Rank and Status in the Dutch Golden Age

you I'm really grateful for the chance to introduce Ronnie bear to this Yale audience and I'm happy she could be here in the midst of a really busy time as you'll hear she's just opened a major exhibition that's getting the kind of reviews that we all dreamt of and still to that show and it's rich and beautiful catalogue and the curator who set herself are in the spotlight these days and for every good reason dr. bear is the William and an L firs senior curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston she got her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York University then did curatorial work at the Frick Collection in New York and in Atlanta both at the High Museum and the Carlos museum at the Carlos she was curator of a Rubens exhibition and for the National Gallery she organized a major one-man show for the artists that she'd written her dissertation about Rembrandt's first pupil the highly influential dutch painter harriet dow for the past 15 years at the Museum of Fine Arts when she wasn't making acquisitions and doing reinstallation and showing pictures from the front auto Lowe collection she's organized an exhibition one called the power of everyday life Dutch painters in Boston she collaborated with cliff Ackley on Rembrandt's journey painter draftsman and etcher and as she organized the excellent show el greco to velasca for which the king of Spain made her a commander of the order of Isabella the Catholic she appreciates the irony to this day anyway our colleague Ronnie Baer will be telling us tonight about her most recent and grandest project class distinctions Dutch painting in the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer please join me in welcoming Ronnie bear thank you I am here to unabashedly plug this exhibition it would have given me equal pleasure to talk about the Van autoload collection but tonight we're going to hear about class distinctions which features 75 Dutch paintings from the 17th century many of them acknowledged masterpieces which have come to the MFA from over 40 public and private collections in Europe and North America as we know by now these naturalistic paintings are not snapshots of daily life painters made artistic choices that tempered the images they made of what they saw around them these choices could involve formal considerations how they wanted to construct a work of art or be a rift on pictorial tradition how the subject was treated in earlier paintings or prints but they can and do contain clues about the social fabric of the culture through closed looking we can discover how artists expressed an individual's social standing in the types and formats of the portraits commissioned in the occupations clothing possessions and activities depicted in genre scenes and landscapes so this exhibition encourages us to do a lot of close looking and thinking in a slightly different way now if I go here we go so the vignette of a woman searching her child's head for lice appears in Terra Bork's the knife grinders family of about 16 53 and I'm talking about this vignette right here this motif has been associated with an emblem whose motto reflects the widespread belief that a well-groomed outer appearance reflected inner virtue but a lot more is happening here we see a humble courtyard in which both a woman and a man or at work the masonry wall is crumbling the foreground is littered with an overturn chair loose stones a broken earthenware pot scythe blades and a hammer beyond is a well-maintained building whose slate roof and front Gable are decorated with pinnacles and turrets the juxtaposition implies that the well-off and poor lived in close proximity at least in some Dutch cities these are the kind of details I was interested in exploring for this exhibition what can we learn about the social classes in the new Dutch Republic left of the 17th century from information provided in these paintings examining the ways in which paintings express class distinctions adds to the arsenal of interpretive approaches at our disposal further illuminating the complex relationship between art and the society for which it was made the exhibition is divided into three broad classes upper middle and lower divisions that reflect not only the way we think about class today but also how people thought about class in the 17th century while there was actually movement between the classes reversals of fortune success in business that catapulted a merchant into the richest stratum of society it was believed by most that the social order was decreed by God and that people were meant to remain in the station to which they were born most simply the elite did not work with their hands though involved with manual labor the middle class had some capital at their disposal whether it was their stock in trade or raw materials members of the lowest classes had only their labor to sell so one room of the exhibition is devoted to each of these broad classes and they in turn are subdivided and the last room contains paintings that highlight where the classes met among the upper classes the highest in rank was a stock holder a hereditary leader whose title means placeholder and one of the big Eureka moments for me as I was starting my research is understanding that the word in Dutch stouter is the same as lieutenant in French yatin Alstott how der placeholder so for most of the 17th century the start out er was the prince of orange and the title Prince of orange had nothing to do with Dutch royalty rather it referred to lands inherited by the leader of the Dutch Revolt William the first in southern France so this seemed to be an also a little piece of a problem area that people I was saying that there was no longer a monarchy in the Dutch Republic yes yet there was a prince of orange and that's because he inherited lands and in southern France and he was really a noble he was from the noble class so on the Left we see Prince maurits the son of William the first who was named stouter of Holland the largest richest and most powerful province in 1585 and by 1620 he was taught how to of all seven provinces power in the new Dutch Republic was shared among the stockholder who was the commander of the Dutch army and navy and was also responsible for the annual selection of municipal officers so between the start outers and assemblies of representatives composed of regents who are civic officials and Nobles so you see here Moritz depicted in a painting of 1607 as Captain General of the Dutch army the portraitist is Michiel von Mira felt he was a local painter who received the Commission from the Delft city fathers for their town hall all subsequent paintings of merits and there were very many displayed in the homes and civic buildings of advocates of the House of Orange depended on this painting he was only willing to sit to the artist one time so when I was trying to get this painting from Delft they were offering me any number of the other versions and I was like no I want the original I need the original so we got the original the format here you see he's an armor three-quarter length holding the baton of command which with the sword allude to his military authority plumed helmet beside him whose color likely refers to the House of Orange this format dates back at least to Titian and you see on the right that the same format was used by Anthony Van Dyck for the portrait of maredsous half brother Frederick Hendrick he succeeded maredsous taught holder in 1625 so the fact that this is you know the shared format in one sense refer refers or insists on their rightful succession but there is a difference between these two paintings as I said Muir felt went to the local artists Miravalle was a local artist and that's who merits went to Frederick Hendrick uses Van Dyck who was a an artist of international stature by this time so what happened between going to your local Delft guy and getting somebody who was really the man who painted all of the royalty of Europe well as you see just looking at the pictures themselves you see a real shift from this very careful description of the armor where all of the detailing the careful in size detailing has been carefully described to a much brushy or approach where the armor the reflective quality of the armor is insisted upon and it seems that van Dyck makes merits stand up a little straighter and he seems to be a little bit more ready for what might come so it reflects a change in taste and it was interesting to discover that the change in taste was largely because of the presence of the winter king and queen in the hague at this time though they're called the winter king and queen because Frederick the fifth of the Palatinate was King of Bohemia for only one winter he was routed at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 and refuge he went into exile with his wife who was the daughter of James the first of England in The Hague where his uncles the princes of orange were so it was very convenient that he had a great place to go he went with two hundred of his bohemian retinue and when as I was explaining all this to the Princess Beatrix the former queen of the Netherlands she said those were the days so so I thought I started laughing so hard but you know she had only had maybe a retinue of ten or twelve and she came to visit but anyway so here we have the winter king and queen and behind them we have Frederik Hendrik and his wife Amalia von Psalms Amalia von Psalms used to be a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth so this watercolor is from an album of a hundred and two pages that are in a wonderful book that was loaned to us from the British Museum and it is a compendium of miniatures describing the political and personal ties between these two families it was commissioned by a man named of a man named Audrey and Vonda Venna and we think it was commissioned by the winter king as a gift for Frederick Hendrik this section of the exhibition also includes paintings of courtiers and courtly pastimes this is thomas de Khazars portrait of Constantine halcon's de Kaiser was perhaps the most important portrait painter in Amsterdam in the first decades of the century halcon's whom you see here was Frederic Hendricks secretary and an important man of letters in the Netherlands he is seated wearing a brown wool writing suit and still has one glove on and he's shown receiving correspondence from a page who has taken his hat off in deference to his social superior this action this receiving a missive implies a moment in time and this was a real innovation in Dutch portraiture at this moment this is 1627 so it's pretty early and the artist is one of the first to do something that's kind of melds portraiture and genre painting in that he surrounds his sitter with things that allude to his his aristocratic pretensions or his daily work and we see here he's in a tapestry lined room which is already something of very very high rank he's got an overturned lute that alludes to his musical talents this is an architectural drawing he helped with the artistic program for Houston boss - two versions of which are in the exhibition and of course the quillpen alludes to his activity as Secretary to the stud holder and then these globes refer to other intellectual pursuits nobles and aspiring Nobles are another subset of the upper-class section to be noble one had to be born noble and the problem with nobility and in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century was there was no monarch to grant noble status so it was a dwindling class by this time they had rights and privileges that distinguish them from other classes including the right to hunt and to be represented as a special group in the provincial assemblies and they were based for the most part in the countryside especially the eastern provinces like Utrecht held or loaned and over a soul like maurits many nobles commissioned local artists to paint their portraits mostly to document their genealogy they were much less concerned about the quality of the picture they were commissioning and much more eager to put a painting up to take its place in the genealogy with the father and grandfather so it was very hard to find a painting that was of the quality of the works that we wanted for this exhibition so I got in touch with the man who wrote the catalog resume on the artist Paulus Moore Elsa because I knew more Elsa painted a lot of nobles and I asked this man where is the best noble and he sent me to Castle Rosendahl near Arnhem and we found this beautiful armed guard elisabeth von dort lady of Rosendahl that more Elsa painted in 1624 and she's never left the province she's never she's come to us from the castle for which she was painted and she's really never left her province so the curator was quite a flutter to bring her to Boston but you can just see what this ostentatious attire this black satin dress trimmed in gold thread the black a gret in her hair the standing cambric collar made from two layers of thin fine linen edged with needle lace and the abundance of jewellery I mean the pearls alone are pretty spectacular these are clear indications of her wealth but there were plenty of wealthy non non noble families who commissioned portraits depicting themselves as though they were noble and here we have an equestrian portrait which is a type of portraiture normally associated with royalty and high nobility and we have sitters who are placed before a tower and ruins implying a memorial of state and a hunting scene in the background which as I said was one of the noble privileges yet these boys depicted by Albert cope Cornelius and Michiel pompe von mer de Voort with their tutor and coachman are really the grandchildren of a wealthy dordrecht merchant magistrate and administrator of the Dutch West India Company and he purchased the country estate along with its title and coat of arms of an extinct noble family so I always think of these guys as like playing Nobles on TV they're not really Nobles but they sure are acting like Nobles and the rich clothing that they're the boys are wearing we're probably studio props of cope and of course they have little to do with hunting attire but they do help contribute to the impression of elite status that you get from this painting the third and largest group in the upper classes were the Regents and wealthy merchants almost all Regents were wealthy merchants but not all wealthy merchants were Regents Regents were those who held municipal offices and the most important of the Regents of Regents were the burgomasters or mayors these men were elected annually by and from the town council and they wielded political power not only in their local communities but also nationally delegates were sent as representatives to the provincial assemblies and to the state's general in the hague which oversaw foreign policy and the Armed Forces unlike the nobles Regents and merchants commissioned their likenesses from the fashionable artists of the day recognizing that portraits could be used to express and affirm their status so on the Left we have Rembrandt's portrait of the Amsterdam Regent Regent Andres de Graaf and on the right France Hall says portrait of villain van hey thousand they're both full-length life-sized portraits you can imagine how expensive and relatively rare they are in 17th century Dutch painting because think of how small most Dutch houses are so that these were really quite extraordinary things to have in a house and the format itself was one that was usually associated with royalty so the format alone is is emphasizing the sitter's aristocratic pretensions decor off on the left was the son of a burgomaster and he became a member of Amsterdam's Town Council in 1646 and served seven times as Burgermaster between 1657 and 1671 so Rembrandt has him has depicted him leaning on a plinth with his glove on the ground kind of conjuring up this idea of spretz a Torah or some kind of ease with bearing and and and carriage and behavior first some reason the sitter didn't like the picture so there were three years of altercation between patron and artist I wish we had documents that said what happened between them or what the original commission was supposed to be we know that degraaf's parents in portraits in berlin by pic annoy are really very different they're very they're full of gravitas which was a something that was valued in the 17th century in in a portrait and and I don't think this painting by Rembrandt exudes much gravitas but he could also have delivered the portrait and started dickering about the price that sometimes Rembrandt would agree on a price and deliver something that he thought was worth more and tried to get more for it and anyway there was a lot of back and forth and we just know that this man wasn't very happy with the portrait and this was the last time Rembrandt actually worked for The Regent class Hall's depiction of hate housing on the other hand we know the sitter loved it because it was placed in the entry hall of his house so the first thing you saw when you came in was that portrait and he's leaning on a sword with his hand on his hip seen slightly from below it really is about the most pretentious portrait in Dutch painting we have but he was not a regent he was a member of the Harlem mercantile elite he was a textile merchant and he had a country house on the spiral River and a large townhouse on the outer crocked so it's a real thrill to come into the exhibition and actually be confronted with these two paintings the painting by Jacque Roth has never been in America before and it's really fun to juxtapose the two with the exception of anatomy lessons the exhibition has all the types of Dutch group portraiture here I'm showing you two wonderful double portraits that tell us not only about the marital harmony of the couples depicted but much more Bartolome is von der Hulst was perhaps the most fashionable amsterdam portraitist at mid century when Rembrandt style was no longer as desirable as it had been and his portrait on the left is of Abraham dell court and his wife and if you look at this painting really the subject of the painting is her dress it's like an advertisement for the source of his wealth he was a textile merchant so in addition to all of the allusions to their marital happiness he's holding her wrist you can see her wedding ring on her thumb there's a fountain playing behind her and she holds a Rose really they went to the right guy to get this kind of shimmering satin and the heaviness of the braid of the trim the founder house could really paint textiles like nobody's business on the right we have yonder Brys portrait of Abraham castellane and his wife wife and this is a Harlem couple who is also well-off but they are more soberly dressed because they were Mennonites Mennonites were a conservative Protestant sect and he too is surrounded by things that allude to the source of his income of his wealth he's a printer and publisher so you have all of these books you have globe that refers to hit the global reach of his newspaper and this bust on the back is of Lawrence Koster who is supposedly the inventor of printing because they are soberly dressed that was fitting to their religion but I love the detail of the read under dress peeking through a little kind of sartorial note group portraits of Regents who were stewards over important civic institutions is one type of portrait group portrait that's particularly Dutch and here is France Hall's depiction of the governors of the st. Elizabeth Hospital in Harlem these are the men that responsible for an institution that served the poor this group portrait would likely have been displayed in the institution's boardroom although they weren't paid for their work their social status and an affirmation of their good work would have been communicated through the painting and Haas gives us a an indication of many of these men's roles in this group this is the chairman he's in front of the table although he is shown in profile here's the treasurer with coins before him and the Secretary has his hand on the minute book but you see how lively this portrait is so he varies the poses he varies the position of the heads and the activity of the hands everything is an emotion and the light hits the faces in very different ways throughout and when you get up close you can see the freedom of brushwork that is the hallmark of houses style and something that helps in addition to the poses and the hands and the various head gestures it enlivens the portrait and it's hanging right next to a Civic Guard portrait another uniquely Dutch type of group portrait this is a militia company painted by the Haig artist yan Van Rothstein and he was appreciated in the hague for his elegant style and tendency to flatter his sitters so these officers of the white flag functioned as an adjunct group to the bailiff and they patrolled the streets at night quelled disturbances and offered help in case of fire so the men of these the the officers of the Civic Guard were recruited from the sorry that men were recruited from the citizen body but the officers are the only ones who appear in these kind of group portraits partly because of their rank and partly because of the expense of such a commission so you see the captain here is in yellow and this is the ensign or flag bearer he was always supposed to be a bachelor because he was supposed to be the first one into battle but dressed like that I imagine he was anyway these these men these men were appointed by the burgomaster and the other officers were elected by their fellow militiamen and these paintings would have adorned the halls of the militia companies where they would have been seen at banquets and other events held there but I do love to compare these two pictures as I said they're hanging side-by-side in the exhibition because as lively and and different as halls has made the fellows around his table van rava stained has given every man his due they're all receiving equal amount of light you can see their faces and their garb everything is kind of equal even elegant and I imagine that they were very pleased with their portrait and I just wonder what the guys below thought of theirs because you know the main guy had is just seen in profile and we know Rembrandt's Night Watch there was a similar problem because there everybody supposedly paid the same amount of money but not everybody received the same treatment in addition to portraits genre scenes or scenes of daily life give an impression of the rituals and leisure of the wealthy Terre Bork's lady at her toilette shows the final stages of the dressing of an upper-class woman she seems lost in thought nervously fingering her ring while a maid adjusts the dress and a page in fashionable French costume offers perfumed water the dressing table covered in an expensive rug is replete with costly objects and auricular mirror frame a heavy silver candelabrum a silver brush box so this painting is actually a perfect example of the artist's fort contemporaries greatly admired Terre Bork for his exquisite rendering of materials palpable satin shimmering golden Shaw nubby ornate ornate oriental style rug and the resplendent wardrobe of the boy and she is flanked in the exhibition by two paintings by Vermeer Thank You Arthur for the painting on the left who whose table covering m'as just told might have originally been green and not blue but they are included in the upper-class section of the show because they depict some of the pastimes of the elite in her case literacy associated with education and wealth of course everything is relative but I think the literacy rate in the Netherlands in the 17th century was probably much higher than elsewhere in Europe that said probably fewer than half the women in Holland the richest Dutch province could write so the fact that this woman is shown writing a love letter or writing a letter there were manuals about how to write a letter letter in the 17th century she has the education and the leisure time which is you know many women were working very very hard in the Dutch Republic at this time so that this is really an elite to pastime the man on the right the astronomer from the Louvre is one of the rare genre paintings that feature a single man in Vermeer's work and he is an amateur so he is looking at a globe he's either an astronomer or an astrologer he's looking at a globe that's out of date but I think it would have been hard to keep up with the amazing discoveries that were happening so rapidly in the 17th century and so he's interested in this kind of intellectual scientific pursuit again he had to have had the time to actually sit around in his costly Japanese robe and look at you know out-of-date globe the first section of the middle classes is devoted to professions and trades and as with the Regent class the better off could afford to have their portraits painted this goes for Yann rikuson and his wife known as the shipbuilder who commissioned Rembrandt to paint their portrait in 1633 the Netherlands was a leader in shipbuilding innovating and producing Laura numbers of seagoing vessels for fishing for the long voyages to Batavia and Japan and to replace ships lost a war or piracy rikes in' was a successful ship builder for the Dutch East India Company and among the earliest to invest in the company so he could well afford a portrait by Rembrandt the painting brings the idea of an activated portrait that we saw with de kaiser's portrait of Constantine halcon's to an extraordinary level there's a sense of urgency communicated by the figure of the woman her hands still on the door latch as she thrusts a letter towards her husband he's been interrupted at work and I do love the fact that he hasn't turned all the way around it's like she's really interrupting something he was intently focused on and he's still a little foggy while he turns around to see what the interruption is it seems that he was working on a treatise of about ship design here and Rembrandt has find it very prominently right here the hull gives the impression of a theatrical performance spotlit with dramatic shadows and really does seem to capture a moment in time but what I really love about this painting which has come I think for the first time in America from the Queen of England is the variety of brushwork that Rembrandt shows in this picture everything from using a very small brush to describe the individual hairs on the on his head and in his beard to these really hugely broad strokes here he's taken a tan a tan layer of paint that's under underneath here and then gone through with very wide stripes to stand for the planking of the wood of the door and everything in between he may even have cleaned his brushes up here there's a little passage of squiggly Brown that doesn't really correspond to anything else so it's and and the most amazing thing is here the side of his collar I don't know if you can make it out in this slide but it's very obvious in the painting he uses abstract squiggles for this collar so it how he how he conceived of it and got away with it is beyond me it's quite extraordinary in addition to the double portrait we also have a group portrait in the middle class section this is Tomas de kaisers syndics of the Amsterdam Goldsmith guild so syndics you're familiar with the Dutch masters that were on the cigars from Rembrandt those were scents index to syndics were responsible for quality control of a certain project product guild membership was open only to citizens of the city in which they worked the guild limited competition maintains standards of quality foster training and apprenticeship and provided sickness and old-age benefits as I said the sudden syndics were responsible not only for the quality control of the product but also for the administrative supervision of the guild so these men oversaw the production of both gold and silver goods assessing the content of each object before it was stamped and sold so the idea behind this picture is to can convey the authority of these officers of the guild and the quality of the workmanship of their products because they've given us a range of things to view and inspect here this kind of tangle of silver there's a whistle a silver chain stirrups and a bridle these were all expensive objects with practical uses visual in information about those lower down on the income scale in the category of professions and trades are found in genre scenes vocational genre paintings are often slightly idealized expressing the pride of the middle classes and the virtues of Industry and probity it's not clear though why some work was represented and other types were not although it seems that the artisans that were depicted were those with whom the buyers of art would have had regular contact including notaries bakers and tailors notaries lower in status than academically trained lawyers specialized in property and family law they marriage employment and real estate contracts wills and powers of attorney and claims for damages and we as historian historians are in terribly indebted to notaries because it's from notarial records that we end up learning an awful lot about the people who lived at the time so we see here on the Left yo bear Qaeda's office of a notary public it shows a notary in an expensive japanese-style house coat the same kind of coat we saw with firm airs astronomer but he was not supposed to dress like this we know from a 17th century source that they were not supposed to dress in silk but he is either doing it or yo bare Qaeda has put him in this outfit and he's in any case in a prosperous town house that you see by this marble checked floor and there's gilt leather wall covering on the back on the wall of the back room and his client by contrast is wearing out-of-date clothes I think his clothes are about 20 years out-of-date he's fumbling in his purse for money he has forgotten to remove his hat maybe any or all of this is is the reason why there seems to be a certain amount of snickering here with the young apprentice so this Harlem artist yo bear Qaeda also painted the Baker here from Worcester this is a more popular subject than a notary but a couple of the the images painted images that we have of Baker's in the 17th century are portraits of actual Baker's this does not seem to be or at least we don't know who he is bread was a mainstay of the European diet and it was eaten in the Netherlands with butter and butter or cheese for breakfast with meat or stew for the midday meal and with porridge at night and I just heard a lecture yesterday or day before yesterday that bread made up 80% of the calories of the Dutch diet in in the 17th century the more affluent bought products made from white flour which was refined from imported wheat and here all of these products that he's displaying as he's blowing his horn announcing the freshness of the bread these are all made from this expect more expensive refined white wheat and the poor may do with coarser rye bread at the bottom we see the interior of a tailor's workshop this is by the Leyden artist queering von break link um and this artist made somewhat of a specialty of depicting tailors and cobblers at work so we're kind of going down the social scale we started at upper-middle class and now we're down to the lower middle class this tailor is shown with two apprentices sitting on a table in the front room of a domestic interior I imagine they're sitting there to get the best light they can coming in from the tall windows maybe to attract custom by pet from passersby tailors made clothing for men and did repair work while seamstress has worked for women and children what I want to show you here is on the back wall this guy didn't make enough money to pay taxes yet he owns a painting here's a still-life painting on panel it's a very quickly brushed it's not a very fine painting it has fruit in a rumor but they any one except for the very lowest classes could still afford to have a painting or two and travelers to the Dutch Republic were struck by the fact that everyone there seemed to own art upper and middle class women were trained in the practical arts in order to be good wives and mothers so lace-making which was a refined type of needlework was we equated with good upbringing diligence and industry but also this was work that could be done at home between times so that a woman could do any kind of needlework or lace making when she wasn't occupied with the stuff that made the household run the light that surrounds the head of Nicolas Moss's lacemaker on the left gives the image a kind of sanctity there's a kind of halo effect around around her head and and he gives us this image of utter concentration there are numerous images of lace makers in Dutch painting of the 17th century the same is not true from about the image on the right which is Peter to hoax women beside a linen cupboard of 1663 this is a mother teaching her daughter the proper care of linen linen in the 17th century was a measure of the wealth of the household both by its quality and its quantity we know that all levels of society use linen on their table they would not eat at a bare table but the the quality of the linen changed drastically between the find a masks of the upper-class and the very plain linen of the lower-class and in fact the linen covered itself was one of the most expensive and imposing furnishings of the home and normally the mistress of the house would wear the key to the linen cupboard around her waist here you see it's still in the lock as she's instructing her daughter on how to fold and put away linen this to Houk is an iconic example of Delft painting with its subtle effects of light and glimpses into adjoining rooms that define clear spatial recession to hope painted both indoor and outdoor spaces and I this this talk is to show you a little bit about the kind of social research that went into this exhibition and not to stress the absolute amazing quality of the paintings that we're talking about we really wanted the very best outstanding examples of everything so we concentrated on quality and quantity quality and condition of the works that came to the show but here I just want these are too unjust whew masterpieces by Pieter de Hoch so you see how Abele he can discuss he can describe that well it doesn't show in this slide but the interior is dusky the dusky interior illuminated by filtered light from the adjoining front room and the open door with more light suggested coming from the top of the stairs and on the right to hoax courtyard of a house in Delft is bathed in the warm light of day these are arguably two hoax two greatest paintings and are clearly the types of compositions that would inspire his compatriot Vermeer who's distilled single figure genre scenes date mostly from the following decade the type of courtyard to Hoch painted on the right was not uncommon it was located between the front and rear of the house affording light for the interior and a protected environment for the inhabitants and if you look closely you'll see that the mistress who's standing here in the hallway looking out into the street is wearing the same costume as the mistress here in the linen cupboard there has often been discussion about whether this is a mistress and maid or whether it's a mother and daughter and I had the great good fortune to work with a costume historian to help me sort out who was who so here we have a servant who's very tenderly taking care of the child in her charge they seem to have emerged from the storage area next to them they both seem to have something in their aprons and a maid generally for this dirty work would wear a dark apron of dark blue apron to help hide the stains whereas the mistress of the house would wear a white apron these tender glances exchange between the child and servant are interesting in light of the fact that in 17th century literature and theatre maids were servants were depicted as thieves lustful and untrustworthy yet here you see this very engaging relation between the two and only occasionally in Dutch art is the servant depicted in a negative light by European standards Dutch women were remarkably independent not surprising since so many of their men were away at sea or at war furthermore foreign visitors remarked on the visibility of Dutch women in business and public life many Dutch middle-class women were active in their husbands and fathers enterprises as shop workers some started their own businesses with capital obtained from inheritance or from relatives others were widows who took over their husbands concerns so shopkeeping was a common way for middle-class Dutch women to make a living yet this shop that carrot Dale presents in this grocery shop of 1647 from the Louvre seems to be made up because he's mixing stuff that would have been obtained in all sorts of different kinds of shop and it's the first shop seen in Dutch art he kind of invented it so this is the shopkeeper here counting money in the front and this is the shopkeepers servant she's kind of like window dressing she's supposed to be attractive and attract the customers and here we have a servant from a well-off house with her market pale and behind as an apprenticed with apprentice with a mustard pot in 17th century Holland there were all kinds of maids so we just saw there's a shopkeeper servant there's a servant from a wealthy home on the left is another painting by Dale called clearing the table from Frankfurt and this features two kinds of maids so there's a maid who's clearing up after a meal and this is the only depiction of clearing a table in 17th century Dutch painting that I know of and she is there there's a younger girl who's come in with a lantern from outside she probably still lives with her parents and she's brought a message of some kind so there were different kinds of servants some lived in some came in occasionally of course this gives Dow the perfect opportunity show his virtuosity with depicting a scene by artificial illumination there's a there were women who came and did the ironing we don't know whether this painting by Jakob duck from Utrecht is actually a servant or the mother of the girl who is sitting here playing with her whirligig but it's the only painted depiction of a woman ironing that we have and prostitutes often self-identified as servants when they were rounded up so they were a common sight in urbanized seafaring and wealthy Amsterdam the third-largest European city after Paris in London so Jakob Bakker depicts one of these women women whose fine apparel was necessary to attract to clients so she either borrowed or bought this dress from the madam and it's a type of clothing that was associated with women of a higher social class so she's placed at the very end of the middle class and she leads us into the lower class she is aping her betters and this went against the common conviction that people should dress according to their rank and station despite the fact that prostitutes dressed better and earned much more than their honourable counterparts nearly all of them actually did below belong to the lower class the first section of the lower classes is devoted to images of Labor though surely labor was among the most common sites in the 17th century hard physical labor is rarely depicted in Dutch paintings one imagines that upper and middle class buyers of quality paintings / Ford preferred portraits of themselves and their fine clothing and images of plump cows rare foodstuffs and costly vessels as expressive expressions of pride in their achievements several of the paintings that do to pick labor were produced by artists active in the industrial city of Haarlem in the middle decades of the century here we have karatbar Qaeda's construction of the new ramparts in Harlem this is the only painted illustration surviving of the creation of Harlem's new era and the relocation of the city's ramparts an expansion that belatedly eased the city's crowding only in 1671 Yakup and Roth styles view of the plain of Harlem with bleaching grounds unlike the Barracuda is one of 15 at least 15 such paintings which would have appear appear appealed more broadly to local residents proud of their city's industry and beauty we know the name this is a particular domain called de Mol but what's interesting here is the the importance of haarlem's bleacher EES it was the most important bleaching center in in europe because of the clear water that emerged at the foot of the dunes and the available ability of buttermilk which was a byproduct of Harlem's dairy farms so this bleaching process took months and months what we see in the painting from a bird's eye view is the step in this process called grassing the stretching out of the fabric on the grass to expose it to Sun and air and this happened after repeated soaking washing rinsing and steeping many of the workers including those who dragged the drench masses of cloth to the fields were women they're miserable weekly wages ranged from 1/2 Gilder to 4 so this glorious monumental landscape with its majestic skies silhouette of Saint Bavo in the distance that's how we know one way we know it's Harlem and the patterning of linen on the fertile earth gives no hint of the arduous nosov the work depicted and when you see the painting you barely can see these tiny figures who are doing the work in addition to working in the textile sector lower-class women were put to work pulling dragging and carrying raw salt peat and water they worked at the brickworks at the breweries and as stackers and dryers in the peat bogs they filled peat bags and turned the green in warehouses to prevent overheating perhaps unsurprisingly none of these jobs were depicted in paint they were also largely responsible for the preparation of dairy products the milkmaid is a common figure in Dutch paintings they milked the cows twice a day churning the cream into butter for the domestic market and using the rest of the milk to produce cheese for export so Tara bork the same artist who gave us that beautiful woman at her toilette here paints a maid milking a cow in a barn from the Getty Museum this is about the most poetic depiction of the subject imaginable women were also fishmongers often the wives or daughters of fishermen and here on the right Audrey and fauna Stata shows us a fishwife who appears to be scaling a haddock or Cod on her stand our other saltwater fish as well selling from a market stall required a license and often also guild membership so this means that the fishmonger would not have been from the poorest social class whereas the textile industry was labor-intensive the brewing of beer another of Harlem's industries was capital intensive breweries usually employed only 10 to 20 people and their owners were among a city's wealthiest individuals one of the paintings in the show that I'm not showing you is a painting by Yann stain that shows a very wealthy Harlem Brewer surrounded by his incredibly elongated fashionable children in a very ostentatious interior beer was the most popular beverage in the Netherlands in the first half of the 17th century largely because water quality was not at all dependable Isaac von tostadas workman before an N is a rare painted representation of porters delivering beer to a village tavern a workhorse has pulled a wooden sledge loaded with three barrels to the doorstep where it is met by the innkeep and a young worker who opens the door to the cellar the two porters and here you see them here their backs are to us they're bent under the weight they've got a yoke between them and they're bent under the weight of a barrel which weighs probably in excess of 300 pounds one of the barrels here is branded with what looks like a white bird in flight brands normally signaled a specific brewery although we've not been able to match this brand with a brewery operating at the time and often the other side of the barrel was branded with the city emblem these porters were responsible for collecting a city sales tax on beer when they delivered the barrels however even though they were employed by the city in this way it was the Brewers who paid their wages in some cities these beer Porter's or Carter's even have their own guild protecting their monopoly on moving beer so this painting contains many points of interest other than the picturesque depiction of country life at which the artists excelled and another wonderful little detail as we know from contemporary sources that these ends were often located very close to the church the importance of water to the 17th century Dutch cannot be overestimated much of the land was at or below sea level after all Netherlands means low country and water and ships were everywhere this is C Mon de flaggers Dutch fishing boats hauling in their nets and it tells us almost everything we need to know about the herring fishery the herring industry was important to the Dutch economy not only because it fed large number numbers of people but also because it provided a high quality export product and significant work opportunities to the right of center here is the new newly invented herring bus it this design allowed fishermen to operate on the high seas following schools of fish and allowing for the gutting and salting of the herring on board permitting longer voyages uninterrupted by constant reach and support because of the valuable nature of their catch these herring buses were frequently accompanied by armed vessels that you see here these vessels protected them from pirates and enemy warships the clear light of day suggests that this is the morning when they're actually hauling in the nets that they set the night before and these the fishermen here in the smaller boat are probably doing the ferrying of course this is an exquisite painting on panel it's in wonderful condition the vast expanse of sky with those scudding clouds that don't show up so well in the slide but that are very apparent in the painting this the the scudding clouds contributes to the movement of the water that you feel with the Whitecaps described below and the silvery tonality of the hole really does evoke the moisture of the atmosphere it's quite a wonderful picture and was the last painting that we got for the exhibition I really looked high and low for such a painting and it was only in Budapest that I found it the lowest of the lower classes were the indigent and here we see one of five paintings made for the meeting room of the all manners house in Amsterdam this institution cared for the people who were not eligible for charity from civic or Church authorities that is they cared for the worthy poor who were residents of Amsterdam but not citizens because in the 17th century you had to buy citizenship we don't know who painted the painting he's adapted the subject of distributing bread in the almshouse from traditional series depicting the Christian works of mercy so feeding the hungry what's very striking here is the difference the portrait quality of the honors themselves these three men who are distributing the bread and the more caricatural quality of the crowd clamoring to get their bread they're trading in tokens for these loaves that are actually stamped with the three exes of Amsterdam most 17th century paintings of the poorhouse were not commissioned like this one was but were rather made for the market so in contrast to the worthy poor Audrey and Vonda Vanna gives us this painting called poor luxury which is kind of a satirical Grizz I won in a series of more than a hundred such paintings they're rapidly brushed they're almost drawings in paint and they all depict different sorts of beggars and tramps these were produced over a number of years at the same time this is the same artist who depicted the winter king and queen and miniature that fine-fine painting we looked at earlier this is the same guy so at the same time he was turning out these exquisite miniatures he was making these very fast drawings and paint in their behavior comportment and dress the wretched poor depicted here are stereotypical members of the undeserving poor the cunning and dishonorable riffraff who aimed to take advantage of the unsuspecting public so you weren't supposed to give them money these works were initially collected by an educated public who would have puzzled over the paradoxical nature of the inscriptions this one is inscribed poor luxury marveled at the artistry achieved with so little means and shaken their heads of the social ills resulting from willful poverty once the market for these drab images of the rabble had been established von de vente exploited his rapid painting technique to turn out ever larger numbers of panels catering to a broader and increasingly anonymous public the last room of the exhibition is devoted to where the classes meet migration into and within the Netherlands both swelled as population and brought diverse people face to face in fact we know that the birthrate dropped in the 17th century and yet the population swelled immigrants became part of the fabric of society and like native-born Netherlanders of various classes met and mingled in the cities in the countryside on the water and on the ice they also met on thresholds either on the threshold of a business or on the threshold of a house this threshold marked the boundary between public and private street and home Jakub Akhter veldt's street musicians at the door is set in a marble floor room of an elegant townhouse where it's upper-class residents opened the door to itinerant musicians playing the hurdy-gurdy and fiddle and what I absolutely adore about this painting which is the cover of our catalog is how the artist has varied not only his choice of colors his use of light but also his way of painting to distinguish the classes so he gives us rather expensive colors for the the clothing of the mistress of the house and her little child it's very amusing that the maid who is somewhere in between is wearing the same colors but not the same quality of clothes so she belongs to the inside it's lit with this very strong spotlight that has a kind of abstracting quality to it and the touch is of the finest brushwork so it's really a fine Manor painting for the interior whereas the itinerant musicians are painted in ochres they receive very little light and they're much more broadly brushed and the whole idea of the painting is captured in this play of hands where the maid is instructing the child to come get the coin from her mother and give it to the musicians so the patrician obligation of providing charity and educating the young to meet that responsibility is a recurring theme in where the classes meet and Dutch painting on the right people often know this painting because it was the cover of Simon Shamas embarrassment of riches this is Yann staines Adolph and catch arena cruiser on the outer Delft it's known as the burger of Delft and his daughter and this in contrast to the octave alt shows a threshold outside the house cruiser was a corn merchant and brewery owner so again remember how wealthy they were who lived across the auda Delft canal from Staines brewery and his expensive black costume and expansive posture the imposing structure of his townhouse the highly refined clothing and posture of his daughter all testified to his privileged place in the world they contrast in every way to the stooped woman on the other side of the railing aged beyond her years wearing a German fur hat her clothes of heavy cloth and with one of her shoes cut it's not a hole in the shoe as I thought at first but it's actually a straight line it's cut across the toe to make more room for her feet having delivered a letter from the poorhouse and the tower of the poorhouse is visible just adjacent to Cruisers head the gentleman holds this letter in which the woman is apparently entreating him to support the boy in her company paintings like this depicting the upper classes fulfilling their societal obligations confirm the values of those who could afford to buy such works finally in the last room of the exhibition we also feature a selection of decorative arts these objects are laid on three tables one for the upper one for the middle and one for the lower classes and on these tables are three examples of each type of object that differ in form material and/or decoration for example we have flute glasses the upper class the upper class on the left is a clear engraved glass like a diamond engraved glass the middle is this tall glass with prints the prints were so your greasy hands didn't lose grip of your drink and the lower is this green glass marked with rings in in rough shape these rings indicate that this was used for a drinking game in the middle slide you seesaw where one is silver one is white files and one is earthenware and plates majolica pewter and wood the fact that this wood plate even still survives is quite miraculous and on these tables we also have 17th century linens the upper-class linen is a very elaborate damn esc' with Orpheus charming the animals so a mythological scene that would again have a appeal to people of education and wealth the middle class has scattered flowers and the lower class has a plain diaper weave pattern on coarser linen so that's an overview of the exhibition I hope you'll make the effort to come to Boston and see it because the slides just don't do it justice thank you

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

Views: 12,717

Rating: 4.9292035 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, Dutch Golden Age (Art Period/Movement)

Id: 3Sfza2_cXRg

Length: 65min 58sec (3958 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2015