Interpretation
Considerably a lot was written about Dou around his own time, such as in Philips Angels’ Lof der Schilderkunst . Angel praises Dou, because of his imitation of nature and his visual illusions. This is evident from the extremely small detailing and the common occurrence of trompe l’oeil effects in his works. Angels also stresses how Dou’s paintings expressed the paragone debate around that time. The paragone debate was an ongoing competition between painting, sculpture and poetry about whom of them was the best representation of nature. The paragone debate was especially popular in Leiden, because the painters wanted to obtain the rights of a guild from the town council, in order to have laws for their economic protection.
The paragone debate is not only addressed in writings from that time, but its popularity can also be seen in the subject matter of several of Dou’s paintings. An example of this is the Old Painter at work, in which an old painter is working on a canvas behind a table displaying objects that show his capabilities of imitation. The aged painter refers to an argument in the paragone debate that a painter can achieve his best work at an old age, while a sculptor cannot because of the physical demands of sculpting. On the table, a sculptured head and a printed book are rendered in a lifelike fashion to show that painting can imitate both sculpture and printed paper, thereby reassuring the notion that painting beats sculpture . According to Sluijter, the “amazing true-to-life peacock and a beautiful Triton shell, next to a copper pot with the most refined reflections of light” shows that art beats nature. Sluijter argues that the peacock stands for the ability of painting to “preserve the transient works of nature thereby even surpassing it”.
Many difficulties arise when one would want to consistently associate a certain meaning to a specific object. One of the most troublesome and thus one of the most educational objects in Dou’s oeuvre is a relief by François Duquesnoy called Putti teasing a goat. This relief features in many of Dou’s pictures with a window-sill motif, and has been assigned various meanings. J. A. Emmens, for example, states that in The Trumpeter the reliefs represents: “the deceitfulness of human desires, because the goat, personifying lust, can time and again be deceived by appearance, by the deceptive imitation, which is the mask”. The shop displayed a whole array of glimmering fish, fur of hares, plants, vegetables, reflecting metal containers of different materials and several kind of fabric, from gilt leather to silk . Through his careful handling of lustre and reflection, the display of these objects in one painting can be interpreted as a contribution to the paragone debate.
The Kitchen Maid with a Boy in a Window, features a maidservant, fishes and a little boy holding a hare, cramped together with a bunch of vegetables, a dead bird and copperware. Sluijter acknowledges that a contemporary viewer would have certainly approved of this scene as representing an approximation of life as the rendering of all the material is very realistic. On the overall series of maidservant-scenes, Sluijter remarks that the image of a maidservant was generally associated with a sexual undertone.According to de Jongh, this motif has erotic references. In his article on Erotica in 17th century genre pieces, de Jongh argues that dead hunted birds and animals most likely all refer back to the notion of eroticism and availability of the woman depicted because birding and hunting were synonyms for sexual encounters. All maidservants show dead birds or animals refer to hunting and vogelen (birding), which in Dutch means to copulate. The maidservants are thereby explicitly erotic. Certainly a cock as a bird refers to a cock as the male sex organ and this can been seen hanging from the wall in Kitchen Maid with a Boy in a Window. De Jongh´s erotic interpretations can be disputed to hold in the paintings by Gerard Dou because he depicts his dead chicks and fury hares not only with seductive maidservants, but also as props in motifs with old servants, or in domestic household scenes, such as the Young Mother.
Additionally to objects possibly having a deeper meaning via emblem books, also complete scenes in Dou’s oeuvre have been related to scenes depicted in emblem books or prints. The Girl Pouring Water is a variation of the theme Educatio prima bona sit from Boissards Vesuntini emblemata. The moral that this emblem depicts is that ‘children absorb knowledge like a pot absorbs water’. The gaining of knowledge is achieved by a little boy in the background, while the water is poured in the foreground.
One painting that is strongly associated with an emblem is the Night school. This particular painting is rather anecdotal in character and Baer disagrees with Hecht who refers to this painting as being merely a demonstration of Dou’s abilities to work with artificial light. Baer identifies the candle lights with the light of understanding and she relates the unlit lantern on the left wall with ignorance, which is combated by teaching embodied in the lit lantern in the middle of the floor. Additionally Baer suggests that the girl at the left is a representation of Cognitione, because she strikes the same pose as in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia. Like Ripa’s emblem, the girl in Dou’s painting holds a candle while pointing towards a line of text. The essence of Ripa’s emblem is that “like our eyes, which need light to see, so our reason needs our senses, especially that of sight, to achieve true understanding”.
Read more about this topic: Gerrit Dou