Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume IV Part 14

The country was not beautiful, but it was twice dear because it had been torn from the sea and from the foreign oppressor. The Dutch artist painted it lovingly; he represented it simply, ingenuously, with a sense of intimacy which at that time was not to be found in Italian or Belgian landscape.

The flat, monotonous country had, to the Dutch painter's eyes, a marvelous variety. He caught all the mutations of the sky, and knew the value of the water, with its reflections, its grace and freshness, and its power of illuminating everything. Having no mountains, he took the dikes for background; and with no forests, he imparted to a simple group of trees all the mystery of a forest; and he animated the whole with beautiful animals and white sails.

The subjects of their pictures are poor enough--a windmill, a ca.n.a.l, a gray sky;--but how they make one think! A few Dutch painters, not content with nature in their own country, came to Italy in search of hills, luminous skies, and famous ruins; and another band of select artists is the result. Both, Swanevelt, Pynaeker, Breenberg, Van Laer, a.s.selyn. But the palm remains with the landscapists of Holland, with Wynants the painter of morning, with Van der Neer the painter of night, with Rusydael the painter of melancholy, with Hobbema the ill.u.s.trator of windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with others who have restricted themselves to the expression of the enchantment of nature as she is in Holland.

Simultaneously with landscape art was born another kind of painting, especially peculiar to Holland--animal painting. Animals are the wealth of the country; and that magnificent race of cattle which has no rival in Europe for fecundity and beauty. The Hollanders, who owe so much to them, treat them, one may say, as part of the population; they wash them, comb them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen everywhere; they are reflected in all the ca.n.a.ls, and dot with points of black and white the immense fields that stretch on every side; giving an air of peace and comfort to every place, and exciting in the spectator's heart a sentiment of patriarchal serenity.

The Dutch artists studied these animals in all their varieties, in all their habits, and divined, as one may say, their inner life and sentiments, animating the tranquil beauty of the landscape with their forms. Rubens, Luyders, Paul de Vos, and other Belgian painters, had drawn animals with admirable mastery, but all these are surpa.s.sed by the Dutch artists, Van der Velde, Berghum, Karel der Jardin, and by the prince of animal painters, Paul Potter, whose famous "Bull," in the gallery of The Hague, deserves to be placed in the Vatican beside the "Transfiguration" by Rafael.

In yet another field are the Dutch painters great--the sea. The sea, their enemy, their power, and their glory, forever threatening their country, and entering in a hundred ways into their lives and fortunes; that turbulent North Sea, full of sinister colors, with a light of infinite melancholy beating forever upon a desolate coast, must subjugate the imagination of the artist. He, indeed, pa.s.ses long hours on the sh.o.r.e, contemplating its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its waves to study the effects of tempests, buys a vessel and sails with his wife and family, observing and making notes, follows the fleet into battle, and takes part in the fight, and in this way are made marine painters like William Van der Velde the elder, and William the younger, like Backhuysen, Dubbels, and Stork.

Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland, as the expression of the character of the people and of republican manners. A people that without greatness had done so many great things, as Michelet says, must have its heroic painters, if we call them so, destined to ill.u.s.trate men and events. But this school of painting--precisely because the people were without greatness, or, to express it better, without form of greatness, modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country, because all had done their duty, abhorring adulation, and the glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of many--this school has to ill.u.s.trate not a few men who have excelled, and a few extraordinary facts, but all cla.s.ses of citizens.h.i.+p gathered among the most ordinary and pacific of burgher life.

From this come the great pictures which represent five, ten, thirty persons together, arquebusiers, mayors, officers, professors, magistrates, administrators, seated or standing around a table, feasting and conversing, of life size, most faithful likenesses, grave, open faces, expressing that secure serenity of conscience by which may be divined rather than seen the n.o.bleness of a life consecrated to one's country, the character of that strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent generation; all this set off by the fine costume of the time, so admirably combining grace and dignity; those gorgets, those doublets, those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons, those arms and banners. In this field stand preeminent Van der Heist, Hals, Covaert, Flink, and Bol....

Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded of this school of painting--its variety, and its importance as the expression, the mirror, so to speak, of the country. If we except Rembrandt with his group of followers and imitators, almost all the other artists differ very much from one another; no other school presents so great a number of original masters. The realism of the Dutch painters is born of their common love of nature; but each one has shown in his work a kind of love peculiarly his own; each one has rendered a different impression which he has received from nature and all, starting from the same point, which was the wors.h.i.+p of material truth, have arrived at separate and distinct goals.

THE TULIPS OF HOLLAND[A]

[Footnote A: From "Holland and Its People." Translated by Caroline Tilton. By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, G.P. Putnam's Sons. Copyright, 1880.]

BY EDMONDO DE AMICIS

The word "tulip" recalls one of the strangest popular follies that has ever been seen in the world, which showed itself in Holland toward the middle of the seventeenth century. The country at that time had reached the height of prosperity; antique parsimony had given place to luxury; the houses of the wealthy, very modest at the beginning of the century, were transformed into little palaces; velvet, silk, and pearls replaced the patriarchal simplicity of the ancient costume; Holland had become vain, ambitious, and prodigal.

After having filled their houses with pictures, hangings, porcelain, and precious objects from all the countries of Europe and Asia, the rich merchants of the large Dutch cities began to spend considerable sums in ornamenting their gardens with tulips--the flower which answers best to that innate avidity for vivid colors which the Dutch people manifest in so many ways. This taste for tulips promoted their rapid cultivation; everywhere gardens were laid out, studies promoted, new varieties of the favorite flower sought for. In a short time the fever became general; on every side there swarmed unknown tulips, of strange forms, and wonderful shades or combinations of colors, full of contrasts, caprices, and surprises. Prices rose in a marvelous way; a new variegation, a new form, obtained in those blest leaves was an event, a fortune. Thousands of persons gave themselves up to the study with the fury of insanity; all over the country nothing was talked of but petals; bulbs, colors, vases, seeds.

The mania grew to such a pa.s.s that all Europe was laughing at it.

Bulbs of the favorite tulips of the rarer varieties rose to fabulous prices; some const.i.tuted a fortune; like a house, an orchard, or a mill; one bulb was equivalent to a dowry for the daughter of a rich family; for one bulb were given, in I know not what city, two carts of grain, four carts of barley, four oxen, twelve sheep, two casks of wine, four casks of beer, a thousand pounds of cheese, a complete dress, and silver goblet. Another bulb of a tulip named "Semper Augustus" was bought at the price of thirteen thousand florins. A bulb of the "Admiral Enkhuysen" tulip cost two thousand dollars. One day there were only two bulbs of the "Semper Augustus" left in Holland, one at Amsterdam and the other at Haarlem, and for one of them there were offered, and refused, four thousand six hundred florins, a splendid coach, and a pair of gray horses with beautiful harness.

Another offered twelve acres of land, and he also was refused. On the registers of Alkmaar it is recorded that in 1637 there were sold in that city, at public auction, one hundred and twenty tulips for the benefit of the orphanage, and that the sale produced one hundred and eighty thousand francs.

Then they began to traffic in tulips, as in State bonds and shares.

They sold for enormous sums bulbs which they did not possess, engaging to provide them for a certain day; and in this way a traffic was carried on for a much larger number of tulips than the whole of Holland could furnish. It is related that one Dutch town sold twenty millions of francs' worth of tulips, and that an Amsterdam merchant gained in this trade more than sixty-eight thousand florins in the s.p.a.ce of four months. These sold that which they had not, and those that which they never could have; the market pa.s.sed from hand to hand, the differences were paid, and the flowers for and by which so many people were ruined or enriched, flourished only in the imagination of the traffickers. Finally matters arrived at such a pa.s.s that, many buyers having refused to pay the sums agreed upon, and contests and disorders following, the government decreed that these debts should be considered as ordinary obligations, and that payment should be exacted in the usual legal manner; then prices fell suddenly, as low as fifty florins for the "Semper Augustus," and the scandalous traffic ceased.

Now the culture of flowers is no longer a mania, but is carried on for love of them, and Haarlem is the princ.i.p.al temple. She still provides a great part of Europe and South America with flowers. The city is encircled by gardens, which, toward the end of April and the beginning of May, are covered with myriads of tulips, hyacinths, carnations, auriculas, anemones, ranunculuses, camelias, primroses, and other flowers, forming an immense wreath about Haarlem, from which travelers from all parts of the world gather a bouquet in pa.s.sing. Of late years the hyacinth has risen into great honor; but the tulip is still king of the gardens, and Holland's supreme affection.

I should have to change my pen for the brush of Van der Huysem or Menedoz, if I were to attempt to describe the pomp of their gorgeous, luxuriant, dazzling colors, which, if the sensation given to the eye may be likened to that of the ear, might be said to resemble a shout of joyous laughter or a cry of love in the green silence of the garden; affecting one like the loud music of a festival. There are to be seen the "Duke of Toll" tulip, the tulips called "simple precocious" in more than six hundred varieties; the "double precocious"; the late tulips, divided into unicolored, fine, superfine, and rectified; the fine, subdivided into violet, rose, and striped; then the monsters or parrots, the hybrids, the thieves; cla.s.sified into a thousand orders of n.o.bility and elegance; tinted with all the shades of color conceivable to the human mind: spotted, speckled, striped, edged, variegated, with leaves fringed, waved, festooned; decorated with gold and silver medals; distinguished by names of generals, painters, birds, rivers, poets, cities, queens, and a thousand loving and bold adjectives, which recall their metamorphoses, their adventures, and their triumphs, and leave in the mind a sweet confusion of beautiful images and pleasant thoughts.