The Fruits of Prosperity and Global Trade: Dutch Decorative Arts of the 17th Century

please join me in welcoming Thomas Nikki [Applause] thanks Kristen and good afternoon to all I knew I was an old head on young shoulders but that really takes the cake but I'll take that it's a pleasure to be here I think this is the sixth in in the 10th series ten core series so you're over the hump and I'm very glad to be here to speak about decorative arts they are prominent in the exhibition thanks to Ronnie bear and I think it's a wonderful moment to reflect on the range of decorative arts which were certainly important particularly in a prosperous time which the 17th century in the Netherlands certainly was my mission today is to present a fairly broad range of media furniture glass ceramics metalwork something of the context more of the context you'll see in the exhibition and it's it's really quite wonderful to to be speaking about decorative arts in the context of the class distinctions exhibition because they're everywhere in every painting and it's it's very nice to be in this series to draw them draw them out as you know from other talks and this in this series of course the the northern Netherlands by by the 1600s had become a glossary of the 7th 17th century 1600s had become a global power it's trading network crossed the Baltic Mediterranean Atlantic and Pacific Oceans literally spanning the globe although not an empire of population it was certainly an economic and trading empire and if trade was the foundation of the Dutch prosperity then Amsterdam was its cornerstone in the seventh second half of the 17th century commodities from around the world baltic timber and grain swedish metals Chinese porcelain Persian carpets sugar from Brazil fruit from the West Indies spices and pepper from Java Sumatra and Borneo all made their way to the Netherlands of course they also begin to appear in still life paintings of the period and here I'm showing you almost standing in for a whole class of of still lifes vilom calfs still life with wineglass and bowl of fruit which does the Cleveland Museum and there in a nutshell you see the the props of a prosperous life and of conspicuous science of one success of Chinese porcelain Dutch glass in this case not imitating venetian glass as we'll see but still quite fine and also a a Persian carpet or one trying to look Persian and hardwood furniture so these are the the emblems of material success which we'll be exploring later on ships and shipping were the natural talents and the native assets in a way for the Dutch Republic as early as 1649 one contemporary an Englishman James Howell noted that having no land to manure they plow the very bowels of the deep the wrinkled forehead of Neptune are the furrows that yield them increase so what other nations had in agriculture the Dutch had in maritime prosperity and I think being a watery nation of course people grew up sailing and were comfortable on ships and ships and shipbuilding were the bread and butter really of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century the East Indiaman which I'm showing you here on the left of an edging by Wenceslas Hall are of a Dutch East German East Indiaman from the 1640s and on the right a replica of an East India ship the Batavia about 1628 a famous ship whose maiden voyage was was really marred by by mutiny shipwreck and murder it's really should be should be a miniseries so a good ship to reproduce but I think you can see in in Hall ours actually of course the the sheer scale of the ship has been somewhat exaggerated but they were all inspiring all inspiring instruments of Dutch prosperity they were part Marchant ships but also part military vessels and the spread of the East India Company success around the globe is is partly due to trading acumen but also military power in East Asia there was nothing to rival European fire little literally firepower of guns and cannons this is the home base of Holland of the Netherlands global empire this is the Dutch East India house in the 17th century and I'll use interchangeably vo C which is the acronym for the United eased India Company which was chartered in 1602 and forgive me that this is probably familiar ground to a lot of you although I think it bears repeating because it was such an amazing creation unique at that time to to the Dutch the vo C was a multinational corporation it issued shares of stock it was immensely successful and possessed quasi governmental powers including the ability to wage war negotiate its own treaties strike its own coinage and to establish colonies all of this of course with the blessing of the government but independent of the government but before long like any multinational corporation all the shareholders literally had a stake so it was with the tacit approval of everyone who had a stake in the vo C and it flourished as a result meetings were held here by the Regents every every week so this was the the nerve center in Amsterdam for a global network of trade on the Left I'm showing you what we call it's become a generic term a crock plate which is a bit of a howler in a ceramic context they're not cracked plates they are cracked plate and I think I've put that in your in your notes KRA k is a is a kind of bastardization of the Portuguese word for the very ships that carried these cargoes the kerrick's and on the right a little vignette from a 16th century map showing you a Portuguese ship perhaps not as great here in in the image as the Dutch East Indiaman of Haller but still these ships ruled the deep in the 16th century I think in general if you think of trade and commerce and and the China trade in particular the 16th century was the Portuguese era the 17th was the Dutch and then I think it's fair to say the 18th century was was the English dominating trade so it really was almost that neat by century that had evolved this plate is significant significant because it comes from a famous shipwreck of a ship called the Whittle ooh or the white lion which sank with its cargo in 1613 it was bound for Amsterdam it's found a Portuguese ship which was going to take as a prize a kind of legalized form of piracy the Dutch over reached their authority or their firepower and a cannon backfired the ship blew up and sank to the bottom of the sea 10 years earlier 3 East India Company ships had captured a ship called the Santa Catarina which was a 1500 Township off Singapore that one cargo which the Dutch seized increased company profits by 50% and the quantities of Ming blue and white porcelain became known as crock porcelain after the ships that carried them there was an auction in Amsterdam heads of state from around Europe came to buy things and it really was the the kind of first volley in what would become a as a century long frenzy for this kind of blue-and-white China the Chinese would have nothing to do with the plate like this it was made for export by Chinese Stan Imperial standards this would be hopelessly crude but by European standards it was the rarest and most exotic thing money could buy in the 17th century the Dutch the Dutch program of securing their bases in global trade was essentially a kind of tit-for-tat war with the Portuguese I'm not sure there was a grand strategy except to break the Spanish and Portuguese monopolies of the spice trade they did this by taking potshots at vulnerable ships like the Santa Catarina so they were little flashes of conflict around around the globe in 1619 the Dutch conquered Jakarta renamed it Batavia and that City was established as the capital of the Dutch East Indies but as its height it only had a population of around 70,000 so these were not great city-states that were created around the globe the Dutch trading empire moved forward on a fairly lean lean basis by the Treaty of the hague in 1661 the Dutch agreed to Portuguese control of Brazil so on a global scale there was well we'll take that you'll get this and this kind of pattern unfolded well into the 18th century of course so it's important to realize that this formula of played on the left with a central scene usually with the Chinese motif and then a rim that's broken up into panels if you blur your eyes that general design is transport to a million different plates from from this period before the arrival in the first decade of the 17th century of Chinese goods domestic ceramics in the Netherlands looked very different it couldn't be more different from what I'm showing you now on the right is a plate from our collection very much like one in the exhibition we have two and I actually forget if this is the one or if it's the other one in the exhibition again these are faithful copies of Italian Mollica wares from Urbino if you know the where my Olek Aware's from the 1560s made in Urbino this kind of yellow and white decoration with with grotesque ornament was a specialty of two families the Fontana and the pata Nazi workshops and that was the high standard of European earthenware which the Dutch naturally sought to emulate on the left is the Urbino example on the right the Dutch example not a bad copy and completely different from from what would follow even the wavy edge of the Euro be no plate known as a Kristina these little deep dishes with a scalloped edge were imitated in this case not Delft but in Harlem where Potter's worked in the Italian style top center above and below are two German stoneware jugs but they bear the coat of the city coat of arms of the city of Amsterdam so these are the basic house wares you see these in Dutch paintings earlier in the 17th century and in fact Delft Potter's imitated the German stoneware forms in blue and white pottery but this one slide is going to have to set for us the stage of what was on the tables really before the first decade of the 17th century and before long these Italian models were clearly eclipsed I love this slide in a way all of these plates are from the museum's collection and I had one slide to bring today this would be it of the global spread of the Chinese style and the race to imitate porcelain by any means they could only the center played is Chinese porcelain the other four are all tin glazed earthenware a less expensive material it's a different lecture but porcelain requires a feldspathic clay which vitrify z-- at high temperatures and becomes almost glass like and translucent the Europeans never figured this out for well hundreds of years until 1710 in Germany in order to get bright white you have to add a tin oxides to the glazes and when that is fired it turns opaque and the whiter and brighter the better and then over that you paint with cobalt to simulate the Chinese blue and white porcelain so by the 1620s in Amsterdam East Indiaman the ships we're bringing around a hundred thousand plates like this per year all destined really for a wealthy minority this was true in Amsterdam but as you see it was also true in in Portugal and in the Middle East as everyone was striving to imitate Chinese wares in the face of this kind of of novelty and production some makers simply closed their factories in the face of that competition and then it was it all went awry because civil wars in China disrupted the supply of porcelain and in a way that spurred the Dutch Potter's to produce similar wares basically to compete in the vacuum created by civil wars in China on the left is a Chinese vase and on the right the Dutch competition and if I hadn't put those small probably illegible captions to you in the back row I wonder if you could tell which one was pottering which is porcelain the fact that you can't really tell is really a tribute to the success of the Dutch where's the only clue in a way are the little dings in the rim where the tin glaze hasn't fused to the body below and that reveals that it's not really vitrified it's just glazed in this way so the fascination with Dutch porcelain spurred the Dutch and it was nearly indistinguishable in its own day this was called Dells porcelain suggesting to me they didn't know or didn't care about the difference of porcelain and earthenware but of course they did what began as very faithful copies as you see here gradually evolved naturally into a product that was distinctively Dutch as we'll see there were at least 30 different factories in Delft who were making making plates like this so it was an enormous industry when the Chinese stepped away for their own internal reasons from production the Japanese filled the vacuum with porcelain by the time the Chinese re-entered the market they were they found themselves keeping up with the Japanese tastes and this is an example of that with a so called Amaury or kaki a mon palate of iron red underglaze blue and applied gilding this is the Japanese taste which then the Chinese imitated to keep up with the Japanese and then the Dutch in turn were copying so it does create this kind of amazing welter of who's on first and what was the the source of inspiration who's copying whom but in fact it's those cross currents that make decorative arts historians interested in in these kinds of patterns of exchange the sources for this kind of ornament and I'm now referring to the the peculiarly Dutch ornament were often are often referred to as chinoiserie which is a European creation has very little to do with actual Chinese or a Japanese ornament it was a European fantasy of what life in East Asia like this is the title page and the frontispiece from an important book published in 1665 by john newhoff who was a steward for the Dutch East India Company's mission to China in the 1650s the mission or I should say expedition was charged with negotiating trade agreements with the Chinese emperor that's generally a fool's errand and in this case no exception the embassy failed in its commercial objectives because essentially we had nothing that Chinese wanted but he nevertheless produced extensive reports on his journey and his observations were subsequently published in a book like this that contains more than a hundred and forty engravings the engravings show architecture general customs landscapes costumes and different people of China the book was a gold mine for Europeans eager if not desperate to know what what was the the Far East about so it went through several Dutch and English I'm showing you a later English edition here this was the grist for the mill of artists for the better part of a century although published in the 1660s newhoff motifs appear in decorative arts for for many generations after that here is a Delft plaque in the Rijksmuseum which shows a fantastical scene I think we say whoa isn't that curious but in the 1670s or so when this was made I think it was thought to be a faithful representation but in fact it's a it's a conglomeration of several engraved plates in that book so it's this is the essence of chinoiserie a European fantasy of Asian of Asian life these plaques and I'll show you another two actually in the course of the lecture these were slabs of clay beautifully painted then fired and they were regarded almost as as pictures shown the way a print or a small painting would be new Huff though it's it's a wonderful source and when you have a hundred 40 engravings I think you can see how rich a mine or rich a vein that was for designs of the period here is a plaque on the left by probably well one of the only artists whose name we know and fortunately in that regard probably the best artist known who was painting on Delft it's a plaque in the Rijksmuseum and on the right I'm showing you a plaque from our collection to remind you that they were framed the way paintings were and displayed the way paintings were and you can find this in in our museum upstairs in the oven swing in in the Hamilton Palace period room at Delft it was really painters rather than the modelers or for makers who determined the look of the various pieces most of these artists remain anonymous most of them also presumably belong to the guild of st. Luke which like all guilds imposed strict rules on its members the rules for powders and painters at Delft were the criteria would have been high quality first and foremost also a kind of course of honor we're masters had to prove or demonstrate their mastery of the skill so they there would be a kind of masterpiece to show their their skill and then for our purposes here rather telling that members were forbidden to work at home no freelancing and no way of identifying yourself as an individual so Delft paintings on ceramic are never signed then frightened though Frederic Van frightened is the artist of this plaque he was not a member of the guild and occasionally signed and dated his work which must have driven the guild members crazy although I don't think anyone expressed that but I'm that's my imagination because anyone who skirted those guild rules and flourished and prospered was not really playing by the rules so he probably did work as a freelance for various Potteries and very few of his clay plaques are marked by the factory so we know his name we don't always know who was producing the plaques on the left I think you can see and I shouldn't it's easy to take this for granted but when I showed you say the crock plate from China or Dutch imitations there they're nicely painted but they're hardly finely painted and then frightened managed with a technique that's really peculiar to him to create an almost boom ATO or smokey shading of fine stippling and brush work on these plaques which when you see one in person you realize yes that that really can pass as as a painting or print that just happens to be in in underglaze blue so the print on the left although late in the game towards the end of the 17th century is I think exceptionally finely painted by the 18th century Chinese porcelain was really being shipped as ordinary ballast and there are diagrams for how to load a ship this is very important and I think it's telling that porcelain although precious was made in huge quantities it was also waterproof the real money in a China venture was in textiles and tea not waterproof so if you could line the hold with the durable goods then you could pack the crates of water-soluble things on on top and hope that they make it this is a view of the roughly hundred and fifty thousand pieces recovered from a shipwreck of the Kaldur mouths and the ship that sank in 1750 - and was recovered in the 1980s on that ship the cargo was 60% tea textiles and finally porcelain before the 17th century porcelain was a rarity that was seldom found outside royal collections by the 1750s just about everyone had porcelain and with the Dutch entry into the East Asian trade throughout the century Holland became the principal importer of porcelain to all parts of Europe that was part of their global global reach once Europeans which is to say the Germans discovered the secret of true porcelain in 1710 Chinese porcelain was suddenly less important than tea porcelain some of you may have heard me speak in other gallery talks it's very difficult to reverse-engineer porcelain because it is transformed in the fire and over the years this was a source of great frustration to Europeans because there aren't that many materials on earth that are incredibly delicate translucent and yet very hard and durable not if you smash it but if you're just holding it it's its eggshell thin and yet it's incredibly hard so it was it had magical associations and Europeans were determined to find the secret and therefore logically would try to create it by throwing glass like things into the pot so they would try with quartz they would try with alabaster they would try with glass but when fired it didn't transform or vitrify the way porcelain does so it was the the the mineral ingredients which the Chinese had and then the Europeans discovered that that made this possible here though I'm showing you the sheer quantity I can't think of another image actually from modern times that that shows you the the sheer quantities and that's just one ship full so imagine the volume of East India Company ships coming in I mentioned that tea was very tea was very important very valuable but alas tin glazed earthenware ie Delft wasn't very well suited to tea if you pour boiling water into a Delft teapot or a tea cup it tends to break it's just it's a cruel irony that the tea wares they wanted so badly weren't really going to hold up on the left is a Delft teapot we think we call it a teapot and yet the lid is fused to the top and you you so it's it's a non functioning vessel you can't use it looks like a teapot it's a it's a very curious thing which I suppose is standing in for for a Chinese teapot I don't think you would fill it by the spout you can't put loose tea in there so it's a it's a mimic of a Chinese teapot then on the right a teacup and saucer in tin glazed earthenware I think they're so rare today because they were so ordinary in their own time you hardly ever see Delft teacups and saucers there were millions in inventories very few in museum collections that we know of it's not out on view at the moment but it's it's an amazing rarity which I'm not sure I fully appreciated until a visitor explained that about boiling water and tea and so forth so these are tea wares but not really well-suited to to the purpose in a lecture on decorative arts of the Golden Age which is essentially the 17th century it's hard to escape the impact of William and Mary although you should know that as a royal couple they there their image and the source of their prestige was a very different taste from most other Dutch people and the the the the prevailing fashion here was of course French taste in France the court of louis xiv set the world standard for luxury in all the arts it simply set the standard for every branch of the arts and so every government from from London to Prague really was trying to imitate what the French had created and William the 3rd Prince of orange here on the left and his wife Mary Stewart were no exception she is he knows the daughter of James Duke of York who's later James the second and therefore the niece of Charles the second so she has the the ticket to to the throne of England and 1689 their their crown joint rulers of England making him that the stout holder Stan told her king they tried to imitate French fashion in a courtly way but we'll see it was again a peculiarly Dutch solution the genius behind their creation is this man whose name is Daniel marrow he's still I'm not sure he's a household name but you still see marrow inspired designs all the time he had a huge impact on the decorative arts of the 17th century in Holland in the Netherlands and in England bad for the Hyuga No but good for Protestant England and Holland and the Netherlands was the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Mount which deprived Protestants as you all know from from schools school age recitations of their religious and civil rights thereby spurring a mass exodus for the rest of Europe maro fled from France to Holland in 1685 immediately he worked in England from 16 94 to 96 Oh a decade in the Netherlands a decade in England and by the end of the 1690s he was back in Amsterdam at the Dutch and English courts of William and Mary he alone I would say oversaw the the court architecture furniture ceramics gardens theater sets tapestries and every branch of the applied arts the result was an unprecedented unity among the different elements that constitute interior interior architecture this sounds obvious but it wasn't obvious at the time and it was rarely unified although louis xiv managed to do this so from i'd written down from from coaches to snuffboxes marrow had a hand in large and small this era where I should say this branch of design the French style was really the culmination of the Baroque style in Europe and it was a style of course that reinforced the power of the monarch in the 1680s William the third acquired head low you can visit it today it's a hunting lodge that became perhaps wishful thinking the Versailles and for the Netherlands I think you can see it is a junior version of Versailles in the palace architecture and also the integration of gardens it's in Apeldoorn about 50 miles east of Amsterdam you can visit it today it's actually a Museum of Dutch royal history and it was maro than Daniel Morrow who laid out its gardens and created its interiors here I'm showing you and engraving his designs were published towards the end of the 17th century and there I think you can see is concept of an integrated design next to it is the Queen's bedroom at het low and if you look above and below you can see I hope painted imitations of marble coved ceilings with paintings on the ceiling and a general grandeur which was recognizably French there are rooms at Versailles that are the counterparts to this on steroids this is really a domestic version of a palatial scale at Versailles but that was really what maro was looking at the formula on the left of a circular mirror in a canted corner fireplace with ornaments above that is also part of the French style which maro brought to the Netherlands and in turn to England here is an oft illustrated image it serves so many purposes for for decorative arts historian a design for a fireplace wall which is described as being in lacquer so these are either imported lacquer panels as you see in some surviving rooms and royal palaces in the Netherlands today or possibly Japan the European imitation of Asian lacquer but most important is that the the piling up of porcelain over the fireplace like most European rulers and Nobles marry Queen Mary was a keen collector of blue and white porcelain she displayed it all over at het low as you see here and later at Hampton Court Palace and also at Kensington Palace in London note also because we'll see as we go on yes it's a brilliant arrangement over the fireplace but it's also this little vignette in my pointer is ailing but inside the fireplace and on the hearth is a significant display of porcelain as well here just to show you in in real life a corner of the porcelain room at at mid Acton which is a home of the count and Countess Bentinck in Cal Durland east of Amsterdam it's one of the rare interiors that survives in Dutch country houses from from this period a rather brilliant use of converging shelves and then mirrors behind them again a junior version in a way of effects at Versailles but on the right I'm showing you similar treatments in Mary's gallery at Kensington Palace which you can see today in London they purchased that in 1689 again mirroring treatments in the Netherlands and sometimes thanks to women Mary's joint rule evidence of decorative arts and interiors survived in England perhaps better than they do in the Netherlands so I think you can see it's quite theatrical almost stage like of carved and gilded wooden drapery porcelain in between and then reflected and composed throughout the room to make a very theatrical and impressive illusion there daniel marrows designed for state beds was perhaps the most conspicuous embodiment of French taste the whole notion of a state bed where no one really slept was an important ritual of of court etiquette essentially it's a different talk but it's that that procession through a palace of an elf allowed from the opening reception rooms where many people come to increasing intimacy as you approach the private apartments of the monarch where very few people get to to arrive so it's actually a kind of filtering process and the furnishings textiles porcelain works of art would would have big crescendo as you reach as you reach the monarch typically in a Dutch home you would find a built-in box bed and if you think of engravings and paintings of the kind in class distinctions and elsewhere you'll you'll see many beds you won't see them looking like this though this is the bed for a king and in fact this is the state bed for the King at Hampton Court at Hampton Court Palace the thing to take away and you I'll stop banging this drum of unified design but I think you can see that the top of the bed has drapery swags which are mirrored in the paneling of the room and then in Kensington Palace I think you can see that the upholstery of the bed and the chairs and the curtains would all have been harmony unified same same fabric so it was a kind of symphony of luxurious materials with the state bed as this small room for for the monarch here's the you not many people saw the inside of a Royal bed but this is one design by maro for William the third Secretary of State for Scotland and it's the Melville bed and I think you can see it's almost like sculpture behind it's a lavish display of textiles but it's also a sculptural architectural treatment and then a chair of the kind that's always said to be after Daniel Mayer oh excuse me on the right which has many elements in common with the bed of scrollwork arches and a general denseness which you really don't see in any other country's furniture you wouldn't mistake this for a French English or German chair this is a peculiarly Dutch design in the back and yet the cross stretchers and turned legs that is a French formula which maro was very familiar with so by going on and on about William and Mary in the Dutch role of maro it's a little not representative of what the rest of the Netherlands was was doing or living with but that's the bias I suppose of museums the museum curators is to focus on royal things we'll try to get away with that I thought it might be helpful to remind us of a roll of gardens which we don't usually ascribe to the period gardens we think of are all about plants but they really are an extension of architecture on the exterior this is the the back side of het lo palace with formal parterre of a design laid out by daniel maro and the gardens were actually the site of incredible baroque grandeur of the kind that i think it's easy to forget once the gardens gone or the things in the garden as we'll see the images that I'm showing you're mostly French here but this is the the inspiration of course for hello this is an 18th century view of of an area of the garden at Versailles the boss gave Marais and I think you can see on the Left center-right blue-and-white vases are helping to punctuate the geometry of the landscape they've been wheeled into garden of course at Versailles you would go off on a walk with the king and two hours later there'd be a whole change of scenery with different vases and so forth that's a level of luxury not many gardeners can afford the the main point though is I don't think we think of earthenware blue and white pots coming out into the garden and lending to the magnificence of the display here's another drawing from around 1680 five of the pool of the sirens at Versailles with presumably blue and white pots all around the edge and I say blue and white because their shapes correspond exactly to faience produced at NAVAIR in France so this was I think counterintuitive that pottery was an expression of royal tastes and grandeur and magnificence because there's a natural hierarchy in the ceramic world with porcelain at the top of the heap pottery is often thought to be you know the the poor cousin but in fact if you hadn't invented porcelain pottery is what there was and the French and the Dutch certainly profited from this and drove the industries to produce things on this scale here's a design by Daniel marrow for Delft vases or garden vases and on the right one from the Greek a factory in Delft a flower pot from about 16 85 that's in our collection on view in Hamilton Palace once you think of it as a flower pot you may wonder what's it doing on top of a cabinet which is a good question here it didn't really fit in the fireplace but it's standing in for the kind of ornamental ceramic that royal courts had and France and Holland produced better than anyone else in in file sort in glazed earthenware it reached the height of ceramic design in the 17th century before the invention of porcelain it had low and at at Hampton Court Palace William and Mary introduced spots like this into the gardens and into the aura jury as you see here on the left at Hampton Court these are modern reproductions but they're playing the role similar to what what I just showed you in the drawings and in the gardens at their side in the wintertime it was natural to bring things into the aura jury orange Potts great machines for moving them and their pots and then into galleries were interiors and here on the left is the recreated painting gallery at hello head low with Delft flower or tree pots like those and then at the right Durham Park fantastic house in England owned by the National Trust but remodeled about 1690 by men named William Blythe wait who was the Secretary of War under William the third he accompanied the King on his campaigns to Holland and he returned to England with a large collection of Dutch pottery Delft pottery and Chinese porcelain with that mixture and here is a room from Durham showing you a very similar vase to ours one of those flower pots from the garden in the fireplace and then tulip flower vases on the right here is again also in England where these things survived better than they do in the Netherlands this is at Chatsworth in the inventories probate inventories or property records of het lo and Hampton Court Palace Delft vases are described as standing on the hearth they were used ornament the fireplace during the spring and summers when fires weren't lit as people often do desperately search for something to put in the firebox which isn't all that attractive when there's not a fire in a flower pyramid as they were called they're there in a way engineering marvels because each stage is made separately they're stacked and joined but in order to have cut flowers put into the nozzles of course each stage has to be its own reservoir to hold water so they're fired separately you build them up the one on the right which is at the Rijksmuseum is about 40 inches tall I think you can museums always photograph them without flowers but if you imagine rare and beautiful tulips or roses or other flowers poking out in three dimensions they must have been the most remarkable remarkable objects Chatsworth these aren't just the curators revenge this is a bedchamber in the state department that was really set up for a visit by the king it was all prepared in anticipation of William the third who never visited as often happened just like state beds that never got slept in vast expense incurred by the owner all for not due to the whim or or conflicting schedule of the king at hat low I'm showing you here the grotto with a fountain that's the gnarly bit with shells and rock work on the left and then beside it in robin's egg blue that's the aviary you have to imagine recess with wire over it then in the back right and in the right slide these are Trump LOI or illusionistic tables with Delft tiles with a scroll with those coral bases this room is in a direct line from Mary's apartment upstairs to the gardens downstairs so it was quite appropriate that she would come through the Garden Room and the grotto and also where flowers were arranged flower arranging tulip vases flower pyramids these are again a peculiarly Dutch Dutch invention here I'm just showing you a range of them the ones on the upper left the only pair known in the image of king and queen and then others from our collection different forms architectural or ornamental shifting gears now because I thought well that ceramics we should look at glass also here's a still life by Pieter Kleiss from 16:42 in our collection just to suggest the transition from imported wares like the German stoneware at the back to Dutch products like the glass in the foreground if you think of this engraving by Hendrik Holtz's of the young the young Bacchus down here in the right is a Romer and a pass glass those Germanic forms of drinking glasses in the left corner are two Venetian style glasses in clear glass we'll have to take my word for that but they would be a flute and a wine glass so even by the end of the sixteenth century these forms were familiar and here is that kind of glorious glass it's so amazing that they survived the left one is a roamer for wine which is in the MFA's collection and then on the right passed glass in in the class distinction exhibition which was for beer both of these are communal drinking vessels the left one more obvious because of its size and most whole practically if well more than a pint I would think and then on the right because of those glass divisions the horizontal bands are your portion to to drain as the glass goes around telling Lee though both glasses are are covered with these wonderful prints which are blobs of glass that are applied separately after the vessel is blown and that is simply for gription to keep it from sliding out of your hand it's amazing they survived because they are just trailed off in points that could easily break break off the one on the left has a wonderful inscription the reason it appealed to us was the virtuosity of its engraving it also has a very nice inscription which calls out for solidarity the the English translation of the Latin is basically anyone who wishes to break us up should be doubly strong so those who wish to spread discord among us should be strong which is a nice a nice thing of esprit de corps where the the strength of a group the most accomplished and the best-known glass engraver of the 17th century was a woman named Anna roamers visscher she died in 1651 she was as proficient at calligraphy as landscape and on the Left I'm showing you again beautiful engraving but the trick is how do you start with a continuous line and end up on a round surface where you began and make it evenly distribute distributed and harmonious it is virtuoso virtuoso stuff on the right is a bad slide I'm afraid of someone at the bench with wheel engraving these are wheels spinning on a lathe you use abrasive powder you hold the glass up to the wheel and that's what grinds so again imagining a round thing fragile held up to a spinning wheel it's quite quite amazing that these are as good as they are Anna Fischer was as good at dragonflies and flowers as she was well she didn't do the one on the right that's an unknown artist with a landscape view a harbour scape of the city of Nijmegen diamond point is essentially like using a pencil with a diamond point so you're making many many many little scratches on the glass it's it's almost like dry point in that it throws up a burr it catches the light and because it's so fine and done on such a small scale with small strokes it enables you to make very beautifully modeled and shaded images the painting on the Left shows a couple I think aspiring to prosperity maybe they've made it or maybe they're the materials are suggestive of prosperity with the appearance of prosperity it's a painting by by Jakob octo veldt it's called the oyster meal from 1667 and the boy manse Museum and we see costly fabrics we see a carpet on the table but the serving of oysters with a bed in the background I think we know how this scene is supposed to end the important part for me is the way she's holding the wine glass between two fingers at the rim on the bottom it's the most improbable thing and on the right is Cara Dolores's book showing the way different classes hold a wine glass and also different kinds of glasses with a big mitt all around it at the top verses and these are different classes too so the lower class is just grabbing at the top and of course the most refined is at the lower right with pinky extended and rim of glass between your fingers so how to handle glassware was of course no surprise an important social indicator and these are translated into paintings as well so as he says the whole hand but she and the lower right is held adroitly and carefully and I don't doubt that that's true how you were supposed to drink from it I that's a different matter but that's how you hold it here is a painting of the Detroit Institute by van musher called the symphonia from the 1670s showing you I think a genuinely prosperous couple and interior and note the marble floors the the servant proffering oranges and then on the right flute glasses tall delicate flute glasses at the Museum we have perhaps a more earthy decoration of a flute class again peculiarly Dutch in this regard but it's believe it or not this is a Dutch forum but it's a Venetian style if you notice the balusters at the at the base of the glass that's a Venetian style in the painting with the dragon applied lamp work at the base that is wrecking knives ibly venetian I think our Dutch flute classes perhaps more subtly in the Venetian style because most people wouldn't get past the engraving the market for luxury glass in the Netherlands increased dramatically during the Golden Age like porcelain it was formerly a very costly import from from Venice or from China where Kris tallow colorless glass had been a carefully guarded monopoly of the Venetians as time elapsed of course beneath the secrets and techniques left and a traveler observed for the Dutch they have high glasses called flutes a full yard long and from around 1600 Venetian style glasses were also made by Venetian craftsmen in Antwerp Middleburg and Amsterdam archaeological evidence suggests that it isn't the kind of glasses but rather the number of glasses that separated the the middling class from from the wealthy and in Dutch still life painting in almost every instance the context in which Venetian glass is shown is is about vanity or poking fun at at luxury on the left are two glasses made in the Netherlands which are I would say just about indistinguishable from their venetian models furniture again passes from local forms into imported forms here is Crispin de pasa German engraver who studies in Paris but works in Utrecht and publishes a pattern book in the 1640s and on the right you recognize that kind of table because you've seen this kind of table in our galleries it's a draw leaf table trek Tafel in Dutch under that double double top which you see here you can extend the leaves to a great length but judging from the visual evidence in paintings they don't seem to have been extended very often or they're rarely shown extending their full length more often they're used like this one covered with carpet and this is terrible a lady at her toilet from in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art chairs I won't talk a lot about because the evolution is is similar in the left chair for about 1610 but look simple enough but it's made of purple wood a tropical wood that's been stained to imitate a Bini on the right is a chair from the second half of the 17th century that is made of rosewood and ebony luxurious rare imported and exotic it's rather wonderful that such a simple form is made of such incredibly rare and costly materials and that would not have been lost on the sitter or the or the visitor the the the great battleships of Dutch furniture in the 17th century are the cabinets cupboards are cast here on the left is the earliest known bailed and cast or figure cast or a cupboard with with sculptural figures this is at the Met it's dated 1622 and it's typically commissioned for or presented to a bride and on the right of Peter to Hoch I think it's Peter Tuhoe in our exhibition showing of the woman of the house and a maid loading it up with Linens these are for storing Linens it's in general for storing folded things it's a northern phenomenon in England you don't find cupboards they prefer to store things in drawers it's one of those great cultural cultural dividers really so these are loaded with imagery and none more than the one from I can roast me of an otter Louis collection which is on loan to the MFA and upstairs on view in the Dutch gallery it bears the coat of arms of the city of an kaizen in the cornice so presumably not for a bride but actually for the council chambers of a public building it's one of the most elaborate examples known with figures flanking the upper doors all with its it's heavily loaded with messages above is faith charity temperance and hope below in the arch panels sorry that in the two upper square panels for the prodigal son below are the evangelists and then on the columns are the virtues of caution justice and steadfastness you really can't look at this and not take away a message which of course would be emblematic of a bride's virtue then the cost and opulence of it would be part of what would make a woman a suitable bride I mentioned that's something that comes with and probably remained her property I'm showing you here just details of the carving this is of solid oak oak is not easy to carve it's a hardwood of fibrous wood and yet the virtuosity and delicacy of these carvings is remarkable so it bears close looking when you go upstairs I'm showing you here a portrait by Rembrandt of Hermann domer he was an ebony worker in Amsterdam who made chests and cabinets like the one here at the Metropolitan Museum his son Lambert was a member of pupil the point of showing you this in Ebony is that from the early 17th century onward the primacy of oak which we've just seen was challenged by exotic imports much as ceramics were so a Bini being brought by the East India Company domer made not only cabinets and mirror frames but also picture frames and his portrait by Rembrandt has certainly naturally led to speculation that he supplied Rembrandt with frames although we don't I don't think we know that as a fact but you can see here the virtuosity of him working there in fact working with ebony is what spawns a whole evolution of cabinet making from mortise and tenon construction of oak essentially built like small buildings that set evany workers apart from the common jointer they were known in French as men we za on a ban carpenters in Ebony from which the present form urban east is derived most of the cabinet makers working in France came from the Netherlands either north or south and they were attracted by the French market growing for for luxury goods so as a result a lot of cabinets looking like this were produced in France Holland and Belgium and they're almost indistinguishable from one another here is the secret weapon to this kind of elaborate picture molding it's known as a waving engine first published in the 1670s and then roubo in paris publishes another one i tried to I should get Andy Haynes to explain this but basically the the piece of wood is fixed and it's passed through blades that wobble and so it creates all these wavy moldings one by one which a frame maker would then combine to create this effect so it catches the light but it's also an incredibly luxurious material in the last quarter of the 17th century we move away from little gigantic oak cabinets which go right to the floor to a much more baroque form of cabinets on tall stands as you see here applied moldings carved ornament basically fade away in favor of surface ornament and in some ways it's the difference between the life of the mind or the imagination and then the life of the senses I feel which takes shape or is reflected in other decorative arts of the period here to show you these glorious still lives made of wooden marquetry different dyed and colored woods cut and assembled like a jigsaw puzzle within a base surface a cabinet the Rijksmuseum incorporates lacquer panels we're back to asian goods again this is a kind of cannibalizing that that happened all over in England and in Holland and in France and here are the glorious lacquers imported to Amsterdam by the VLC before 1641 so the Van Diemen box below is a VNA with the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company's wife's name on the inside of the lid the imitation of lacquer was spread to other materials here I'm showing you a Delft tea canister from our collection and then a plate it's difficult to achieve black glazes in ceramics these have always been the most highly prized Delft objects highly prized by collectors and it involves cobalt and manganese oxides fired to become dark dark dark black so these are consciously imitating lacquer so the the ultimate expression of Asian taste in in objects silver was also an important part of the luxury goods in the Dutch Golden Age here I'm showing you garabrant vent and echo it's Isaac blessing Jacob and what is that thing on the bedside table well in fact it is this which was a famous object in its own day a silver you were made by Adam von V Annan in Utrecht in 1614 it is a tour de force it looks like pliable material but it's silver wrought at the bench with hours of hammering is it human or a dolphin a woman's hair becomes liquid it is really a demonstration of great talent and not surprisingly made for the Amsterdam's Goldsmith's Gil the style is called auricular for lack of a better term because it looks like the flaps and cartilage of the ear it's strange and wonderful it's a style that was developed in the Netherlands and then practiced in England and then across Europe all the way to Prague at the court of Rudolf the second but it was spawned by two generations Dutch Goldsmith's the valve Yunnan's in Utrecht and the look m'as in Amsterdam the source of these it was not unique to the 17th century this is essentially a grotto for the residents of the startled of Frederick Henry in the hague from 1620 bhaiyaa to gain deaf gain so it's the auricular style it's a sculpture approach to silver it had its origins in late 16th century engravings which were in turn inspired by reworkings of ancient ornament called the grotesque so that are four highly appropriate for grottoes as this and you can see these fleshy folds and hoods and it's it is very strange it was purposefully strange and a kind of anti classical gesture upstairs in our gallery is one of the great objects by christian vang vien and a you were in basin with the engravings that record this is the the son publishing his father's ornaments in the 1630s this is the only one really known in this country you see this work in Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum maybe the V&A in London but not in another American Museum as you see here as I'd mentioned this is almost that you were in a still life again by vilem calve at the Rijksmuseum so these were famous objects in their day portraits of silversmiths not surprisingly show auricular objects at surprise possession this is johannes look ma the other silversmiths with Avignon ins who worked in this style in a portrait by Jakob Bakker he's shown holding a hammer the jar of metal punches is on the bench beside him and then there in silver and gold is the salt cellar and the salt cellar today at the Rijksmuseum so rather nice to have a portrait of a craftsman with his work Rembrandt shows the same silversmith as a much older man and again beside him is the auricular basin which he's known for and the basin today and punches so is this fluid style which belies the durability of the material the auricular style was popular in furniture as well here's a table side table from about 1660 and Utrecht and I think you can see it's like a spooky mask between between scrolled legs and again the circular style is reflected engravings which then promoted other arts even Delft ceramic figures show a regular basis not unlike the table and this is a pair in our collection as always it was the court the nobles and the merchants and the church who were the principal patrons of the Arts but in the Netherlands towns and guilds were also important patrons on the Left I'm showing you the style of all over engravings no longer about modeling and sculpting it's really virtuoso engraving a beaker from 1660 in the Rijksmuseum with this all-over pattern that reached pinnacle in the 17th century on the right is a communion cup from the Old South Church in Boston made in Harlem in 1643 and given to the church in 1751 so in fact Dutch Reformed Church and and other Protestant parishes in this country had Dutch silver as well very different is this floral repousse a box it's all over floral decoration is entirely different from the lean and mean tautness of the beaker that I showed before and really a baroque expression very different from the Mannerist tradition of the penance and loot mozz here's a great expression of that in the MFA's collection layette basket layette so if you know these are the the clothing for a newborn child which in high-end rituals would have been stored just for the ceremony or baptism in this kind of silver dish it's as thin as aluminum foil when you pick it up it's all wobbly it's not quite as substantial as it looks and the monogram on the handles shows it to be that of a second cousin of of King William the third so this is essentially royal or courtly taste this would pass for baroque silver throughout Northern Europe and I think you can see we've come a long way from from those beakers the court the notion of court display in a buffet or a banquet setting that's an important role for silver not just domestic but courtly ceremony as well and this is a pair of pilgrim bottles not unlike some you'll see upstairs for the German court these were made in the hague in the 1680s and they were part of something owned by the Duke of Devonshire there Chatsworth today and they were probably given to the Earl of Devon sure as a reward by the King for ensuring his accession to the throne at William the thirds coronation it was the Duke of Devonshire was the Lord High Steward and carried the crown so that's why at Chatsworth you see a lot of wonderful Royal Dutch things as well here in the distance you can see the buffet where that kind of pilgrim bottle would be this is the state dining room a Tetlow designed by Daniel marrow also at rats worth is the only chandelier like this in captivity made in Holland in 1694 probably designed by marrow marks for Leia Vardhan and I it's just the most remarkable object there because of Devonshire's connection to the king also in the French taste our toilet services and here on the right is of French toilet service owned by the King William and Mary again today at Chatsworth but I showing you next to a terrible painting of a woman at her toilet this kind of dressing ritual was peculiar to royal and noble aristocratic women it was a social time we're getting dressed was a public and social occasion just as for the King getting up or eating breakfast was a time to be seen and watched so these are our super refined elegant objects not often bearing lots of signs of use I think it was more about the ritual than then daily use I conclude with a image that suggests the sheer bounty of the Golden Age which really coincided with where I should say which ended with the turn of the 18th century in the death of William the 3rd the Netherlands economy its power began to wane commerce was outstripped by industry in general Wars and import restrictions choked off their former markets and as I mentioned when we started the Netherlands really had no population Empire the way England did it had no populous colonies that could sustain its economy they were commercial trading entrepot but they weren't rising cities so the Netherlands through having reached the pinnacle in the 17th century the 18th century was more a kind of downsizing and must have been a little painful although the Netherlands remained certainly a banking power and the Delft industry continued to flourish but I think the Golden Age and the 17th century is is happily coincident and the 18th century in the Netherlands is a very different story thank you very much [Applause] all right we have time for a few questions there's going to be a microphone on either side so please just raise your hand if you have any questions and I please ask that if you are leaving now please do so quietly that's a good sign mission accomplished so where is that arrangement of pottery that you have there on the slide oh I'm sorry this this is a bad snapshot that I took at the Jemaine to Museum in The Hague and there is a was I think it's still up a small exhibition about Delft and they have one of the great collections outside the Rijksmuseum and they simply there's no label identifying things it's simply to show the vast production and variety of Delft pottery in the 17th and up to the mid 18th century so at last I checked you could see this in The Hague any other questions yes warfare at the same time you know what would be the mix of people on the ships cuz if they're being military I assume they would be Dutch but then you'd have the sailors I think it was mostly sailors and not military and the Dutch ran into well I suppose some of them were accomplished at firearms and cannons they had to operate those although some of the shipwrecks we've learned about since were because of malfunctioning or badly handled artillery at on ships the question was what is the mix of people onboard ship to my knowledge it was Dutch I don't think there were mercenary sailors who came to fuel the Dutch but I think what's important is to realize that ships and shipbuilding were the scale of that operation was enormous and the Dutch East India Company had about 1500 ships at a time so that is that shows global global reach much of the population was involved in seagoing trade and I suppose the rest in who weren't in cities were were involved in agriculture was there a demand for these items outside of Holland did they trade out to other parts of Europe er yes before the invention of porcelain or let's say the the wider distribution of of European porcelain around 1710 these were the most enviable objects in Europe Delft porcelain or Delft faience or earthenware was the finest pottery produced in Europe it was collected and exported everywhere so they were the shipping agents for Chinese porcelain but they were also exporting enormous quantities of Delft they set the standard for the rest of Europe and many other factory actually every country had a porcelain industry but few of them ever rivaled Dutch Delft where and the secret of that was the the whiteness of the ground and the fineness of the painting to my it's my impression much less so much more difficult to ship furniture in fact there's not that much Asian furniture coming because the cargoes were limited and furniture takes up a lot of room whereas tea and textiles and porcelain can be much more compacted so they were much more profitable to ship yes we're the Chinese keeping the techniques for porcelain a secret and how did the Dutch finally arrive at it did they discover it or steal it the Chinese very much kept it a secret mostly by restricting European access to China at all so foreigners never really made it more than a hundred yards on shore and most of them had trading ports outside of Canton for example either at Macau or Singapore similar restricted colonies it wasn't the Dutch who dis who discovered porcelain that reverse-engineering was it you know it my son just outside of Dresden sponsored by the elector of Saxony it was a byproduct of his quest with alchemists at the ready to produce gold and it's often said I love the the kind of footnote to history that it is the I want to say petri dishes but now I'm remembering from Forgetting for chemistry class the little dishes that you would burn on the flame in order for them not to burn up in the laboratory that was where first stoneware and then porcelain was discovered so it was chemists who worked at the court of the elector of Saxony in Germany who discovered the mineralogical basis for porcelain but it was a lot of trial and error the Dutch did produce porcelain at low strict but that's a much later 18th century product and those are mostly derivative things I didn't show a lot of eighteenth-century Delft there's a ton of it you well you can still buy Delft today but I think without being too disrespectful after 1720 1740 the Dutch Delft wares are pretty they're not innovative they're not ambitious they're not artistically innovative at all we're since 1680s they're at the top of their game and those are amazing things by by European standards I was wondering if we know much about how the retail portion of this work I'm picturing all these ships coming into harbour with a lot of sailing folk on them and then the the products end up in rich people's houses but how does that happen I think short answer is I don't know completely but I do know that many people were investors in the void not only in the ships but also in the voyages so when the ships arrived back in Amsterdam there were hundreds of people who were stakeholders in the mission that was part of the success of this United East India Company as a share holding company so the investors had you know they had their stakes most of the products the the household things that would come back were special order you you they were a spoke work that someone had sent instructions to China to bring back this was true the English trades during the American trade it was was not a big part of the of the the economics of the voyage whether there were retail shops for ceramics I don't I don't know I did you never read about them so I think it was the distribution of the shareholders when the ship came back but there must be more to it than that the 17th century Dutch of course also had a foothold in in the Western Hemisphere and even after New Amsterdam became New York there was a very strong presence of Hudson Valley Dutch did any of this material find its way into the new world yes this will yes and there are have been wonderful books about the Dutch in Albany the Dutch in New Amsterdam even the Dutch in Rhode Island we're trading posts were I don't think the scale of the West in there was the East India Company which I talked about today is also the West India Company in the West India house a similarly Grand nerve center in Amsterdam for the West India trade I think though you don't find these things in China and you don't find them that much in America because I think those were those were trading posts rather than Dutch colonies intending to form an empire it was really more about commerce than settlement is my impression of how that differed from other European colonizers like Britain and France and Spain but there certainly were Dutch wares objects owned in Dutch colonies and there's quite a quite an extensive literature but most of it archaeological about those things you know on the east coast yes my impression is most of them were men it's extraordinary that we know about Anna roamers bisher because she signed her work she also was a poet so her work was published she must have been a remarkable woman I think in in the Netherlands as elsewhere widows would inherit businesses and become the proprietors of important businesses the Redell Potteries run by run by women so they were certainly an economic force I'm not sure in the creation of the decorative arts we don't know of many there's certainly there were women painters notable women painters I don't know of women silversmiths or painters on pottery we know that they were proprietors of the factories so they were they they had an important part in the manufacturing role I think the role of painters is much better known than the craftsman engine men or women they simply were below the radar she was the only woman I know whose work on glass or the decorative arts is is known to that extent and signed and dated all right thank you so much

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 43,905

Keywords: european art, dutch art, decorative arts, dutch golden age, silver, delft, ceramics, art, art history, lecture, course

Id: xH7CK5tAw3A

Length: 83min 24sec (5004 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2017