Tradition of the Golden Age of Dutch Art

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

The first Dutch paintings came to Russia in the early eighteenth century. In the St. Petersburg and Peterhof galleries of Peter the Great and in the Kunstkameer he founded, works by Dutch artists were for a long time, and with good reason, the nucleus of the collections.

In 1715-16 Osip Solovyov and Yury Kologrivov, diplomatic and commercial agents of Peter the Great, bought 43 pictures in The Hague, 121 in Amsterdam and 117 in Brussels and Antwerp.

The artistic merits of the Dutch canvases in the St. Petersburg collections of the time were, generally speaking, not very high. Nevertheless, they included several masterpieces that were later to become the pride of the Hermitage collection, in particular Rembrandt's David's Farewell to Jonathan (purchased in Amsterdam in 1716). This was the first work of the great Dutchman to come into Russian ownership. Interesting, too, are Adriaen van Ostade's The Scuffle, Jan Steen's Marriage Contract and Scene in a Tavern, and Johannes Oudenrogge,s The Weaver. Originally housed in the Monplaisir Palace of Peterhof (now Petrodvorets), they were transferred to the Hermitage in 1882.

With the founding of the Hermitage in 1764 and the purchase of works in the possession of Johann Ernest Gotzkowsky, Heinrich Bruhl, Pierre Crozat, Baudouin, and others, the collection of Dutch painting in St. Petersburg had by the second half of the eighteenth century become one of the richest in the world. It was now characterized by fullness, diversity, and very high quality. Almost all the leading masters of the seventeenth century, the heyday of Dutch painting, were represented by major works. The Rembrandts acquired by then included Abraham's Sacrifice, Flora, Danae, The Holy Family, Portrait of an Old Man in Red, Ahasuerus, Haman and Esther (now in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), and The Return of the Prodigal Son.

But whereas the Golden Age of Dutch painting was represented to a degree that, it seemed, couid hardly be improved, the same could not be said of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There were few pictures from this period of birth and maturation of Dutch art, a period uvderestimated and little studied at the time. Yet even then the Hermitage could take pride in Lucas van Leyden's large altarpiece The Healing of the Blind Man of Jericho - considered a special rarity by the painter and historian of Dutch art Karel van Mander in his Het Schilderboek (Book of Artists) as far back as 1604 - as well as two group portraits of Amsterdam musketeers ( a genre that hardly exists outside Holland) by Dirck Jacobsz, and Pieter Aertsen's superb picture The Apostles Peter and John Healing the Sick, at the time ascribed to Hans Holbein.

The quality and scope of the Hermitage collection directly influenced the character of private collecting. It was precisely the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that saw the formation of the Golitsyn, Yusupov, Sheremetev, Stroganov, and other galleries, and if some collectors favored the Italian or French schools, they almost always gave the Dutch second place in their collections. These private galleries were of course less famous than the Hermitage, but they did own some quite valuable pictures.

In Moscow in the nineteenth century, Dutch painting could be seen not only in the Golitsyn Museum and the palace collections of the Sheremetevs and Yusupovs, but also in the private galleries of A. Vlasov, F. Mosolov, A. Tuchkov, and E. Tiurina, and, finally, in the Rumiantsev Museum, which was transferred to Moscow from St. Petersburg. In 1862 this museum's collection was enlarged with the entry of two hundred works from the Hermitage, more that half by Dutch and Flemish painters. Well represented in the Moscow collections of the time were Rembrandt and his pupils Gerrit Dou, Ferdinand Bol, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Govaert Flinck, Philips de Koninck, Aert de Gelder; the genre painters Adriaen van Ostade, Cornelis Dusart, Pieter Codde, Gerard Ter Borch; the landscapists Salomon van Ruysdael, Jan Both, Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem, Aert van der Neer, Jan van der Heyden; the still-life painters Willem van Aelst, Abraham van Beyeren, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Martinus Nellius, Juriaen van Streeck, and other minor Dutchmen. The works of all these masters were handed over to the Museum of Fine Arts (since 1937 the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) in 1924.

Among the new museums organized after the October Revolution was the Kiev Museum of Western European and Oriental Art, inaugurated in 1919. Its exposition was built around the private collection of B. and V. Khanenko, which boasted some superd Dutch canvases. In 1925-26, another rich private collection, that of V. Shchavinsky, entered the museum. Like Semionov-Tien-Shansky, Shchavinsky had striven to gather as complete a selection of Dutch and Flemish masters as possible and from the very beginning intended it for city of Kiev.

The same period saw the inauguration of museums in Ulynovsk, Novgorod, Tambov, and Perm. The Soviet government's prime achievement in the museum field, though, was the organization of art galleries in the outlying areas of the former Russian Empire - the cities of Central Asia and Transcaucasia, Siberia, and the Far East. Today their holdings of Dutch art include works of high and in some cases outstanding artistic merit. Such canvases as Hendrick Terbrugghen's Christ Crowned with Thorns (Art Museum, Irkutsk), Mathias van Stomer's The Annunciation (Museum of Art and Local Lore, Zhitomir), and a sketch by Jan Steen (Art Museum, Khabarovsk) indicate well the quality and importance of these collections. dutch art

In their best works, history painters roused the patriotic sentiments of the Dutch. However, they all too often limited themselves to the moralizing illustration of biblical stories. But the man who breathed real life into the history genre was Rambrandt. The art of this great genius is the supreme achievement of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Democratic and humane, permeated with an impassioned faith in the triumph of truth, it embodied the life-asserting ideals of the age.

The enormous interest in the sea and in fishermen, inherent in the brave seafarers that are the Dutch, gave birth to a new form of landscape painting - the marine. The pictures of Jan Porcellis, a prominent marine painter of the first half of the seventeenth century, and his pupil Simon de Vlieger demonstrate the level of perfection achieved by marinists in their handing of the humid, sun-pervaded sea air, the wind-driven clouds, the wavy surface of the water, and the shores and villages dissolving in the silvery distance.

The realist trend in the Dutch landscape reached maturity in the works of Jacob van Ruisdael. No artist before him achieved so majestic and at the same time so compassionate a portrayal of nature. Even his admirable early pieces, The House in the Grove (1646, the Hermitage, St. Petersburg) and Peasant Houses in the Dunes (1647, the Hermitage, St. Petersburg) are marked by a deep insight into the soul of nature that his predecessors did not possess. In The Marsh (c.1660), one of the gems of the Hermitage collection, Ruisdael builds a synthetic image of nature that is at once a powerful artistic generalization and a profound philosophical study

The end of the seventeenth century saw the triumph of decorative tendencies in Dutch still-life painting. The most popular of these were «trophies of the chase,” which accorded better with the increasingly aristocratic tastes of the bourgeoisie. The leading exponents of the genre were Melchior de Hondecoeter and Jan Weenix.

In the course of the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries Holland gradually lost its leading position in the economic, political, and cultural life of Europe. This was immediately reflected in its art. True, in the eighteenth century, Dutch painting, based as it was on well-established tradition, managed to preserve its national character, but by the nineteenth century Dutch masters had joined the mainstream of European art movements.

The first of these to draw Dutch painters firmly into its orbit was Romanticism. Admittedly, thought, the revolutionary essence of French Romanticism was alien to them, and they absorbed only its painterly idiom and techniques. The one truly talented representative of this movement in Holland was Ary Scheffer, a pupil of Pierre Narcisse Guerin and a friend of Teodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix. This sketch for a large picture reflects well the author's impulsive temperament. Nicolaas Pieneman's Jacoba of Bavaria (Museum of Western European and Oriental Art, Riga) exemplifies Dutch Romanticism in the history genre.

Dutch Romantic landscapes are especially numerous in Russian collections. JAndreas Schelfhout, the genre's most prominent exponent, is represented by four winter scenes (his favorite subject); several museums house works by Barend Cornelis Koekkoek and marines by Johannes Christianus Schotel. Tye Hermitage has some canvases by Johannes Bosboom, the last romantic of the Dutch school.

Very well known in Holland at the time was scholl of The Hague which strove to create a modern art that would break with the old, outmoded, and by now routine traditions. Willem Roelofs, one of the founders of the Pulchri Studio that was the nucleus of The Hague school, in Landscape with a Lake (the Hermitage, St. Petersburg) and Jan Weissenbruch in Street in a Dutch Town (the Hermitage, St. Petersburg) abandoned the method of painting landscapes in the studio.

Jozef Izraels ranks the foremost masters of the new age. His democratic protagonists, humane outlook, and deep psychological understanding of human emotions recaptured for Dutch art some of its lost glory. He looks for his difficult everyday existence of the common people. Very typical in this respect are At the Fireside (Art Museum, Kharkov) and Seamstresses (the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow). Israels was a convinced and passion humanist in art. So too was his younger contemporary, Vincent van Cogh was the same.

Van Cogh took up painting rather late and devoted himself to it the last ten years of his short life. But perhaps that is precisely why his art was from the very fist so integral and so mature - he knew what he had to sy to the world even his speech was as yet imperfect.

Van Gogh's artistic career spans a period of only ten years. But in that short time he manager to produce, by unparalleled dedication, struggle, and self-denial, and by drawing on the whole of his creative powers, over eight hundred painting and more than eight hundred drawings. Every one of these works breathes the life of the times, and in each is invested some part of the artist's being.

With Kees van Dongen, the last of the Dutch masters to be represented in Russian museums, we enter the twentieth century, when the destiny of Dutch art was decisively influenced by its contacts with all the existing artistic trends. The oeuvre of Van Dongen is a case in point, his encounter with Fauvism making him a staunch adherent of that movement. Even after the First World War, when he returned to the realist fold, his painting preserved certain Fauvist attributes. In Moscow, St. Petersburg museums there are works from Va Dongen's Fauvist period. Lady in Black Hat, The Red Danseuse (both in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg) and Lady in Black Gloves (the Pushkin Museum arts, Moscow) rank among his masterpieces. Each is stamped with the emotional intensity - one might even say the unbridled feelings - and heightened expressiveness that show him to be Van Cogh's compatriot and heir.

The humaneness and sincerity that still characterize the art of the foremost representatives of Dutch painting in the twentieth century witness to the strength inherent in the traditions of the Golden Age of Dutch art. Coupled with an expressive artistic idiom, these qualities account for the success enjoyed today by the Dutch school of painting.

Размещено на Allbest.ru