The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

"Every book I’ve mentioned so far is relatively easy and enjoyable to read, but I thought I’d give you a difficult one. This is a wonderful book, but it is not an easy read. She’s arguing that maps and mapping are a way of understanding much of Dutch art. She’s absolutely brilliant in the way that she shows that Dutch art is, in many ways, following the mariners, the tradition of seagoing. A lot of maps actually appear in the background of the paintings she’s talking about. But it’s more than that—it’s an epistemological way of approaching it. Mapping and describing come naturally to the Dutch for all sorts of reasons. It is a very challenging and original way of responding to Northern art, to Dutch art in particular, which has been a bit absent. It’s obviously there in Honour and Fleming, but not so much in the John Berger or the Nochlin. It’s nice that Dutch art is given a little special attention here. That’s certainly true, although she shows how the great artists can ring the changes, like Vermeer . She explains how brilliant Vermeer’s art of describing is, the way he avoids contour but instead uses modeling with light, and how a lot of his work can be understood with Dutch cultural context. It’s a difficult society to understand, having an emphasis not only on hierarchy but also on Calvinism. This is something which is very interesting in Vermeer’s paintings. He was a Catholic so working against the grain and yet at the same time celebrating some of those Calvinist-inspired values. This is taken up by Simon Schama’s very good book, The Embarrassment of Riches , which he wrote at roughly the same time as Svetlana Alper’s but has got a different take on it. He comes at it much more from the political and economic side, but I think that her work is still preeminent in this particular field. Let’s be careful about context here. There was a proposal to abolish the A Level, but it was quickly brought back from the dead. Eton College had already abandoned the A Level and moved to Pre-U. Most subjects at Eton are now Pre-U, which stands for pre-university. It’s more difficult than A Level and it’s run by the Cambridge International Examinations Board. However, if that hadn’t been invented, we’d still be with the A Level. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching A Level course, which I did for 25 years. “Why should any child study art history? It sums up human life.” Why should any child study art history? It sums up human life. The same issues that might be involved in geography or English or economics come into art history: poverty and wealth, the growth of cities, the landscape, colonialism. You can study Gaugin, or you can study Manet, but it’s the same issue. The great stories in poetry or novels or drama you can also find in great paintings. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is the story of the Creation and the Fall of Man. All the excitement and humanity of human beings is there, as in any great artist’s work, right up to the present day with David Hockney. So art history is humanity in the most important sense of the word. It is something that young people should be allowed to study if they are interested. It does require a good visual memory. It’s not for everyone. As with the study of physics and chemistry, there are complicated technical terms. It’s not an easy subject for the mentally lazy. It used to. It must be clear that you’re sitting in a darkened room looking at slides—this is still the case, as it was when Anthony Blunt was teaching at the Courtauld. There’s a temptation for the slacker to think a darkened room looks nice. But any good teacher pounces on people and asks, ‘What does that look like? What have you learnt here? What’s new about this and do you think that succeeds or not? Is that a balanced painting or not? Is this a moral subject well expressed or is there some problem here? When you’re looking at Degas’s famous pastels of naked women—where he wanted to show the woman, as he put it, “like an animal” and they’re observed as though through a keyhole like a voyeur—does one feel uneasy about this, especially in the year 2019 after Me Too?’ You’ve got to make it quite difficult, because its reputation used to be of a fairly easy ‘A’ level or Pre-U. But I think and hope that reputation is not the same today."