Date: 15-05-2011
Owning Institution: Queen’s Gallery
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012  
Subject:     17th Century    

Dutch Landscapes at the Queen’s Gallery. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.

Over the centuries the British have had something of a love-hate relationship with Dutch painting. John Ruskin attacked what he saw as its dry, empty literalism: “the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, cattle and ditchwater”. He was echoing the even more caustic remarks of the eighteenth-century connoisseur Horace Walpole, who pigeonholed the painters of Holland as “drudging Mimics of Nature’s most uncomely coarseness”, complaining that they “thought a man vomiting a good joke; and would not have grudged a week on finishing a belch, if mere labour and patience could have compassed it.”

Yet at the same time British art collectors showed an enduring affection for Dutch painting, a taste reflected in the National Gallery’s rich holdings of Rembrandt, de Hooch, Hals, Avercamp and Vermeer. That taste is also reflected in the shape of the royal collection, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of George IV. “Dutch Landscapes”, an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery next to Buckingham Palace, testifies to his devotion to the painting of Holland during its so-called Golden Age, namely the middle to later years of the seventeenth century. The show contains some 40 pictures, no fewer than 32 of which were purchased by the future king, while still Prince Regent, in a spending spree that lasted from 1809 until 1820. “Mad” King George’s affection for Dutch art was likely related to his mental instability. He detested the large and nightmarishly phantasmagoric history paintings turned out by the then President of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, complaining that they made him feel ill. By contrast, it seems that he found a kind of solace, a soothing antidote to the nervous vagaries of his own disposition, in the reassuringly solid and grounded art of the Dutch landscapists.

This is a relatively modest show, but it represents much of the complexity and subtlety of the Dutch view of landscape. Contrary both to the preconceptions of a collector like George IV and to the old academic and critical myths spun by the likes of Walpole and Ruskin, this never was a form of art simply devoted to the objective depiction of the real world. The Dutch frame of mind was inherently symbolic and the landscape painting of seventeenth-century Holland expresses that in every bump, hollow and declivity, every image of sun-dappled polder or working windmill. The Dutch landscape was itself a work of art, a man-made creation of huge ingenuity, with its systems of canals and dykes, its fertile acres of land redeemed from marshy waste. It is no coincidence that the great age of Dutch landscape painting should have coincided with the end of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648), the war of the Netherlands’ independence from Spain; because it is the young nation’s proud spirit of independence which so many of the pictures in the royal collection quietly proclaim. When Jan Wijnants painted Sportsmen in the Dunes in 1669, with its riders meandering along a narrow path by sandy hillocks under a lowering sky, his subject was at least in part a symbol of national pride – namely the very dunes themselves, long celebrated as a natural bulwark against those who would invade Holland from the seaward side. When Paulus Potter depicted the similarly innocent-seeming A Young Bull and Two Cows in a Meadow in 1649, he too was blowing a trumpet for the newly independent United Provinces, because the Hollandse kuh, the Dutch cow, was seen both as a symbol of the nation’s agricultural and commercial prosperity, and as an emblem of the doughty Dutch character itself. The standing bull in Potter’s painting is a fiercely recalcitrant beast with bulging eyes, threateningly poised to charge. Likewise, Jacob van Ruisdael’s Evening Landscape: A Windmill by a Stream, is more than a paean to the peaceful beauties of rural Holland. The painter has contrived his composition so that the windmill, emblem of Dutch self-sufficiency and hard work, is silhouetted against a majestic sky of wind-tossed clouds. A humble structure has been recast as a monument.

No seventeenth-century painter more fully exemplified the Dutch habit of finding the larger significance in ordinary things than Aelbert Cuyp, who is particularly well represented in this show. His Cows in a Pasture beside a River, before Ruins, of the late 1640s, in which two men lounge on a cattle-crowded sandbank at dusk, contemplating the ruins of an old abbey, is a gentle allegory of the benefits of peace. Even more striking is his radiant depiction of The Passage Boat, a thronged ferry becalmed under a sky filled with coiling, sun-struck clouds. The clouds resemble angels, while the prominently crossed spars of the boat were surely intended to evoke Christ’s crucifixion. Cuyp was a passionately devout Calvinist and the picture seems to have been his way of depicting the Dutch nation, in microcosm, as God’s chosen people: one nation, embarked on the ship of the one true faith.

These pictures have also played a part in shaping the history of British painting. The royal collection of Dutch paintings was frequently lent for public exhibition in the years after George IV acquired it, and it had an inspiring effect on two of the greatest English artists of the nineteenth century. John Constable and J.M.W. Turner were both driven by the belief that landscape, transformed through painting, could amount to a form of language, freighted with all kinds of moral, political or spiritual meaning; and it was a belief that they derived, to a great degree, from their contact with Dutch painting. Constable, on looking at Ruisdael’s Evening Landscape: A Windmill by a Stream, proclaimed his wonder at the “acres of sky expressed”; while Turner, on looking at a seascape by Aelbert Cuyp’s contemporary Willem van de Velde, simply proclaimed “Ah! That made me a painter”. British artists, at least, saw beyond the surface of Dutch art and into its deeper meanings.