Gabriel Metsu At The National Gallery of Ireland

On a gray and rainy Friday 29^th October 2009, I went with Carol to the National Gallery of Ireland to see an exhibition of Gabriel Metsu, a neglected and underrated painter of the Dutch Golden Age. I was familiar with Metsu from two small companion oil paintings that had been donated to the National Gallery by Lord and Lady Beit in the 1980s - after they had been robbed and recovered from Irish criminals. The two paintings Woman Reading a Letter and Man Writing a Letter had long been two of my favourites in the National Gallery and with Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter, they offered an immediate chance to compare the techniques and styles of these two Dutch masters who both sadly died as they had just hit their prime.        

Both were part of the Dutch Golden Age, which after the Spanish Empire had signed a twelve-year truce with the Netherlands and formally recognized it as an independent commonwealth - saw an unprecedented period of peace, trade, commercial prosperity - and the flourishing of Dutch painting. The Dutch did not go in for the Italian love of religious, mythological or historical painting. They were common sense people and the art they liked was a mirror to their mercantile success. The Dutch genre picture was born from the low-life and moralizing pictures of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel in the early 16^th century. The Dutch painters of this middle-class genre specialized in low-life debauchery and high-life ‘merry-companies’. The genre produced a host of minor masters like Nicholas Maes, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard Terborch as well as Metsu and of course Vermeer who transcended the genre. Their work appealed to the common person’s love of stories, anecdotal details, realistic depiction, humour and moralizing. In a sense, they were lowbrow works but executed with a lot of talent and some originality.                                                                                     

                                             

Born three years apart and both dying in their late thirties, both Metsu and Vermeer had similar degrees of minor and purely local success in their day. Both produced a small number of finished and surviving works, Metsu about 130 oil paintings and Vermeer only about 34. Both specialized in domestic interiors scenes, Vermeer in a more distant manner - Metsu in a more interactive one. Both knew of each other’s work and were influenced by each other, in Metsu’s case the influence is obvious, Vermeer on the other hand - because of his distinctive style hid his influences better. Yet while Vermeer was almost forgotten in the following two hundred years, Metsu became highly collectable in the eighteenth century - especially amongst the Royal families of Europe. So much so, that Vermeer’s were sold as “in the manner of Metsu.” All this was to change in the late nineteenth century, when art critics, connoisseurs and writers like Proust wrote rapturously of Vermeer. The Impressionist generation of painters and art lovers, prized the painterly magic and originality of Vermeer, while at the same time poured scorn on the kind of minutely detailed and ‘fine’ painting of the likes of Metsu - whose reputation had never really recovered from this change in taste. This was the first exhibition devoted to Metsu since 1968, and the last book devoted to him had been published in 1974. Therefore, I saw this as a historically rewarding exhibition, which allowed modern day viewers to make up their own mind about Metsu.   

                                       

Before going into to see the exhibition of Metsu, I re-read my Heron History of Art volume on Baroque art and its chapters on the prolific and stunning Dutch Golden Age. While Vermeer had three pages of hyperbolic praise devoted to him, Metsu had just one dismissive paragraph: “Dutch art eventually became very tedious. If proof be needed, Metsu provides it. This latter painter was able to create illusion, but in him Gerrit Dou’s mastery became no more than a method; he took Vermeer’s stillness without his mystery... The truth is that Metsu was a cold painter. Ingres amply proved that coldness and stupidity do not preclude genius. Doubtless, Metsu could have proved an analogous demonstration if he had not been so strictly involved with school methods.” (Philippe Daudy, The XVIIth Century II, Heron History of Art, 1968, P. 37.)                     

                                                          

So as I entered the start of the exhibition, and began looking at Metsu’s early canvases my heart sank and my mind concurred with what I had read the night before. Metsu’s early low-life scenes painted on medium size canvases were workmanlike but uninspired. Reminiscent of Gerard Ter Borch, and countless other Dutch genre painters they lacked an authentic voice and offered little visual delight. Yet by the second room, I could already see a great leap forward in Metsu’s technique and maturing of his vision. As he grew into his art, his skill at rendering silk, velvet, fur, metal, wood and flesh became masterful. He was still painting subjects borrowed from others, yet his mastery of his medium was beginning to become evident, as where his own personal gifts of characterization and storytelling. As the size of his work shrank and he shifted from canvas to smooth wooden panels and minute and painstaking brushwork - his work began to exude a genuine glistening magic. In the crass modern age, big is often thought of as better - and even more difficult. Paintings like those of Metsu and Vermeer gave the lie to such primitive delusions. Their paintings made small details a trial of skill and patience beyond most blustering painters. Gerrit Dou for example was famous for spending days on a detail no bigger than a fingernail. I imagined that there must have been countless times when Metsu and Vermeer must have wanted to tear their hair out with despair - while trying to master a detail no bigger than an inch.          

Typically, Metsu painted on wooden panels that he prepared with a reddish brown, buff or grey ground - on which he painted a sketch in black and white, which produced a kind of black and white photograph. Over this, he then painted in colour, before finishing the painting off with a final layer of carefully modulated paint. He used a variety of brushstrokes from blended to stippled to scumbled depending on the surfaces he was trying to capture. Each layer of paint was thin and the final polished painting had virtually no impasto. Metsu’s fine brushwork was subtle but still visible up-close which gave his work a liveliness lacking in other painters of the period - like Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris - whose paintings had an enamelled polish that denied life. Amongst the paintings on show, my favourites were his; Still Life with a Dead Cockerel from 1655-8 whose stark mortality was more moving than many an over the top crucifixion, A Baker Blowing his Horn from 1660-3 which was almost surreal in its magic-realist combination of objects and action, The Intruder an erotic drama from 1661-3 and A Woman Composing Music, with an Inquisitive Man, from 1664-7, a beautiful and charming group scene, masterfully painted.

                 

The influence of Vermeer, was evident in Metsu’s later interior scenes yet the differences between them - were as telling as their superficial similarities. Vermeer’s work was almost dreamlike and uncanny whereas Metsu’s were more naturalistic. Vermeer’s use of a camera-obscurer was obvious - not only because of the strange perspectives, cropped compositions and spatial distortions - but also because of paintwork which seemed filtered and almost abstracted in parts. Vermeer’s use of optical devices may in part explain his rediscovery in the late nineteenth century as photography emerged. Perhaps, it took the photographic age to educate the public in the strange objectivity and dispassionate gaze of the lens. Metsu may have also used an optical device as an aid, but his work seemed far more conventional in its observation and application. While Vermeer presented interiors that were almost voyeuristic in their hidden-camera quality - of people caught unawares in their own silence - Metsu directly engaged us in conventional theatrical scenes that had been set up for an audience. In fact, they presented us with two very different kinds of aesthetics as dissimilar as hidden-camera spying and public theatrics respectively. The hidden-camera Vermeer was more radically modern - presenting a human solitude that was existential in its singularity. The theatrical Metsu was more of his period - presenting the spectacle of social dramas - anchored by a narrative that was traditional in its social discourse and moral presumptions. 

Sadly, the art world is a thing of fashion and bogus ratings. There are always a handful of winners and many losers. However, one of the purposes of the museum is to care for all with talent regardless of the vicissitudes of fashion - so that future generations, can make up their own minds and I for one found Metsu’s late paintings some of the most magnetic and stunning I had ever seen. Besides, even if Metsu was not as great as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals and a host of other Dutch masters he still possessed a talent and skill-set sadly all but lacking today.                                                                                

Apart from the forty oil paintings, there were also a few very rare drawings by Metsu – where he had sketched figures for his later oil paintings present in the show. In addition, there were costumes and objects like a linen night-rail, a pair of mules, an ornate buffalo drinking horn with silver gilt and a sewing cushion from Metsu’s day that all featured in his paintings - these gave an added depth to the exhibition.    After looking around the Metsu exhibition, we went around the permanent collection and looked at Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter. After being immersed in Mestu seeing it again was a shock to the system. Of course, it was a stupendous painting, of course, it was a work of genius and of course - it set me dreaming. However, was it any better than Metsu at his best? Maybe it was. But did it really matter? Besides, although Vermeer had always been an exemplary painter in my mind, I had never been able to rate him as highly as Rembrandt - who was in my opinion was the greatest Dutch artist ever and one of the greatest artists of all time. Vermeer and Mestu were masterful painters of small scenes, so had Rembrandt been in his early years. Nevertheless, Rembrandt had gone on to take in completely the rich pageantry of life. Rembrandt was a humane genius who had a vision of the world that transcended mere subjects or mediums – he was the Shakespeare of painting. Where Vermeer and Metsu had confined themselves to mostly oil painting, Rembrandt had produced drawings in chalk, and ink and etchings that were as great as anything ever done in those mediums. Vermeer and Metsu seemed to look at the work through microscopes – whereas Rembrandt could see the world from on high.                                       

We went to the gallery cafe and had Mocha’s and cakes. Carol had a Carrot cake and I had a Profiterole cake that melted in the mouth. We looked around the gallery bookshop and Carol bought me the catalogue for the Metsu exhibition and bought herself an amazing big book on Henry Darger.                   

As we collected our coats, the friendly girl told us that half the gallery would be closed next year for renovations. The roof was leaking and the heating had to be repaired. She told us also that the Metsu exhibition would be the last major exhibition in a long time because of budget cutbacks. I found it very sad and senseless to cut the funding of our National Gallery. Surely, to God, tourists wanted to come to Dublin to do more than just drink! And what about the up and coming generation of arts lovers and students, how were they going to educate themselves?

The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius

In the last week of March 2009, I went to see The Goldfinch, 1654 by Carel Fabritius’ (1622-54) in the National Gallery. It was on loan from the Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, The Hague. It was the centrepiece of a tiny show Vermeer, Fabritus & De Hooch: Three Masterpieces from Delft. The National Gallery of Ireland had painted the walls a beautiful shade of sky blue, which set off this gem perfectly with its companions; Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid by Johannes Vermeer which our National Gallery owned and The Courtyard of a House in Delft by Pieter de Hooch also on loan. I knew the Vermeer well as a stunning work of genius, so I did not look again at it. I looked at the de Hooch and was impressed by the magical light of his scene of a courtyard. However, I still thought of him as a poor man’s Vermeer. No, I had only come for one reason – to see this little bird.                                                                                                                             

I had first discovered The Goldfinch, in my father’s Heron History of Art books when I was a little boy and I instantly feel in love with it. However, given its location in The Hague I doubted I would ever get to see it in person. The reproduction of the painting in my old book was very crude, dark, warm and yellowed with age - but magical all the same. So to see The Goldfinch in the flesh; the purity of the bone-whites and warm and cool creams of the wall, the subtly modulated dusty blues of the bird box, and the symphony of Naples yellow, burnt sienna and a myriad of flecked greys and ochre’s that made up the bird’s plumage - was intoxicating.                                                                                 

            

It is estimated that during the seventy-five years of the Dutch Golden Age, Dutch painters made around five million oil paintings. That makes The Goldfinch, one of the most precious moments of inspired genius in Dutch art - especially since most of Fabritius’s other works had been destroyed in a catastrophic explosion in Delft.                                                                                                              

Little was known of Fabritius other than he was a star pupil of Rembrandt in Amsterdam and an early teacher of Vermeer in Delft – whose technique he clearly influenced. The history of art was full of hard luck stories, like when Camille Pissarro’s studio was ransacked by Prussian soldiers and many of his paintings were damaged or destroyed. But, Fabritius was even more unlucky. He was killed with all his family in a fluke explosion at a gunpowder factory near his studio that also destroyed much of Delft. He was only thirty-two when he died. The fire also destroyed virtually all his paintings so that there were only about twelve paintings left in the world by this precocious and unfulfilled master.          

                           

The Goldfinch was a small and deceptively simple picture, just a solitary Goldfinch, perched and tethered by a slender chain, on a rail in front of its feeding box. These little birds were common pets in the Dutch Golden Age, where they were nicknamed puttertjes or little water drawers due to their agility at taking in water. Some have seen the Goldfinch as symbolic of Christ on the Cross.         It was 355 years old, yet it was in immaculate condition, a validation of Fabritius’ technique and the care taken over its preservation by the Dutch who considered it one of the most beautiful paintings of its Golden Age. Ironically, this masterful painting may never have been intended as framed painting, but rather (given the thickness of the wooden panel) it might have been meant as a door to another encased painting.                              

                      

It was a poem in paint, in which Fabritius had gone beyond mere trompe-l’oeil –and entered into the soul of this little Goldfinch. The bird is captured almost in mid movement in a blur of brushstrokes. I looked at it repeatedly thinking that at any moment it might to come to life, sing or try to fly away. The brushwork was broad and direct but also very subtle and measured. The ghostly shading of the white wall behind the bird alone was beyond belief. I was astounded by Fabritius ability to shift even the tiniest portions of the painting from super-fine detail to enigmatic suggestion - in the space of a hairs breath. It was at once highly objective in its technique and humane in its vision, fresh in its paint handling and reasoned in its composition – based on an off-set x pattern. And it was the compositional purity and strength of The Goldfinch which drew me back to look and look again – even at home with the excellent postcard I bought of it. It was as close to a perfect piece of painting - as I had ever seen.