On
a gray and rainy Friday 29th 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 16th 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?