ONLINE LINDA BLAIR ART HISTORY LECTURE

In his last years, buffeted by grievous personal and financial losses, Rembrandt turns inward. The cockiness of youth yields to a tragic vision of age and loss. Western art has never experienced such magnificent examinations of what it is to be human. Rembrandt’s portraits present compelling, sentient beings, who think… feel… remember. This is an art that reveals us to ourselves, informs us, defines and enlarges our humanity. Rembrandt’s depictions of man's inner life, and of the tragedy of life, transcend boundaries and borders, time and place.

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When the young Rembrandt arrives in Amsterdam in 1631, he is not only ambitious, but judging from his self-portraits of that period, brash and cocky, confident of his artistic power. Determined to prove that he was the equal of the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, recognized by all Europe as the greatest artist of the age, Rembrandt paints in Rubens’ Baroque style. But a decade later, Rembrandt realizes that despite the drama and theatrical lighting effects of Baroque art, characteristics he will retain, he needs to seek a deeper, more profound, art. In short, his unrelenting need for drama deepens as he moves toward the drama of the soul.

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This lecture will be a meditation on Jan Vermeer, an artist today celebrated in literature and movies, but forgotten until the 1850s, when a French art critic stumbled upon a masterpiece, View of Delft,” by a mysterious artist he thought might be named “Meer,” and devoted the rest of his life to searching for more “Meers.” Today, of course, Vermeer's crystalline cubes of light-filled space and his meditative, solitary women make him one of the most revered of painters.

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The lecture examines in greater depth the paintings the Dutch loved to see on their walls: landscapes, evocations of a land dearly wrested from the oppressive rule of Spain and from the sea; still lifes, from glorious floral bouquets sparkling with butterflies to dour skulls and smoking candles; genre painting, scenes of everyday life, evidence of a people able to laugh at themselves, and evocations of the Dutch love of the pleasures and solace of the home.

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It is most certainly not an overstatement to refer to 17th century Dutch art as a “Golden Age.” In the space of just three generations, tiny Holland burst forth with genius—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals. and many other brilliant, innovative artists. What caused such a glittering galaxy of truly great painters? What unique historical imperatives account for this singular phenomenon, this artistic anomaly that has no parallel in the European experience?

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It was Brigadoon! The stuff fantasy is made of: it alighted to earth in a blaze of brilliance, this glorious, Golden Age of Dutch art, but in the next moment, it vanished. The very words, Golden Age, summon visions of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and many other brilliant artists. There is no equivalency in Western history for the phenomenon of 17th-century Holland. How to explain it? Three words: independence, Protestantism, prosperity. Its long, ultimately victorious war of independence from Spain freed the Dutch from the only power structures Europe had ever known–king and Church. A new ruling class emerges, a solid middle class that guides the state and quickly garners immense riches from its maritime empire. But lurking within that wealth was a serpent: Calvinist structure against ostentation in any form. There was only one way to sublimate their riches: art, paintings. (There were more artists than bakers in mid-century Amsterdam.)

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