The Discovery of Nature: Art of the Netherlands & Low Countries. 4

Reynolds & the Subject in Dutch Art

Svetlana Alpers begins her ground-breaking study of representation in 17th century Holland with reference to two very different views of the country’s art: on the one hand the French painter Fromentin was enthusiastic and saw Dutch art overall as a portrait of Holland itself; at the other extreme, Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Journey to Flanders and Holland in 1781 was critical of the country’s art and regarded most of it as vulgar Like Paulus Potter (above).¹ But more telling than this value judgement was Reynold’s claim that Dutch art was primarily about representation rather than narrative: there was no subject in Dutch art; one simply looked with the eye, and that was it.² In order to throw some light on Reynold’s attitude, and by extension, the English attitude towards Dutch art in the eighteenth-century, it is helpful to quote Reynolds: “The account which has now been given of the Dutch pictures is, I confess, more barren of entertainment, than I expected. One would wish to be able to convey to the reader some idea of that excellence, the sight of which has afforded so much pleasure: but as their merit often consists in the truth of representation alone, whatever praise they deserve, whatever pleasure they give when under the eye, they make but a poor figure in description. It is to the eye only that the works of this school are addressed; it is not therefore to be wondered at, that what was intended solely for the gratification of one sense, succeeds but ill, when applied to another.” To Reynolds, a subject in the picture is essential because painting must be didactic and impart moral guidance to the spectator. It must have a public function, and the problem with Dutch art for Reynolds is that it is intent on conveying private experience, not civic virtue. What Reynolds calls the “republic of taste,” and the grand style in painting has been corrupted by the “pursuit of trade as an end in itself” which Reynolds detects in Venetian, and especially in Dutch art which he calls a “history piece” that shows the Dutch people “engaged in their own peculiar occupations; working or drinking, playing or fighting.”³ This is what we would recognise as genre: scenes of people in everyday activities.

1Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth-Century, (University of Chicago, 1983), xvii.

2Constable’s “pure apprehension of natural effect” comes to mind.

3Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Pat Rogers, (Penguin, 1992), Discourse IV 129-130. “The painters of the Dutch school have still more locality. With them, a history-piece is properly a portrait of themselves; whether they describe the inside or outside of their houses, we have their own people engaged in their own peculiar occupations; working or drinking, playing or fighting. The circumstances that enter into a picture of this kind, are so far from giving a general view of human life, that they exhibit all the minute particularities of a nation differing in several respects from the rest of mankind.” This passage is discussed in John Barrell’s The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (Yale University Press, 1985, rep. 1995), 74-75.