A History of European Art

(Steven Felgate) #1

reported more than twice as many painters as bakers and four times as
many as butchers—but few of them earned their living solely as painters.
Moreover, to paint for the marketplace an artist had to be recognized; the
style and subject had to appeal to prospective buyers.


Although some artists were adventurous in their range of subjects, the
majority felt obliged to specialize. There were landscape painters, and within
that genre, there were specialists in dunes, coastlines, winter landscapes,
night scenes, rivers and canals, panoramas, woods, the sea, towns and cities,
foreign lands, and some imaginary scenes. Among still-life painters were
those who painted À owers, banquets, breakfast tables, moralizing still lifes,
musical instruments, and scienti¿ c instruments. Other artists specialized in
birds, cows, or other animals—either as separate subjects or in partnership
with other painters who supplied the landscape. Genre artists specialized
in taverns; middle-class homes; peasant huts; music making and dancing;
bakers, butchers, and other tradesmen; and hunting, ¿ shing, and riding.
Churches were a subject, especially church interiors, while portraiture
was needed for individual, family, and civic-group portrayals. There
were religious and mythological paintings and some still overtly Catholic
paintings, especially in Utrecht and other Catholic centers. There were also
disguised religious paintings.


We will look ¿ rst at portraiture as a category and consider some examples.
Frans Hals (1581/85–1666) was born in Antwerp and moved to Haarlem
as a child with his Protestant family. He did some early genre paintings or
portraits disguised as genre, but otherwise, he painted portraits for 50 years
without obvious repetition. In his later work, he and Rembrandt sometimes
resemble each other, and they must have known each other’s work, but they
apparently never met. Our example shows Hals’s The Merry Drinker (c.
1628–1630). This is probably a portrait, but it has been called an allegory
of the sense of taste. One expert speculated that this could be a portrait of an
innkeeper named den Abt, who owned four Hals paintings in 1631.


An example of a group portrait is The Governors of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
(c. 1641). Hals did many portraits of militia companies in Haarlem. In
addition, the painting of regents of charitable institutions was a Dutch
tradition since the 16th century.

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