Painting "Shepherd". Holland, 18th century.

Painting "Shepherd". Holland, 18th century.

Size: 21.5 x 27.5 cm.Weight: 1400 g. Oil, wood. tablet in a vintage frame. Unknown artist.

Dutch painting of the 18th century

Despite the fact that some significant masters of the national direction of Dutch painting, the student of Rembrandt Art de Gelder, who died in 1727, and the great student of Ruisdael Meindert Hobbema, who died in 1707, lived partly in the 18th century, Holland, under the influence of paintings and works of the Liege pseudo-classicist Gerard Leresaa, who died in 1711 in Amsterdam, by 1700 had already lost the habit of the fresh, wide brush and creative spontaneity of her great era and began to produce in a multitude of smoothly painted with a dry brush, cold in form paintings. Adrien van der Werf (d. 1722) and Willem Van Mierys (d. 1747) are typical representatives of this trend, which was followed in landscape painting by the smoothly described, idealized paintings of Johannes Glauckber (1646 - 1726), Isaac Musheron ( 1671 - 1744) and Jan Van Guizum (d. 1749), as well as the graceful city views of Jan Van der Heide (d. 1712). In the field of flower painting, paintings by Konrat Röpel (1678 - 1748) and the aforementioned Jan Van Guizum belong here, while the Artist Rachel Ruysch (died in 1750) was also able to endow her extremely carefully painted flowers with a hot and harmonious color. We have no interest in tracing all the feeble imitators of these and other epigone artists to the end of the 18th century. However, one cannot pass in silence the historical painter and engraver Jacob de Wit from Amsterdam (1695 - 1754), who studied in Antwerp, whose decorative panels, kept in gray on a gray background, imitating stone reliefs to full illusion, can be seen in the former Amsterdam City Hall, in the Dutch museums and in Dresden; one should also mention the outstanding portrait painter Jan Maurice Quinkgardt (1688 - 1772), numerous large groups of syndics and separate portraits of which are conceived in the old spirit, but painted in a more rigid and variegated manner of the 18th century (of which 34 are in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum alone); we can also mention Isaac Ouvater (1747 - 1739), who was among the most ardent followers of the glorious old painters of urban views, as his two paintings in the Rijksmuseum show. We can dwell in more detail only on two Dutch painters of the 18th century, on the portraitist and genre painter Cornelis Trost (1697 - 1750), about whom Vergul wrote, and on the landscape painter and animal painter Johann Baptiste Kobele (1779 - 1814); Obren's research is devoted to him and the Males family in general. The artistic pedigree of Cornelis Trost goes back through Arnold Boonen (1669 - 1729) and Schalken to Samuel Van Googstraten. As a painter with oil paints and pastels, as a draftsman and engraver of mezzotinto, he is the only Dutch artist of his time who was able to visually, uniquely, but also wittily capture the life, interests and customs of his people. His portrait groups of "choir directors", free in composition, with a lifelike rendering of faces and with the pale tones of air and light characteristic of that time, are beautifully represented in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. The Seven Elders of the Medical College (1724), The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Roel (1728), The Eight Regents of the Orphanage (1729), and The Three Syndics of the Guild of Surgeons (1731) put Troost high on the dozen works of his contemporaries. A group of four children playing with a monkey in the garden (1723), painted fresh and natural.

His self-portrait and the knee-length portrait of Isaac Svers from the Rijksmuseum are very expressive. The colorful feel of that era is clearly reflected in a life-size generational portrait of an unknown man in the Schwerin Museum (1740), displayed during breakfast, against a purple wall background. Full of humor and subtle observation of the picture "Maternity room" in the Rotterdam Museum. Trost's satirical pastels and gouaches, which mostly represent ordinary outdoor scenes and plays with songs, are best found in The Hague Museum. Lovely "Christmas carols on the feast of the Epiphany" and "The wedding of Chloris and Roosier." A fascinatingly interesting series of five genre paintings "NERLI" (5 initial letters of the titles of the paintings. - Ed.) (1740), depicting a meeting of six friends at the "Biberiusa" ("Drinkers"). Stupidly, silently, they sit in the first scene until the wine looses their tongues and, in the end, overcomes them at all. These paintings constitute the transition from Wall to Hogarth. The brilliant and original technique, which combines pastels with watercolors, is joined here by the sharpness of observation, perception and transmission of life.

During the transition period from the 18th to the 19th century, Holland did not possess any outstanding new neoclassicist. The French classicism of Adrien van der Werf already anticipated the main features of neoclassicism. But on the other hand, the turn to a simple, artless observation of nature found itself in the landscapes with the animals of Kobel the same clear expression as in the works of the Belgian animal painter Ommeganck. And the Dog is clearly adjacent to Potter; and he, embodying the naturalistic trends of his time, possessed an independent, although perhaps more plastic than pictorial, feeling, as his paintings show at least at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. It was only during the 19th century that Dutch painting found itself again - on its old paths.