Dutch Golden Age Painting - Subsequent Reputation

Subsequent Reputation

The enormous success of 17th-century Dutch painting overpowered the work of subsequent generations, and no Dutch painter of the 18th century—nor, arguably, a 19th-century one before Van Gogh—is well known outside the Netherlands. Already by the end of the period artists were complaining that buyers were more interested in dead than living artists.

If only because of the enormous quantities produced, Dutch Golden Age painting has always formed a significant part of collections of Old Master paintings, itself a term invented in the 18th century to describe Dutch Golden Age artists. Taking only Wouwerman paintings in old royal collections, there are more than 60 in Dresden and over 50 in the Hermitage. But the reputation of the period has shown many changes and shifts of emphasis. One nearly constant factor has been admiration for Rembrandt, especially since the Romantic period. Other artists have shown drastic shifts in critical fortune and market price; at the end of the period some of the active Leiden fijnschilders had enormous reputations, but since the mid-19th century realist works in various genres have been far more appreciated. Vermeer was rescued from near-total obscurity in the 19th century, by which time several of his works had been re-attributed to others. However the fact that so many of his works were already in major collections, often attributed to other artists, demonstrates that the quality of individual paintings was recognised even if his collective oeuvre was unknown. Other artists have continued to be rescued from the mass of little known painters: the late and very simple still lifes of Adriaen Coorte in the 1950s, and the landscapists Jacobus Mancaden and Frans Post earlier in the century.

Genre paintings were long popular, but little-regarded. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the English leader of 18th-century academic art, made several revealing comments on Dutch art. He was impressed by the quality of Vermeer's Milkmaid (illustrated at the start of this article), and the liveliness of Hals' portraits, regretting he lacked the "patience" to finish them properly, and lamented that Steen had not been born in Italy and formed by the High Renaissance, so that his talent could have been put to better use. By Reynold's time the moralist aspect of genre painting was no longer understood, even in the Netherlands; the famous example is the so-called Paternal Admonition, as it was then known, by Gerard ter Borch. This was praised by Goethe and others for the delicacy of its depiction of a father reprimanding his daughter. In fact to most (but not all) modern scholars it is a proposition scene in a brothel – there are two versions (Berlin & Amsterdam) and it is unclear whether a "tell-tale coin" in the man's hand has been removed or overpainted in either.

In the second half of the 18th century, the down to earth realism of Dutch painting was a "Whig taste" in England, and in France associated with Enlightenment rationalism and aspirations for political reform. In the 19th century, with a near-universal respect for realism, and the final decline of the hierarchy of genres, contemporary painters began to borrow from genre painters both their realism and their use of objects for narrative purposes, and paint similar subjects themselves, with all the genres the Dutch had pioneered appearing on far larger canvases (still lifes excepted).

In landscape painting, the Italianate artists were the most influential and highly regarded in the 18th century, but John Constable was among those Romantics who denounced them for artificiality, preferring the tonal and classical artists. In fact both groups remained influential and popular in the 19th century.