“Painting Family: The De Brays, Master Painters of 17th Century Holland” at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
Date: 27-07-2008
Owning Institution:
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010
Subject:
17th Century
It is 1635 and Salomon de Bray, a painter in the town of Haarlem, Holland, has decided to broaden his repertoire to include some sex and violence. His pretext is a story from the Bible about the liberation of Israel from the Canaanites. He squeezes three figures from the tale into the confines of a narrow upright canvas. Barak, the commander who led the Jews to victory, wears a soldier’s helmet and a steely expression to match. Deborah, the prophetess who had foretold the triumph, is shown as a devout ancient with upturned eyes and hands clasped in prayer. But the star attraction is Jael, who had set the seal on the defeat of the Canaanites by driving a tent peg through the skull of their leader.
De Bray depicts her as a stocky young maid of Holland in ancient fancy dress, turban and all. In her right hand she holds a hammer, in her left a bloodied nail. Her cheeks are ruddy, her bosom ample. She is a femme fatale in the same mould as Caravaggio’s sexy Judith, beheader of Holofernes. In fact the Dutch artist, who was familiar with the latest Italian innovations in painting, used a number of Caravaggiesque tricks and techniques to emphasise the allure of his heroine: the raking light that sets her apart from her shadowed companions; the cheek-by-jowl contrast between her smooth, milky-white skin and the wizened flesh of Deborah; the tight-cropped composition that makes the painting into a shop window for her charms.
It was a winning formula and marked another step up on the ladder of success for Salomon de Bray. Painter and draughtsman, architectural theorist and urban planner, poet and trades-union activist – a big wheel in Haarlem’s painters’ guild, the Guild of St Luke – he was clearly a man who liked to keep busy. Among his many other achievements, he was the founder of an extraordinary family business. No fewer than three of his many children became painters and his older son, Jan de Bray, became one of the most gifted history painters and portraitists of the so-called “Golden Age” of Dutch painting. The achievements of the dynasty are chronicled in a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, “Painting Family: The De Brays.”
Salomon emerges from this show as a painter of great virtuosity and versatility, with a chameleon-like ability to change style according to the requirements of his patrons. He painted St Lawrence, nude save for a loincloth, as a spotlit figure in dire straits looking upwards to the heavens in anticipation of glorious martyrdom. He depicted Semiramis, the Assyrian Queen of romantic legend, as a doughty matron swathed in draperies of red velvet, determination etched on her face. He also painted architectural fantasies and an unusual portrait of two of his children, The Twins Clara and Albert de Bray, as whey-faced infants swaddled in a giltwood crib of intricate Baroque design.
Family obviously meant a lot to Salomon de Bray, who with his sons established one of the busiest workshops in seventeenth-century Haarlem. Dirck de Bray was a sensitive soul – a painter of delicate, solemn still life paintings, heavily shadowed by morbidity. His brother Joseph was an altogether more robust and original artist, also a painter of still life but in a very different vein. His masterpiece is In Praise of Pickled Herring, a picture of 1656 which hymns the pleasures of the Dutch table – and, by implication, the sturdiness of the Dutch Republic – while offering up a dazzling array of effects: the rainbow radiance of the herrings’ skin and the oiliness of its flesh; the substantiality of two wedges of black bread smeared thickly with butter; the frothy head on a glass of beer; the milk-white shine of peeled cloves of garlic in a bowl. At the centre of the scene there is a plaque inscribed with a poem which makes no bones about the digestive benefits of eating pckled fish: “It causes one to piss, / And without fail to crap; / Breaking wind is done with ease.”
Joseph died young when the plague ravaged Haarlem in 1664. So did the venerable Salomon, aged 67 by then, and most of the rest of the de Brays. Of the entire family only Dirck and Jan survived, and the pious Dirck was so marked by the experience that he took himself to a monastery. For his part, Jan painted a darkly beautiful profile portrait of his mother and father, a muted act of commemoration, and did his best to carry the family name into the future.
Cleaving more to the influence of Rubens than Caravaggio, Jan de Bray excelled in highly coloured, richly dramatic narrative paintings. The pick of them on display at Dulwich is the fantasically grisly Judgement of Zaleucus. It shows a stoical lawgiver in ancient times consenting, for the sake of his errant son, to have his own eye put out with a scalpel – a fitting subject, or so it was thought, for Haarlem’s Chamber of Magistrates. But perhaps his most remarkable pictures are the compellingly sober and severe corporate portraits that he painted for the charitable institutions of his city. The Regents of the Childrens’ Almshouse stare out solemnly from beneath their tall black hats, while their gestures – a hand on a heart, a hand held open above a table – symbolise compassion and fiscal transparency. To be effective, feeling must be aligned with practicality. The same idea is conveyed, albeit with less optimism, in his portraits of The Regents and Regentesses of the Leper, Plague and Mental Hospital. They are sad-faced men and women doing what they can in troubled times. Jan de Bray paints them, in 1667, with a palpable sense of fellow feeling.
These are works worthy of comparison with the great portraits of The Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse that were painted, at around the same date, by Frans Hals, the city’s most famous painter – in whose shadow the reputation of the entire De Bray family has long languished. This small but exemplary exhibition rescues them from centuries of unjust neglect.
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