Antwerp, DIVA, 19 October 2018 – 28 April 2019

[i] The present author wishes to thank Michael J. Ripps for his invaluable comments. The text has benefited from it a great deal. The collection of the wealthy lawyer Robbert de Neufville (1670-1735) was one of the choicest in the first decades of the eighteenth century in Holland. On de Neufville see: B. Dölemeyer, Frankfurter Juristen im 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main, 1993, no. 447, p. 139.

La grande dame belongs to a group of highly-finished masterpieces, featuring several full-length figures, which Van der Neer painted during the 1660s and 1670s.[i] Closely related, for instance, is the Visit to the Nursery (1664) in Antwerp.[ii] Made in the same year (i.e., 1665) as our painting is the Young Woman at a Meal of Oysters (Liechtenstein Collection, Vienna, inv. no. 475), which ranks as one of Van der Neer’s most celebrated works.[iii] In all three paintings, Van der Neer bedazzles the viewer with his display of virtuosity, which has become almost an end in itself.

Our work offers an outstanding example of high-life genre or cierlijk modern (elegant modern), as the subject matter, style and accompanying elements were dubbed in Van der Neer’s day.[iv] Van der Neer operated at the vanguard, eagerly applying the latest stylistic and thematic novelties in his production. He held a discerning sense of what his privileged clientele wanted in their paintings and his distinctive images of civilized society must have met with considerable success. In forging his own pathway, Van der Neer drew upon the rich legacies of Ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu and Frans van Mieris. In our painting the décor was painted in emulation of De Hooch. In that artist’s iconic interiors from the early 1660s,tiled marble floors - often with busy patterns - also serve to impress the viewer through an extraordinary rendering of the play of light and gleaming reflections.[v]

In giving such prominence to satin gowns Van der Neer was indebted to Ter Borch, whose reputation as a painter of satin was and remains legendary.[vi] Yet Van der Neer literally outshines him with the compelling realism of the silk satin dress. Van der Neer’s predilection for the shimmering textile is already apparent in his earliest paintings and he continued to perfect his rendition of eye-catching garments in satin weave. An explanation for the true-to-life appearance of the garment in our painting could be that the artist copied it after life.[vii]

As in Ter Borch’s interiors, the satin catches the light and surges forward out of the shadowy background. Van der Neer probably used silver in the underpainting of the bodice, sleeves and upper skirt to strengthen this effect.[viii] Shell gold has been detected in some of the small landscapes Van der Neer painted at the end of his life for his German patron Johann Wilhelm of the Palatine. This use of silver and gold is exceptional in seventeenth-century painting and demonstrates that Van der Neer, in different phases of his career, experimentedwith unorthodox techniques and materials in his quest to achieve certain desired effects.[ix]

The subject of our painting is a pretty young woman gracefully descending a flight of steps while looking over her shoulder to a chained monkey. In the background, a man reads a letter and a couple is engaged in a tête-à-tête. By the 1650s scenes revolving around a minor incident and depicted as a frozen moment in time had become typical of both peasant and high-life genre painting, and they continued to form a popular mise en scène in the decades following. Usually, the precise circumstances are left unexplained. Ter Borch was the master of ambiguity par excellence and in our painting Van der Neer also gives the viewer’s imagination free rein to speculate on the scene at hand.[x]

A pentimento gives an interesting glimpse into Van der Neer’s thinking process as a ‘stage director’ of sorts. The monkey was initially faced towards the lady but Van der Neer decided to treat us to the animal’s impertinent gaze instead, and in so doing, amusingly draws us into the scene. Van der Neer beautifully captured the monkey’s primitive movements, which form a comical contrast with the elevated setting and, in particular, the aristocratic demeanour of the woman’s lapdog. The dog mimics his mistress’s fine locomotion, quite possibly alluding here to a famous saying popularized by Jacob Cats: “As the girl, so her dog”.[xi]

The figures in the background augment the scene’s anecdotal richness. The couple at right seem to be whispering to each other. Are they flirting? The pose of the letter reader - a head supported by a hand - was known at the time as representing the mental state of melancholy.[xii] Letters in seventeenth- century Dutch genre painting are often to be understood as love letters and the reader is no doubt a “Venusjanker” (Venus crier), a hopeless lover suffering lovesickness.[xiii] Venusjankers can be regularly found in conversation pieces by Van der Neer’s colleagues such as Johannes Vermeer, Metsu and Gerbrand van den Eeckhout.[xiv] In fact, a painting by Metsu showing a lady in red and white satin descending a stairs and also featuring a Venusjanker in the background may have provided Van der Neer with inspiration for our painting.[xv]

As encapsulated in our painting, Van der Neer is an exponent of the “beau fini.”[xvi] Van der Neer’s smooth, enamel-like treatment and the (probable) use of precious metals, surprisingly, went hand in hand with flexibility and economy of means. As mentioned above, the artist modified the position of the monkey’s head, but he also shifted the right upper sleeve of the lady and reworked the figure in the left background.[xvii] Furthermore, the artist saved paint and time by blocking out - in advance - the main forms before beginning to paint the background. The outlines of the lady’s figure, as well as the rug draped over the balustrade,reveal tiny spots of the ground layer.[xviii] These details underscore Arnold Houbraken’s observation that Van der Neer exercised an “ever active ingenuity”.[xix]

Van der Neer’s brilliant techniques meant to do more than simply convey the tactile qualities of an array of materials. These materials, as a rule, were extremely costly and their painstaking rendition also intended to invoke the theme of opulence. Indeed, Van der Neer attained “a rarefied level of elegance and refinement seldom witnessed in Dutch genre painting”, as one scholar eloquently summarized it.[xx] Works such as the one under consideration exemplify the culmination of a fascinating process that played out in the works of the leading high-life genre painters during the 1650s and 1660s. Their settings became increasingly aristocratic and the protagonists were developed into fashionably and extremely richly dressed beau monde indulging in all kinds of elegant diversions.[xxi]

The interior of Van der Neer’s Grande dame is furnished in princely fashion. The mirror is a conspicuous sign of status, and a true showpiece at that. With an estimated height of about a meter and a half it is enormous by mid-seventeenth-century standards.[xxii] One easily overlooks the tapestry that covers the back wall. Tapestries were the most precious type of wall coverings and Van der Neer quite regularly used them as embellishments in his interior scenes.[xxiii] The oriental rug with its lush red fringes, draped over the balustrade, is not only a pictorially appealing symbol of status, but also adds exotic lustre to the scene.[xxiv] The monkey no doubt serves a similar function.[xxv]

The true focal point is the rich apparel of the sartorially splendid lady. Through her elegant attire, artistic prowess, taste and haute couture come together. The lady’s elegantly curved bodice and three-quarter sleeves with slits were the height of fashion and features such as the strings and gilded buttons (on the end of the sleeves) can be seen in portraits by other artists from the early to mid-1660s as well. In lifting the white satin of her dress, the young woman reveals a pink underskirt, lavishly decorated with gold trimming. Her jewels, too, catch the eye. Her parure consists of a pearl necklace, pear-shaped pearl earrings and two matching bracelets of seed pearls, complemented with a magnificent brooch, fashionably attached to her bodice with a bejewelled chain.[xxvi]

Until recently our painting was only known through the reputation it achieved in the nineteenth century, when it passed through the hands of several distinguished collectors.[xxvii] One of them was the painter and printmaker Louis Bernard Coclers, who was especially renowned for his excellent taste.[xxviii] Another was the banker Charles Piérard of Valenciennes, an avid collector of Dutch and Flemish paintings. The next owners, the Péreire brothers, also bankers, created the Crédit Immobilier bank in 1852 and were also famous for establishing railroad companies in France and elsewhere in Europe. After the sale of their collection in 1872, the painting disappeared from sight for more than a century and a half. Thanks to its rediscovery,it can finally be restored to its rightful place - as a major achievement - in the artist’s oeuvre.[xxix]

BIOGRAPHY

Eglon van der Neer was the eldest son and pupil of the landscape painter Aert van der Neer. Having completed his training with Jacob van Loo, Van der Neer started his career in the south of France, working as court painter for Count Friedrich von Dohna, the governor of the principality (1655-58). On his return, he married Maria Wagensvelt, the daughter of a well-to-do notary. Van der Neer worked for most of his career in Rotterdam (1663-1680), although he frequently visited Amsterdam and Leiden and registered with the artist’s confraternity Pictura in The Hague in 1671. In 1677 Eglon’s first wife died and three years later he moved to Brussels where he married Marie du Chastel, daughter of the painter François du Chastel and herself a painter. In 1687, Van der Neer entered the service of Charles II of Spain but remained in the Southern Netherlands. Du Chastel died in 1692 and five years later Eglon married again, this time to Adriana Spilberg, another painter and a daughter of the former court painter at the Electoral court at Düsseldorf, Johannes Spilberg. In 1698 Eglon relocated to Düsseldorf, having been appointed court painter to Johann Wilhelm the Elector Palatine, a post he held until his death in 1703. During the last years of his career,he concentrated exclusively on painting extremely detailed landscapes. Eglon van der Neer practiced all genres save still life. 

Eddy Schavemaker