Hendrick AvercampSummer, early 1600s
Room 034. Together with Winter, a pair by the painter of skating scenes. Avercamp was deaf and mute, and his pictures are all about watching.
This is the visit for the fifteen-minute habit. Seventeenth-century Dutch painting was made to be looked at from twenty centimetres, by people who owned the picture and saw it every day. Svetlana Alpers called it "the art of describing": a culture that believed knowledge came through the eye, and painted accordingly. Your Bosch instinct belongs here. Bring a hand lens if you own one.
The pair
Avercamp's Winter against Cranach's Golden Age. Both are full of people, and both are about a community at leisure. One is a Lutheran court's classical fantasy, the other a Calvinist town's actual Tuesday. Which is the more detailed, and which detail is doing the most work?
The pictures
Hendrick AvercampWinter, early 1600s
Room 034. Count the stories. Find the one figure who is looking at you.
Jan SteenThe Oyster Meal, c. 1660–65
Room 038, 38 × 32 cm. Steen is the comic novelist of Dutch painting. Every object is a joke or a warning, and oysters meant one thing in 1660.
Frans SnijdersA Game Shop, 1625–30
Room 038, nearly three metres wide. The museum's text points to the boy who is not quite up to his task, so the hens flutter away. A Flemish market stall as a display of painting skill; Rubens borrowed him for the animals.
Jan van GoyenThe River Oude Maas near Dordrecht, between 1620 and 1656
The tonal landscape; its heir is Jacob van Ruisdael's Mountain Landscape with an Old Oak (1660s, room 034). Van Goyen painted with almost one colour.
Thomas de KeyserFamily Portrait, between 1622 and 1640
An interior: the floor tiles are a lesson in perspective. The same goes for Pieter Janssens' The Messenger (c. 1670–75), where the letter is a plot.
Daniël de BlieckChurch Interior, 1651
A whitewashed Protestant church as subject.
Lucas Cranach the ElderThe Golden Age, after 1534
Room 033. Cranach was Luther's friend and portraitist, and The Golden Age is Wittenberg's idea of paradise. In the same room hang Gerard David's Virgin and Child and two Dürer woodcuts from the Apocalypse (1498). The Dürer prints are what reached Norway first: paper travels.
Jan van der HeydenThe Old Church in Delft, 1675
A detour to floor 1, room 005. The museum's one Dutch cityscape hangs among the design galleries, not on the art floor. Van der Heyden painted brick by brick, and he also invented the fire hose; both belong in the look.
Around the pictures
How did van Goyen paint with almost one colour? Ask the question in front of The River Oude Maas near Dordrecht.
De Blieck: Compare, in your head, with the Catholic altarpieces in room 033, painted a century earlier. The same Low Countries, with a Reformation in between.
The exercise: Pick one picture under 50 cm and do "ten times two" (list ten things, then ten more). Then describe it from memory, without looking. Then look again and note what you remembered wrongly.
Before you go
- Laura Cumming, Thunderclap (2023) Fabritius, de Hooch and Vermeer in Delft, by a critic who looks slowly. The best single book for this visit.
- Hagen and Hagen, Bildbefragungen (Taschen) The chapters on Avercamp, Steen or Bruegel, detail by detail.
- Konsthistoriepodden (in Swedish) on van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait or Vermeer For the train.
- Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983) The introduction and the chapter on maps. Dense; one chapter is enough.
- Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987) Any chapter on food or the home, for what oysters, tiles and letters meant.
- The Rijksmuseum's Night Watch in ultra-high resolution, and the Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights interactive As homework in zooming.
Afterwards
Describe the pictures from memory, without looking at them, and record a voice note.
- The Dutch museum you remember for paintings arranged by historical period was the Amsterdam Museum and its Amsterdam DNA timeline (March 2013). The Rijksmuseum, which since 2013 has hung art and history together by century, is still the natural end of the year.