Mess and Mystery

Adam Eaker is an assistant curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Met.

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Audio Transcript

Adam Eaker: Hi, my name is Adam Eaker. I’m an assistant curator in the Department of European Paintings here at The Met, specializing in Northern Baroque art.
I wanted to put these pictures in a new conversation with each other and tell some aspects of the story of seventeenth-century Dutch art that may be less familiar.

Emanuel de Witte (Dutch, ca. 1616–1692). Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft, probably 1650. Oil on wood, 19 x 13 5/8 in. (48.3 x 34.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Virgilia and Walter C. Klein, The Walter C. Klein Foundation, Edwin Weisl Jr., and Frank E. Richardson Gifts, and Bequest of Theodore Rousseau and Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, by exchange, 2001

Narrator: Where do we begin when looking at these paintings? Eaker sets them in context, starting at the heart of the culture. Consider Emanuel de Witte’s painting titled Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft.

Eaker: One of the key things to know about this chapter of Dutch history is that it began with an act of iconoclastic violence. In 1566, there is a major uprising in the Netherlands against Spanish rule, and one of the manifestations of popular anger is the wholesale destruction of religious art. The churches are stripped, the sculptures and paintings smashed, and the walls are whitewashed in an attempt to purify them according to the dictates of the Reformation.

So artists have to find new ways to survive, and one of the new genres that emerges is paintings that depict these reformed church interiors. So these aren’t religious paintings that you’re meant to pray in front of. Instead they’re almost documentary images of what Dutch churches look like after the Iconoclasm.

Instead of seeming like divine interior, this is a very everyday space where children are writing on the walls, dogs are being taken for walks, you might even see a young couple flirting. Yet at the same time, in the foreground of the picture, there’s an open grave. So there is a very stark reminder of mortality within this interior. The detail of the dog urinating against the wall is a strong indication, I think, of the degree to which the Reformation had brought Dutch art down to earth, really grounded it in reality.

The seventeenth-century Dutch church was often the major social space in a given town or city. It was where you met up with your neighbors, where you might transact a business deal, where teenagers could flirt clandestinely. So it really is the space where all aspects of everyday life might be carried out, and that’s how it usually is depicted by these artists. They’re not showing it as the site of sacred ritual, and so much of that ritual had been removed by the process of reformation. So instead they make it into a very ordinary forum.

Gerard ter Borch the Younger (Dutch, 1617–1681). Curiosity, ca. 1660–62. Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 1/2 in. (76.2 x 62.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.38)

Narrator: What do we see when we get out of public spaces and look behind closed doors? Take the more intimate scene in Ter Borch’s painting Curiosity, which features women the artist knew personally.

Eaker: Gerard ter Borch transformed genre painting by focusing on the private lives of the wealthy—primarily wealthy women. Observing the social life of this very precocious and talented teenage girl—his much younger half-sister, Gesina—seems to have inspired Ter Borch to create a whole new type of imagery showing the behavior of wealthy women when they believe themselves to be unobserved. So we see them going about private tasks, having their hair done, writing letters, making music, playing with their dogs. It’s a very tantalizing glimpse into a world that would normally be hidden from public view.

One of Ter Borch’s favorite subject matters was women reading and writing letters. This was an era of vastly increased literacy, particularly for women. Dutch women had greater rates of education than most of their European contemporaries, and Ter Borch uses letter writing and reading as a way to gesture toward the interior life.

At the same time this is a scene with erotic overtones. We don’t actually know what the story depicted here is. One theory is that the beautiful young woman standing on the left has received a love letter and has asked her more matronly friend to write a response. So there is a degree of flirtation, eroticism, going on here in a rather muted way.

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) (Dutch, 1606–1669). Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, 1665–67. Oil on canvas, 44 3/8 x 34 1/2 in. (112.7 x 87.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.140)

Narrator: Iconic portraits are well-represented in Dutch masterworks. For example, Gerard de Lairesse shunned realism. But when he sat for Rembrandt, his contemporary created a likeness that’s painfully truthful.

Eaker: This is Rembrandt’s portrait of his fellow artist Gerard de Lairesse, and I think it encapsulates the theoretical debate that these two men embodied. Rembrandt really was not a classicizing, idealizing artist. He offended the principles, the rules of art that most art theorists were trying to propagate in this period.

De Lairesse’s appearance reveals his condition of congenital syphilis, particularly in the degradation of his nose, also his sunken eyes. And Rembrandt really was the archetype of an artist who looked at and depicted what he saw in front of him, what he saw in the real world. And this is a portrait in which Rembrandt depicts his fellow artist with an unsparing realism that De Lairesse himself objected to. Rembrandt, here, doesn’t hide any of the visual markers of De Lairesse’s condition, at the same time as he depicts him as a very dignified and engaging figure.

I think we can sympathize with De Lairesse, though. Many of us would not want to have a completely realistic depiction of our own physical flaws, even by such a great master as Rembrandt.

Although, actually, I’d love to—I mean, I would not turn Rembrandt down. 

Jan Steen (Dutch, 1626–1679). The Dissolute Household, ca. 1663–64. Oil on canvas, 42 1/2 x 35 1/2 in. (108 x 90.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982 (1982.60.31)

Narrator: When we think of Rembrandt and other Dutch masters, we often think first of gravitas. But Eaker reminds us this is only part of what makes these paintings endure. He breaks this down in The Dissolute Household, by Jan Steen.

Eaker: Humor is a major aspect of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Often the jokes that we see may strike us as cruel or strange. In this case, we have an artist who really is making fun of himself. The figure at the center of the composition is a self-portrait of the artist Jan Steen. He shows himself in a dissolute household, where everything is running amok.

This painting gives us a whole catalogue of different transgressions, whether it’s overindulgence in food and alcohol and tobacco; whether it’s the licentiousness of the husband’s flirtation with the maid; the way that the children are allowed to run wild; the way that the grandmother has dozed off and is no longer vigilant.

A few of the things that are going wrong here, for example, include the cat, who’s about to get into this ham in the foreground. All of these humorous elements exist in tension with some very grave reminders of the consequences of this sort of misbehavior. Even to this day, Dutch parents who want their children to clean up their rooms can tell them that their rooms are starting to look like a household by Jan Steen.

This was a very stern, Calvinist culture that nonetheless enjoyed incredible material wealth. Where people clearly loved to indulge in food and drink and raucous behavior, and yet seem to have been wracked with guilt about some of that material comfort and indulgence. And I think it’s that tension, that ambivalence, that made it such a fertile moment for artists, and that can also make it so easy for us to identify today with these pictures.