Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  And there were plenty more ‘Dutch’ Turners to come: a whole sequence of them in the 1830s and ’40s, in which the paragon was not Cuyp, but Jacob van Ruisdael. It doesn’t say a lot for Ruskin’s own attentiveness to, or familiarity with, the whole range of Dutch painting that he regrets that Ruisdael never turned his hand to painting rough water, when in fact English collections had countless examples of Ruisdaels in precisely this vein and which were so clearly the departure point for many of Turner’s most powerful choppy-seas pictures, including the stunning Port Ruysdael of 1827, now in the Mellon Center for British Art at Yale. (How much of a gesture of homage did Turner have to make before Ruskin would acknowledge it?)

  There was another aspect of these sea paintings which was obviously inconvenient for Ruskin’s determination to make Turner the embodiment of everything Dutch art was not: namely their Whiggism. The Prince of Orange, William III Embarked from Holland and Landed at Torbay, November 4th 1688 after a Stormy Passage was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832 and was thought then – and now – to be an allegory of the Parliamentary Reform Act of the same year, a campaign into which Turner’s patron, Walter Fawkes, MP, threw everything he had. Whether or not William III’s ‘stormy passage’, dramatically sketched in on the left of the picture, did refer to the proceedings in Parliament, there’s no doubt at all that Turner meant to make a connection between the canonical scripture of the Glorious Revolution and the consummation of that tradition of Whig liberty in the act of 1832. The picture, then, is a supreme instance of Turner doing something which Ruskin’s view of him precluded: drawing inspiration from the tradition of Dutch painting, especially its dramas of light and darkness, in order to make visible an historical theme which, at least in the terms of its sympathetic protagonists, was morally and constitutionally heroic.

  When Ruskin returned to the attack in volume V of Modern Painters, published of course in 1860, he had not seen any reason to moderate his hostility. Quite the opposite in fact. The last part of the book, ‘Of Inventions Spiritual’, which contains some of Ruskin’s most wonderful literary pyrotechnics, is a critical review of the landscape tradition in European painting, beginning with the lofty heroes – Titian and Veronese – and ending with the low villains, or rather the clowns, as Ruskin calls them more than once, not just Cuyp but new targets of his excoriation: Teniers and Wouwermans. Rubens, who gets to share a chapter with Cuyp, is not treated to quite the same roasting, but he is patronised by Ruskin in, if possible, an even more deadly manner, as ‘a healthy, worthy, kind-hearted courtly-phrased Animal – without any clearly perceptible traces of a soul except when he paints his children’. And it is not just in Rubens, but in Dutch painting generally, this obstinate earthiness, which for Ruskin makes Netherlandish art finally so irredeemable. The whole point of art being, for Ruskin, the transcendence of the material conditions of its production, Netherlandish painting was something which remained locked up in so much pigment, canvas and linseed oil. It was only to be expected, then, that when Dutch painters turned to animals, they should treat them as so much material stock-in-trade, the seventeenth-century equivalent of air-brushed lustrous advertising copy: ‘Paul Potter their best herd and cattle painter does not care even for sheep but for wool; regards not cows but cowhide’, incapable of perceiving ‘any condition of an animal’s mind except when it is grazing’. Veronese, on the other hand, seems to have a direct line to what Ruskin calls ‘the spiritual view of the dog’s nature’, while ‘the dog is used by Teniers and many other Hollanders merely to obtain unclean jest; while by the more powerful men, Rubens, Snyders, Rembrandt it is painted only in savage chase or butchered agony’.

  The two chapters which follow are best summed up by Ruskin’s opening of chapter VIII in which he contrasts Wouwermans and Fra Angelico – ‘Having determined the general nature of vulgarity we are now able to close our view of the character of the Dutch school.’ And Ruskin’s preceding chapter on distinguishing between vulgarity and gentility is one of the least rewarding and tendentious in the entirety of Modern Painters, soaked in a kind of moral snobbery which on the page at least reads even more odiously than the regular social kind. But by this point there is absolutely no stopping him in his Manichaean opposition between the forces of good and wickedness. The ‘Hollanders’, as he calls them, turn out to be defective painters because they lived in a defective world: a world of cabbages and wool. It is a stupid world, bound to create stupid art in the literal sense of inducing stupor in those who behold it: Cuyp, of course, a ‘brewer by trade’ whose work ‘will make you feel marvellously drowsy’; a world, too, from which God has been completely banished. In their ‘pastoral landscape we lose not only all faith in religion but all remembrance of it. Absolutely now at last we find ourselves without sight of God in all the world.’ As a view of Jacob van Ruisdael’s mature landscapes, this reading would be forgivable in its obtuseness, I suppose, if the overwhelmingly self-evident spirituality of so many of those great paintings, most obviously of course with the two versions of the Jewish Cemetery, remained generally obscure to nineteenth-century critics. But of course they didn’t. At least since Goethe and Hegel, if not before, Ruisdael’s obvious transcendentalism had been the subject of innumerable essays and critical investigations: none of them, I suppose, read or at least taken on board by Ruskin. But as he warms to his task Ruskin reveals himself, I think, to be part of that strain, not entirely pleasant in nineteenth-century moral criticism, which is intent on pinning down and pinning the blame on specific historical moments when the Christian inheritance was sold off for pieces of silver. It’s worth quoting this extraordinary passage in full: ‘being without God in all the world,’ then:

  So far as I can hear or read, this is an entirely new and wonderful state of things achieved by the Hollanders. The human being never got wholly quit of the terror of spiritual being before. Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Hindoo, Chinese, all kept some dim, appalling record of what they called ‘gods.’ Farthest savages had – and still have – their Great Spirit or, in extremity, their feather idols, large-eyed, but here in Holland we have at last got utterly done with it all. Our only idol glitters dimly in tangible shape of a pint pot and all the incense thereto comes out of a small censer or bowl at the end of a pipe. Of deities or virtues, angels, principalities or powers in the name of our ditches, no more. Let us have cattle and market vegetables.

  Perhaps none of this would matter for Ruskin, had not this art of cattle and vegetables managed to infect landscape painting ever since, nowhere more completely than in England. Perhaps he was thinking of Crome and the Norwich school; perhaps Gainsborough. In any event Ruskin declares, ‘the whole school . . . inherently mortal to all its admirers having by its influence in England destroyed our perception of the purposes of painting’ (in particular a proper sense of colour; Ruskin was adamant that in a land without sunshine it was only to be expected that the only colour interest would be to extract ‘greyness’ and ‘shininess’).

  Something had happened between writing volume I and volume V of Modern Painters to make Ruskin apopleptic about the Dutch disease in landscape. It happened, I believe, in 1857: the year of the Manchester lectures which became Unto This Last, Ruskin’s headlong assault on the barbarities of liberal capitalism, and also the year when he began to work on the completion of Modern Painters. And the event was the mother of all blockbusters, held on the old cricket ground at Old Trafford and known as The Art Treasures of the United Kingdom (although an enormous number of works were in fact lent from abroad, as well as the cream of private collections within Britain itself). Evidently designed to be a riposte to the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855, in what had become an alarming competition of exhibitionist one-upmanship, the Manchester exhibition was, for the art world, what the Great Exhibition of 1851 was for everyone else. The scale itself was gargantuan: 2,000 paintings, 1,200 of them Old Masters, from Byzantine icons all the way to Turner, as well as sculpture, decorative art – ceramics, enamels, terrac
ottas, bronzes, glass, armour, ivories; watercolours, drawings, etchings and photographs. A railway line and station had been constructed expressly to transport visitors to the show (without, however, a four-hour wait on opening day) and disembarked them right in front of the exhibition. A great processional boulevard led to the immense iron-and-glass cathedral of art (just the sort of architecture, of course, abominated by Ruskin), the ‘nave’, as it were, 700 feet long by 200 wide, each branch of the crossing 400 feet long, with galleries running around them and a huge ceremonial space for a full orchestra at the crossing itself. A hundred thousand meals were served daily, 300 roast chickens an hour, a feat duly applauded in the national press. Once Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had lent their names to the organising committee, the £75,000 needed to underwrite the show appeared magically from the Bank of England. Ten thousand two-guinea season tickets had sold before opening day on 5 May. The Queen herself arrived on the twentieth anniversary exactly of her accession, on 30 June, together with the Prince Consort and a number of her children, including Vicky and her betrothed, the Crown Prince of Prussia. It was, of course, raining. This was Old Trafford in June after all.

  The ceremonial centrepiece of the show was, naturally, a procession of historical portraits celebrating the grand continuities of British history: kings and queens to be sure (including Holbein’s sublime miniature of Anne of Cleves, which Horace Walpole thought his greatest masterpiece), but also of course the great pantheon of cultural worthies: Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Dr Johnson and, rather surprisingly, Oliver Cromwell and John Hampden. But the curator in charge of the Old Masters’ collection, culled from the great and the good among the British aristocracy and plutocracy – the dukes of Devonshire, Buccleuch, Richmond, Northumberland; from Scotland: Breadalbane, Lothian; and on and on (and occasionally plain citizen collectors like John Walter, the journalist writing for The Times) – was none other than Gustaf Waagen, the director of the Berlin Museum, who in 1854 had been publishing his exhaustive inventories of the Old Master paintings in private collections – still an extraordinary source for our understanding of the history of taste. And although Waagen ensured an astonishing representation of Italian painting – Giotto, Pollaiuolo, Mantegna, Masaccio, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Titian, Tintoretto, the Caracci and so on – it was northern painting which really excited him, and which he mustered at Manchester in profusion and quality. Twenty-eight of what were then thought to be Rembrandts: three from the Queen, four from the Marquis of Hertford (core of the Wallace Collection), the double portrait of Jean Pellicorne and Susanna van Collen, the great grisaille of John the Baptist Preaching (now in Berlin), Floris Soop and so on. But also a huge haul of precisely the pictures for which Ruskin had such deep repugnance – a crowd of Cuyps including the great view of Nijmegen from Woburn Abbey, Queen’s Hunters; also a mass of Hobbema, Potter animal pieces and the execrated Wouwermans. And twenty Jacob van Ruisdaels, including the View of Bentheim in John Walter’s collection; the pollarded oak, and marsh and waterfalls as well as a whole number of stormy marine paintings which would have confirmed for Ruskin the connection between the Dutch master and Turner.

  The list, of course, is not the point. It goes on and on. What the Manchester show affirmed, to a degree that must have set Ruskin’s teeth on edge (despite the inclusion of a hundred Turners) and sent him back to further rounds of denunciation, was the pride of place given to precisely the kind of paintings that he believed were destroying the vitality of true painting in England. The Manchester exhibition must have seemed to Ruskin, despite all those Turners and a sprinkling of the Pre-Raphaelites, a repeat performance of the tawdry vulgarity of the Great Exhibition six years before, but perhaps even worse because it suggested so eloquently the essential imperviousness of English taste to the sacred reawakening launched by the Pre-Raphaelites: the tyranny of polish. The immense presence of Dutch art could only have confirmed him in his judgement that it was, essentially, manufactured interior decoration for the plutocracy. It’s hard not to read Unto This Last and not see it as Ruskin’s specific counterblast to the orgy of vulgarity, the loss of gentility represented by the iron-and-glass cathedral at Old Trafford.

  Nor does it come as a surprise to learn that incomparably the best – not necessarily the most exhaustive, but certainly the most perceptive – report on the Manchester exhibition comes from the pen of a French critic, then living in exile in Holland under the adopted name of ‘Willem Bürger’ – Bill Citizen – and that critic was of course the great Théophile Thoré. (It’s odd that no one has thought to write a parallel life of Ruskin and Thoré, since their passions were so similar and their influence almost equally profound.) Though they’re slight in length, Thoré’s two introductory chapters to his Trésors d’Art en Angleterre (published at amazing speed in London – in French – in 1858) are little gems of insight, since he sees right away to the social argument made by the fact of the Manchester show. Faux-naïf, he begins by asking why – at least for the convenience of foreigners – such an important exhibition wasn’t located in London, a mere two hours’ train journey from Dover, and then of course answers his own question. The idea is a parade of the educational pretensions of industrial capitalism in its own back yard, specifically a kind of pedagogical gift donated from capital to labour, from the entrepreneur to the worker. And it must be an expressly British enterprise at that – hence the deliberate distance, so Thoré thinks, from the Channel and the North Sea, and the enormous prominent space given to historical portraiture, historical miniatures and artefacts illustrating the continuity of British history. In continental Europe, the implication is, according to Thoré, you have revolutions. In Britain we have exhibitions. This ostensible union of classes is made all the more solid by the fact that the community of collectors increasingly cut across the formal stratifications of class in England – as far as owning great Dutch paintings is concerned, the journalist John Walter and Sir Robert Peel (or, rather, by 1857, his widow) were every bit the peer of the aristocratic Cavendishes, Grosvenors and Russells.

  Thoré evidently has mixed feelings about all this, because while he’s genuinely lost in admiration at the smoothness with which this propaganda stunt is handled by the businessmen of Manchester, in alliance with the broad acres of the rest of England, the old revolutionary in him rankles at ‘his’ favourite art – Dutch art – being shamelessly exploited as an emollient for discontent. For it was not fortuitous that Thoré had chosen the Kingdom of the Netherlands for his place of exile (rather than Victor Hugo’s Guernsey) from the police state of the Second Empire. It was not just Dutch art that was the attraction – although that was of immense importance to him – but the kind of society Thoré, in common with many other old revolutionaries, believed to have survived in the Netherlands, a society at the opposite pole of the metropolitan corruptions of Paris and London, or the industrial brutalities of Lille and Manchester. The best account of this French vision of the Netherlands is in an extraordinary book written by a now undeservedly forgotten writer, Alphonse Esquiros, who spent 1855 in Holland and who published La Néerlande et la Vie Hollandaise four years later. Esquiros was an old revolutionary comrade of Thoré, a cell-mate at Sainte-Pélagie where they had both done time for offending the censors under the July monarchy. Though his family was well-to-do haute bourgeoisie, the paternal house remained right in the centre of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and thus in the middle of the bloodiest action of the June days in 1848. While Thoré was editing La Vraie République together with George Sand and the Saint-Simonien Pierre Leroux and contributing liberation manifestos to the République des Arts, Esquiros was opening his house to the wounded and dying hauled directly from the barricades.

  After it was all over, and the warriors of the new France were all either in prison, exile or discreet silence, they cast around for some sort of light in the general darkness and, perhaps improbably, perhaps not, saw in Holland a culture in which bitter social division, plutocratic hegemony, cultural intoler
ance and the bureaucratic state were all miraculously absent. The northern Netherlands seem to have missed out altogether on the Industrial Revolution (in contrast to Belgium). Its little towns – Haarlem, Delft, Rotterdam and Gouda – all little miracles, so they thought, of self-government. In the writing not only of Esquiros but another utterly infatuated admirer of the Dutch, Jules Michelet, the trekschuit, the tow-barge, became the symbolic opposite of the railway locomotive. In the slow, horse-drawn barge, time and space, they thought, remained astonishingly in balance, its languid schedules utterly incompatible with the urgent clock of industrial production; and within the trekschuit were accommodated all types and conditions, with none of the glaringly inegalitarian class separations that marked the compartments of the railway train. The first thing that all the Francophone pilgrims did on disembarking from the train (in which, perforce, they were compelled to arrive in Holland) was to get on the trekschuit. Likewise the individual cargo-barge symbolised something else of supreme significance for the French Hollandophiles: the sanctity and autonomy of the nuclear family on which they believed true social happiness depended. (It’s striking how little Ruskin has to say about this issue.) Jules Michelet, another of the most passionate devotees of the Dutch, and a personal friend of the great archivist historian Groen van Prinsterer, described the tow-barge (in a purple passage which in places almost anticipates the bateau ivre) as a ‘Noah’s ark’: ‘C’est l’arché de Noë, qui doit contenir toute une famille, homme, femme, enfants, animaux.’

  To these writers and critics, then, Holland was an unforced, organically cohesive community; precisely in fact the kind of society which Ruskin, and before him Pugin, imagined had existed in Christian medieval England and which he wanted to reintroduce through the Guild of St George. But in reinstating, as they imagined, the integrity of the medieval craft guilds along with neo-medieval design and painting, Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Guild Socialists were reaching back across a great span of time in which the actual lived experience of work and worship had been irrevocably lost. But the French enthusiasts of small-town Dutch culture were, they supposed, witnessing a continuity they thought had never actually been broken. And granting a large degree of wishful thinking – especially in respect of the larger cities like Amsterdam – they were not entirely wrong. The northern Netherlands was one of the very last cultures in western Europe to experience the Industrial Revolution. Compared with Holland, Ruskin’s Switzerland was Coketown.