As impartially as we art historians conduct our scholarly pursuit of the honest truth, on rare occasions we are forced to deal with issues that arouse partisan passions and inflame the emotions. One of these is the question of national identity in art, or in the present case, of the Dutchness of Dutch art. Does Dutch art contain essential characteristics that are unique unto itself, and if so, what are they? Yet, a recent provocative statement on the subject was followed by an unexpectedly calm and amicable discussion. The setting was a three-day congress in Nijmegen and Kleve devoted to the Treaty of Münster, the 350th anniversity of which is fast upon us.
The speaker was Thomas daCosta Kaufmann of Princeton University, a specialist in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century art in Central Europe. This gives him a perspective of his own on Dutch art. It cannot be called an eccentric view. During much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Prague and Vienna were truly central to European art. What Kaufmann observed is that Dutch artists worked there side by side with Flemish, Italian and German colleagues without anyone ever noticing anything essentially different about their art. What’s more, it was in Prague that many of the features originated that were later called typically Dutch: realistic landscape, detailed depictions of natural objects, scenes from everyday life, intensive specialization. Far from having been developed for a bourgeois, Calvinist Dutch audience, these innovations were first addressed to the Catholic Emperor Rudolph II, who was a passionate patron of the arts and who took a personal interest in furthering exactly these aspects of painting.
Although Kaufmann’s thesis undermines many fond notions about the uniqueness of Dutch art, critics in the audience responded to it with notable mildness. Unable to make a dent in his arguments, they posed a counter-challenge by asking why you can always tell a Dutch painting from a non-Dutch one. Kaufmann’s rejoinder was strong: the paintings we recognize as Dutch are the ones that fit stereotypes we ourselves have invented. No one recognizes the Dutchness of Neapolitan painting of the early seventeenth century, although it was largely the work of “fiamminghi,” as the Italians called Dutch and Flemish masters indiscriminately.
Kaufmann’s most surprising proposition is that what the Dutch were famous for in Central Europe during the Golden Age was not painting at all but architecture and sculpture. From the court of St. James to St. Petersburg, the favored builders and sculptors were Netherlanders. What people wanted from them was anything but a northern vernacular style. In architecture they were the best purveyors of stately, aristocratic designs in an international, Italianate idiom now known as Vitruvian classicism. Dutch sculptors had equal if not even wider appeal. For the heroic monuments on the Place des Victoires in Paris, commemorating Louis XIV’s military triumphs (especially those over the Dutch Republic), no better artist could be found in France than a man who called himself Martin Desjardins, but who was born in Breda as Martin van den Bogaert. By eliminating from the history of Dutch art such figures as Desjardins and all others who resemble Pieter de Hooch insufficiently for our taste, we have created the cozy picture of Dutchness that makes it so easy – too easy, by far – to distinguish the Dutch from the non-Dutch.
The revision proclaimed by Kaufmann is overdue; the world is ripe for it.
© Gary Schwartz 1996 and 2024. Published in NRC Handelsblad in Dutch, 6 September 1996, in Frankfurt Allgemeine in German, 9 October 1996, and in English on the Schwartzlist, 9 December 2024