French, Spanish, and Dutch Baroque

French Art
La Tour
Rubens
Art in Spain
Ribalta
Ribera
Velazquez
Rembrandt
Dutch Genre and Portraiture
Vermeer

French Art

Three strands can be distinguished withint the texture of French art in the first half of the seventeenth century: the realistic; the classicizing; and, emerging at the beginning of the reign of the Sun King Louis XIV, the court Baroque.

Georges de La Tour

La Tour was truly of the provinces, working in Lorraine all his life. In 1630s he introduced into his paintings a lighted candle, naked, or shielded, the single source of light, insisting less on detail, achieving in the single figure a classic monumentality-- a serving-woman intent on crushing a flea.

In his masterpiece, The new-born child, there is no explicit religious symbolism--simply a woman and her child and an attendant, observed in static calm in the warm, steady glow of the candle flame with utterly cool detachment--yet it is one of the fullest records of the miracle of birth, human or divine, ever painted. The quietism and intense serenity of La Tour's later work have answered some deep need of the twentieth century; like Vermeer, he remained unappreciated for centuries.

St Ferome, 1630s

The single saint with still-life attributes was a favorite Caravaggesque type. The light and shade and sculptural realism are quite close to Caravaggio.

A woman crushing a flea, c. 1645

The light is used not so much to model in three dimensions as to delineate the forms sharply against a dull, darkling background. An almost sordid subject is treated with an abstract transfiguring stillness.

The new-born child, c. 1650

In La Tour's mature work the forms are severely simplified and reduced almost to silhouettes.

As Bernini is the supreme representative of Baroque in Italy, so Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) is the commanding figure of Baroque in the north--indeed his influence was further-reaching and more enduring than Bernini's.

After about 1615, Rubens' early vigorous but somewhat dark-toned style gave way to a clearer palette, and he achieved in such works as The rape of the daughters of Leucippus that radiance and abundance of color that is the essence and delight of his painting.

The rape of the daughters of Leucippis, c. 1618

Francisco Ribalta (1565-1628) in Valencia developed an early Spanish Baroque, influenced by Titian in technique but powered also by the enduring involvement of Spanish painters with the drama of light and shade first revealed by Caravaggio.

Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) is believed to be Ribalta's pupil. His early work there is intensely Caravaggesque sharply forcused light lingers on vivid detail against a dark ground, and is used to portray with minute realism lowlife and sometimes grotesque subjects.

The style of Ribera's middle maturity was more balanced, the contrasts of light and dark less fierce, but his painting lost nothing in immediacy. Later Ribera's colors lighten, and paintings such as The mystic marriage of St Catherine are suffused with a spirituality now of lyrical tenderness.

St Bernard embracing Christ, c. 1620-28

Ribalta was more than a mere Caravaggisto: he used Caravaggio's lighting to lend a sculptural monumentality to his figures. The composition is simple, the realism--despite the visionary content--strong.

The mystic marriage of St Catherine, 1648

Ribera's late work is all serene and spiritual: his early emphatic chiaroscuro has yielded to light and air.

Velazquez: Las Meninas (Maids of Honor)

"Las Meninas" (The mais of honor), 1656

Velazquez worked directly on to the canvas, usually, it seems, without preliminary drawings, realizing the physical form of his subject not so much in rhythmic line as by an immensely subtle tonal analysis in little touches--observe the smallness of the brushes on his palette in "Las Meninas". His art is one of the meditative observation rather than of overt expression or energetic composition.

The new-born child, c. 1650

Manet and the Impressionists would be fascinated by the way in which Velazquez could catch with unerring accuracy not the mere physical substance, say the hairs of a dog, literally recounted, but the essence of its appearance in light, its gleam in the eye.

Rembrandt van Rijn

"The Night Watch", 1642

Rembrandt Harmensz. Van Rijn (1606-69) is almost a separate dimension in Dutch art. His early work is dramatic, with stressed diagonals, sharp recessions, contrasts of light and shade (there are sometimes very fierce) and also hard, clear contours. Rembrandt's most famous work, "The Night Watch" marks both a climax and a turning point. Rembrandt transposed the traditional Dutch Civic Guard group into a "history" composition of stupendous drama, color, tonal contrast and movement. Characteristically Rembrandt's is the inexplicable element, the incandescent figure of the little girl.

In his last two decades Rembrandt tended to simplify his compositions, rejecting his earlier highly-strung Baroque for a more classical more stable and enduring structure. His use of paint and handling of light became ever richer and subtler. This light, charged with an intense spirituality, seems to come from within rather than from an external source.

"Las Meninas" (The mais of honor), 1656

This is perhaps the most "Baroque" picture Rembrandt ever painted, probably emulating the searing drama of the Rubenisian style favored at courts. The horror is extreme, and so is the use of all the illusionistic, dramatic and violend devices dear to Baroque art.

The anatomy lesson of Dr Tulp, 1632

In the company's fascinated intentness on the corpse there is a palpable unease, almost an awareness of their own mortality. Already the disposition of light and shade is masterly, and is a vital element of the drama.

There is in fact a link between Rembrandt and Vermeer, in the elusive personality of Carel Fabritius (1622-54). He was working with Rembrandt in the 1640s and was by far the most gifted of his pupils. By 1650 he was in Delft but there he was tragically killed by an explosion in a gunpowder magazine in 1654. Very close to Rembrandt in his understanding of the possibilities of paint textures and tonal contrasts, in a sense he reversed Rembrandt's vision, he worked in darks against light, rather than in lights against a dark ground, his subjects becoming coolly luminous in a pervasive natural light.

These two interests, in the reflection of cool light and in optics and illusionism, have an important place in the mature work of Jan Vermeer (1632-75) who owned at least three paintings by Fabritius

A goldfinch, 1654

In Rembrandt's work, light plays suggestively about the forms; here the light strikes the form and is obstructed: there is no interpenetration. Fabritius uses Rembrandt's techniques to paint a more literal, more material truth.

The anatomy lesson of Dr Tulp, 1632

The subject matter is detailed with all Vermeer's firm modeling and luminous, cool serenity: a painter, seen from behind, is in the act of painting on the easel before him the figure of a young girl who stands in the gentle light of a window in the corner of the room. It is a rich and typically Dutch interior--the black and white marble pattern of the floor; the sumptuously textured curtains; the fine brass chandelier; a map of Holland on the wall inhabited by an inimitable element, Vermeer's pervasive and all-creating light.

The head of a girl, c.1666

Though the girl may well be Vermeer's daughter, it is an impersonal portrait. It seems to have been made chiefly to explore a fascination with the behavior of light.

A soldier and a laughing girl, c.1657

A dark, large soldier in a large hat seems almost too large as he faces the smiling, innocent girl, who is bathed in light and nervously holding the wineglass in front of her. Contrast between the figures is established by scale, color, mood and attitude.

A woman weighing pearls, c.1665

The pearls are specks of light--an obvious instance of Vermeer's "pointillism"; the tiny sprinkled dots are usually apparent only on close inspection. Here is Vermeer's art fully mature.

View of Delft, c.1660

Its bold colors, its quiet composition without any of the forceful diagonals and accentually placed figures usually in landscapes of the "classic" phase above all the naturalism of its air and light set this painting part. "Pointill" dots make glints of light, and all the horizontals and verticals seem to have been softened in the gentle air.

Next article: The Wild Age of Revolution