Exhibitions
Gerrit Dou: Rembrandt's First Pupil (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21, till 19 November)
Fleeting beauty
John Spurling
The Dutch Republic was very prosper- ous in Gerrit Dou's lifetime, highly urbanised and tolerantly governed by an oligarchy of moderately Calvinist business- men. Labourers and artisans were better paid than anywhere else in Europe; the merchant fleet grew larger than those of England, France, Spain and Portugal com- bined; paintings were much in demand; and a legion of artists supplied work whose general level of technical skills, humour, thoughtfulness and human sympathy has scarcely been equalled in any society before or since. But there were some flies on this Protestant capitalist haven. Taxes were high and the huge influx of immi- grants from war-torn Flanders and the Spanish Inquisition meant that there was still much poverty as well as devastating epidemics of disease. Fifty per cent of chil- dren died before they were old enough to be married; life expectancy was around 30.
Dou painted a particularly large and well-lit fly on the wall of his earliest dated painting, 'An Artist in his Studio', possibly because in that year, 1635, his home town, Leiden, suffered a plague which killed 14,000 people. This painting is not in the present exhibition at Dulwich, but was one of the ten included in a small exhibition at the David Carritt gallery in London's West End in 1980, probably the first one-man exhibition ever given to Dou since the one in his own lifetime, in 1665, when a patron rented a room in Leiden and put 27 paint- ings on public display. The Dulwich exhibi- tion, arriving from Washington and moving on in December to The Hague, is there- fore, with 35 paintings, the largest ever mounted.
Except perhaps for his master Rem- brandt, with whom Dou studied in his teens — Rembrandt was only a few years older — no other Dutch artist was so admired or so expensive in his own day. Dou was fortu- nate enough to have a patron who paid him a regular stipend for first refusal of all his work, so that he could paint entirely as he pleased and at his own meticulously delib- erate pace. His work grew more elaborate and profound as he matured, but nearly half the paintings in this show date from before 1645, when he was 32, and he was a virtuoso with colour, texture, light and space from the beginning. The British deal- er John Smith wrote in 1829:
The anxious care which he took to preserve the purity of his colours is almost incredible. He prepared and ground them himself, shut his palette and pencils up and in a box, made the window of his room almost airtight to prevent the entrance of dust, always entered his room as slowly and quietly as possible, and seated himself gently in his chair, where he paused to let all the dust subside previous to taking out his palette...'
In his `Self-Portrait', at the age of about 32, there is a little parasol propped over The Grocery Shop' by Gerrit Dou the easel in the background, presumably to keep off the dust, though the painting on the easel — a version of 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' — is not one he is ever known to have painted except as a painting within a painting. It appears again, closer up, in the studio with the outsize fly on the wall, painted ten years earlier, though the artist depicted there is not Dou himself but a model, a much older man, bald and bearded.
Dou not only painted exquisite surfaces, he was also a master of involuted mean- ings, so that his best works can be read visually almost like plays by Chekhov: plain and undramatic at first glance, but richer, stranger and more stirring the more you look. They are apparently moralising sto- ries, with all the conventional vanitas appa- ratus one associates with Dutch painting of the period: birdcages shut or open to sym- bolise virginity or its absence; musical instruments standing for love and the sweetness of life, so soon silent; burning candles for similar; books and globes for learning and discovery; sculptures, draw- ings, illustrated pages to refer to some rele- vant mythical or historical story; skulls and dead trees etc. Yet many are also framed within the frame, either by being overtly an artist's studio or by being seen through a window or with a drawn-up curtain at the side, or even — when there is no such framing device and one is looking straight into a domestic interior — by the way the protagonist or some other figure stares directly at you.
It is not so much the 'character' of the figures that matters — they are all, includ- ing the artist himself, quite everyday sorts of people — as their being so alive, so deli- cately, calmly alive in the midst of a narra- tive about the shortness of life. But then again, because of the beauty of the objects, the delicious play of light and air over faces, furs, feathers, wood, stone, metal, glass, vegetables and textiles, these paint- ings seem less laments or mementi mori than celebrations of humanity amongst its own wealth of artefacts. The finest artefact of all, of course, is the painting itself which still, three-and-a-half centuries later, makes that whole world seem alive to us, but was and is the artist's illusion.
None of these layers of meaning is paramount. They pulse back and forth, curling in and out of each other, sometimes looking at you sideways in a mirror like the `Lady at her Toilet', sometimes head-on like the several self-portraits or the `Woman at the Clavichord', sometimes directly but distantly like the girl at the back of 'The Grocery Shop', but always tantalisingly elusive, in spite of the extreme clarity of their visual expression. One visit to this bewitching show is not enough, but for most of us Dulwich is apt to seem as far away as The Hague, and there is at least a fully illustrated catalogue (120), with three substantial essays and a commentary on each picture, to pore over afterwards.
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