Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel

"I included that book partly for personal reasons because I’m someone who loves Victorian novels almost as much as I love Dutch painting! And so, it was helpful for me to understand the origins of my own personal artistic tastes and to see that that really has been a shared taste for a long time. I think one thing that she makes clear is that, in a sense, we still look at 17th-century Dutch art with 19th-century eyes. That cliché about it being a realistic transcription of everyday life is one of the clichés of 19th-century art criticism. And those clichés often have much less to do with what 17th-century Dutch people wrote about their own art, where they seem to value things that are very different from what we value. “Is there something irreducible in the greatest Dutch art that you can’t boil down to historical context?” I think it’s very helpful to have the sort of reception history that Yeazell charts there. Also, just as I love how Doty wrote about what he had learned as a poet from being an admirer of Dutch painting, I loved reading Yeazell’s account, for example, of George Eliot being liberated by looking at Dutch art in Munich and finding an aesthetic model for the kind of writing that she wanted to do. That sort of cross-media artistic inspiration across centuries is fascinating to me. Well, one thing that I find very gratifying every day in my work as a curator of Dutch art is how many people—ordinary museum-goers—come up to me and tell me that it’s their favourite thing at the museum. I think there is something very enriching and inspiring to people in seeing historical art in which they recognise themselves. It’s difficult in a scene of Greek mythology and heroic nudity to recognise yourself as a 21st-century person but when you’re looking at a scene of domestic life, you can see very familiar things. “Schama himself is explicit in making some parallels between, particularly, contemporary American culture and the Dutch Golden Age” And I think that is a powerful way for people to see across the centuries, to recognise themselves mirrored in a sense. As an academic historian of art, I have to remind people about all the ways in which the past was different—it was a foreign country—but I don’t think we should discount the power of that recognition and particularly when we live in a society that struggles with materialism, with consumption, with ambivalence about our own abundance—there are a lot of lessons to be learnt from the 17th-century Dutch. And Schama himself is explicit in making some parallels between, particularly, contemporary American culture and the Dutch Golden Age. I think Schama also does a wonderful job of pointing out the strangeness of some of the rituals of daily life even as, ultimately, I think he gives a very sympathetic and appealing account of the Dutch. That’s a wonderful question. Absolutely, there are a number of major figures in 17th-century Dutch art who were women. There was a genre painter named Judith Leyster, who has a wonderful self-portrait that you can see at the National Gallery in Washington. She eventually married another painter and largely gave up her career. But there are other major figures, particularly in still life painting, because that was a genre that was more open to women because it didn’t require training in figure-drawing after the nude model. For example, there’s an artist called Rachel Ruysch who had a hugely successful career and became a court painter to a German prince and is one of the greatest figures in Dutch still life painting. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I hope people will discover their own personal relationships with Dutch art and be inspired by these books to go to their local museum. There is a lot of Dutch art in museums all over the world. Dutch painters were enormously productive and there has been a sustained taste for their work. Particularly here in New York, it was the most coveted art for 19th-century Gilded Age collectors, which is why we have such a rich collection at the Met. There’s been a very interesting identification with the Dutch at different moments—like 19th-century New York and 18th-century France—when people felt a particular emotional connection to the Dutch Golden Age that they expressed through collecting. And, thanks to the access that museums provide, that experience is more available than ever."