Meet the De Brays
By Brian Sewell, Evening Standard
01.08.08
If one of the purposes of art exhibitions is, with some painting
rare and beautiful, to excite curiosity and lust for more, then we
should for the past three years have been baying for an exhibition
devoted to Jan De Bray. In a survey in 2005 of Dutch 17th-century
paintings in the Royal collection, his Banquet of Mark
Antony and Cleopatra dominated the room in which it hung.
I was spellbound by this picture, for here was a masterpiece by a
painter of very much the second rank, little known in Britain but
for the dull and rootless portraits mistakenly attributed to him
largely by the art trade.
Painted in 1652 when he was 25 or so and sufficiently revised to
also bear the later date 1656 or 1658 (it is not quite legible), it
illustrates the tale of Cleopatra's dissolving a priceless pearl in
vinegar and drinking
the concoction, thus for a wager turning a frugal supper with
Mark Antony into the most extravagant feast in history. It is also,
however, a portrait of the painter's family, Cleopatra his mother,
Mark Antony his father, his younger siblings the children in the
foreground (some posthumously), his nearer contemporaries playing
the subsidiary figures on the right, but for the black servant
closing the composition. Jan himself was formerly identified as the
shadowed closing figure on the left holding a halberd, but is now
thought to be the young man looking at the spectator from behind
Cleopatra. It is a masterly composition of still pathos framed by
bustling irrelevance, the inheritances from Rubens and Caravaggio
distant but still evident, the mood compellingly intense. In detail
it demonstrates the young man's skill with portraiture, costume and
still life, the dish of aphrodisiac oysters perhaps most
significant-as a clue to post- prandial developments.
This painting now reappears at Dulwich Picture Gallery as the
high point in a survey of the work of not only Jan De Bray but of
his two brothers, Dirck and Joseph, and their father, Salomon. All
were based in Haarlem at a time when painting there was still
distinct from painting by artists grouped in Amsterdam, Leyden,
Utrecht and other Dutch cities, but external influences from these
are, nevertheless, obvious. Salomon, born in 1597, who first
emerged as a painter of portraits in 1622, was indeed something of
a magpie when he established himself as a painter of figure and
narrative subjects a decade or so later, borrowing not only from
other Dutchmen, but clumsily from Rubens, indirectly from
Caravaggio through his followers in Utrecht, and closely from
Rembrandt, in no particular order, before he developed the
formula-
of small, ill-proportioned and even ill-constructed figures in
wide open spaces for which he is perhaps best known. Nevertheless,
one contributor of essays to the catalogue asserts that Salomon was
"more versatile, graced with greater intellect than his sons; a
veritable universal artist ..." but then the whole book, rich in
facts, is poor in matters of judgment. Salomon and other members of
his family died in an outbreak of the plague in 1664.I must argue,
however, that whatever the mature Salomon could do, his son Jan
could do better. Salomon could be exquisite when pretending to be a
Utrecht Caravaggist, but as a borrower from Rembrandt - his lasting
source of influence, probably mainly from the etchings - he was
weak, constantly misunderstanding the poses and proportions of
Rembrandt's figures. Jan is at his worst when closest to his
father's later work, as in the ludicrous little picture of
Leda showing her daughter Helen to Tyndareus, her
Husband - a lawks 'a mercy episode of "I didn't know you'd
a bun in the oven" humour camouflaged as a polite history. In this
the face and hands are absurdly large for figures of whose anatomy,
beneath the clothes, he seems to have not the slightest knowledge.
In setting this ancient mythological episode from a time when Zeus,
in the form of a swan, could sexually seduce a pretty woman, in
17th-century dress and in the garden of a Haarlem burgher's house,
it is doubly absurd.
To the sane man it seems inconceivable that this horrid and
silly painting, the boorish joke gentrified, unsigned, unpublished
and only recently identified, could have been painted by Jan in
c.1660, some eight years after the notable achievement of the
Cleopatra-cum-family portrait, but this is the date given it by the
curator "on the grounds of its stylistic similarity to the works of
Salomon De Bray from the period 1655-60." Is it by some other
studio collaborator? In this exhibition, no other painting from
these years - beautiful, perceptive and independent portraits and a
competently Rubensian Judith and Holofernes -
brings Jan so confusingly close to his father, reversion to whose
petty manner seems inexplicable.
The Judith panel is tiny - only 40cm high - but its composition
fits well with Jan's long-term inclination to paint ambitious
large-scale and dramatic figure subjects. Rubensian reds flood the
picture but it is the split second before death and no gout of
blood yet jets from the unsevered neck of Holofernes; it is a
brilliant baroque opposition of slumbering relaxation and furious
activity. The foreground is in Rembrandtian gloom and in it we can
dimly discern a double-entendre of imagery in the snuffed candle -
the fleeting nature of a human life cut short, as that of the
honourable Babylonian commander is imminently to be, and a phallic
reference to his drunkenness, which enabled Judith to complete her
act of treacherous seduction. And from 1661, in The Finding
of Moses, we have a characteristically large painting that
is calmly classical enough to have been distantly inspired by
Orazio Gentileschi, yet is wholly consistent as a consolidation and
simplification of trends established almost a decade earlier in the
Cleopatra. These two paintings form the bracket in which the nasty
little Leda is supposed to fit.
Jan's work is, I admit, dismayingly uneven, particularly on the
large scale that he seemed to prefer or in which public commissions
fell to him. Caring for Children is a didactic and
admonitory piece painted as an overmantel for the meeting-room of
the Regents of the Haarlem Children's Almshouse; in it, the then
houseparents are portrayed as performing what can be interpreted as
seven corporal acts of mercy as applicable to children, some in
duplicate to make up for the absence of ministering to prisoners,
visiting the sick and burying the dead. The children, all but one
an unprepossessing brat, may be portraits too - to have invented
such ugliness is quite improbable. The composition plods its weary
way across the canvas but serves its purpose well with busy
concentration on bread and trousers on the one hand, and rapt
gazing heavenward on the other, the viewpoint and perspective
scrupulously related to the height of the mantelpiece below.
They were equally scrupulous in the group portrait of the
Regents of the Children's Almshouse themselves,
painted in the same year, 1663, but without the anchor of the
fireplace to determine them. The viewpoint is to the left, more or
less at the jutting corner of the carpet-covered table and just
high enough for the spectator to see its top in steep perspective.
I suspect that the picture hung ahead and to the right of anyone
entering the room, the real and pictorial lights both falling from
a window on the left, making the Regents seem real in a real space;
standing opposite the hatless standing figure of the housefather
from Caring for Children, the visitor is drawn into the unoccupied
space and completes the angled arrangement of figures. In that that
visitor was probably an orphaned child pleading for help and this
is precisely how he encountered the great men who might give him
charity, Jan De Bray invented a wonderfully lively composition for
a subject that could have been dully hieratic; in this he had
absorbed examples set by Frans Hals, then an old man still at work
in Haarlem, and himself set an example that Hals could not outdo.
These two paintings represent the high point of Jan's later work on
a large scale; all others are marred by too serious a sense of
moral instruction, as in the ludicrously unhorrible blindings of
The Judgment of Zaleucis of 1676, or by a
fundamental lack of gravitas as in the bucolic and bovine peasantry
of David and the Ark of the Covenant, in which the
model for the King of Israel could have served just as well as
drunken Silenus.
One smaller painting deserves far longer contemplation - the
double portrait of Salomon and Anna de Bray. In
this, Jan pays a final homage to his parents, perhaps posthumously
in 1664 (perhaps earlier), in profile, as a classical relief or
cameo, on panel, giving it an enamel-like refinement of finish. If
not intensely observed at the time, the faces were intensely,
devoutly and affectionately remembered. It is a quiet and sober
masterpiece of 17thcentury Dutch memorial portraiture, too easily
overlooked in the torrid context of late Rembrandt and his many
imitators.
Too uxorious a man, the early deaths of wives provoking trouble
with their families, bankruptcy in 1689 seems to have put an end to
Jan's aesthetic energy; almost no work survives between then and
his death in 1697 at the age of 70 or so. The plague of 1664 wiped
out most of his family, including one of his younger brothers,
Joseph, who was also a painter; another, Dirck, survived until
1678. Both painted still lives. Of the eight wagging the tail of
this exhibition, the one work of genius is by Joseph, dated 1656,
when he was in his late twenties (born after 1628 and by 1634).
In Praise of Pickled Herring is an elegant
arrangement of the fish, vine leaves, eggs, bread and beer about a
stone cartouche on which is engraved a poem by his uncle; the
herring of poetry, it seems, provokes a thirst, opens the bladder
and the bowels, and encourages us all to fart and fuck. This is
characteristically coarse Dutch humour of the day, encapsulated in
a still life of sublime quality. Joseph was never again to achieve
a thing so exquisititious and Dirck's pretty little flower pieces
are quite unremarkable in such a fertile field.
This is a thoroughly useful and enjoyable exhibition that,
building on others in recent years - at the National Gallery as
well as Buck House - consolidates knowledge with delight. It is
just the sort of judiciously purposeful exhibition for which we may
now hope again in Trafalgar Square. The catalogue, though it does
not quite deserve to be free of censure and lists nearly three
hundred entries in its bibliography, is itself the only substantial
work in any language on any of the De Brays and is, for the moment,
of some importance.
Read Brian
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