Master I.S., Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left, ca. 1650. Private collection, courtesy of Nicholas Hall.

A long absence from Leiden

Before last week, I hadn’t been to the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden since January 1978. Back then, I was 22 y.o., and one of ten graduate students on a tour of Netherlands art museums. Our guide was Franklin Robinson, an expert in early modern Dutch Art and a man of limitless enthusiasm. “Uitstekend!” he’d exclaim, before picture after picture. He expounded upon everything on view, I’m sure, plus artworks in storage – and I tried to absorb it all. But the only thing in the collection I clearly remembered when I returned 47 years later, was David Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life with Portrait of a Young Painter (1651). Seeing it again, it prepared me for a remarkable exhibition at the Lakenhal called Masterful Mystery – On Rembrandt’s Enigmatic Contemporary (until March 8) about an artist known to us only as Master [or Monogrammist] I.S. His art – which mostly consists of hyper-realist tronies, or character studies such as Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left, ca. 1650 – marks the boundary between non-portrait and portrait, as does Bailly’s. But I.S.’s works have a greater verism and poignancy than Bailly’s, Jan Lievens’ or almost any other Dutch artist of the time, save perhaps Johannes Vermeer. To me, his art anticipates nothing so much as photographs by 20th-century documentarians like the Americans Dorothea Lange, or better, Diane Arbus. But how did this strange and affecting body of work come to exist? Whodunit and why?

David Bailly, Vanitas Still life with Portrait of a Young Painter, 1651. Leiden, Lekenhal Museum.

Bailly’s Vanitas Still life with Portrait of a Young Painter

The subject matter of Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life is literally written on the picture, on a cartellino at the bottom right: “Vanitas vani(ta)tum et omnia vanitas.” The line comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2-4:

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. /What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? /One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”

Dutch Calvinists of the 17th century adapted as creed this dour corner of the Hebrew bible, preaching that Christ provided an alternative to the depraved pursuit of worldly goods. Drawing upon Paul’s letters to the Romans and Galatians, they argued that salvation comes through faith alone, and that all work is a calling from God: “Your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 15:58). It’s a suitable belief for a nation of traders, manufacturers, investors and savers. Max Weber saw it as a “Protestant ethic” underlying an emerging “spirit of capitalism.”

Yet few nations have ever been more focused on material life and the accumulation of wealth than the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age. The contradiction between Calvinist frugality and capitalist accumulation was resolved by a veritable army of talented ideologists, including artists of genius like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals and many others. They managed at once to affirm and deny the moral validity of wealth and splendor, celebrating abundance while also preaching the virtue of its absence. Bailly’s painting is filled with luxurious tokens of worldly knowledge and aesthetic refinement – pearls, a flute, sculptures, coins, fine glassware, silver, prints, papers and an inkwell; but it also contains apprehensions of transience and death – soap bubbles, an hourglass, wilting flowers, a half-burned candle and a skull. Freud might have learned about dream interpretation (“turning [one thing] into the opposite”) from Dutch still-life paintings such as Bailly’s: luxury signifies paucity; dearth suggests lavishness, vanity stands for modesty.

The figures in Vanitas Still Life are as paradoxical as the props. The seated young man at left with ample chin and pursed lips is clearly an artist — he holds in his right hand a maulstick, used for steadying a paintbrush, and is accompanied by objects typically found in an atelier – paintings, a drawing and print tacked to the back wall, a Roman-style bust and Baroque sculpture of St. Sebastian. But is this a portrait – perhaps of the young Bailly himself – or a tronie? And what about the paintings on display? The old man within an oval (in an oblong canvas) could be a self-portrait. The artist was 67 when he painted the work. The young woman could be Mrs. Bailly, decades earlier, and the ghostly figure on the wall behind the flute glass the artist’s wife in her maturity. Nobody knows for certain, and it’s not even clear whether the artist did.

Bailly was working with a set of conventions in flux. Portraiture was in crisis even as it reached its creative apotheosis. By the mid-1650s, Frans Hals’s career was in shambles. Rembrandt’s too: his dark, thickly impastoed surfaces and figures with soft but still penetrating gazes – eyes that follow you around the room – were disfavored by a gentry that increasingly preferred the elegance and insouciance associated with the French court of Louis XIV. He would die penniless in 1669. Until Van Gogh, more than two centuries later – another Dutchman who died broke –there was no greater portrait painter.

Portrait theory

Portraiture is a type or “genre” of art. Its purpose is to represent individuals or groups so they can be recognized by viewers. A portrait doesn’t have to closely resemble its subject, however, to be successful, as long as it is accepted as a likeness. Shakespeare may have looked like the figure in the famous Chandos canvas, but that’s irrelevant to its status as a portrait. Anytime we view a bust-length figure – high forehead, long, thin moustache, short beard, shiny loop-earing and lace collar – we know we’re looking at a portrait of the greatest of all English writers.

Even highly abstracted treatments of a face and body may be portraits. Picasso’s Cubist Portrait of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1910) doesn’t look much like photos of the famous art dealer, but the title of the work assures us it’s him. The........

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