Friday, February 17, 2017

Paintings from Holland - 17th century

Govert Flinck
Bathsheba with letter from King David
1659
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"A fixed element in a work, such as a dried passage where the painting is effectively finished, can be a cornerstone around which the work is constructed. It is necessary, but it also hurts. It is often possible to look at a painting and guess which passage was fixed early in the process. It may be a face, or a beautiful passage of drapery, or a brilliant gestural mark: usually it is whatever is so obviously successful that the painter could not bear to efface it even when the whole painting changed around it until its very existence became a luxury. At first the perfect place in the image is a happy discovery, what in French is called a trouvaille, and then as the painting gathers around it, it wears out its welcome and becomes an annoyance. Often, too, it is possible to see paintings where the perfect place, prematurely fixed, has outlived its value and continues to exist only as a fossil of some earlier notion of what the picture might have been. Paintings tell the story of their creation that way. The paint gathers around the one fixed spot like the nacre of a pearl around a piece of grit. Anything permanent in the imagination is like an obstruction, an ossification of the freedom of thought. Like a bursa in a should joint or a sand grain in a clam, it attracts accretions that try to smooth it out and make it less painful. The painting swirls around the fixed spot, protecting and enclosing it like a bandage. But thoughts rub against it, and it aches."  

 from What Painting Is by James Elkins (Routledge, 1999)

Govert Flinck
Portrait of a man
1637
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Gerard Ter Borch
Glass of Lemonade
1660s
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Jan Steen
Esther before Ahasueras
ca. 1665
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Jacob van Ruisdael
The Great Oak
1652
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Jacob van Ruisdael
Road through cornfields near the Zuider Zee 
1660-62
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Jacob Ochtervelt
Child giving alms
1663
oil on canvas
private collection

Caspar van Wittel
Piazza Navona, Rome
1699
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Gerrit Adriaens Berckheyde
Groote Market in Haarlem
1673
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg
 
Barent Fabritius
Ruth and Boaz
1660
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Cornelis van Poelenburgh
Diana and Callisto
ca. 1650
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Allaert  van Everdingen
Rocky River Landscape in Scandinavia
1649
oil on panel
private collection

attributed to Jacob van Ruisdael
View inland from the coastal Dunes
ca. 1670
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Simon de Vlieger
Stormy Sea
ca. 1650
oil on panel
private collection