Tijana Žahula. Reforming Dutch Art: Gerard de Lairesse on Beauty, Morals and Class. Part One

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Tijana Žahula
Reforming Dutch Art:
Gerard de Lairesse on Beauty, Morals and Class

Published in
Simiolus
Netherland quarterly for the history of art
Volume 37 Special edition 2013-2014

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part One

The Fortune of the Gerard de Lairesse's Writings

There is very little awareness in Italy of the success which Gerard de Lairesse (1641-1711) achieved with his writings. The Walloon artist was born in Liege, but soon emigrated to the Netherlands, first to Utrecht and then to Amsterdam. He wrote two texts in particular: a drawing manual published in 1701, with the title Grondlegginge ter Teekenkonst (Principles of the Art of Design) and a treatise called Groot Schilderboeck (The Great Book of Painting), published in two volumes in 1707. As usually Schlosser, in his Kunstliteratur (p. 559), liquidated the works of these Northern European artists with a few words only, stating that they had anything new to say. Yet, it would be enough to browse the reference literature quoted in the same work (p. 561) to begin to suspect that that opinion was simplistic: the Principles of the Art of Design were published in ten editions, also in French, English and German; The Great Book of Painting had nine complete editions (also translated into the same languages) plus an infinite number of texts reproducing ample, but not complete versions. As a curiosity, we would like to take note that illustrations taken from Schilderboeck also appeared in the Japanese book Komo Zatsuwa by Moroshima Churyio of 1787 (p. 732). However, there never was any Italian translation. The editions of both works have one thing in common: they were all published in the eighteenth century; only two were released at a later stage, i.e. in 1817 and 1836. This, of course, can be easily explained: de Lairesse was the champion of a classicism that had great success at the upper classes of the Dutch republicans and was also acclaimed in the courts of half of Europe, in the same years as the triumph of the Sun King. The Walloon artist's manual on design, for example, established itself as a tool for study in European academies, and was then reprinted with extreme frequency. All of it ended with the early nineteenth century, when the neoclassical taste was swept away by the romantic breath and de Lairesse underwent a sudden and inglorious sunset. A sunset from which the author seems to come out in these years, with the publication of even two English volumes: the first, titled How to create beauty. De Lairesse on the theory and practice of making art) was written by Lyckle de Vries who, along with the book, also provided a CD-ROM containing the English translation of the first of the two volumes of the Schilderboeck (in the second Dutch edition of 1740) [1]. The second recent publication was instead this special issue of the magazine Simiolus, entitled Reforming Dutch Art: Gerard de Lairesse on Beauty, Morals and Class, written by Tijana Žakula [2]. The present review deals with the latter, it being understood that we will soon publish also a book review of the first one.

An image of the Groot Schilderboek by Gerard de Lairesse (1707)
Source: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/Het-groot-schilderboek-Lairesse-Gerard-Willem/16662077751/bd

Different opinions

The reason for proposing two different reviews is trivial. I have rarely read such different judgments on the same text. Something which - I would like to make it clear - is absolutely legitimate (our past is not an objective fact: it is interpreted differently by each one of us), but, in this case, the contrast is really impressive. Obviously, the purpose of this review is not to draw up a merit ranking, but to highlight the main dissimilarities. Some examples: according to De Vries, the Schilderboeck was not a book of art theory, but "distinguishes itself as a manual on the making of paintings, explaining how an artist could reach better results when working in the studio, and how his products should be judged. The author shifted attention from the theory of art to such practical matters as the coherence between the elements of a composition, the best way to apply colours for the suggestion of pictorial depth" [3] etc… For Žakula, instead, the same work was, among those written in those years, "the most comprehensive art-theoretical treatise, the aim of which was to teach all branches of painting the silver-tongued language of the antique" (p. 8). According to De Vries, in terms of art theory, de Lairesse wrote nothing new. The most important feature characterizing the work was instead its didactic purpose, based on experience and the firm conviction that, through training, one can improve and achieve the perfect art: "I am convinced that de Lairesse did not try to reformulate the theory of painting as he knew it from recent French publications, or to stimulate its development. A limited number of central ideas were assimilated without much discussion" [4]. To Žakula, on the contrary, de Lairesse was a pioneer, and his main merit consisted in having tried to reformulate the basic concepts of 'low' art (i.e. of genre painting, landscape, portraiture and still-life representations) according to the principles of classicism: "Comparing and contrasting the program for the lower genres as presented in the Groot Schilderboeck with what is found in earlier art literature, as well as contextualizing it within contemporary Dutch theory and practice, this book will present de Lairesse as a true pioneer in the domain of art theory. It will explain how he employed the antique to transfer the qualities of history painting onto its less important kin so as to uplift those lesser genres, to make them worthy of an enlightened patron’s interest"(p. 9). De Vries translated the first six books of the work (corresponding to the first volume) and omitted the remaining seven, claiming that they were of limited interest; Žakula, to the contrary, spoke at length of the sections on portrait and still life, which were not dealt with specifically in the books translated by her colleague. It is immediately clear that the two scholars really had different views in many respects. In fact - if I can afford a personal comment - I made myself the idea that, if de Lairesse were alive today and had a passion for social media, he would be an influencer, or a reference entity for all of those who share his interests and who, in fact, are induced to change their behaviour based on the suggestions provided by him. But let us examine more carefully Ms Žakula’s essay, making first of all an observation: the strength of her work is that the authoress always explained with illuminating examples the state of the art prior to and after de Lairesse’s treatise, thereby successfully describing the influence he played, both in theoretical and in practical terms.

Gerard de Lairesse, Allegory of the Sciences, about 1675-1683, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?p=1&ps=12&f.principalMakers.name.sort=Gerard%20de%20Lairesse&st=OBJECTS&ii=0#/SK-A-4177,1

Beauty and history painting

De Lairesse was a history painter really appreciated for his accomplishments in both the Orangist environments as well as in the republican circles in Amsterdam. Since 1670, the great Dutch nobility developed the habit to decorate the internal of their houses with large-sized paintings covering all domestic walls, often conceived to form a series of works related to one another. The Walloon artist built his fortune on this kind of history painting. But when he wrote, his parable had already been completed. In 1690 he lost his sight, and spent the last twenty years of his life in blindness. Of course, my thoughts immediately flew to the other famous blind treaty writer of art history, namely the Lombard Lomazzo, also by virtue of objective similarities at least in the structure of their texts. In reality, however, it is a risky comparison and is much more realistic to say that, in de Lairesse, the classicism was completely embedded in what was emerging in France since the mid-seventeenth century: with Félibien as his champion, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts dictated the rules of taste. We do not know the circumstances that led him (already blind) to write first the manual in 1701 and then the treatise in 1707, but, at least in the latter case, it seems that it was the result of a series of public lectures on art at the municipality of Amsterdam, organized by Jonas Witsen, one of the great patrons of his artistic work. 

Gerard de Lairesse, Selene and Endymion, about 1680, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?s=objecttype&p=1&ps=12&f.principalMakers.name.sort=Gerard+de+Lairesse&st=OBJECTS&ii=2#/SK-A-4210,2

Actually, the content of most of the first volume was the hard core of the artist's theory, a theory (of course) aiming at the creation of beauty as part of a world all directed towards classicism and antiquity. De Lairesse’s beauty was not only a formal value, but also addressed the content of the work, which ought to tell a story proposing moral values and being clearly intelligible to the public (and in particular to the customer) [5]. To be interested in beauty meant to face a process of personal growth that was not only a professional, but also a personal one and led to the nobility of the soul (and, with it, the practice of art). The artist made an immediate choice of side: the beauty was identified with the antique (meaning as such not only the statues of the Greeks and Romans, but also the works of great reference artists such as Raphael and Poussin) and was studied by examining the statues and the prints reproducing the masterpieces of the past. The antique offered the example of a "proper” nature, i.e. an art that exceeded the nature, since it selected all best aspects hereof and discarded the imperfect ones. In this, de Lairesse provided a set of rules that - in all sincerity – were not much different from those of other treatises that were written in Italy, France or Spain during the seventeenth century. The rules were presented by extrapolating individual topics, starting with the basics, namely the teaching of design, and then continuing with the representation of the human figure in certain proportions, the movement and the emotions (the authoress noted that - comparing de Lairesse for example with Félibien or Hoogstraten - the study of physiognomy took on more weight, surely because of the publication of the Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions by Charles Le Brun (President of the Academy of France) in 1668). Great importance, of course, was assigned to the decorum, to the verisimilitude of the subject and the composition of the historical painting, all fundamental aspects of classicism. Worth to be mentioned were, moreover, the references to colour, because they were completely unexpected: thanks to the colour, nature overcame art (as opposed to drawing); therefore, what one had to do, was to imitate the colours of nature, as the great Venetian colourists had done. We are therefore faced with a classicist who, somehow surprisingly, recognized the value of colour and linked it back to a school in which the design - according to the clichés of the time – had really not mattered much.

Gerard de Lairesse, Five.part Ceiling Decoration for the Great Hall of Soestdijk Palace, 1676-1682, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?s=objecttype&p=2&ps=12&f.principalMakers.name.sort=Gerard+de+Lairesse&st=OBJECTS&ii=7#/SK-A-1233,19

The opening to the ‘lower’ genres

It goes without saying that de Lairesse was well aware that the reality in which he lived was another one: it was a reality in which, at least until 1650, the modern had dominated and the reference to antiquity was absent. The Netherlands and Flanders were famous for their landscape painters and the attention to detail, not to mention the usual scenes of drunkards in the taverns or markets. According to De Lairesse, this was a way of painting that made slaves of nature and confined the artist within a world of pure craftsmanship. The modern had been applied in different ways, from genre painting (and not history painting) to descend according to a scale of values (which is not identical to that of Félibien, or - for example - of a Mancini) that begun with landscape, continued with portrait and reached the lowest step with still life. While clearly expressing the idea that the beauty is in the antique, de Lairesse (and this is the big news according to the authoress) did not turn his back to the 'lower' genres, but developed a program that, on the one hand, allowed artists to improve and create products that, although not part of history painting, could be considered beautiful, and, on the other hand, allowed the exhibition of genre artworks also next to the large set of history paintings that decorated the houses of the Dutch aristocracy. Following the reasoning of Žakula, we can say that the artist distinguished between what is excellent, what (while not being such) is tolerable and what, to the contrary, is impossible to propose. And to clarify, he did not place genre painting (i.e. the modern subject painting) in the category of what should not be proposed. What he did not tolerate, if anything, was the nonsense combination of old and new (like a dormant Mars dressed with contemporary armour or a Sophonisba who had nothing of the tragic heroine, but looked like a lady of high society, dressed in a perfectly fashionable way). 

Gerart ter Borch, Gallant Conversation (known as The paternal admonition), about 1654, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/artists/gerard-ter-borch/objects#/SK-A-404,2 

Johannes Vermeer, The milkmaid, about 1660, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=vermeer&p=1&ps=12&st=OBJECTS&ii=1#/SK-A-2344,1

However, there was a way to paint 'modern' in a graceful way, not forgetting the noble and ethical nature of painting (which should delight and instruct). Above all, Ms Žakula noted that "when it comes to the practical side of things, the author’s ambition to give a classical form to genre painting was already visible in certain tendencies manifest in Dutch genre painting of the second part of the seventeenth century, particularly from the 1660s onwards. In that period, elegance and sophistication carried the day. Dutch genre painting was dominated by Gerard ter Borch, who influenced Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch in Delft, and a number of Amsterdam artists, including Gabriel Metsu and Eglon van der Neer. The other center of elegant genre painting was in Leiden, where Gerard Dou’s pupil Frans van Mieris had elevated his master’s descriptive high finish with an obviously class repertoire" (p. 38).

Frans van Mieris, The letter writer, about 1680, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=frans+van+mieris&p=1&ps=12&st=OBJECTS&ii=6#/SK-A-261,6

Changes also originated from social developments and the emergence of an upper-middle class which demanded paintings with a great formal elegance, that same elegance inspiring their own way of life. De Lairesse wrote: "The continual Changes in worldly Things afford us plentiful Matters for modern Manner, without recourse to History, Fables or Emblems; even so much as to be endless; as may be gathered from the Assemblies for public Worship, Pleadings in Court, Plays, Family-occurrences, and the like: All which we perceive to be either majestic, amorous, sorrowful, or otherwise. Those Things, how different soever, can be represented in the antique Manner as well as in the modern, provided each keep its Quality"(p. 44). Particularly beautiful are the pages where de Lairesse explained how a seemingly 'frivolous' subject as the scene of a family bathroom, with father, mother and children, could be painted in a 'old-fashioned' way, which, in essence, means not to be painted from reality, but by giving to each character a 'virtuous attitude', borrowed from the poses of Greek statues. And the authoress pointed out that, although she did not known anyone who had painted a similar scene, several paintings by Willem van Mieris showed 'modern' figures of women that take for example the laying of Greek deities like Venus. Both Willem and Jan (who died young) should be certainly counted among the artists who "succeeded in mastering a pictorial idiom that answered de Lairesse’s call for a more classical form and, unlike Frans van Mieris [n.d.r. their father], were capable of making history paintings according to his rules" (p. 55).

End of Part One
Go to Part Two 


NOTES

[1] Lyckle de Vries, How to create beauty. De Lairesse on the theory and practice of making art, Leiden, Primavera Press, 2011.

[2] Tijana Žakula, Reforming Dutch Art. Gerard de Lairesse on Beauty, Morals and Class, in «Simiolus» vol. 37 (2103-2014) Special Edition, Amsterdam 2015

[3] Lycle de Vries, How to create beauty… quoted., p. 13.

[4] Lycle de Vries, How to create beauty… quoted., p. 20.

[5] Simply by way of curiosity, it must be said that the painter was surrounded by a bad reputation of libertinism which certainly did not come across with his "ethical" approach to painting. This reputation was also the result of ignorance (de Lairesse became blind because of the congenital syphilis with which he was born and that had nothing to do with syphilis in the strict sense) and was abundantly mentioned by detractors of his work in the nineteenth century, as further confirmation the artist would have proposed decadent and immoral artistic models.