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For more on the Worcester Art Museum, see last week’s post. This series of posts looks at some of the WAM’s portraits from Europe, then portraits from the United States – not room by room, but in chronological order. This week: five Dutch portraits of the 17th century.

This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/PVZmN93_zVM.

1617, Dutch: van der Voort

The plain black worn by husband and wife is not so much a fashion choice as a religious necessity: Protestant Holland had strict rules about frivolous dress. But there are ways to avoid the spirit of such restrictions. We know these sitters are quite well off from the exquisite workmanship of the collars, cuffs, and hat, combined with the varied and luxurious textures of the black fabric.

Cornelis Van der Voort (ca. 1576-1624) was a leading portrait-painter in Amsterdam, which became a thriving, wealthy city in the late 16th century, when religious wars drove masses of Protestants from Catholic-controlled southern Netherlands into the newly formed Dutch Republic. During the the Dutch Golden Age, which ran from about 1588 to 1672, the Dutch were the wealthiest traders in Europe.

Ca. 1633, Dutch: workshop of Rembrandt

You might mistake a Rembrandt portrait of the 1630s for a portrait by van der Voort … but not one of the 1640s. By then, Rembrandt was handling paint in a very different way, with bolder brushstrokes, sharper lights and darks, and more dramatic scenes. Some clients continued to prefer the formality and minute detail of artists such as van der Voort, but Rembrandt’s style also became popular. So popular, in fact, that Rembrandt had a significant number of painters in his workshop, such as the one who produced this painting of St. Bartholomew. (The WAM gives the date of this work as ca. 1633, which surprises me: the style looks more like Rembrandt’s works of the 1640s-1650s.)

Ca. 1655, Dutch: Hals

Frans Hals (ca. 1581-1666) was the leading portrait-painter in Haarlem. He’s my favorite among the Dutch painters, mostly because his figures are far more lively than those in most Dutch portraits. This cheerful fellow is Frans Post, an artist already famous for painting the first landscapes of the Americas. His scenes of Dutch Brazil (from Maranhao to Pernambuco) were based on a visit there in the 1630s: examples here. (Isn’t it interesting that it took more than a century for artists to begin painting the New World? But then we haven’t yet sent an artist to the moon. Priorities.)

1662, Dutch: van Mieris

Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681) was a leading Dutch painter in Leiden. Most of his paintings are genre scenes (scenes of everyday life), executed in meticulous detail like those of his contemporaries Jan Steen and Gerrit Dou. He preferred to work on a small scale: this self-portrait is only 5 1/2 x 4 5/16 inches, so the detail is quite fine – look at that scarf! By contrast, the Hals portrait above is about 11 x 9 inches, and the painting from the workshop of Rembrandt is about 25 x 19 inches.

Next week: French and English portraits of the 18th & 19th centuries.

More

• For the Resurrecting Romanticism conference in October 2023, I’m working on a talk on art at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Columbian Exposition. One of the questions I’ll be addressing is why the organizers of the Exposition, and the painters whose works appeared there, were so very keen to surpass the buildings and exhibitions of the 1889 Paris world’s fair. As background this series of posts is a quick overview of European portraits from the Renaissance to the 19th century, and then American portraits. Eventually I’ll post on other paintings at the Worcester Art Museum.
• If the history of Western painting interests you, check out my Innovators in Painting: a 140-page survey focusing on innovations that gave painters more power to make their viewers stop, look, and think about paintings.
• Want wonderful art delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my Sunday Recommendations list and rewards for recurring support: details here. For examples of favorite recommendations from past years, click here.