Questions of Dutchness

Svetlana Alpers

• Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580-1620 by Wouter Kloek, translated by Michael Hoyle
  Yale, 720 pp, £60.00, January 1994, ISBN 0 300 06016 5

Until not so long ago it seemed Fromentin had got it right in 1876 when he celebrated Dutch art as offering a portrait of a new, free state: ‘un Etat nouveau, un art nouveau’, as he put it in Les Maîtres d’ autrefois, an account of his travels through Belgium and Holland. The humanised universe of Italian painting, with its emphasis on an idealised human body – indeed, the very notion of a universal humanity – was replaced, as he saw it and as many have seen it since, by the depiction of a specific and most ordinary visible world: a particular place, its towns, its landscape, its skies, domestic settings, the manners of its people. In Dutch paintings, Fromentin wrote, man was as put back in his place or simply done without. The emergence of such an art during the first decades of the 17th century seemed related to the truce concluded with Spain in 1609 and hence to the birth of a Dutch nation.