Paragons of Virtue Women and Domesticity in Seventeenthcentury Dutch Art

Book reviews -- Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Fine art by Wayne E. Franits / Judith Leyster: A Dutch Chief and Her World edited past James A. Welu and Pieter Biesboer

WAYNE Eastward. FRANITS, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. New York: Cambridge University Printing, 1993. 271 pp.;

Martha Hollander / The Fine art Bulletin

Sep 01, 1994

WAYNE E. FRANITS, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. New York: Cambridge University Printing, 1993. 271 pp.; 172 b/w ills. $70.00

JAMES A. WELU AND PIETER BIESBOER, EDS., Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her Globe, exh. cat. Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem; Worcester Art Museum. New Oasis: Yale University Press, 1993. 391 pp.; 45 color ills., 200 b/due west. $60.00; $35.00 paper

A painting past Nicolaes Maes in the Philadelphia Museum of Art shows a young woman bent over the task of plucking a duck. She is seated next to window, in the corner of a room; at the back of the room are the accoutrements of the chase; a gun leans against the wall and a purse hangs from a claw. Scattered on the flooring at her feet are various kitchen utensils, in the midst of which lies a 2d expressionless bird, stalked past an alert blackness and white cat. This arresting scene is one of the numerous images of women at work in the household treated in Wayne Franits`south book, the starting time systematic report of domestic themes in 17th-century Dutch painting. Franits`s contention is that images of domestic life, whether portraits or genre scenes, functioned as reinforcements of the pervading patriarchal values in Holland. According to Franits, Maes`southward young woman--a servant or the young mistress of the business firm--is engaged in the ideal feminine activity of preparing food for the household, which the husbandly provider has left. Maes omits the man himself from the feminine domain of the interior, instead suggesting his presence with the masculine attributes of the chase. This illustrates the Aristotelian paradigm, adopted by Dutch moralists, of women as the weaker sex who confine their duties to the dwelling while men role in the world at large. Meanwhile, the woman`south serious absorption and the fragile lighting falling on her immaculate white cap, leaving her face in subtle shadow, impart an air of sanctity to her piece of work.

In many ways, Franits`s book is indispensable, a fitting culmination to numerous articles and exhibition catalogues appearing in the past decade that have treated individual pictures of domestic life.(1) (It is a revision of his 1987 dissertation, already a standard resources on the subject.) Franits has assembled, for the first time on this scale, a large grouping of images that explicitly reflect the activities prescribed for the household, and specifically for women, in 17th-century Holland. The cultural fabric that virtually clearly articulates this credo of domesticity can be found in household manuals, pop didactic treatises on family life that had their origins in the Reformation and became a flourishing industry by the mid-17th century. In addition to the famous moralist Jacob ("vader") Cats, the author of numerous hortatory texts on family life so ofttimes invoked by scholars of Dutch art, he offers other 16th-and 17th-century Protestant thinkers such as Petrus Wittewrongel, the Puritans John Dod, Robert Cleaver, and William Gouge, and Erasmus himself. Their treatises on union, kid rearing, and household management were widely distributed in kingdom of the netherlands and did much to shape the prevailing standards of domestic life, standards that are, Franits says, "very definitely that of a patriarchal social order" (p. 17).

Franits`s contention is that domestic images function as pictorial analogues to these texts, expressing the aforementioned ideals of family life in an attractive and entertaining manner. His use of household manuals every bit a background for the pictures is very unusual for an art historian; in fact he is expanding on, and in some ways departs from, the historian Simon Schama, who start treated art equally the production of a Dutch mentalite(2). He observes that these domestic images are overwhelmingly depictions of women, or, rather, are cultural constructions of femininity. In an engaging organizational tactic, he divides his book into chapters that follow the format of Cats`due south tome Houwelck (Marriage) of 1625, by far the most popular and influential of these instructive household texts: "Maiden," "Sweetheart," "Wife," "Mother," and "Widow." Nosotros are guided through numerous images of maidens spinning, sewing, making lace, and beingness wooed by ardent young men; married women ownership and preparing food and supervising their servants; mothers feeding, cleaning, disciplining and educating children; and finally elderly women, nevertheless plying their needles, instructing the young, and praying over their solitary meals.

Franits`s writing, like the overall presentation, is disarmingly simple and elegant, while his selection of pictures is nicely balanced betwixt canonical, oft-discussed works and pictures rarely, if ever, reproduced. In add-on to household texts, Franits examines compelling visual fabric: prints, which distributed stock iconography to a big segment of the population, and commissioned portraits, which reveal a self-consciously formal language of display. Deftly handling a big variety of master sources, he surveys a wealth of data about feminine experience, such equally schools here girls learned the art of needlework, or the different stages, significantly depicted in paintings, in the process of spinning. Furthermore, he exploits the latest research in investigative social history to qualify some unremarkably held views about Dutch society. For example, he offers ii interestingly conflicting portraits of the Dutch household: a rather grim vie versus the traditional notion of a close relationship between Dutch women and their servants, and a consummate disagreement with the archetype vie of Philippe Aris of the close emotional bonds between parents and children in early modern Europe.(three)

No art historian working on Dutch genre painting can avoid addressing the thorny interpretive debate of the past forty years. The gist of this disharmonize is whether images of daily life should be "read," given that they are replete with objects and motifs adapted from other symbolic sourcess, or should be apprehended according to their persuasive qualities of description. Thus far, the rich and subtle coaction in Dutch art betwixt iconographic convention and anecdotal freshness has compelled interpreters to take sides. Many of the arguments have tended to be semantic quarrels over such loaded, troubled terms every bit "bearded symbolism" and "realism." In his admirably lucid account of the problem, Franits surveys the terrain with generosity and precision. He chooses an interpretive mode that encompasses both the moral and the artful values of Dutch art, acknowledging at once a widely meaningful organization of motifs and what he calls "the value-costless pursuit of mimetic naturalism" (p. thirteen, n. 46). Accordingly, he proposes another literary form as a methodological model: 17th-century Dutch ekphrastic poems. These descriptive poems almost pictures respond to their artful and narrative elements, their qualities of emotional engagement, rather than to their didactic function. Yet Franits manages to show how the pictures still have moral, if not moralistic, resonance; that is, they are indeed cultural constructions but demand not repeat the insistently moralizing tone of the didactic literature to which they correspond. his casual synthesis reflects the approach of a new generation of scholars moving beyond the terms of the contend, accepting as a given that "the verisimilitude of paintings, their presentation of a plausible reality that was so esteemed, served every bit a conduit for ideas and associations" (p. ix).

He uses this approach with item success in his chapter on "Maeght" and "Vryster" (maiden and sweetheart), probably the most imaginative department in the book. Here he neatly undoes the all-too-mutual assumption that erotic or amorous content in Dutch genre paintings must be equated with vice. He extends his thematic territory to include sure "merry company" scenes of flirtation and music making, along with buitenpartijen, idyllic outdoor versions of the same subjects. Departing from the canonical view of these scenes as cheerful debauches evolving from 16th-century representations of the Prodigal Son, Franits considers them as dramas of romantic love, or, rather, of the accepted etiquette for courting and amour. He points out that amorous associations, such as references to or representations of Venus, or image borrowed from Petrarchan love poesy, do not necessarily indicate that the action takes place in a brothel, as is frequently assumed. Hither is his useful reminder:

... the propensity to view such pictures [buitenpartijen] as morally doubtable and predominantly didactic probably stems from our all too homogenous view of seventeenth-century Dutch civilization as dogmatically Calvinist. While it is truthful that some overzealous clergymen wrote vehement tracts denouncing the evils of potable, information technology would be reductive to presume that the unabridged population endorsed their objections (p. 40).

Quite correct--still he sometimes fails to do justice to the pictures he has emancipated from Calvinist didacticism. Understandably, he wishes to emphasize the programmatic nature of Dutch domestic imagery. While acknowledging their persuasive skill and oftentimes cracking psychological subtlety, he observes how remarkably conventional and repetitive such pictures are. Whereas Schama remarks on the naturalistic ease with which women are portrayed in genre scenes, equally opposed to the classicizing conventions of other European Bizarre art,(4) Franics says: "When painting domestic subjects, Dutch artists (who were mostly male) invariably presented women as types. Very often they are generalized and objectified, their individuality and psychic dimension minimized, in the interests of having them embody an thought, or, more accurately, an appropriate feminine virtue" (p. 14). I am not sure I agree; the treatment of faces and gestures reflects an creative person`due south individual response to his models rather than a predetermined fix of rules. (Perhaps it is more accurate to speak of a "Maes type" or a "Terborch blazon.") In any case, what is the alternative to types in formulaic genre painting-or, for that matter, in anything other than a commissioned portrait Likewise, this handling is not bars to women. Franits declines to mention that men and children, the supporting players in these domestic visions, are likewise portrayed equally "types."

Franits then goes on: "In portraits and in genre paintings, artists repeatedly surroundings these -women with the same, surprisingly limited number of meticulously painted objects that could merely take been meant to connote virtue." A closer look at Maes`s Adult female Plucking a Duck proves instructive. Certainly this charming picture abounds in formulaic imagery and captures household piece of work at its most serene. The woman` s paradigmatic feminine manufacture is illuminated by bright sunlight falling on her spotless white cap and busy fingers. Withal this light also strongly illuminates the objects at her feet which fill upward nearly of the picture infinite, and which Maes had distorted his perspective meliorate to brandish: the prowling cat, the bird, the pots and pans precariously counterbalanced against each other, and an overturned handbasket with apples spilling out across the floor.

What`s wrong with his picture The tableau of present and potential disorder strikes an oddly discordant annotation in this otherwise peaceful image of domestic order. In a footnote, Franits remarks that the prowling cat is probably non a symbol of illicit sexual beliefs, equally these animals are often thought to be, and leaves it at that. Of the dishes and fruit, he says that they are probably references to housewifely duty; of their odd, disorderly configuration, he says null. Overlooking such a discordant notation, even every bit a purely formal inconsistent, regardless of what these hell-raising elements and the prowling cat might signify well-nigh domestic virtue, is letting down both viewer and artist.

Despite Franits`s sharp center for certain details and motifs, which he advisedly compares to other visual and literary sources, there are other elements--whether pregnant motifs or simply anecdotal tidbits--that appear to slip from his grasp. In Jacob van Loo`due south Interior with Women Making Lace, a group of immature women are sewing, i of whom is being wooed by a beau; why is in that location a kid continuing behind one of the women, looking at the viewer and eating a cookie? (This effigy does not appear in the catchpenny print from which the scene might derive.) Why does Esaias Boursse, in his Old Adult female Spinning, display a man`due south clothes on the chair side by side to her? In his moving, severe Sometime Woman Saying Grace, why does Maes include the playful detail of a cat clawing at the tabular array cloth?

To his credit, Franits sometimes mentions a detail that he cannot account for, but often in a footnote, which is, I call back, an mistake. Despite his evident desire to go along his text lean and uncluttered, more direct mention of cryptic details and their implications would exist welcome. It is especially important to account for such internal contradictions or discrepancies since he claims that domestic imagery is so conventional and selective, while still deviating in sure respects from didactic literature. Franits`s evasion of visual elements is all the more troubling considering, as a cosmetic to what he sees equally an excessive apply of iconographic interpretation, Franits calls for a closer scrutiny of such a picture`s "visual qualities" (p. xc).

I besides found a curious ambivalence in his arroyo to he problem of erotic associations. Franits is conspicuously exasperated that scholars, following the clues of phallic pitchers, dead birds, and the like, still insist on finding erotic content in domestic scenes. He implies that such associations can only occur in scenes of courtship. On Maes`s moving picture, for case: "given the intimate, peaceful aura of this painting, information technology seems logical" to view the girl`southward activities every bit purely domestic in nature (p. 90). Nonetheless he has already indicated, in his chapter on buitenpartijen, that the image of sexuality--whether coy or romantic--need not be equated with vice. Thus he begs the question of why the intimate, peaceful tone of a moving picture has to preclude any kind of erotic undertone, no matter how subtle. Certainly fine art historians rarely worry well-nigh this discrepancy in Vermeer`south fine art. Why should an intriguing domestic scene by Maes necessarily be unlike?

In fact, these evasions and uncertainties lead me to what is in fact the questionable premise of the book: his decision to limit a treatment of domestic imagery to domestic virtue. He says he intends to deal with "wanton" women in a sequel, and hither limits his discussion to exemplary images. Though this is, again, a corrective to the traditional notion that nigh Dutch genre scenes are negative and admonitory, Franits assumes that the qualities of virtue and vice are indeed articulate-cut and separate in pictures. Certainly in literature, and in many Netherlandish prints, this skillful woman/bad woman dichotomy arising from the upheaval of the Reformation prevails. The didactic household manuals cited past Franits are based on the assumption that women`southward anarchic potential could be controlled through industry and docility. But are these skilful and bad female stereotypes always expressed equally clearly in 17th-century genre paintings Many of the pictures he shows are indeed unequivocally celebratory images of domestic order. (The felicitous term he uses is "wholesome.") But elsewhere are elements that, if but in terms of mood and composition, might call this unified vision into question.

This restriction too underscores the problematic nature of his chapter on courtship. Though the observations on positive images of recreational pleasure reveal Franits at his virtually perceptive, the expansion of his subject thing seems not just refreshing, but somehow arbitrary--as though using Cats`s divisions of a woman`s life, including the unmarried "Vryster," forced him to account for courting imagery that might non otherwise exist relevant. Possibly a taxonomy of domestic themes in general, without the restrictive qualification of Cats or the emphasis on virtue, might have made Franits`s task easier, and more naturally broadened the scope of his volume.

The phenomenon of discordant or contradictory elements in the pictures ultimately reflects the more than general problem of motifs that tin signify dissimilar things in different contexts. For instance, Franits`s analysis of Caspar Netscher`due south Woman Making Lace (pp. 78-80) includes the observation that the prominently displayed mussel shells and discarded shoes at the adult female`due south anxiety are motifs with "wholesome" domestic associations every bit well every bit the perhaps more than familiar erotic associations. Just he fails to suggest a reason for this ambiguity. In that location are many motifs, familiar in the Dutch home, that float freely through the mural of Dutch imagery: musical instruments, cats and dogs, birdcages, and beds, to name a few. (Sensibly, Franits insists that the latter do non specifically refer to brothels, as is usually thought; yet he stops short of suggesting culling uses for the presence of beds, such every bit associations of conjugal or amorous experience.) In such an intelligent study of art as ideological structure, the very issue of multiple and even contradictory pregnant--why pictures are so ofttimes mis-or over-read--is surely worth discussing.

Primal to Franits`due south written report is the fact that the artists articulating the patriarchal values of Dutch Calvinist culture were predominantly male. In fact, he omits whatever mention of Geertruyd Roghman, whose engravings of women at their tasks, explored with not bad sensitivity by Schama, are almost unique in 17th-century Dutch fine art.(five) It is therefore instructive to compare these pictures with the work of Judith Leyster, ane of the few Dutch women to triumph every bit a professional painter (and one of the few women artists of her 24-hour interval to achieve success without a male relative).

The sprightly, confident self-portrait that graces the cover of the exhibition catalogue for the recent evidence at the Worcester Art Museum offers a bracing contrast to the sedate maidens and housewives in Franits`due south report. Laughing, smartly dressed, leaning dorsum jauntily with brush and palette in hand, Leyster confronts the viewer just underneath the catalogue`s subtitle: "A Dutch Main and Her World." This constructive juxtaposition of the words "master" and "her" immediately introduces Leyster as, substantially, i of the boys. (It has more bite than the Dutch version of the title, schilderes in een mannenwereld--"woman painter in a human`due south world.") Indeed, she combined artistic and entrepreneurial talent to a degree that seems unusual for a woman even by relatively liberal Dutch standards. While all the same a single adult female in her early twenties, she became a master in the Haarlem guild, fix her own shop and took pupils, the only woman painter in Kingdom of the netherlands to practice then; later in life, after her marriage to Jan Miense Molenaer, she was largely responsible for running her hubby`southward studio.

Expanding on Frima Fox Hofrichter`s catalogue raisonne of 1989, this interdisciplinary study assembles the latest in biographical, social, economic, and technical scrutiny. Ellen Broersen, Koos Levy-van Halm, and Pieter Biesboer write graceful, informative essays on Leyster`due south life and career; Thera Wijsenbeek-Olthuis and Leo Noordegraaf use legal documents and inventories to survey the commercial, social, and economic milieu for practicing artists in Haarlem; Els Kloek examines the condition of Dutch women and women artists, including rare pictures by such little-known painters every bit Maria de Grebber and Suzanna Gaspoel; Ella Hendriks and Karin Groen perform the first technical assay of Leyster`s work; and Hofrichter concludes with a quite moving account of Leyster`s consummate disappearance from the annals of art history and her subsequent (accidental) rediscovery.

One of the best things about this well-rounded portrait is that if debunks certain myths nigh Leyster. Although she stopped painting when she married, she was no victim of the patriarchy; male artists such as Ferdinand Bol and Meindert Hobbema had similar histories. Conversely, other women artists continued to paint later marriage, the most celebrated example being Rachel Ruysch, mother of 8 children and painter of still lifes, who became court painter to the Elector Palatine. It is also useful to learn that Leyster`s disability to obtain lucrative commissions was not because of whatever inferior condition as a adult female, only probably because her parents, whose social contacts might accept helped her, went bankrupt and had to leave town only equally her career began. On the other hand, her accommodate against Frans Hals after a student left her shop for his is assessed hither as a painter`due south standard response, rather than precocious feminine assertiveness. It should too be remembered that her decision to start her own store instead of working as a studio banana was, at least in part, motivated by financial need.

At that place are a few small flaws in this otherwise excellent presentation. The entries themselves, by Cynthia Rupprath, are breathtakingly thorough, bolstering each picture with a fascinating array of like subjects from prints, emblems, and other paintings. They are also particularly impressive in their attention to details of costume, ofttimes overlooked by fine art historians. Withal the virtuosic display of accumulated art-historical knowledge sometimes backfires. In most cases, Rupprath presents every possible association of a item motif--music making, drinking and smoking, teasing pets--and the cumulative effect of this judicious iconographic rehearsal becomes a strain. The entry for Leyster`south Concert, for example, where two men accompany a singing adult female on their instruments, alludes to the moral allegory of temperance and the importance of harmony in 17th-century musical theory, then rejects all secondary references as "veiled" (whatever that means) in favor of "the sheer joy of music making" (p. 185).

The catalogue besides includes v pictures that are no being removed from Leyster`s oeuvre. The rationale for this update is sound enough, yet it seems our of identify, specially since this volume is non a new catalogue raisonne, and since a number of Haarlem school pictures are already included to replenish Leyster`s artistic milieu. I kept wishing that this de-attribution had been dealt with more summarily; it shifts the focus away from this remarkable creative person.

Finally, the authors seem reluctant to see any qualities of Leyster`s piece of work as specific to her gender. Is her work entirely neutral? Her celebrated Human being Offer a Woman Money in which a woman resolutely bent over her sewing ignores the man who leans over her shoulder and smilingly offers her a handful of coins, has long been considered a woman`s view of a common subject. Her Game of Tric-trac is similarly revealing: the 2 men at the game-board in this beautifully lit dark scene are accompanied by a woman, dressed not in the deep decolletage of her counterparts in similar Caravaggist scenes but covered up to the neck in starched linen similar whatever good huisvrouw. Nonetheless, this adult female grins and offers a pipe to her male companion with an almost masculine casualness. It is tempting to see this straightforward woman comfy amid the men equally a figure for Leyster herself.

Rupprath, for all the erudition she brings to impact the painting, is unable conclusively to identify the figure as whore or modest lady. The absenteeism of a clinching interpretation in this instance illustrates the situation of many historians of Dutch art currently practicing. The work seems to rhyme with another scene from the Worcester exhibit, not depicted on one of their panels, but taking place in the galleries 1 fall afternoon. Several art historians gathered before an intriguing cocky-portrait past Molenaer. The elaborately dressed artist sits at his easel surrounded past the accoutrements of his arts and crafts, effulgent with cheerful airs at the viewer, while an erstwhile woman, her lap full of coins, importunes him by grabbing his wrist and holding out her other manus. What is going on here? Is she offering more money, or demanding information technology? Why? The museum label alluded to the traditional pairing of a swain and old woman (with money) as unequal lovers, but seemed imprecise, unsatisfying. The scholars, their preparation and senses sharpened afterwards a proficient luncheon, spontaneously began to offering half a dozen possible interpretations of the picture: the erstwhile woman is a procuress, the artist`due south mother, his landlady, a symbol of commerce versus loftier art, and so on. Nobody regarded whatsoever gloss as the comprehensive business relationship, and shrugging in skilful-natured resignation, they moved on to other pictures.

More than a century before, French critics similar Thore-Burger and Duranty strolled through the galleries of the Louvre, attempting to read their beloved only mysterious Dutch paintings as if they were novels, responding to their inventiveness, psychological dash, and play of chestnut. The rich inventiveness of their readings was untouched by the iconographic and historical cognition that would accumulate over successive generations; they seemed animated by an innocent enthusiasm. Since then, the interpretation of Dutch art has evolved from the determinist view of fine art as "slices of life" that unconsciously reveal the Dutch national character, to Calvinist enigmas, to animated emblems of virtue and vice, to an exploration and celebration of vision itself. Contemporary fine art historians like the group in Worcester are equipped with a high sophistication that is both a benefit and a burden; asking what`s wrong with this picture, equally I did before of the Maes interior, still tin yield more puzzles than answers. It is ironic that art affording such rich testimony of its age persistently defies exegesis, that the splendors of representation seem manifestly indeterminate. Lawrence Gowing described Vermeer`s work as "an cryptic miracle."(6) What is incorrect with these pictures may, at final, be yet another facet of their genius.

1. The most notable catalogues in recent years include Masters of Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Fine art, 1984; Portretten van Echt en trouw: Huwelijk en gezin in de Nederlandse kunst van de zeventiende eeuw, exh. true cat., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, 1986; Leidse Fijnschilders: Van Gerrit Dou tot Frans van Mieris de Jonge, 1630-1760, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden, 1988; De Hollandse fijnschilders: Van Gerard Dou tot Ardriaen van der Werff, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1989-90.

2. South. Schama, The Embarrassment Riches, New York, 1987.

three. P. Aries, Centuries of Childhood, trans. R. Baldick, New York, 1962.

4. Schama, 413.

5. Ibid, 416.

6. L. Gowing, Vermeer, New York, 1970, 67.

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