Информационно-экскурсионная деятельность. 2

Context

Introduction……………………………………………………………………….3

1. History of the acquisition of the Dutch collection……………………………...5

2. Dutch painting…………………………………………………………………..7

2.1. Frans Hals…………………………………………………………………….14

2.2. Jan Steen……………………………………………………………………...18

2.3. Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn………………………………………………20

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...25

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………26

Introduction

State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The Hermitage is the largest public museum in Russia and home to one of the greatest art collections in the world. Russian empress Catherine the Great founded the Hermitage in 1764 as a museum for the royal court. The holdings originally consisted of Western European works of art that she purchased from private collections. These were housed in a private gallery called the Small Hermitage that was connected to the Winter Palace, the vast, ornate winter home of the Russian tsars. The tsars who succeeded Catherine substantially increased the collections, which expanded into the Old Hermitage, another private gallery adjoining the Winter Palace. The buildings comprising the Hermitage were rebuilt after a fire in the Winter Palace in 1837. The museum opened to the public in 1852 and became public property known as the State Hermitage Museum in 1917, following the Russian Revolution. The collections are now housed in five magnificent interconnected buildings, including the Winter Palace. The lavish exteriors and interiors of these buildings are of architectural and historical importance in themselves. They provide a rich setting for collections that cover virtually every aspect of the fine arts, from classical antiquity to 20th-century painting. The collection also includes examples of Russian art, artifacts from non-Western cultures, Oriental art, coins, and jewelry.

The Hermitage`s collection of Western European art is particularly strong in Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and Dutch paintings and includes major works by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, Caravaggio, Diego Velazquez, El Greco, Rembrandt, and Pieter Paul Rubens. The Schukin and Morozov Collections of impressionist, postimpressionist, and modern paintings contain many of the finest works by Henri Matisse, as well as major paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, and Pablo Picasso.

The collection of Western European art is regarded as one of the finest in the world, and forms the nucleus of the Hermitage display. It occupies 120 rooms in the four museum buildings, and reflects all the stages in the development of art from the Middle Ages to the present day. The collection includes numerous works by outstanding masters from Italy, Spain, Holland, Flanders, France, England, Germany, and other Western European countries. Great numbers of various items of applied art are presented side by side with paintings and sculptures. Due to their great fragility, prints and drawings are displayed only in temporary exhibitions according to international practice.

History of the acquisition of the Dutch collection.

1764: Empress Catherine II purchases Johann Ernest Gotzkowski's collection, the first collection of the Museum. In 1764 Empress Catherine II acquired the collection formed by Johann Gotzkowski for King Frederick II of Prussia. A rich Berlin merchant and founder of silk and porcelain factories in Berlin, Johann Gotzkowski was one of Frederick's agents, in charge of the purchase of works of art for the royal collection. Frederick II (the Great), owner of a wonderful collection of contemporary French paintings, ordered Gotzkowski to purchase paintings by old masters. The merchant was a zealous agent and it took him only a few years to put together a large collection, but by this time Frederick had lost large sums of money in the Seven Years War and he refused to make the purchase. The enterprising merchant was forced to look around for alternative buyers and he offered the collection to Russia. Catherine II was pleased to take the opportunity of hurting Frederick's self-esteem and of proving that the Russian State Treasury, despite losses which were no less than those of Prussia, could still afford to make such an expensive acquisition. The 225 paintings in the collection were of uneven quality, as Gotzkowski was not a great specialist in painting. There were mainly Dutch and Flemish works - Frans Hals's Portrait of a Young Man with a Glove and Jan Steen's The Idlers are considered the best - as well as a number of 17th-century Italian pieces.

1769: Purchase of Count Heinrich von Bruhl's collection.The Bruhl collection arrived in St Petersburg in the summer of 1769. It contained a vast number of prints and drawings, as well as over 600 paintings from the Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian and German schools. It was acquired from the heirs of Count von Bruhl, chancellor of Saxony, who imitated his master, King Augustus III, in collecting works of art. Following the advice of his secretary Heinrich von Heinecken, a notable connoisseur, Count von Bruhl was able to put together a large and valuable collection, with the help of the king's own agents. Amongst his masterpieces were Rembrandt's Portrait of a Scholar and Portrait of an Old Man in Red, Rubens's Perseus and Andromeda, Nicolas Poussin's The Descent from the Cross, Antoine Watteau's An Embarrassing Proposal and landscapes by Salomon van Ruysdael. Bruhl was also the source for a series of views of Dresden and Pirna by the Italian artist Bernardo Bellotto, which the Count had commissioned. Amongst the Italian canvases, of particular interest is Maecenas Presenting the Arts to Augustus by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, which was commissioned by Count Francesco Algarotti in 1745 in honour of Augustus III by Count von Bruhl.

1781: Purchase of Count Baudouin's collection. The collection of Count F. Baudouin arrived in the Hermitage in 1781 through the mediation of Melchior Grimm. For over 20 years Grimm worked as Catherine's agent, acquiring art for her in Paris. He initially recommended the Baudouin collection to the Empress, stressing that it was well known to Russians coming to Paris. With 199 paintings, mainly form the Dutch and Flemish schools, this was Catherine's last major acquisition of a whole collection for the Hermitage. The picture gallery gained nine works by Rembrandt (Portrait of the Poet Jeremias de Decker, Portrait of an Old Woman, Portrait of an Old Man) and paintings by Anthony van Dyck, Adriaen van Ostade and Salomon van Ruysdael.

Dutch painting

Taking as its goal the realistic representation of life, Dutch art drew its themes from surrounding reality. Portrait, landscape, genre, still-life painting and the portrayal of animals were all developed on a large scale. The Hermitage collection of Dutch painting is famous throughout the world; the main exhibition is in room 249 –  the Tent Hall – where paintings by the leading masters in the different genres are displayed. Jan van Qoyen (1596-1656) is one of the outstanding landscape painters of the first half of the seventeenth century. A list of titles – The Coast at Schevenlngen, The Maas near Dordrecht, Winter Landscape near the Hague – is enough to show that Goyen was inspired by his native countryside. His paintings are usually much greater in width than height, the sky occupying two thirds of the canvas with the horizon set low in the picture. This manner produces an extraordinary sense of space, emphasizing at the same time the flatness of the Dutch landscape. There are no bright colours in his paintings: they are almost monochromes. The fine gradation of grey and subdued yellow tones conveys the feeling of air saturated with moisture, softening the contours, and the further away the objects are the more indistinct their outlines become. This method, known as aerial perspective, was one of the splendid achievements of the Dutch school of painting. The figures of people – fishermen, skaters, townspeople going about their ordinary, everyday affairs – are an integral part of van Goyen’s paintings. Goyen’s contemporary, Salomon van Ruisdael (1600-1670), is represented by an excellent canvas entitled The Ferry. The Hermitage collection, through the example of the works of Aert van der Neer, Pieter Nolpe, Jan Porcellis, Abraham Willaerts, etc., enables us to trace the development of Dutch landscape painting. The most successful landscape painter in the second half of the seventeenth century was Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-1682); there are eleven paintings by him in the Hermitage. One of his most celebrated works is The Marsh. Surrounding the marsh, covered with flowers and water-lily leaves, are some trees, stout, their branches outstretched; a withered oak mournfully extends its bare branches skywards, and beside it lies the trunk of an old tree, blown to the ground during a storm. The silence is broken only by the sudden noise made by the wings of a flock of ducks taking flight, and the gentle, rustling footsteps of a hunter wandering into this mysterious thicket rarely penetrated by the sun’s rays. Thus is created a romantic conception of nature, mighty and eternally reborn. Peasant Cottages in the Danes, Waterfall In Norway and Mountain Landscape mark Jacob van Ruisdael as an artist capable of reproducing all the diversities of nature, her ever-changing appearance, with such profundity and feeling as was unknown previously in Dutch art. Portrait, like landscape painting, is represented by the works of artists of different generations. The early canvases of Mierevelt and Ravesteyn, for the most part half-length portraits, are distinguished by the painstaking rendering of face and costume. The next period is illustrated by the work of Thomas de Keyser (1596-1667), the best known portrait painter of his day. In his painting a bold, vigorous manner is combined with a vivid depicting of the character of his model. In his knee-length Portrait of a Man de Keyser creates the type of a Dutch burgher, business-like, self-confident, and prosperous. Belonging to this same period, the apogee of Dutch realistic art, is the work of Frans Hals (1580-1666). The two pictures in the Hermitage, Portrait of a Young Man with a Glove in His Hand (c. 1650) and Portrait of a Man (before 1660), are painted in a vigorous, robust manner, and with that ability to capture in his paintings fleeting impressions that distinguishes the brilliant talent of Hals.

Exceptionally rich is the collection of genre painting, which was widely developed in Holland as in no other country in Europe. Examples of the genre painting of the 1620s and 1630s are presented in the works of Dirck Hals, Willem Duyster, Jacob van Felsen and Jacob Duck, who portrayed groups of people making merry, tavern carousals, family concerts, card games and tric-trac, and everyday scenes, mainly from the lives of prosperous burghers and soldiers. Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685), who for the most part portrayed peasants, occupies a special place among the genre painters. He is represented in the exhibition by paintings which are typical of his work generally: The Scuffle, The Village Musicians, four pictures from The Five Senses series, and others. The distinctive feature of the work of Jan Steen (1626-1679), one of the foremost Dutch painters of everyday life, is his fascinating anecdotal approach. The nine paintings by him in the Hermitage reflect his wide range of interests, and his humour and keen powers of observation in depicting scenes from the daily lives of the different strata of Dutch society (The Smoker, The Marriage Contract, Physician Visiting a Sick Girl, The Revellers, etc.). The artistic achievements of the Dutch genre painters of the second half of the seventeenth century can be seen clearly in the work of Pieter de Hooch (A Lady and Her Servant), Pieter Jansens (^4 Room in a Dutch House), Cabriel Metsu (Breakfast, Physician Visiting a Sick Girl), Frans Mieris (Young Lady in the Morning, Breakfast with Oysters) and Gerard Terborch (^4 Glass of Lemonade, Reading a Letter, and Portrait of a Woman). These artists, extolling in their paintings the mode of life of the upper layers of Dutch bourgeois society, did not consider the subjects themselves of much importance; these are often repetitive and serve merely as a pretext for magnificent reproductions of items of furniture, clothing, and airy, brightly lit interiors. Still-life painting came to be very widely practised in Holland during the seventeenth century. With brilliant mastery of the methods of painting the artists convincingly reproduced the beauty of objects which surround us in our daily lives. Examples include the Breakfast paintings of Willem Claesz Heda (1594-1680/82) and Pieter Claesz (1596/97-1661), and Dessert by Willem Kalf (1622-1693). Also characteristic of Dutch seventeenth century art is the depiction of animals, the chief exponents of this genre being Paulus Potter (1625-1654), the creator of The Farm, The Watch-dog and A Bull, and Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691). An important part of the exhibtion in room 251 is made up of paintings by Bartholomeus van der Heist (1613-1670), fashionable among the highest circles of the Dutch bourgeoisie as a portrait painter, whose large formal pictures were painted to cater for the tastes of those who commissioned them (The Presentation of the Betrothed and Family Group).

Room 254. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). In the Hermitage there are twenty-six of Rembrandt’s works. Few of the early of the great Dutch artist’s paintings have been preserved, two of them in the Hermitage collection. These are the Adoration of the Magi, a painting only recently identified as a Rembrandt original, and a portrait entitled The Old Warrior (c. 1629-30). In his search for expressiveness, the young artist here endows his subject with unusual attributes, dressing him in an old beret and the breastplate of a knight; he also employes a peculiar lighting effect with marked contrasts of light and shade. The young Rembrandt discovered for himself the ability of chiaroscuro to intensify the emotive quality of a figure. The beginning of the 1630s was a period of great success for Rembrandt; he became the best known painter in Amsterdam. This period is illustrated in the Hermitage by some outstanding works: Flora, Descent from the Cross, Abraham’s Sacrifice, Danae, Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard and a number of portraits. The gem of the collection, Danae (1636), is based upon a subject that was rather common in the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but was interpreted by Rembrandt with freshness and originality. It is not gold, as in the painting by Titian, but sunlight pouring in from the depth of the canvas in a warm stream that rushes towards Danae, illuminating the face of the young woman. Her naked body comes to life, as it were, at the touch of the magic rays. “What a dazzling feast of love!” wrote the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren of Danae, “how lithe that body, plump and tender, breathing the joy of youth; how it glows with ardour beneath the caresses of the divine metal!” In Flora Rembrandt portrayed his wife Saskia as the goddess of spring and flowers. She is dressed in a heavy satin garment, and the head of the young woman is crowned with a spray of flowers. The beautiful gold and olive-green colours are characteristic of Rembrandt’s work of the 1630s. The main theme in his art is the world of human feelings, and this is seen in canvases painted during different periods and on various subjects. Almost at the same time as Danae Rembrandt painted the Descent from the Cross (1634). The limpid darkness makes it possible to descern in the distance the vague outlines of the town. The light of the torches and the lamps flickering in the breeze bring individual figures sharply from out of the darkness, and it is this contrast of light and shade which expresses to the utmost the tragedy of the scene. The personages of the painting are simple Dutch folk; the Virgin, an elderly, haggard peasant woman, is falling into the arms of her friends who have hastened to her assistance. The biblical story of the aged Abraham is presented by Rembrandt as an actual event (Abraham’s Sacrifice, 1635). Isaac is lying bound on the altar; his father raises his hand to deliver the blow and, in order not to see in this dreadful moment the face of his son, he covers it with his large, sunburnt hand. Suddenly an angel appears, diverts Abraham’s hand, and the knife falls to the ground. The unprotected, motionless body of the sacrifice and the vigorous movement felt in the powerful figure of Abraham; the impassive face of the heavenly angel and the father’s grief-stricken expression – in these contrasts lies the key to the emotional and psychological content of the painting. The Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (1637) reflects certain social relationships; the labourers, indignant at an injustice, are presenting their demands to their employer. The scene is set in the dark semi-basement of a building, penetrated by a wonderful, typically Rembrandt light coming through a dusty window. Rembrandt’s profound realism and the wide scope of his artistic conceptions were alien to his burgher surroundings. At the beginning of the 1640s came the break with official Amsterdam society. Belonging to this period in his work is the small painting entitled David’s Farewell to Jonathan (1642), subtle in its psychological mood and priceless in the richness of its artistry. The Holy Family, painted in 1645, depicts the family of a carpenter. Here kindness, tranquility and peace reign supreme. The master of the house is working at his bench, and the Virgin, breaking off from her reading, is lifting, with a gesture full of maternal care, the canopy above the cradle to have a look at her baby. Rembrandt’s colours during these years became warmer, a golden red predominating. The last twenty years of Rembrandt’s life – the most mature period of his work – are represented in the Hermitage by paintings which belong to the golden treasury of world art. These consist of a number of portraits and two pictures, David and Uriah and The Return of the Prodigal Son. In the latter Rembrandt uses the Gospel parable of the reckless youth who leaves his father’s house and gives himself up to riotous living, returning home repentant after many ordeals. Rembrandt portrays the emotions experienced by father and son with restraint, but with moving sincerity. The young man falls on his knees in front of his father, his torn raiment reminding us that his wanderings have been long and hard. The figure of the son, his back turned to the onlooker, conveys the feelings of a troubled soul. The blind old man, bending over his son tenderly touches his shoulders, the face and hands of the father expressing undying love, affection and forgiveness. Rembrandt’s humanity, his ardent belief in man and in the great, ennobling power of love receive here their fullest expression. Both the bold handling and the warm crimson colours are in harmony with the concept of the work.

In the Hermitage there are thirteen portraits by Rembrandt illustrating different periods of his work; among these is the early Portrait of a Scholar (1631), in which the young artist focuses attention upon a spontaneous movement of his model; Portrait of a Young Man with a Lace Collar (1634), an excellent example of a commissioned portrait of the period when Rembrandt was the favourite of the Amsterdam burghers; the delicate Portrait of Baartjen Martens Doomer (c. 1640); and the late portrait, seemingly woven out of air and light, of the poet Jeremias de Decker (1666), to whom Rembrandt was bound by friendship lasting many years. The finest paintings produced by the great master in this genre, however, are the psychological portraits of the 1650s when the artist’s attention was particularly struck by the faces of old people, bearing as it were the wisdom of experience:-Portrait of an Old Man In Red (c. 1652-1654), Portrait of an Old Woman (1654) and Portrait of an Old Man (1654). In these paintings Rembrandt subtly conveys man’s inner world. The face and hands are touched with light; the rest – details of dress and of the immediate surroundings – melt away in a warm semi-darkness. The death of the ruined painter, forgotten by all, occured almost unnoticed by his contemporaries. His genius was only “rediscovered” in the nineteenth century.

The work of some of Rembrandt’s pupils, Jacob Backer, Ferdinand Bol, Jan Lievens, Nicolaes Maes, Aert de Gelder and others, is widely represented in room 253. This room also contains five paintings by a teacher of Rembrandt, the famous Amsterdam painter Pieter Lastman (1583-1633)-Abraham on His Way to Canaan, Bathsheba, Abraham and the Three Angels, The Annunciation and Midas’ Judgement. In rooms 255-257, which are situated in a gallery alongside the Hanging Garden, there is an additional exhibition of seventeenth – early eighteenth century Dutch painting. Of particular interest is the very large collection of paintings by Philips Wouwerman/(1619- 1668), a prolific and, at one time, extremely popular artist who painted battle scenes, hunts, cavalcades, pictures of horses, and landscapes. There is also a large display of paintings by artists of the “Italianizing” trend.

Frans Hals

Hals was born in 1580 or 1581, in Antwerp. Like many, Hals' family fled during the Fall of Antwerp (1584-1585) from the Spanish Netherlands to Haarlem, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Hals studied under another Flemish-émigré, Karel van Mander (1548–1606), whose Mannerist influence, however, is not noticeably visible in his work. At the age of 27, he became a member of the city's painter's corporation, the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and he started to earn money as an art restorer for the city council. He worked on their large art collection that Karel van Mander had described in his book The Painting-Book (Middle Dutch: Het Schilder-Boeck), published in 1604. The most notable of these were the works of Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Jan van Scorel and Jan Mostaert, that hung in de St. Jans kerk in Haarlem. The restoration work was paid for by the city of Haarlem, since all religious art was confiscated after the iconoclasm, but the entire collection of paintings was not formally possessed by the city council until 1625, after the city fathers had decided which paintings were suitable for the city hall. The remaining art that was considered too "Roman Catholic" was sold to Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, a fellow guild member, on the grounds that he remove it from the city. It was under these circumstances that Hals began his career in portraiture, since the market for religious themes had disappeared. The earliest known example of Hals' own art is the 1611, Jacobus Zaffius. His 'breakthrough' came in 1616, with the life-size group portrait, The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company. His most noted portrait today is the one he made in 1649 of René Descartes. Historians have erroneously reported that he mistreated his first wife, Anneke Hermansz (Annetje Harmensdochter Abeel), based on records that a Frans Hals was charged with spousal abuse in Haarlem in 1616. However, as Seymour Slive has pointed out, the Frans Hals in question was not the artist, but another Haarlem resident of the same name. Indeed, at the time of these charges, the artist had no wife to mistreat as Anneke had died during labor earlier in 1616. Similarly, historical accounts of Hals' propensity for drink have been largely based on embellished anecdotes of his early biographers, namely Arnold Houbraken, with no direct evidence existing documenting such. In 1617, he married Lysbeth Reyniers, the young daughter of a fishmonger that he had taken in to look after his two children. They married in Spaarndam, a small village outside the banns of Haarlem, because she was already 8 months pregnant. Frans Hals was a devoted father and they went on to have eight children. Where Hals contemporaries such as Rembrandt moved their households according to the caprices of patrons, Hals remained in Haarlem and insisted that his customers came to him. According to the Haarlem archives, a militia piece that Hals started in Amsterdam was finished by another painter because Hals refused to paint in Amsterdam, insisting that the militiamen come to Haarlem to sit for their portraits. Although Hals' work was in demand throughout his life, he lived so long that he eventually went out of style as a painter and experienced financial difficulties. In addition to his painting, he continued throughout his life to work as an restorer, art dealer, and art tax expert for the city councilors. His creditors took him to court several times, and to settle his debt with a baker in 1652 he sold his belongings. The inventory of the property seized mentions only three mattresses and bolsters, an armoire, a table and five pictures (these were by himself, his sons, van Mander, and Maarten van Heemskerck). Left destitute, the municipality gave him an annuity of 200 florins in 1664.

At a time when the Dutch nation fought for independence, Hals appeared in the ranks of the schutterij, a military guild. This fact found in the Haarlem archives has led to speculation that Hals made a self portrait in his 1639 painting of the St. Joris company, though this has never been confirmed. It was not normal for mere members to be painted, that privilege was reserved only for the officers. It is possible that he received the privilege as thanks for painting that company 3 times. Hals was also a member of a local chamber of rhetoric, and in 1644 chairman of the Painters Corporation at Haarlem.  Frans Hals died in Haarlem in 1666 and was buried in the city's St. Bavo Church. His widow later died obscurely in a hospital after seeking outdoor relief from the guardians of the poor. Hals is best known for his portraits, mainly of wealthy citizens, like Pieter van den Broecke and Isaac Massa, whom he painted three times. He also painted large group portraits, many of which showed civil guards. He was a Baroque painter who practiced an intimate realism with a radically free approach. His pictures illustrate the various strata of society; banquets or meetings of officers, sharpshooters, guildsmen, admirals, generals, burgomasters, merchants, lawyers, and clerks, itinerant players and singers, gentlefolk, fishwives and tavern heroes. In group portraits, such as the Archers of St. Hadrian, Hals captures each character in a different manner. The faces are not idealized and are clearly distinguishable, with their personalities revealed in a variety of poses and facial expressions. He studied under the painter and historian Karel van Mander (Hals owned some paintings by van Mander that were amongst the items sold to pay his bakery debt in 1652). Hals was fond of daylight and silvery sheen, while Rembrandt used golden glow effects based upon artificial contrasts of low light in immeasurable gloom. Both men were painters of touch, but of touch on different keys — Rembrandt was the bass, Hals the treble. Hals seized, with rare intuition, a moment in the life of his subjects. What nature displayed in that moment he reproduced thoroughly in a delicate scale of color, and with mastery over every form of expression. He became so clever that exact tone, light and shade, and modeling were obtained with a few marked and fluid strokes of the brush. He became a popular portrait painter, and painted the wealthy of Haarlem on special occasions. The only record of his work in the first decade of his independent activity is an engraving by Jan van de Velde copied from the lost portrait of The Minister Johannes Bogardus. Early works by Hals, such as Two Boys Playing and Singing and a Banquet of the Officers of the St Joris Doele or Arquebusiers of St George (1616), show him as a careful draughtsman capable of great finish, yet spirited withal. The flesh he painted is pastose and burnished, less clear than it subsequently became. Later, he became more effective, displayed more freedom of hand, and a greater command of effect.

During this period he painted the full-length portrait of Madame van Beresteyn (Louvre), and a full-length portrait of Willem van Heythuysen leaning on a sword. Both these pictures are equalled by the other Banquet of the Officers of the Arquebusiers of St George (with different portraits) and the Banquet of the Officers of the Cloveniers or Arquebusiers of St Andrew of 1627 and an Assembly of the Officers of the Arquebusiers of St Andrew of 1633. A similar painting, with the date of 1637, suggests some study of Rembrandt masterpieces, and a similar influence is apparent in a picture of 1641 representing the Regents of the Company of St Elizabeth, and in the portrait of Maria Voogt at Amsterdam. From 1620 till 1640 he painted many double portraits of married couples, on separate panels, the man on the left panel, his wife at his right. Only once did Hals portray a couple, Isaac Massa and his wife on a single canvas: Double Portrait of a Couple, (c. 1623, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam). His style changed throughout his life. Paintings of vivid color were gradually replaced by pieces where one color dominated; black. This was probably due to the sober dress of his Protestant sitters, more than any personal preference.

Jan Steen

Steen was born in Leiden, where his well-to-do, Catholic family were brewers and ran the tavern The Red Halbert for two generations. Like his even more famous contemporary Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Steen attended the Latin school and became a student in Leiden. He received his painterly education from Nicolaes Knupfer (1603–1660), a German painter of historical and figurative scenes in Utrecht. Influences of Knupfer can be found in Steen's use of composition and colour. Another source of inspiration were Adriaen van Ostade and Isaac van Ostade, painters of rural scenes, who lived in Haarlem. Whether Steen actually studied with Ostade is not known. In 1648 Jan Steen and Gabriel Metsu founded the painters' Guild of Saint Luke at Leiden. Soon after he became an assistant to the renowned landscape painter Jan van Goyen and moved into his house on the Bierkade in The Hague. On Oct 3, 1649 he married van Goyen's daughter Margriet, with whom he would have eight children. Steen worked with his father-in-law until 1654, when he moved to Delft, where he ran brewery De Roscam (The Curry Comb) (or De Slang (The Snake)) without much success. After the explosion in Delft in 1654 the art market was depressed, but Steen painted his famous A Burgomaster of Delft and his daughter. It does not seem to be clear if this painting should be called a portrait or a genre work.

Steen lived in Warmond, just north of Leiden, from 1656 till 1660 and in Haarlem from 1660 till 1670 and in both periods he was especially productive. In 1670, after the death of his wife in 1669 and his father in 1670, Steen moved back to Leiden, where he stayed the rest of his life. When the art market collapsed in 1672, called the Year of Disaster, Steen opened a tavern. In April 1673 he married Maria van Egmont, who gave him another child. In 1674 he became president of the Sint Lucas Guild. Frans van Mieris became one of his drinking companions. He died in Leiden in 1679 and was interred in a family grave in the Pieterskerk. Daily life was Jan Steen's main pictorial theme. Many of the genre scenes he portrayed, as in The Feast of Saint Nicholas, are lively to the point of chaos and lustfulness, even so much that a Jan Steen household, meaning a messy scene, became a Dutch proverb (een huishouden van Jan Steen). Subtle hints in his paintings seem to suggest that Steen meant to warn the viewer rather than invite him to copy this behaviour. Many of Steen's paintings bear references to old Dutch proverbs or literature. He often used members of his family as models, and painted quite a few self-portraits in which he showed no tendency of vanity. Steen did not shy from other themes: he painted historical, mythological and religious scenes, portraits, still lifes and natural scenes. His portraits of children are famous. He is also well known for his mastery of light and attention to detail, most notably in persian rugs and other textiles. Steen was prolific, producing about 800 paintings, of which roughly 350 survive. His work was valued much by contemporaries and as a result he was reasonably well paid for his work. He did not have many students—only Richard Brakenburg is recorded—but his work proved a source of inspiration for many painters.

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on 15 July 1606 in Leiden, in the Dutch Republic, nowadays the Netherlands. He was the ninth child born to Harmen Gerritszoon van Rijn and Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuytbrouck. His family was quite well-to-do; his father was a miller and his mother was a baker's daughter. As a boy he attended Latin school and was enrolled at the University of Leiden, although according to a contemporary he had a greater inclination towards painting; he was soon apprenticed to a Leiden history painter, Jacob van Swanenburgh, with whom he spent three years. After a brief but important apprenticeship of six months with the famous painter Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam, Rembrandt opened a studio in Leiden in 1624 or 1625, which he shared with friend and colleague Jan Lievens. In 1627, Rembrandt began to accept students, among them Gerrit Dou. In 1629 Rembrandt was discovered by the statesman Constantijn Huygens, the father of Christiaan Huygens (a famous Dutch mathematician and physicist), who procured for Rembrandt important commissions from the court of The Hague. As a result of this connection, Prince Frederik Hendrik continued to purchase paintings from Rembrandt until 1646. At the end of 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, then rapidly expanding as the new business capital of the Netherlands, and began to practice as a professional portraitist for the first time, with great success. He initially stayed with an art dealer, Hendrick van Uylenburg, and in 1634, married Hendrick's cousin, Saskia van Uylenburg. Saskia came from a good family: her father had been lawyer and burgemeester (mayor) of Leeuwarden. When Saskia, as the youngest daughter, became an orphan, she lived with an older sister in Het Bildt. Rembrandt and Saskia were married in the local church of St. Annaparochie without the presence of Rembrandt's relatives. In the same year, Rembrandt became a burgess of Amsterdam and a member of the local guild of painters. He also acquired a number of students, among them Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck.

In 1635 Rembrandt and Saskia moved into their own house, renting in fashionable Nieuwe Doelenstraat. In 1639 they moved to a prominent house (now the Rembrandt House Museum) in the Jodenbreestraat in what was becoming the Jewish quarter; the mortgage to finance the 13,000 guilder purchase would be a primary cause for later financial difficulties. Rembrandt should easily have been able to pay the house off with his large income, but it appears his spending always kept pace with his income, and he may have made some unsuccessful investments. It was there that Rembrandt frequently sought his Jewish neighbors to model for his Old Testament scenes. Although they were by now affluent, the couple suffered several personal setbacks; their son Rumbartus died two months after his birth in 1635 and their daughter Cornelia died at just three weeks of age in 1638. In 1640, they had a second daughter, also named Cornelia, who died after living barely over a month. Only their fourth child, Titus, who was born in 1641, survived into adulthood. Saskia died in 1642 soon after Titus's birth, probably from tuberculosis. Rembrandt's drawings of her on her sick and death bed are among his most moving works. During Saskia's illness, Geertje Dircx was hired as Titus' caretaker and nurse and also became Rembrandt's lover. She would later charge Rembrandt with breach of promise and was awarded alimony of 200 guilders a year. Rembrandt worked to have her committed for twelve years to an asylum or poorhouse (called a "bridewell") at Gouda, after learning she had pawned jewelry that had once belonged to Saskia and that he had given to her. In the late 1640s Rembrandt began a relationship with the much younger Hendrickje Stoffels, who had initially been his maid. In 1654 they had a daughter, Cornelia, bringing Hendrickje a summons from the Reformed Church to answer the charge "that she had committed the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter". She admitted this and was banned from receiving communion. Rembrandt was not summoned to appear for the Church council because he was not a member of the Reformed Church. The two were considered legally wed under common law, but Rembrandt had not married Henrickje, so as not to lose access to a trust set up for Titus in the son's mother's will.

Rembrandt lived beyond his means, buying art (including bidding up his own work), prints (often used in his paintings), and rarities, which probably caused a court arrangement to avoid his bankruptcy in 1656, by selling most of his paintings and large collection of antiquities. The sale list survives and gives us a good insight into Rembrandt's collections, which apart from Old Master paintings and drawings included busts of the Roman Emperors, suits of Japanese armor among many objects from Asia, and collections of natural history and minerals; the prices realized in the sales in 1657 and 1658 were disappointing. Rembrandt was forced to sell his house and his printing-press and move to more modest accommodation on the Rozengracht in 1660. The authorities and his creditors were generally accommodating to him, except for the Amsterdam painters' guild, who introduced a new rule that no one in Rembrandt's circumstances could trade as a painter. To get round this, Hendrickje and Titus set up a business as art-dealers in 1660, with Rembrandt as an employee. In 1661 Rembrandt (or rather the new business) was contracted to complete work for the newly built city hall, but only after Govert Flinck, the artist previously commissioned, died without beginning to paint. The resulting work, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, was rejected and returned to the painter; the surviving fragment is only a fraction of the whole work. It was around this time that Rembrandt took on his last apprentice, Aert de Gelder. In 1662 he was still fulfilling major commissions for portraits and other works. When Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany came to Amsterdam in 1667, he visited Rembrandt at his house. Rembrandt outlived both Hendrickje, who died in 1663, and Titus, who died in 1668, leaving a baby daughter. He died within a year of his son, on October 4, 1669 in Amsterdam, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Westerkerk. In a letter to Huyghens, Rembrandt offered the only surviving explanation of what he sought to achieve through his art: the greatest and most natural movement, translated from de meeste en de natuurlijkste beweegelijkheid. The word "beweechgelickhijt" is also argued to mean "emotion" or "motive." Whether this refers to objectives, material or otherwise is open to interpretation; either way, critics have drawn particular attention to the way Rembrandt seamlessly melded the earthly and spiritual. Earlier 20th century connoisseurs claimed Rembrandt had produced over 600 paintings, nearly 400 etchings and 2,000 drawings. More recent scholarship, from the 1960s to the present day (led by the Rembrandt Research Project), often controversially, has winnowed his oeuvre to nearer 300 paintings. His prints, traditionally all called etchings, although many are produced in whole or part by engraving and sometimes dry point, have a much more stable total of slightly under 300. It is likely Rembrandt made many more drawings in his lifetime than 2,000, but those extant are more rare than presumed. Two experts claim that the number of drawings whose autograph status can be regarded as effectively "certain" is no higher than about 75, although this is disputed. The list was to be unveiled at a scholarly meeting in February 2010.

At one time about ninety paintings were counted as Rembrandt self-portraits, but it is now known that he had his students copy his own self-portraits as part of their training. Modern scholarship has reduced the autograph count to over forty paintings, as well as a few drawings and thirty-one etchings, which include many of the most remarkable images of the group. Some show him posing in quasi-historical fancy dress, or pulling faces at himself. His oil paintings trace the progress from an uncertain young man, through the dapper and very successful portrait-painter of the 1630s, to the troubled but massively powerful portraits of his old age. Together they give a remarkably clear picture of the man, his appearance and his psychological make-up, as revealed by his richly weathered face. In a number of biblical works, including The Raising of the Cross, Joseph Telling His Dreams and The Stoning of Saint Stephen, Rembrandt painted himself as a character in the crowd. Durham suggests that this was because the Bible was for Rembrandt "a kind of diary, an account of moments in his own life." Among the more prominent characteristics of Rembrandt's work are his use of chiaroscuro, the theatrical employment of light and shadow derived from Caravaggio, or, more likely, from the Dutch Caravaggisti, but adapted for very personal means. Also notable are his dramatic and lively presentation of subjects, devoid of the rigid formality that his contemporaries often displayed, and a deeply felt compassion for mankind, irrespective of wealth and age. His immediate family—his wife Saskia, his son Titus and his common-law wife Hendrickje—often figured prominently in his paintings, many of which had mythical, biblical or historical themes.

Conclusion

The Hermitage collection of Dutch painting consists of more than 1,000 items, among them some of the most important works in the museum. The exhibition of Dutch artists' works occupies six rooms in the New Hermitage, the largest of them, the Tent Hall, containing an excellent display of 17th-century genre works by leading masters: landscapes by Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael, genre pictures by Jan Steen, Gerald ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Adriaen, and Isaac van Ostade, animal paintings by Paulus Potter, probably the greatest representative of this genre, still lifes by Willem Claesz Heda and Willem Kalf. One of the most prominent and daring Dutch artists of the period, Frans Hals, is represented by two marvellous works: Portrait of a Young Man with a Glove in His Hand (about 1659) and Portrait of a Man (before 1660). Over 20 works by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, one of the greatest artists in the history of world art, hang in a special room devoted to him and his pupils. The master's portraits, compositions on mythological and biblical subjects, enable us to trace all the stages in his career, from his early canvases through to his last works. Among early notable works by Rembrandt are Flora (1634), and The Descent from the Cross (1634), and Abraham's Sacrifice (1635). The first painting by Rembrandt to be brought to Russia by Peter I was David and Jonathan (1642); with Danae (1636/1640s) and The Holy Family (1645) it forms a group of masterpiece from the artist's late period. The last two decades of Rembrandt's life are represented by such prominent works as Portrait of an Old Man in Red (1652-1654) and The Return of the Prodigal Son (1668-1669).

Bibliography

1. http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/03/hm3_3_1_4.html
2. http://www.petersburg-bridges.com/hermitage/western-art/dutch-art-17th-century.html
3. http://www.cairos.ru/en/spb/museums/63-hermtage
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