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The 17th Century

Whereas the 17th century witnessed in Italy the ascendancy of eclecticism and a brilliant if often sterile decorative manner, in other parts of Europe, it was a period of the most striking and significant creative activity in the field of painting. Flanders, Holland, Spain, and France all produced or sheltered during this period painters whose names are to be ranked among the greatest in the history of art. A time of great cultural ferment, the expansion of intellectual and emotional horizons that characterized human activity in all fields is no less apparent in painting than in philosophy, literature, and the sciences of the epoch.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) had studied painting in his native Flanders under second-rate artists who had learned something of the formulas current in Italy in the late 16th century, but it was his own personal observation of the High Renaissance masters seen while he sojourned for eight years in Italy, that formed the basis of his style. The colorism of the Venetians, the swirling movement of Leonardo, and the sculptural monumentalism of Michelangelo were the things which he saw and absorbed, adding to them a feeling for decorative pattern in line and color, a sense of scale, and above all a quality of life and vitality that were all his own. Greatly versatile and gifted in many fields, he was one of the most prolific artists of his time. The subject matter of his painting ranges from altarpieces like the Descent from the Cross at Antwerp, in which the baroque sentiment of the Counter Reformation is comprehensively embodied, through mythological and allegorical themes such as the Marie de' Medici series, to portraits and landscapes. Of lasting significance were his experiments in color composition. Simplified and popularized, his style was continued and spread still further by his one-time helpers, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) and Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641). The tradition of decorative portraiture which the latter established in England as court painter to Charles I became in time a factor influencing the painting of colonial America.

While Rubens was establishing himself as the outstanding painter in Catholic Flanders, Protestant Holland, but recently freed from Spain, formed the background for a notably contrasting conception of painting. Lacking the patronage of the church and a noble class, men like Adriaen Brouwer (Brauwer; 1606?-1638) and Frans Hals (1580?-1666) recorded with striking fidelity the faces of their friends and companions in many a drinking bout in styles that, in the case of the latter at least, are of remarkable technical assurance. Occasionally the brilliant materialism of Hals' well-known Laughing Cavalier reaches the level of searching character study, as in the Lady Regents of the Haarlem Alms-House. But it was Rembrandt (1606-1669) who, more than any painter of Holland, saw in the ways of living and thinking of his time the great rhythms of a superior order that are the material of significant art. His early works have the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, which he knew well, and something, too, of his theatricalism, but as early as the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632) Rembrandt seems to have become conscious of the fact that light can interpret and suggest as well as merely reveal. The Night Watch (1642), more accurately termed the Shooting Company of Banning Coq, was an ambitious and not entirely successful attempt to develop this idea. The self-portraits, which he executed throughout his entire career, are an unforgettable series in which his ultimate mastery of light as an expressive implement is shown. The Syndics of the Amsterdam Cloth Guild (1661) is the final statement of his creed. In it light, conveyed by color and tone, embodies in a strong and simple pattern of form the mystery that is human temperament and character. Later painters in 17th century Holland, like the "Little Dutchmen," were to achieve great beauty in their paintings of light-filled rooms-the examples by Jan Vermeer of Delft (1632-1675) are particularly notable-but without attaining to the Rembrandtesque conception of light as the symbol of spiritual truth.

Two great masters of painting appear in Spain in the 17th century-El Greco (1541-1614) and Velazquez (1599-1660). El Greco was not Spanish by birth but came from Crete after studying in Rome and Venice, where he is said to have worked with Titian and undoubtedly knew the painting of Tintoretto. His style is intensely personal and, more than that of any other painter of his time, reflects the violent feelings and emotions of Counter Reformation sentiment. The numerous large altarpieces he painted, like the Burial of Count Orgaz (1586), are filled with figures strangely elongated like flickering flames, as if their material substance had been volatilized in the fire of fanatic faith. All the harsh and sadistic cruelty of the Inquisition is in the staring eyes and clawed hands of Cardinal Guevara, Grand Inquisitor (c.1596-1600). And the landscape of hills dried by a pitiless sun and blasted by ceaseless winds that is Toledo in a Storm (1600) is a shattering symbol of the moral and spiritual exhaustion of a people.

No such interpretive problem is raised by the painting of Velazquez. It does not seem probable that there was ever another eye that regarded so dispassionately the life about him or another hand that recorded visual facts with such cool objectivity. It is in precisely 'the technical and mechanical perfection of -Velazquez' painting that its distinction lies. Pope Innocent X (1650) was painted by him with no apparent purpose other than to recreate as accurately as possible the visual impression of the man's appearance. In the Maids of Honor (1656), he extends this principle of illusionism to the setting as well as the figures and achieves success by reproducing the act of seeing in addition to the forms that are observed. Within the limits imposed by Velazquez' rank as court painter and his own interests (he rarely attempted landscapes for instance), there has been no more complete attainment than his of the naturalistic ideal which popular taste considers the primary aim of the painter's art.

France was the birthplace in the 17th century of Descartes' system of philosophy and the classic dramas of Corneille and Racine, and the paintings of their contemporary Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) partake of the same qualities of rationalism and classic order that characterize the philosophical code and the works of literary art. Animated by a profound admiration for the principles of antique art, and finding inspiration in the sculpturesque forms of Raphael and the sensuous colorism of Titian, Poussin evolved in the landscapes of such paintings as St. Matthew and The Angel (c.1651), now in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, a form that combines the logic of the classic with the space patterns of baroque style in a concept of inherently monumental character. The most meticulous of pictorial architects, he left nothing to chance or emotional whim in the ordered world of pictorial reality that he created. The stately impersonality of his style has been considered cold by those who do not perceive its vital rhythms, and its generalizations made it an all too easily misunderstood model for succeeding generations of academicists; but the most creative painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found in his work an authority which they were quick to recognize, and he is considered today one of the significant sources of the creative strain in modern art. More intimate in character than Poussin's "heroic" landscapes are the evocations of mood painted in somewhat similar forms by his contemporary, Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). In them many artists of romantic tendencies were to sense an ideal.

It was France that succeeded in the 17th century to the artistic leadership of Europe, a position Italy had established and maintained in the 15th and 16th centuries. The institution which enabled France to attain this distinction was the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, established in 1648 by royal decree as the instrument by which artistic creation could be' controlled and directed by the state, thus replacing the older system of artists' guilds which had performed this function since the Middle Ages. The foundation of Academy practice was a theoretical definition of what acceptable style should be, based on an intellectualized rationale of the art of antiquity and of those later artists who seemed most completely to have followed its precepts, such as Raphael and Poussin. The influence of the academy from the time of its establishment to the present has been incalculable, and not always for the good. Conformity to rule has been encouraged over imaginative creativeness, and recognition has often been given on grounds of political expediency rather than for inherent quality of pictorial construction and expression. The continuing power and influence of the academy is a consequence of its substitution of formulas for feeling and of rules for creative imagination. The painters who dominate the traditions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries do so because even the precisely defined ideals of the academy were not sufficient to restrict them in their search for truth in experience, and consequently they were often condemned to life-long conflict with the accepted doctrines as well as to economic penalties resulting from the withholding of official recognition.

The 18th Century

Outstanding among French painters of the early 18th century was Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), who won distinction in spite of his nonacademic style, which represents a continuation of the vital and decorative colorism of Rubens. His Embarkation for Cythera (1717) is a charmingly conceived yet expressively sincere embodiment of the laissez-faire sentiment of the court of Louis XV. Painters of the Ecole Galante who popularized his sensitive color construction include Jean Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) and Francois Boucher (1703-1770), while it is degraded to commonplace sensualism in Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805). Allied in sentiment to the "Little Dutchmen" and influenced in some measure by their style, was Jean Baptiste Chardin (1699-1779). Painting around the middle of the 18th century, the sober and honest craftsmanship of his many still fifes and the sympathy and understanding revealed -in genre scenes of bourgeois kitchens and dining rooms ,continue the tradition of painting as an art of expression rather than as mere decorative proficiency. A somewhat comparable dualism appears in the 18th century painting of England, where the taste for decorative portraiture created by Van Dyck in the 17th century accounts for the popularity of men like Joshua Reynolds (17231792), Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), and Henry Raeburn (1756-1823), a taste which is reflected in the portraits painted in the English colonies of the New World. But William Hogarth (1697-1764), who was also of the 18th century, was a satirist whose trenchant brush executed sharp commentaries upon the follies and foibles of the society of his time. The pictures that go to make up a series of paintings like those in Marriage-a-la-Mode (finished in 1745) and A Rake's Progress are social documents of primary importance as well as accurate observations and well-composed patterns.