Chapter 9: English Poets on Dutch Golden Age Paintings

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, we will explore the fascinating poetry written about Dutch Golden Age Painting. At the same time, the chapter is a summing-up of our exploration of ekphrasis so far. From here on, we will consider not only ekphrastic texts, but other intriguing types of word/image relationships as well (illustration and emblem books, for example). Many of the poems on these paintings were collected by my colleague and friend Helen Wilcox (formerly professor at University of Groningen, now at the University of Wales, Bangor) and myself while we were co-teaching a Master’s course on Word and Image over several years. The body of work that we’ve accumulated is titled “Speaking Pictures: English Poets on Dutch Golden Age Paintings” and we use this for teaching purposes only. In the spirit of passing on the ‘joys of ekphrasis’, we are delighted for the opportunity to share some of them here.

This present chapter will be divided into 5 parts (one posted each week): Dutch Interiors, Portraiture, Still Life, Genre Scenes, City-scapes, and Landscapes. Genre pictures were concerned with “contemporary society and human nature, Still Life with domestic life and collectibles (including flowers), and Seascapes with foreign travel, the sea itself, the grandeur of nature, and so on. Like marine views, Dutch and Flemish landscape paintings were rarely symbolic but were usually rich in associations, ranging from God and all of nature (in this age of observation and exploration) to national, regional, or local pride, agriculture and commerce, leisure time (many Dutch landscapes suggest walks in the countryside, as a break from city life), and the sheer pleasure of physical sensation: fresh air, daylight, wind, moisture, cold and warmth, colors, textures—all of which was seen as God’s creation, and, however immediate, of fundamental or universal significance.” (Walter Liedtke, Metropolitan Museum of Art: Timeline Art History Essays, https://www.metmuseum.org/)

Selecting the Dutch Golden Age for our ekphrastic project was an easy choice for us, as the paintings of this period have inspired generations of writers in all genres, but most particularly poets. The sheer number of poems on Dutch Golden Age painting that has been produced in the 20th – 21st centuries alone is remarkable and a significant number of these have been written by English poets. What is it about this period, these artists, these artworks that has generated such a wide and varied literary response?

First of all, Dutch Golden Age painting marks a departure from the religious art that was typical of the Italian Renaissance and, instead, it represented everyday domestic life, most notably through still-life painting (flower pieces, food, dead animals) and homely scenes. According to the French painter and writer Eugene Fromentin (1820-1876), who was largely responsible for drawing wide attention to Dutch Golden Age painting,  Dutch art was  ‘truthful, familiar, and natural’, it followed ‘moral roots’, which were based on ‘domestic virtues taken from private life’. On its style, Fromentin states that Dutch drawing was precise and intimate and the colouring strong, with the effect of making us feel as though we are there: ‘we live in the picture, we walk about in it, we look into its depths, we are tempted to raise our heads to look at its sky. Everything unites to produce this illusion.’ Most importantly, it is the portrayal of a common humanity that inspires in us, the viewers, a sense of empathy and timelessness. As Fromentin points out:

“I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow mortals than a life of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors , to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noon-day light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, and her stone jugs, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessities of life to her.” (Enchanting the Eye, p. 39)

This ‘turning’ from ‘cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sybyls, and heroic warriors,  in other words, from Italian Renaissance subjects, to the everyday of Dutch interiors may explain the impact these paintings have had on the literary world as well. There are several novels written on Dutch Golden Age painting (see ‘Suggested Reading’), and a massive body of poetry. Perhaps it’s not surprising, considering the richness of the paintings, the familiarity of their scenes, and the narrative possibilities they offer. As Christopher Lloyd puts it, these possibilities ‘stem from the accessibility of the subject matter’; from the deeper meaning given to the ordinary. In particular, their ‘engagement with issues that are pertinent to the modern world means that it (17th Century Dutch Art) transcends the boundaries of the Golden Age.’ (Enchanting the Eye, 41)

Part 1: Dutch Interiors

The following two poems are responses to the simple beauty of Dutch interiors and reflect many of the points made above.  The first poem, appropriately titled ‘Dutch Interiors’ (Jane Kenyon) even begins with a reference to Italian and Northern European art and its stark contrast to the warmth of the domestic interiors of  Dutch painting.

 

1. “Dutch Interiors”, Jane Kenyon

Still Life with Cheeses, Floris Van Dijk( 1615), Rijksmuseum

 

Christ has been done to death
In the cold reaches of northern Europe
A thousand thousand times.
Suddenly bread
and cheese appear on a plate
beside a gleaming pewter beaker of beer.

Now tell me that the Holy Ghost
does not reside in the play of light
on cutlery.
A Woman makes lace,
with a moist-eyed spaniel lying
at her small shapely feet.
Even the maid with the chamber pot
is here; the naughty, red-cheeked girl….

And the merchant’s wife, still
in her yellow dressing gown
at noon, dips her quill into India ink
with an air of cautious pleasure.

(From Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (St. Paul: Graywolf Press).

 

Jane Kenyon’s wonderful depiction of the spiritual in the ordinary begins with a rejection, in the first stanza, of the religious themes that dominated art until that point. The line ‘Christ has been done to death’ has a double meaning here; first, it refers to the many painted religious scenes which focus on the death of Christ, but the words ‘done to death’ also mean these scenes have been ‘overdone’, betraying an exasperation, even boredom, with the genre. With the ‘sudden appearance’ of still lifes, in the second stanza, we sense a new aesthetic order where the skilled hand of the artist can make light ‘play’ on table settings and where cheese on a plate, instead of Christ on a cross, now takes center stage. What Kenyon does next in the poem is to refer to several types of Dutch interior scenes as examples, ones that may remind of us of particular paintings or artists, or give a general sense of the peopled interiors that have become so familiar in art books or museums that we have visited. In this way, we sense that something new and exciting has happened to art, something that depicts familiar scenes that we can identify with.

Kenyon’s ekphrastic poem does not directly name specific paintings, but it does allude to familiar domestic topics (lacemakers, women at writing desks, lazy maids). Although she does describe some details of the paintings that could lead us to the source, it helps to have some knowledge of the period and artists to sleuth out which paintings she has in mind. Most of us have seen these artworks in museums or in art books, so we might have already recognized Vermeer’s ‘Lady Writing a Letter’ (below). The picture below that is by Nicholas Maes, titled ‘The Old Lacemaker’, is a bit more difficult. There were many ‘lacemakers’ painted by Maes’ and his contemporaries, so without more information, alighting on the right one is a challenge. (You will notice that the lacemaker pictured below can’t be the right one either, as it does not show a spaniel at the old woman’s feet. But since Maes’s painting is one of the most well-known among others of its type, I included it here as a nice example of a genre. If anyone can find a lacemaker with spaniel at her feet, please let me know!)

‘Lady Writing a Letter’, Johannes Vermeer (1665), National Gallery, Washington DC.

 

‘The Old Lacemaker’, Nicolaes Maes, 1655, Mauritshuis.

Lacemaker with spaniel! With thanks to Cecily (see comment section)

 

Ekphrastically speaking: Since none of the paintings are directly named, but referred to by allusion, the poem is not strongly Attributive, according to the Differential Model. Some, but not all, of details of the paintings are given, so the poem is only slightly Depictive. Kenyon seems mostly concerned with the general topics of Dutch Golden Age Interior paintings rather than re-creating paintings in their full detail –  and so the poem can be said to be more Associative. In it’s reflection on the refreshing difference between Dutch Golden Age painting as compared to ‘dead’ religious painting  begun with the Italian Renaissance, Kenyon has set up a contextual ekphrasis (temporal) that places the Golden Age ‘present’ in contrast to paintings from different periods and places: paintings that had dominated the European artworld to that point. I might add here that this poem would be classified as a “one-to-many” type of ekphrasis (one poem about many paintings), as described by Tamar Yacobi in “The Ekphrastic Model: Forms and Functions” (Robillard and Jongeneed, eds: Pictures Into Words, Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995).

 

2. “The Music Lesson”, Mark Wormald

This is one of my favourite ekphrastic poems! It is a poet’s personal response to the simple beauty of Vermeer’s paintings, and specifically The Music Lesson’ or Lady at the Virginals with Gentleman’ and praises the artist’s remarkable command of light and his use of perspective. All objects in the painting draw our attention to the man and woman standing by the virginal at the back of the room.  On the floor, we see a cello, half-hidden, and a virginal with the inscription “MUSICA LETITIAE CO[ME]S / MEDICINA DOLOR[IS (‘Music is a companion in pleasure and a balm in sorrow.’ ). According to a commentary by the curator of the Royal Collection, the inscription “suggests that the artist is exploring the relationship between the two figures.  The presence of two musical instruments in the composition implies shared pleasures and a potential harmony.  This theme is echoed by the rapt expression on the man’s face, as he listens to the woman or sings as she plays on the virginal”.  Let’s see how the poet, Mark Wormald’ explores the the painterly and thematic aspects of this remarkable painting.

Vermeer: The Music Lesson, (1665), Royal Collection, London

 

Vermeer, I’d forgotten how you made me love
Your light, and each rapt stage it plays upon.
How, in this Delft ante-room, you humble
The expectant surface – each tile’s marble
Sharing its unique disappointments with
That jug, that tray, most of an empty chair,
A cello nursing its neglected head
Just out of view and concentrate instead

On the domestics. Look at this drape, thrown
By its boldness, amazing a table;
The virginal’s gilt case a consolation
For the absence of keys (hidden, like her hand,
By her full dress?); that mirror, calm above
Her coy averted head on the far wall,
Asking its own questions from a dull
Frame. How long, I wonder, have those eyes known

They are the instrument her tutor plays
As his hand tightens – look! – around a cane
Under a landscape he has to disdain?
And would it flatter her to find her face
Reflected, compromised, reserved, caught
Between that drape and an easel’s crude support,
Or put her nose out of its painted joint
Seeing it varnish your vanishing point?

 

From the poem’s title and very first line, both artist and artwork are directly named, leaving no question as to what artwork we are ‘seeing’. In expressing his ‘love’  for Vermeer’s use of light, the poet draws our attention to one of the most important aspects of Vermeer’s technique: his ability to re-create the magnificent light streaming through Dutch windows. In invoking the artist’s practice of ‘humbling the expectant surfaces’ with ordinary objects such as jugs or carpets, the poet emphasizes the artwork’s place within the genre of Dutch Domestic Interior painting. From the mirror’s ‘crude frame’ to the unattractive landscape that the young tutor ‘has to disdain’, Wormald leads us around a very ordinary Dutch domestic scene. It is nothing spectacular or grand; even the very surfaces are ‘disappointed’ with the objects thrown on them. All of this ‘ordinariness’ leads ultimately to the background, framing a coy girl whose averted face is reflected in the mirror above a virginal, along with the artist’s easel, the viewpoint from which this scene is recorded. Wormald even captures the tension between the girl and her teacher – and ultimately, between the girl and the painter, whose unrelenting gaze turns her into an artistic object, her nose ‘a vanishing point’ to serve the demands of perspective.

Ekphrastically Speaking: Mark Wormald’s “The Music Lesson” is a vivid and clearly-marked ekphrastic poem. It directly names both artist and artwork (and therefore is highly Attributive, according to the differential model), describes nearly every detail of the painting (and therefore is highly Depictive), and in his repeated reference to the everyday nature of its domestic interior, he places Vermeer’s painting firmly within the tradition of this genre (and therefore is highly Associative). In leading us around the scene, Wormald uses a method that is mentioned in Kranz’s Categories: the Rhetorical – specifically, the speaker in the poem is discussing aspects of the painting with someone else. Although the first stanza is addressed to Vermeer, the rest of the poem seems to be a conversation between two viewers, one leading the other: ‘look at this drape’, ‘that mirror’ and again, ‘look’. In this way, Wormald is leading us through the painting, making us see it as he does.

By considering both poems through our ‘ekphrastic lens’, we can easily see how differently they approach their subjects: the first uses allusion, few details, speaks in terms of generalizations and more or less leaves it to the reader to figure out which specific paintings might have inspired the poem; the second poem leaves no doubt about its source and uses the art of description to ensure that the reader becomes a ‘viewer’ of a specific painting. Two ekphrastic poems, two  poetic approaches: one structured to make us think about the uniqueness and impact of Dutch Golden Age Interiors, the other to ponder the brilliance of one of its painters. But the two poems are similar in the way they draw our attention to, what Fromentin called, ‘all those cheap common things which are the precious necessities of life..’

 

Addition: Nicholas Maes, ‘Sleeping Maid and her Mistress’.

Note: See image added to Kenyon’s poem: Wybrand Hendricks, The Lacemaker …with spaniel! With thanks to Cecily (see comment section)

Below I am adding an additional image to give another example of generic scenes that are referred to in Kenyon’s poem: the idle, naughty maid. These images have everything to do with extolling the domestic virtues (embodied by the mistress) and condemning their opposites, often represented by servants.

Some paintings come very close to those suggested in Kenyon’s poem but, with the exception of the clear allusion to Vermeer’s Woman Writing a Letter,   I think, on the whole, that Kenyon is lumping generic images into one poem, to make her point about the variety of familiar domestic objects and scenes that define Dutch art.  But Kenyon’s non-specific diction (cheese appears on a plate, light shines on cutlery), as well as a parade of familiar characters that people many domestic landscapes, it might be assumed  that the ‘here’, where they all appear, could be a generalized space, ie: Dutch paintings of this period. (I would love to be proven wrong on this, by the way. Maybe such a packed canvas can be found in one of Jan Steen’s boozy scenes? )

 

‘A Sleeping Maid and her Mistress’
‘Interior with a Sleeping Maid and her Mistress’
(Paul Durcan)

Maids are gone to pot.
Look at my maid.
Look at her. The puss on her.
Depression, no less.
What next?
Complains that she is worn out
From having to make love to my son.
What does she think I pay her for?
For washing up dishes?
For scouring pans?
For walloping pots?
My dear little son Tom
Likes his slice of breast
And he is a curious little boy
Which is why I pay her a penny a week
To instruct him in the facts of life
And to keep it clean in my kitchen.
A penny a week may not be much to you
But it is a lot to me
Married as I am to a stockbroker in Godalming.
I have my hands full
– The Lord love me –
Playing daylight Bridge
In the front parlour.

(From Give Me Your Hand)

The next entry: Portraiture.