Ode to Antwerp: the secret of the Dutch mastersuntil September 17 at the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, argues that the key developments underlying the flowering of Dutch painting in the 17th century actually took place in what is now Belgium.
“We wanted to show Dutch public painting from the 16th and 17th centuries, and our project group quickly got to the heart of the matter: without Antwerp in the 16th century, 17th century Dutch art would not have existed”, explains the curator Micha Leeflang.
The exhibition, produced with the Phoebus Foundation in Antwerp, recounts how 16th-century Antwerp painters laid the foundations for techniques typically associated with 17th-century Dutch painting – once known as the Golden Age, although that phrase is to fall of use for its association with slavery.
Antwerp, with its huge inland port, was the original commercial metropolis of northwestern Europe, a furnace for the wool, spice and diamond trade as well as home to a growing middle class that would soon fill its walls with art. The exhibition of around 80 paintings shows how Belgian painters such as Joachim Patinir, Pieter Aertsen and of course Peter Paul Rubens developed techniques that would later be perfected in Amsterdam: genre pieces, realistic portraits, still lifes, landscapes with grainy colors and church interiors.
At the time, the region of Flanders included the Netherlands with an economic center in Antwerp; but in 1585, as the Plains rebels fought an eight-year war with the Spanish government, the city fell and the Protestants were given four years to leave (or convert). This, as the exhibition shows, led to a mass exodus of artists and also of their wealthy buyers.
“The most important Dutch painters of the 17th century were Vermeer, Rembrandt, then Frans Hals – whom the Dutch do not know, was born in Antwerp and went after the fall of Antwerp with his parents to Haarlem”, explains Leefland. “He was proud of his origins and signed several of his paintings ‘Frans Hals d’Anvers’. He’s a typical Dutch painter… who actually wasn’t Dutch at all!
The exhibition shows one of the first Rembrandts, The baptism of the eunuch, alongside a work by Antwerp artist Hans van der Elburcht 60 years earlier – with a similar vertical format and pastel palette. The landscapes of Joachim Patinir, another Antwerp painter, are presented as setting the stage for the panoramic landscapes of Jacob van Ruisdael, “with the typical Dutch cloudy sky”, says Leefland.
Katharina van Cauteren, chief of staff of the Phoebus Foundation, which holds the private collection of Fernand Huts, Karine van den Heuvel and the Katoen Natie company, says it is time to better recognize Antwerp’s influence in “Dutch” art. “.
“A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of opening a major exhibition with the Phoebus Foundation in Denver, Saints, sinners, lovers and fools, which tells the story of Flemish art in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries,” explains Van Cauteren. “I went for a ride, full of enthusiasm, and at the end two people came up to me and asked me: ‘Is that Dutch?’ It was a bit of a revelation. We Flemings are not very good at promoting ourselves, and even in the Netherlands, our closest neighbours, people don’t know that their golden age was born in Antwerp.
