air it would almost seem part of the country itself, as Velazquez's picture of a room seems part of the gallery in which it hangs. It was only by degrees that he attained this quality in his work. He had had the ordinary teaching of a painter in Spain, but the level of art there at the time was not so high as in Holland or Italy. Like Rembrandt he was to a great extent his own master. In his early years he painted pictures of middle-class life in which each figure is truthfully depicted, as were the early heads in Rembrandt's anatomy. Like Rembrandt in his youth he looked at each head separately and painted it as faithfully as he could. The higher art of composing into the unity of a group all its parts, and keeping their perfections within such limits as best cooperate in the transcendent perfection of the whole, this was the labour and the crown of both their lives. Velazquez's best and greatest groups are such a realised vision of life that they have remained the despair of artists to this day. Velazquez came to court in the year in which Charles I, as Prince of Wales, went to Madrid to woo the sister of Philip IV. He painted her portrait twice and made an unfinished sketch of Charles which has unfortunately been lost. Five years afterwards Rubens was a visitor at the Spanish court on a diplomatic errand. The painters took a fancy to one another and corresponded for the remainder of their lives. They must have talked long about their art, and the elder painter, Rubens, is thought to have promoted in Velazquez a desire to see the great treasures of Italy. At all events we find that in the next year he has obtained permission and money from Philip to undertake the journey, which kept him away from Spain for two years. There is an amusing page in doggerel verse which I remember to have read some years ago. I trust the translator will pardon the liberty I am taking in quoting it. It reports a perhaps imaginary conversation between Velazquez and an Italian painter in Rome. The master in this rhyme is Velazquez. The master stiffly bowed his figure tall and said, for Raphael to speak the truth, I always was plain spoken from my youth. I cannot say I like his works at all. Well, said the other, if you can run down so great a man I really cannot see what you can find to like in Italy. To him we all agree to give the crown. Velazquez answered thus, I saw in Venice the true test of the good and beautiful. First in my judgment ever stands that school, and Titian, first of all Italian men, is. Velazquez in Rome was already a ripening artist, whose vision of the world was quite uncolored and unshaped by the medieval tradition. Raphael's pictures with their superhumanly lovely saints, their unworldly feeling and their supernaturally clear light, doubtless imparted pleasure, but not a sympathetic inspiration. Tintoret's immense creative power and the colours of Titian's painting which inspired Tintoret's ambition, as we remember, these were the effective influences Velazquez experienced in Italy. His purchases and his own later canvases afford that inference. On his return from Italy he painted a ceremonial picture as wall decoration for one of the palaces of Philip, and in it we can trace the influence of the great ceremonial paintings of the Venetians. The picture commemorates the surrender of Breda in North Brabant when the famous general Spinola received its keys for Philip IV. It is far more than a series of pictures of the Venetians. It is far more than a series of separate figures. Two armies, officers and men, are grouped in one transaction, in one near and far landscape. It is a picture in which the foreground and the distances, with the lances of the soldiers and the smoke of battle, are as indispensable to the whole as are the central figures of the Dutchmen in front handing the city keys to the courtly Spanish general. Don Balthazar Carlos was born while Velazquez was in Italy. On his return he painted his first portrait of him at the age of two. The little prince is dressed in a richly brocaded frock with a sash tied around his shoulder. His hair has only just begun to grow, but he has the same look of determination upon his face that we see four years later in the equestrian portrait. A dwarf about his own height stands a step lower than he does, so as again to give him prominence. Another picture of Don Balthazar a little older is in the Wallace Collection in London. Velazquez's power with his brush lay in depicting vividly a scene that he saw, thus in portraiture he was at his best. He knew how to pose his figures to perfection so as to make the expression of their character a true pictorial subject. In our picture it is on high ground that the hooves of the pony of Don Balthazar Carlos tread. So to raise the little prince above the eye of the spectator was a good stroke, suggesting an importance in the gallant young rider. The boy's erect figure too, firmly holding his baton, as a king might hold a scepter, and the well-stirrupt foot are all perfect posing. Velazquez does not give him distinction in the manner of Van Dyke by delicate drawing and gentle grace, but in a sturdier fashion, with speed and pose and a fluttering sash in the wind. All the portraits of this lad are full of charm. He was heir to the throne, but died in boyhood. Velazquez paid another visit to Italy twenty years after his first, for the purpose of buying more pictures to adorn Philip's palaces. Again we find him in Venice where he bought two tinterettes and a veronaise, and again he made a long stay in Rome, this time to paint the portrait of the pope. When he returned to Spain in 1651 he had still nine years of work before him. There were portraits of Philip's new queen to be painted, a young girl in a most uncomfortable dress, and portraits of her child, the Infanta Margarita. Be witching are the pictures of this little princess at the ages of three, of four, and of seven, with her fair hair tied in a bow at the side of her head, and voluminous skirts of pink and silver. But sweetest of all is the picture called the Maids of Honor, Les Meninas, in which the princess, aged about six, is being posed for her portrait. She is petulant and tired, and two of her handmaidens are cajoling her to stand still. Her two dwarfs and a big dog have been brought to amuse her, and the king and queen, reflected in a mirror at the end of the room, stand watching the scene. Velazquez himself, with his easel and brushes, is at the side painting. The picture perpetuates for centuries a moment of palace life. In that transitory instant Velazquez took his vivid impression of the scene, and has translated his impression into paint. Everything is simple and natural as can be. The ordinary light of day falls upon the princess, but does not penetrate to the ceiling of the lofty room, which is still in shadow. All seem to have come together haphazard without being fitted into the canvas. There is little detail, and the whole effect seems produced by the simplest means. Yet in reality the skill involved is so great that artists today spend weeks copying the picture, in the endeavour to learn something of the secret of Velazquez. The best judges are among those who rank him highest, so that he is called preeminently the painter's painter. It is impossible for anyone but a painter to understand how he used paint. From near at hand it looks a smudge, but at the proper distance every stroke takes its right place. Such freedom was the result of years of careful painting of detail, and is not to be attained by any royal road. Velazquez seldom seems to have made preliminary drawings, but of that we cannot be sure. Certainly he had learned to conceive his vision as a whole, and we may fancy at least that he drew it so upon the canvas, altering the lines as he went, working at all the parts of the picture at once, keeping the due relation of part to part, not as if he finished one bit at a time or thought of one part of a figure as distinct from the rest. To have drawn separate studies for legs and arms would have been foreign to his method of working. The picture paints it in this his latest style are few, for the court duties heaped upon him left too little time. Maria Teresa, the sister of Don Balthasar Carlos, was engaged to be married to Louis XIV, king of France. The marriage took place on the border of France and Spain, and Velazquez was in charge of all the ceremonies. The princess travelled with a cavalcade 18 miles long, and we can imagine what work all the arrangements involved. The marriage over, the ever-loyal Velazquez returned to Madrid, but he returned only to die. End of CHAPTER XII. Read by Kara Schellenberg on July 24, 2008, in San Diego, California. CHAPTER XIII. RENALDS AND THE 18TH CENTURY. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Book of Art for Young People by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway. The painting discussed in this chapter is The Duke of Gloucester by Sir Joshua Reynolds. CHAPTER XIII. RENALDS AND THE 18TH CENTURY. Hither, too, we have travelled far and wide in our search for typical examples of the beautiful in painting. We went from Flanders to Italy, from Italy to Germany, back to Holland, and thence to Spain. It is true that we began in England with our first picture, and that we have returned twice, once with Holbein, and again with van Dijk, both foreign-born and trained artists. We will finish with examples of truly native English art. In the 18th century England, for the first time, gained a foremost place in painting, though the people of the day scarcely realized that it was so. Even the poet Gray, writing in 1763, could say, Why this nation has made no advance hitherto in painting and sculpture, it is hard to say. You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to foresee, that art shall one day flourish in England. I too much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far. Yet in 1763 Reynolds was forty years of age, and Gainsborough about four years younger. Hogarth was even sixty-six, and at work upon his last plate. Although hitherto the best painting in England had been done by foreign artists, such as Holbein and van Dijk, yet there had always been Englishmen of praiseworthy talent who had painted pleasing portraits. Hogarth carried this native tradition to a high point of excellence. He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an unaffected and straightforward way. But he was a humorist in paint, and as great a student of human nature as he was of art. His insight into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter. In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six servants in a double row. They might all be characters from Dickens, so vividly and sympathetically humorous is each. In his engravings Hogarth satirized the lives of all classes of the society of his day. When we look at them, we live again in eighteenth century London and walk in streets known to fame, though now destroyed, thronged with men and women true to life. As an artist, Hogarth occupies a position between the seventeenth-century Dutch painters of low life and the English painters that succeeded him, who expressed the ideals of a refined society. His portraits have something of the strength of Rembrandt's. His street and tavern scenes rival Jan Steen's, but behind the mere representation of brutality, vice, crime and misery, we perceive not merely a skilled craftsman, but a moral being whom contact with misery deeply stirs and the sight of wickedness moves to indignation. After seventeenth-twenty, a succession of distinguished painters were born in England. Many of them first saw the light in obscure villages in the depths of the country. Reynolds came from Devonshire, Gainesborough from Suffolk, Romney from the Lake Country. The eighteenth century was a time when politicians and men of letters had the habit of gathering in the coffee-houses of London, forerunners of the clubs of today. Conversation was valued as one of life's best enjoyments, and the varied society of actors, authors, and politicians in which it flourished best could only be obtained in the town. To the most distinguished circle of that kind in London our painter Reynolds belonged. In the eighteenth century society had also begun to divide its time in modern fashion between town and country. Many of the large country houses of today and nearly all the landscape-gardened parks belonged to that date. Nevertheless it was a time of great artificiality of life. The ladies had no short country skirts, and none of the freedom to which we are accustomed. In London they wore long, powdered curls and rouge, and in the country too they did not escape from the artificiality of fashion. Indeed their great desire seems to have been to get away from everything natural and spontaneous. The artificial poetry of that time deals with the patchboxes and powder puffs of the fashionable dames of the town, and with nymphs and dresden china shepherdesses in the country. Even on Reynolds' canvases the desire to improve upon nature is apparent. In his young days he painted the local personages of Devonshire. Then he made a journey abroad and spent three years in Rome and Venice. On his return he settled in London, and the most distinguished men and women of the day and their children sat to him. It seems that he would have liked his lords and ladies to look as heroic or sublime as the heroes or gods of Michelangelo. Instead of painting them in the surroundings that belonged to them as Holbein or Velazquez would have done, he dressed his ladies in what he called white drapery, a voluminous material, neither silk, satin, woolen, nor cotton, and painted them sailing through the woods. The ladies themselves liked to look like nymphs, characterless and pretty, so the fashion of painting portraits in this way became common. The pictures are pleasing to look at, although so artificial, and after all it was only full-length portraits of ladies that Reynolds treated in this way. They were a small part of his whole output. But he and Velazquez worked in a totally different spirit. Velazquez made the subject before him, however unpromising, striking because of its truth. Reynolds liked to change it on occasion into something quite different for the sake of making a picture pretty. Nevertheless his strength lay in straightforward portraiture and in the rendering of character. His portraits of men, unlike those of women, are dignified, simple, and restrained. His art was one long development till blindness prevented him from working. Every year he attained more freedom and naturalness in his pose and developed more power in his use of color. Many would say that his loveliest achievements were portraits of children, yet he did not attain the same freedom in his child-poses till late in life. You have all seen photographs, at any rate, of the age of innocence and the heads of angels, but this little picture of the Duke of Gloucester, nephew of George III, will not be so familiar. I wonder whether it reminds you of anything you know. It reminds me of Van Dyke. The little Duke stands with an air of importance upon the hillside, which is raised above the eye of the spectator, as Velázquez raised the ground beneath the pony of Don Balthasar Carlos. There is no mistake about the child being a simple English boy, with a nice chubby face and ordinary straight, fair hair. But he is a prince and knows it. For the sake of having his picture painted he poses with an air of conscious dignity beyond his ears. He sweeps his cloak around him like any grown-up cavalier and holds out a plumed hat and walking stick in a lordly fashion. The child is consciously acting the part of a grown-up person, which only emphasizes his childhood. But the air of refinement and distinction in the picture comes straight from Van Dyke. As you look at the portraits of the Duke of Gloucester and William II of Orange side by side, it may puzzle you to say which is the more attractive. Van Dyke has painted the clothes in more detail. A century later Reynolds has learnt to paint with dash, though not with the mastery of Velázquez. The effect of the cloak of the little Duke, its shimmering shades of mauve and pink, is inimitable. It tones beautifully with the background, varying from dull green to brightest yellow. The background happens to be sky, but it might as well have been a curtain, as long as it's bit of color so set off the clothes of the little Duke. When Reynolds painted children he delighted in making them act parts. Even in the age of innocence the little girl is looking how very, very innocent. He painted one picture of a small boy, master crew, dressed to look like Henry the Eighth, in the style of Holbein. With broad shoulders and a rich dress he stands on his sturdy legs quite the figure of Henry. But the face is one beam of boyish laughter, and on the top of the little replica of the body of the corpulent monarch, the effect of the childish face is most entertaining. When Reynolds puts away his ideas of the grand style of Michelangelo to paint pictures such as these he is entirely delightful. He sometimes painted holy families and classical subjects, but the more the spirit of medieval sacred art has sunk into us the less we can admire modern versions of the old subjects. The sacred paintings of the middle ages owe some of their charm to the fact that they do not make upon us the impression of life. In Reynolds, holy families, the mother and child are painted with all the skill of a modern artist, and look as human as his portraits of the Duchess of Devonshire and her baby. It is no longer possible to think of them as anything but portraits of the models whom Reynolds employed for his picture. Another method that modern artists have sometimes adopted in painting sacred subjects is to imitate the faulty drawing and incomplete representation of life which are present in the art of the old masters. But this conscious imitation of bygone ignorance beguiles no one who has once felt the charm of the painters before Raphael. Reynolds' great contemporary, Gainsborough, has been called a child of nature. He would have liked to live in the country always and paint landscapes. He did paint many of his native Suffolk, but in his day landscapes were unsailable, so he was driven to the town and to portrait painting to make a living. Less than Reynolds, a painter of character, Gainsborough reproduced the superficial expression of his sitters. But he had so natural an eye for grace and beauty that his portraits always please. He did not attempt Reynolds' wide range of subjects, or the same difficulties of pose. Of Reynolds he said, How various he is! But his admiration did not make him stray from his natural path to attempt the variety of another. Reynolds, equally admiring, said of him, I cannot make out how he produces his effects. Perhaps Gainsborough did not know either. He does seem to paint by instinct and successive pictures become more pleasing. Boyant in his life, as in his art, his last words were, We are all going to heaven, and Fandike is of the company. Another great contemporary painter was Romney, whose portraits of ladies are delightful. Figured as nymphs too, they are so buoyant with bright expressions and wayward locks that one wishes he had depicted in their faces a soul. All over England and Scotland, portrait painters flourished at this time. There were so many English artists that in 1768 the Royal Academy was founded, with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president. It was to the students of the Royal Academy that he delivered his discourses upon art, setting forth the principles which he judged to be sound. He was an indefatigably hard worker, until within two years of his death in 1792. All classes of men esteemed and regretted him, clouded though his intercourse with them had been by the deafness from which he suffered during the greater part of his life. Goldsmith, the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, wrote this character epitaph for him. Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind, he has not left a wiser or better behind. His pencil was striking, resistless and grand. His manners were gentle, complying and bland. Still born to improve us in every part, his pencil our faces, his manners our heart. To coxcombs of verse, yet most civilly steering, when they judged without skill, he was still hard of hearing. When they talked of their ruffles, corregios, and stuff, he shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff. By flattery unspoiled. The end is missing, for while Goldsmith was versifying so feelingly about his friend, death overtook the writer eighteen years before the subject of the epitaph.