For a general book on Dutch seventeenth-century painting, yesterday I wrote a text on the winter landscape, represented by a painting by Isaac van Ostade in the National Gallery, London. I’m afraid it reads more like a column than part of a survey. It may not make its way into the book, but I don’t want it to vanish, so I have expanded it into … a column.
Isaac van Ostade (Haarlem 1621–1649 Haarlem), Winter in the Dutch countryside, ca. 1640s
Oil on panel, 48.8 x 40 cm
London, National Gallery (NG848)
In his outstanding book of 1966, Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century, Wolfgang Stechow wrote: “In many ways, the Winter Landscape is the Dutch seventeenth-century landscape par excellence. There is here no competition from Italy or France, and little from Flanders, although Flemish sixteenth-century antecedents were of decisive importance in its genesis. […] The output was of surprisingly large proportions.” It has become chique to link this predilection to a meteorological phenomenon called The Little Ice Age. Everyone who studies that event dates it differently, but what it boils down to, in terms of the Dutch seventeenth century, is that between 1580 and 1710 the average temperature in Northern Europe was one degree Celsius lower than before 1400, with colder winters and milder summers.
A typical remark on what this meant for painting: “Since the Netherlands and Belgium were at the center of the Little Ice Age, it is no surprise that the winterscape painting emerged as a favored genre there in the seventeenth century.” For years I have been arguing against this link. All right, the colder winters provided artists with more opportunity to paint obviously wintery weather from life. But their decision to do so was an artistic choice that had nothing to do with the weather as such. There is in fact a perfect mismatch between the frequency of winter scenes in the meteorologically indistinguishable Northern and Southern Netherlands. Stechow again: “Strangely enough, the large number of winter landscapes painted in Flanders towards the end of the sixteenth century finds no equivalent in the Northern Netherlands of the same period. No Dutch winter landscapes were painted until the first decade of the new century and even the relatively scarce prints from the period before 1600 are, with few exceptions, of strictly Flemish provenance.” And after 1600, as quoted above, Flemish artists painted few winter scenes. So it is not snow on the ground that drives artists to go into the cold with their sketchbooks and paint what they drew. The “surprisingly large proportions” of winter painting in the Northern Netherlands, I would say, we thank mainly to the proliferation of specialties in Dutch painting as the population of artists exploded. The economist Michael Montias, writing about the career choices of Dutch painters, said sensibly that piggybacking on a popular genre was a good option, especially if an artist could “develop a style, or a variant of a successful style, that was clearly recognizable as their own.” An artist like Hendrick Avercamp noticed, when he had started making paintings of winter fun on the ice, that they sold well to people living in well-heated houses.
One painter who cashed in on this opportunity was Isaac van Ostade (1621-49), a younger brother of Adriaen. In 1968–69, as an associate of the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, I worked through the file on the artist and developed a weakness for him. I found him modest and humane. I was touched that he died at my age and humbled by the awareness that he had already achieved so much. One thing I noticed had to do with what Montias said about carving out a piece of artistic territory for oneself. Nothing in Isaac’s art is unique, except for one motif that he owned: a horse pulling a cart over an embankment. Whenever I came across that detail it was in a painting by Isaac. It made me feel for the horse, exerting itself in a situation made onerous because others have not provided the facilities to make it easy. In Isaac’s painting in the National Gallery, above, the white horse (it’s not a coincidence that nearly all his draft horses are white) gets the brightest light, as if a spotlight were turned on him, the main actor in the scene.
Why I wanted to put this into my book is that it contributes to understanding the factors that go into making artistic reputations. My indignation about the Little Ice Age and my feelings for Isaac van Ostade’s horses exemplify the highly personal quality that attachment to a work of art or a master can have. The canon may be nothing more than received opinion incarnate, but the judgments it incorporates begin as an aggregate of experiences like mine with Isaac.
Here are some more of his struggling horses, with instead of captions links to their entries on the RKD website.
https://kmska.be/nl/meesterwerk/winterlandschap
and climbing down, which may be as demanding:
Having started to tell about my sentiments working at the RKD, I don’t know how to stop except just to stop. I’ll write about them another time. As an indication of the difficulty of recapturing those years, I’ll close with one reminiscence. When I told the administrator of the RKD, the inestimable meneer S., that I regretted not being able to work there on my own projects over the weekend, he gave me the keys and showed me how to turn the alarm off and on.
On to night scenes and Aert van der Neer.
© Gary Schwartz 2024. Published on the Schwartzlist on 28 July 2024. On 29 July I added the parenthesis about most of Isaac’s horses being white, as noticed by readers Steve Goldman and Jaap Nijstad. On 9 August I added a painting in the Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA) that I came across and is not in the RKD files. The horse is brown, shifting the ratio a bit.
Sources:
Marion Elisabeth Wilhelmina Goosens, Schilders en de markt: Haarlem 1605-1635, dissertation for Leiden University, 22 March 2001, p. 261
Hessel Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn (Canaletto) 1980, vol. 2, pp. 582-83
The above two masterpieces of scholarship are cited for a story about Isaac that is not in the column but will be in the book.
Nancy Minty, “Picturing the Little Ice Age,” 31 January 2019: https://about.jstor.org/blog/picturing-the-little-ice-age/
Wolfgang Stechow, Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century, London (Phaidon) 1966, pp. 82-84
Loekie and I are spending the summer at home, mainly so I can keep my nose to the grindstone and finish that book on time, but also because we just like being here. It’s bad of us, but there’s also that unworthy schadenfreude as we sit at the tv watching in criminal comfort fellow humans caught in terminals with no planes departing, trains that are not riding, traffic standing still for hours at a time, enduring heat and floods and fires.
Do you remember when in August last year I wished that Joe Biden would drop out of the 2024 election? (See below the line of Schwartzlist 420.) Well, now I’m glad he didn’t. The developments that followed have given the Democrats the best chance yet of winning. The emotions that have been unleashed through the sequence of events have given Kamala Harris’s campaign a charge it would not have had had she or anyone else begun a year ago. In the last week my expectations for the outcome of the election have reversed. That’s fine, but it reminds me of the irreversability of the daily, tragic, unnecessary loss of life in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine and Russia, and the bitterness it generates.
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Absolutely right about the timing of Biden’s withdrawing, Gary. The shortened lead time to the election will mean less time for the excitement and enthusiasm to die down, fewer opportunities for mistakes, and the energy will only get a nice boost (like the gravitational acceleration that space rockets get from planets) from the convention at the end of August. NOW there’s hope!
Fingers crossed. Considering the use of amulets and the techniques of applied Kabbalah which Gershom Scholem looked down on.
I’m nearly buried under my amulets, and have been attempting applied Kabbalah by standing on my head and invoking Isaac Luria. I think it’s working, but my head hurts.
That’s a good sign!
Somehow–I don’t know why or how–your messages had disappeared from my entry box. I am delighted that they have begun to reappear. Thank you!
Thanks, Clara. I have heard this from a few others as well, and don’t know what if anything I can do about it. It’s true that the number of email addresses to which MailChimp tells me it has sent an announcement seems to have dropped by 30 or 40 addresses from a year ago, but I thought this was just people signing off. I’ll have another look at my subscribers. If anyone else reads this reply and has had the same experience, please let me know.
Dear Gary,
You write that Isaac van Ostade’s unique contribution to art is the motif of ‘a horse pulling a cart over an embankment’. He actually contributed two motifs: a horse pulling a cart; and a horse pulling a sleigh, as in most of the paintings you illustrate. Today the sleigh reminds us of Winter, yet in the 17th century they were in use year-round for heavy transportation. If not two, these are one-and-a-half motifs at least.
Great, Marten Jan. I had first written “conveyance” to cover it all, but decided that that sounded pretentious. Your comment now does the job, and more.