The new sense of prosperity that we find depicted in 17th century still- life painting was not confined to the Dutch table, but to depictions of the houses and streets of towns like Delft and Haarlem. This found its form in a new and poplar genre of painting called the ‘cityscape’, which reflected a collective pride in towns and cities. This pride generated many paintings of city skylines, windmills, and church towers, daily life along canals and in town squares. Perhaps the most famous of these is the panorama of Delft, as seen through the eyes of Vermeer, in his ‘View of Delft’ (below).
This painting and other city-scapes were produced by artists belonging to ‘The Delft School’, a category of mid-17th-century Dutch Golden Age painting known especially for scenes of domestic life, church interiors, courtyards and city streets. Two of the most famous painters in the Delft School were Vermeer (domestic interiors and some city-scapes) and De Hooch (famous for his courtyard scenes). We will look at examples of each, below.
Vermeer, Het Straatje (or View of Houses in Delft)
Vermeer painted primarily interiors and there are only two ‘city-scapes’ known to be by his hand: View of Delft and The Little Street. (The location of the house was recently determined to be Vlamingstraat 40 en 42).
J. Vermeer, Het Straatje (The Little Street), (1658) The Rijksmuseum.
The painting depicts a quiet street in Delft, with women going about their daily tasks. The simplicity of the painting and the intimacy of the domestic scene represented here is echoed in Duncan Tweedale’s poem ‘School of Delft’. Notice how this tone and diction change as the poem moves from the painting to the topic of men and their wars.
‘School of Delft’
A woman in a cap leans in a doorway
and brushes light over a chequered floor.
There’s a child in half-shadow. Something tells
how the long chart of the domestic day
in this same-as-always place reads like a prayer
only a woman or child could learn to say.
Men, if they’re needed, are peripheral;
cock-birds condemned to preen, twirl a moustache,
rest a gloved hand on an insouciant table
while a glove, a map, goblet or candlestick
notes their wraithlike irrelevance, and sniggers
shiver the bowl of a lute hung on the wall.
Years of swordplay have gone, yet there’s the message
of plague still rife, and nights of burning towers.
In times of calm, though, it’s the houses rule,
the soul displaced into worn bricks and tiles,
the warmth of cobblestones and turkey carpets,
a girl shelling peas in a sunlit passage.
We have attributed the painting to Vermeer’s The Little Street. The sparse, but precise, descriptions match this painting and no others of the Delft School (not even De Hooch’s). The poet is not concerned with the details of the painting as much as with the sense of peace and simplicity that the painting creates, until the quiet scene is disrupted by images of ‘preening’ men and their ‘swordplay’- emphasizing that this is a woman’s world depicted here, one populated by house-proud wives and children, going quietly about their daily chores.
Ekphrastically-speaking: Only the first and final lines of the poem refer to the painting at all. But the minimal description in these lines and the generally attributive reference (Differential Model, Robillard) to the School of Delft in the title are sufficient to help us locate the source painting. The second stanza is meditative, and goes beyond this painting to allude to the genre of portraiture (particularly that of men), paintings filled with the ubiquitous objects of male portraits such as maps, goblets, and so on – punctuated by the traditional male portrait pose. The allusion to many other types of painting creates a temporal contextual ekphrasis (Lund). The third stanza is purely meditative (Kranz), as it reflects, not on the painting, but on the ravages of the past that have nothing to do with the quiet of the present street scene: plagues, wars, and the cruelty of Spanish rule placed in juxtaposition with the simplicity of home and a girl shelling peas.
Pieter De Hooch: Courtyards in Delft
De Hooch painted the daily lives of Delft houses and their courtyards. He experimented with light (and was considered a master of this effect, which was more highly regarded than Vermeer’s use of light). But his play on perspective which allowed small glances ‘nooks and crannies’ in his courtyard scenes was unique. His paintings focus on quiet corners of Delft with which De Hooch was familiar: ‘a world of quiet, domestic contentment, of pleasure taken in the performance of simple household tasks and in the appearance of well-ordered surroundings. It is an art which celebrates simple virtues, the efficient running of the home and the conscientious raising of children.’ (Web Gallery of Art: https://www.wga.hu/html). One of the finest examples of these paintings is de Hooch’s ‘Courtyards in Delft’:
Pieter de Hooch: ‘Courtyards in Delft’ (1658) . National Gallery, London
The carefully observed architecture takes precedence over the figures in the painting; the decayed garden wall on the right contrasts with the well-preserved house on the left, where a passage affords a view to the street beyond, and with the freshly swept pavement. Again, as in Vermeer’s The Little Street, this is a woman’s world: a mother cares for her child, while another woman stands expectantly in the doorway. Derek Mahaon, in his poem ‘Courtyards in Delft’ has painted a scene of simplicity and composure. But notice how, as in the Tweedale’s poem on ‘The Little Street’, the poet goes outside the painting itself to reflect on the wider significance of the scene:
Courtyards in Delft for Gordon Woods
Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile –
Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that
Water tap, that broom and wooden pail
To keep it so. House-proud, the wives
Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives
Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate.
Foliage is sparse, and clings. No breeze
Ruffles the trim composure of those trees.
No spinet-playing emblematic of
The harmonies and disharmonies of love;
No lewd fish, no fruit, no wide-eyed bird
About to fly its cage while a virgin
Listens to her seducer, mars the chaste
Precision of the thing and the thing made.
Nothing is random, nothing goes to waste:
We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin.
That girl with her back to us who waits
For her man to come home for his tea
Will wait till the paint disintegrates
And ruined dykes admit the esurient sea;
Yet this is life too, and the cracked
Out-house door a verifiable fact
As vividly mnemonic as the sunlit
Railings that front the houses opposite.
I lived there as a boy and know the coal
Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon
Lambency informing the deal table,
The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon.
I must be lying low in a room there,
A strange child with a taste for verse,
While my hard-nosed companions dream of war
On parched veldt and fields of rain-swept gorse;
For the pale light of that provincial town
Will spread itself, like ink or oil,
Over the not yet accurate linen
Map of the world which occupies one wall
And punish nature in the name of God
If only, now, the Maenads, as of right,
Came smashing crockery, with fire and sword,
We could sleep easer in our beds at night.
(From Courtyards in Delft, Dublin: Gallery Press), 1981
In the first stanza , the poet seems to be addressing not only this painting, but the genre of courtyard paintings in general, pointing out the key elements that belong to this genre (that/Water tap, that broom and wooden pail” and enumerates many of the painting’s details in the plural: house-proud wives, thrifty lives, scrubbed yards. In the second stanza, the poem widens its perspective and mentions everything that courtyard paintings are not, setting up a temporal contextual ekphrasis, ie, placing the paintings in the context of other styles of well-known paintings or genres. There is n’o spinet-playing emblematic of the harmonies and disharmonies of\ love’ (an allusion to Vermeer’s paintings), there are ‘no lewd fish, no wide-eyed bird (which might be an allusion to the surrealistic oeuvre of Hiernoymus Bosch),
no image of a virgin listening to her seducer (an Italianate painting?), and, finally, there is no ‘dirty dog’ or ‘fiery gin’ that we will find in Frans Hals or Jan Steen paintings.
In the third stanza, the poet reflects on the painting as a work of art and its nature as an object ‘frozen’ in time. Indeed, the entire stanza is rhetorical and meditative, although it does contain some details specific to this painting: the ‘outhouse door’ and ‘the girl with her back to us’. The final two stanzas take us entirely away from the painting and meditate on the speaker’s own experience of the place, and the final stanza places the courtyard painting in the context of Dutch expansionism (and its parade of cruelties).
I think that it is safe to say that this poem offers a kaleidoscope approaches to the painting that are not technically ‘ekphrastic’, there are enough hints in the details of the painting given and its direct naming in the title, to lead the reader to the correct source.
Finally, I am including a final ‘courtyard’ poem that is a comment on the frustration that art’s ‘frozen narrative’ creates in the viewer! It’s also a lovely dig at collectors who need to possess these works of art to enjoy them. ***
Enjoy – and see if you can work out the poem’s relationship to the painting (ekphrastically-speaking).
‘A Dutch Courtyard’ (De Hooch’s courtyard paintings)
(Richard Wilbur)
What wholly blameless fun
To stand and look at pictures. Ah, they are
Immune to us. This courtyard may appear
To be consumed with sun.
Most mortally to burn,
Yet it is quite beyond the reach of eyes
Or thoughts, this place and moment oxidize;
The girl will never turn,
Cry what you dare, but smiles
Tirelessly toward the seated cavalier,
Who will not proffer you his pot of beer;
And your most lavish wiles
Can never turn this chair
To proper uses, nor your guile evict
These tenants. What surprising strict
Propriety! In despair,
Consumed with greedy ire,
Old Andrew Mellon glowered at this Dutch
Courtyard, until it bothered him so much
He bought the thing entire.
(from New and Collected Poems, London: Harcourt and Brace)
*I am reminded here of a statement that Elton John made during an interview about his extensive art collection; that he doesn’t like going to museums because he can’t buy anything!
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