The Netherlands: A Study of Some Aspects of Art, Costume and Social Life

By Sacheverell Sitwell

Sacheverell Sitwell goes beyond the generic images of Holland as all museums, windmills, canals, tulips and clogs. Sitwell leads us out of museums and away from the great cities, where tourist, and their guidebooks, usually remain cloistered.

By traveling outside the usual, Sitwell has discovered a new and beautiful Holland in which 18th century architecture, strange villages and costumes of Friesland, and undiscovered artists. Sitwell's account of the Netherlands awakens anew our curiosity in this well trod country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448203444

Sacheverell Sitwell

Sir Sacheverell Sitwell (1897-1988) was a member of the famously talented Sitwell family – the younger brother of Dame Edith Sitwell and Sir Osbert Sitwell. He was educated at Eton College and Oxford and served in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War. He and his siblings were a formidable force in artistic circles and Sacheverell became known for both his art and music criticism, as well as his writings on architecture. Cited in the BBC’s 1986 Domesday project as “a leading authority on Mozart & Liszt”, Sitwell’s excellent books on the lives of composers are still consulted today.

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The Netherlands

I

Introduction

It would be a happy opening to this book upon The Netherlands to describe how I found myself, one February morning in the middle of the war, safe and sound in Rosyth harbour, come up from Portsmouth in convoy, upon first one and then another destroyer of the Hunt class, belonging to the British Navy. Having the honour to be received an hour or two later by the British Admiral in charge, he asked me if I had noticed the pair of destroyers of The Royal Netherlands Navy berthed alongside, and then proceeded to tell me of the gallantry of their officers and crews, and of how he could rely upon them in all circumstances to do their duty. In his opinion, as sailors and mariners, they were second to none, and he spoke of the glories of their naval history and their great commanders. It is in this spirit that we would begin a book treating of Holland and the Dutchmen, for it has to be, above all else, a tribute to their sturdy independence. The very soil of their country is, in large part, due solely to their industry, and such being the case, since they are in a literal sense creators of their native land, their devotion and patriotism have ceased to be legendary and are become a living fact. It stirs the blood, when in Holland, to be told the stories of their brave resistance, and to see still painted upon the house walls the slogans conveying the thanks of the Dutch population to the United States and British airmen. It is touching to travel in a land where to be known for an Englishman means that every door is open to you, and that strangers will come up in the street and take your hand. No book written in English, and dealing with Holland in these tragic times, can begin without acknowledgment of these many acts of friendship. Perhaps this spirit of gratitude and affection is best expressed in the drawing on the cover of the little guide book to the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden, which shows a Canadian and a Dutch soldier, and in between them the crowned lions of Holland. Many, many were the Dutchmen, known and unknown to me, who said that were it not for England, during that fearful year of 1940, Holland, and the rest of Europe, would have gone down, irrecoverably, not to rise again.

Always, I can only imagine, behind the minds of Dutchmen there must be the memory of the terrible struggles by which they won their independence from the Spaniards. That time is not so remote from them, historically. It is but a generation earlier in date than many of the old houses in most of their old towns. And it was followed, immediately, by their golden age. But, in the meantime, the Flemish-speaking portions of the Low Countries relapsed into somnolence. The natives of Flanders were not to distinguish themselves as scientists or explorers. Pieter Breughel, Peter Paul Rubens, were the last great Flemings. But it is necessary to realize that Holland, like Belgium, is an old and essential part of Europe. Flanders, a half of the ancient and vanished Duchy of Burgundy, was a great mediæval centre of culture and of civilization. Its painters and tapestry weavers were among the greatest artists of Western Europe. Its great cities were Brussels and Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent. But the Dutch towns, which succeeded to these, were not content to be merchants for all Europe. Having flung back the Spaniards they sailed forth upon the seven seas. They followed, more particularly, in the track of Portugal, doubling the Cape of Good Hope to the Indies and crossing the South Atlantic to Brazil. Had it been a few years later, the Dutch and not the Spaniards might have been the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. We only recall, here, their discovery of Australia and New Zealand, in order to reflect that these intrepid explorers and mariners, like the burghers of Cape Colony, of Surat and Batavia, like the spice merchants of Ceylon and the Moluccas, came from a handful of small Dutch towns.

During the seventeenth century there can be little doubt that Amsterdam was the richest and most prosperous of European towns. Its rich citizens were merchants, as they were bankers in the century following. But perhaps the greatest single factors in the Dutch good fortune were William the Silent and his great-nephew, known to ourselves as William III, the two heroes of the House of Orange, the one by his patriotic example, and the other for his military genius which kept the French at bay. Their collateral, or remote descendant, Queen Wilhelmina, has been not unworthy of them, and is the living historical link that holds the Dutch together. For their innate conservatism is, probably, the strongest trait in their national character. The Dutch, however, are not reactionary. They are unchanging, which is something different. They cling to their old habits. It is not only because of their waterways and love of kite-flying, because of the pagoda eaves of their bell towers and the sails showing, mysteriously, above the house roofs, that some, not even distant parts of Holland, may remind us of Confucian China. The strongly marked character of the Dutch, it is certain, makes them unlike any other race in Europe. It must be this strength of individuality that defies the laws of nature, and turns one of the smallest into, apparently, one of the most widely extended of European lands. Not, of course, if you fly across it in an aeroplane, but by motor car the polders can seem as lost and endless as the steppes or the prairies. Holland has a static tempo, all its own at all seasons of the year; in the rain (which is not unfrequent), at high summer, or at its most typical when the canals are frozen. And the Dutch painters have made their contribution to this static condition in their quiet interiors and still life paintings.

It is a fact that the majority of books on Holland have been over-weighted with descriptions of Dutch pictures, pages which must amount to a solecism in themselves because all Dutch painters, except Rembrandt, set out to narrate or describe, and not create. Their authors, more often than not, would seem to have visited Holland during the rainy season and stayed indoors, in the museums. They have seen the flower markets, and the cheese markets, but only in between the showers. They have entered the churches, but found the interiors bare and all alike. But Holland, which, as a country, is as individual as Russia or as Spain, calls for more careful treatment. And, in the first place, it has been our endeavour to get out of the museums into the open air—out of the museums and, likewise, away from the great cities, not without having entered, meanwhile, some of the old and forgotten patrician houses of The Hague and Amsterdam. There must be others, besides the writer, to whom these are more interesting than the paintings in the Rijksmuseum. The wooden ships’ models, even the unique and peculiar barrel organs playing on the canal banks, tell us as much of Holland as the canvases by minor painters.

If we would have a vision of the Dutchmen in their golden prime we must see the small old towns, like Hoorn (72) or Enkhuizen (p. 65), remembering that from those now lonely quays, or their like, ships set sail for Surinam and Curaçao in the West Indies, for the lonely and frightful Jan Mayen and for Nova Zembla, for Greenland and down the long coast to what is now New York, for the turtle islands of the South Atlantic, and round The Cape to the fabled Indies, regions that the Netherlands East India Company kept secret, as far as possible, thereby adding to the romance and mystery. The Dutch, it must be realized, had no colonial possessions nearer than several thousand miles distance, or many months’ voyage; they had no Algeria across the Mediterranean, no Madeira in the North Atlantic, but a week or two away. The nearest of their colonies was probably New Amsterdam, which is now New York, while Java, the richest of their settlements, was some ten thousand miles away. It is six or seven weeks’ sail, even now, by fast steamer, to New Zealand, which was the far limit of their explorations. The Japan trade, by which they were much influenced, æsthetically, was their entire monopoly for two centuries. Every old lacquer box, every old saucer of Japanese porcelain in English country houses, came from that small islet of Deshima in the Bay of Nagasaki, to which the Dutch merchants were confined in humiliating but comical conditions from 1641 to 1858, a mudbank 600 ft. long by 240 ft. broad, and only 6 ft. above high tide, upon which sixteen to twenty Dutchmen were allowed to live and carry on their trade. In contrast, we would cite the splendid old Dutch buildings at Batavia and at The Cape, the latter being of particular interest because it has become the vernacular of the Union of South Africa and is the most promising of all colonial styles. The whitewashed walls and curving gables of the farmsteads, the shade of vine and bougainvillea, are in addition to the Dutchmen’s houses as we know them at Haarlem or at Amsterdam. The Cape ‘style’ has produced such delightful, if lesser, masterpieces as the pediment to the wine cellar at Groot Constantia, a sculpture of Ganymede and the Loves by the German Anton Anreith, bathed in the bright sunlight of South Africa, but overhung by the cool green shadow of the oak trees. The most prominent of the architects was Louis Michel Thibault, who had come to The Cape as soldier in a regiment of Swiss mercenaries in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, was appointed chief military engineer, and sent to Paris to study under A. J. Gabriel. Thibault, it is to be noted, died in 1815, and these Cape buildings are a generation later in style than they would have been at home. We must consider, too, that the craftsmen employed were often Malays, excellent carvers and joiners, while, for picturesqueness, we should add the slaves imported from Madagascar or from Mozambique, the dwarfish, yellow-skinned Hottentots or Bushmen being incapable of agricultural labour. And we bid farewell to colonial Holland with this picture of the very wine presses at Groot Constantia from the pen of Lady Anne Barnard who, in 1798, was taken by Mijnheer Cloete into the wine press hall where, she writes: what struck me most was the beautiful antique forms, perpetually changing and perpetually graceful, of the three bronze figures, half-naked, who were dancing in the wine press and beating the drum (as it were) with their feet to some other instrument in perfect time. Of these presses there were four, with three slaves in each. Into the first the grapes were tossed in large quantities and the slaves danced on them softly … this was done to slow music. A quicker and stronger measure began when the same grapes were danced on again.

We have come far, indeed, from the flat waters of the Zuyder Zee. But the Dutch influence was as fertile nearer home, and in a form more typical of the Low Countries than this antique vision of coloured slaves treading down the purple grapes. For Dutch architects and craftsmen went in great number along the Baltic shores. The Bourse at Copenhagen, one of the most conspicuous buildings in the Danish capital, with its high roof gables and its tower crowned with four dragons with entwined tails, is a work of the Dutch Renaissance by Hans van Steenwinkel (1619-40); or there is the Zeughaus at Danzig by Anthony van Obbergen (1602-5). Dutch architects worked at Riga and at Reval in the Baltic provinces, and in Poland. All this is Dutch Renaissance, but the later style, as we should expect, found deep root in England. The characteristic steeples of the City churches owe their form to Dutch examples, not necessarily ecclesiastical, for the pattern of origin was often the tower of a town hall, or a gate tower to a Dutch town. Dutch influence upon Wren may be exaggerated, for he worked at least as much upon French models; but the stepped and curled gables of Holland are to be found in weaver’s villages in East Anglia, while the Customs House at King’s Lynn, or the row of old Dutch houses in the Strand at Topsham, the old port of Exeter, where Dutch ships unloaded clover seed for sale by travelling chapmen in the west of England, these give the entire illusion of The Netherlands set down in England. More universal in influence was the Dutch walnut furniture, or the Dutch garden with its pleached alleys, its brass or lead statuary and coloured pebbles.

But it will be remarked that the following pages, the chief concern of which is with the Dutchmen as a race of artists, have even avoided most of the famous names of painters. This is, for instance, our only mention of The Night Watch of Rembrandt. It could be argued that this is a painting that must be seen unprejudiced, and were that possible, with a mind uncontaminated by all the spate of criticism and descriptive writing. The calm and serene beauties of Vermeer—when he is Vermeer and not van Meegeren—his spatial miracles and exquisite handling, these, too, are better loved, unheralded and in silence. Were the present writer to take up his pen, he would do so, of preference, for the comparatively unknown Polish Rider of Rembrandt, in the Frick Collection, in New York, surely one of the world’s greatest masterpieces of painting. But this wonderful picture is in New York, not The Hague or Amsterdam, and it is soon apparent that no account of Dutch painting, consisting chiefly of cabinet pictures, can be complete that only treats of those paintings still remaining in Dutch hands. It would be possible to write of Frans Hals in situ, for all of his large ‘Shooting Guild’ and ‘Regent’ pictures still at Haarlem. It would be pointless, though, to describe in writing what Hals has set forth and made immortal with his brush. Those are paintings that tell everything; and a mere photograph gives a better account of them than a page of prose. They are among the most wonderful and least poetical triumphs of the human eye and hand.

Lesser masters, Pieter de Hooch or Gabriel Metsu, could be as well written of in London, by walking no further than the Wallace Collection or Trafalgar Square. Or the task could be undertaken in and out of the Louvre; at Dresden, if that still exists; or in New York. In none of the instances mentioned are those masters less fully represented than they are in Holland. If you write of them in Dutch galleries you describe but a portion of their output. It is not even that, as in the case of Pieter Brueghel, a Fleming, the majority of his paintings are in Vienna; or of Van Dyck, another Fleming, that his best portraits are still in England, where he painted them. The pictures of the lesser Dutch masters, as a rule, are evenly distributed, in Holland and in foreign lands. They are the universal comment, by Dutchmen, upon Dutch life. So avidly have they been collected, owing to their easily appreciated qualities, their painstaking accuracy, exact representation of texture and surface, diffusion of light, and exquisite and precise finish, that it may be correct to assume that only a quarter of the Dutch pictures are in Dutch collections. The natural tendency, where the subject is so huge and large, is to choose particular favourites among the painters, to look, for instance, in old flower pictures for old garden flowers, or to study minor artists like the delightful but quite unimportant Pieter Post (1608-69), the painter of Pernambuco, in Brazil. Or there are painters, like the unexpected Pieter Saenredam, who contrived to give to their empty church interiors something of the poetry, and chalky light, of Patinir. There is van der Heyden, who rendered every brick and stone, but who is one of the most beautiful of atmospheric painters; or van Schrieck, who painted reptiles, insects, and curious plants, that in the rhythmic prose of Fuseli, he designed with surprising fidelity and finished with uncommon care. Near Dessau, the old capital of Anhalt, where the military band used to play at midday the Dessauer Marsch, the favourite air of Prince Leopold, the hero of the Seven Years War, upon an islet in the lake at Wörlitz, the prince’s summer residence, there are collected all the known paintings by Abraham Snaphau, a painter of Leyden (and pupil of van Mieris), who is to be seen in no other place. The paintings of church interiors of Amsterdam by Emanuel de Witte, with his figures of ladies and burghers in the dresses of their day, such are pictures that, so to speak, can be gathered together privately, with constant additions, through a lifetime. It would be possible to love exceedingly, in the same manner, the paintings of houses and shipping, the light and floating skies, the clear and transparent waters of Abraham Storck, who was usually content with views along the Y or Amstel, in the immediate neighbourhood of Amsterdam, or still lives of pewter, glass, and silver by Pieter Claesz, paintings which are little miracles in their textures and reflections. Among flower painters, alone, it is possible to range from the simple effects of Clara Peeters, her daffodils and narcissi, bouquets of flowers that could be kept alive in water for as long as she needed them before her, to the huge open red poppies and great cabbage roses of Nicholaes Lachtropius, to the paintings of Jacob van Walskappelle, bouquets that stand in globular glass bottles and that display his extraordinary genius in the variety of their arrangement, the backs of the leaves accentuated, in some, as though the bunch of flowers was fading from long study as, in fact, is the case, for the flower heads are drooping. But there are ears of corn in nearly all his pictures, there are drops of water upon petals and on the table, and a cluster, perhaps, of fresh strawberries, close to a severed pink or a carnation; through the flower paintings of de Heem, van Aelst, Rachel Ruysch, and the host of unknown lesser names, but not minor in their wonderful accomplishment, to the most famous of all, van Huysum, a painter who, it is self-evident, was supplied by the first florists of Holland with their choicest flowers, for his huge flower trophies are resplendent with blue gentians, crown imperials, chequered fritillaries, yellow ‘sulphur’ roses (R. hemispherica), the gayest and most flaunting of the ‘flamed’ tulips, and the double-striped auricula with white paste eye. But it may be that van Huysum is at his most exquisite in water-colour drawings done before the flowers had wilted. If the writer may be allowed a personal preference in Dutch pictures, it would be for the skating scenes and winter Kermissen of Hendrik Avercamp, the deaf-mute of Kampen, pictures which can become a passion, like the cult for Brueghel. His sketches of figures, in watercolour and black chalk, are the most curious costume evidence for seventeenth century Holland, and they produce an extraordinary illusion of living for a few moments, miles away from anywhere, on a winter day in Holland, three centuries ago. But, always, we return to what are perhaps the most typical of Dutch paintings, the pair of courtyards of houses by Pieter de Hooch, in the National Gallery, and if we were to point to a passage in both pictures which is essential to the Dutch master it would be to the long-handled broom in each painting lying or standing upon the tiled floor; or we think again of that supreme masterpiece of the whole Dutch school, The Artist in his Studio by Vermeer, in the Czernin Collection at Vienna. Or is it the View of Delft by Vermeer, in the Mauritshuis at The Hague? There can be exceptional paintings, too, by masters who have become so familiar that they are neglected, such as The Game of Skittles by Jan Steen in the National Gallery, a picture that could hardly be improved upon in sensibility or for skilful manipulation in the medium of oil paint. And how many names there are of great painters whom we have not mentioned! The landscapes of Ruisdael and of Hobbema, the great plains of Hercules Seghers, the moonlit and winter scenes of Aart van der Neer, the golden mists of Cuyp, the sandy dunes of van Everdingen, the painters of shipping, and of the oyster-lined flats and mudbanks along the level shores; the multiplicity of Dutch artists is such that there could be no other school of painting.

This has been our opportunity to speak of painters. No book on Holland can ignore them. But, for the rest, they lie outside the scope of our discussion. Instead, we have attempted to prolong the argument of Dutch architecture into another century, and to extend the golden age of the Netherlands through the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. In this manner we have treated of a considerable body of buildings that have been neglected or forgotten, but without which the vision of that glorious past is unfinished or but half-complete. Trying to see Holland through eyes of our own, and not following, necessarily, in the footsteps of our predecessors, we have been led into directions that may appear unorthodox only because they are not familiar. Space that might have been devoted to Delft or Haarlem, to Rembrandt’s Night Watch, or to the paintings of Frans Hals, has been given, instead, to Friesland, a province of Holland that has the importance and individuality of a separate kingdom, and that yields a rich reward of works of art. It is nearly unknown to Englishmen, omitted by Dutchmen (unless they are Frisians), and could be described, in paradox, as being as unfamiliar as might be East Anglia or Somerset or Shropshire to the Hollander.

In the case of Friesland, more particularly, we have enlarged upon the costumes (4, 57, 79). That is because in those matters it is—or was —one of the most fascinating parts of Europe. The Frisians are an old race; perhaps, physically, they are our closest link with the ancient Germanic past and the living representatives of one branch of the ‘barbarians’ who defied, and then destroyed, the Roman power. For those were of two stocks, the Mongol, or yellow-skinned, more or less, with slit eyes and Tartar features, and the fair-haired Teutons, among whom the Frisians, it may be said, occupied a position halfway between the Anglo-Saxon and the ancient Norsemen. After a comparatively uneventful passage through the Middle Ages, undisturbed by wars and invasions, the bucolic dairylands of Friesland emerged during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and first half of the nineteenth centuries into Arcadian conditions of prosperity and wealth. Under these favouring circumstances their costumes developed to the furthest point of fantasy and elaboration (4), and not only among the farmers and peasants, but with the burghers and small landowners, all pleasantly remote from the high tides of fashion. There were, in addition, the extraordinary communities and sects, and the mariners and sea captains of little ports, like Hindeloopen upon the Zuyder Zee, who were influenced, beyond doubt, by the tales of returned travellers, and who clothed themselves in a mood of sober intoxication (79), a poetical, if stolid trance, developing from the Orient.

At the other end of Holland lies Zeeland, unhappily much devastated by the recent war, and this province can have been little less wonderful in respect of local arts and costumes. The Zeelanders, it may be, are the typical Dutchmen while the Frisians are a race apart. In Zeeland, at