Romain Thomas, before devoting himself to art history, started by studying physics. He unlocks for us the doors of the painter’s workshops, a space that is far from being solely a realm of the mind. Although we might consider the brush and the paintbrush to be the traditional tools of the trade, he unearths, for the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a plethora of materials and gestures that echo more recent practices : the imprint of hairs, handles, the blade of a knife, fingers, textiles or various sponges. Through careful observation, one might even find tiny butterflies on the surface of a painting. The meaning of works by artists such as Titian, Ketel, Van Schrieck, Marseus, Rembrandt or Van der Heyden could not be unaffected by this. Once more, we must brush up on our classics !
Laurence Bertrand Dorléac
Creating the painted surface.
The case of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century
Romain Thomas
Fig. 1. Rembrandt van Rijn, Isaac and Rebecca, also known as The Jewish Bride, c. 1665 – c. 1669, oil on canvas, 121,5 x 166,5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
In Rembrandt’s biography (1606-1669), written within the pages of Le Grand Théâtre des peintres néerlandais (1718-1721), Dutch author Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) compared the painter’s manner, in his later works, to the smearing of mortar by a trowel. When discussing other paintings, he suspected the artist of using a ‘ruwe teerkwast’ (‘coarse brush for tar).1A. Houbraken, Het Groote schouburgh der nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, t. 1, Amsterdam, 1718, p. 259. While this devaluation of Rembrandt’s style can be partly explained by Houbraken’s taste for a ‘neat’ way of painting – a taste shared by his contemporaries -, it also hints at the importance of the artists’ tools and their eventual legitimacy. Indeed, they act as an attribute that can differentiate painters and their intellectual status from the artisanal world and manual labor, symbolized by the trowel and the tar brush, and condemned as vulgar.
Beyond these social factors, Houbraken’s ironical statement questions the idea of the tools used by painters in the early modern period, and of their variety. How was the painted surface created? What were artists looking for? If the materiality of the painted surface has been at the center of conservators’ preoccupations for centuries, its status is far more ambiguous amongst art historians. Working within a ‘technical art history’, and grounded in a small group of relevant artworks, we would like to explore here the importance of the painted surface and of the “things” with which Rembrandt and his Dutch peers made it, questioning thusly the added meaning their use might have brought to the works.
The artist’s tools
Once the artist had chosen his support – be that a wood panel, a stretched canvas on a frame, a copper plate, etc. – and once he had prepared its surface (or had it prepared by a supplier or an assistant), he could apply his colors by using paintbrushes (with a pointed shape) or brushes (with a flat shape). At least that is how artists and their guilds would depict themselves since the end of Middle Ages, when the first representations of painters in their workshops started to appear (most notably in images of Saint Luc painting the Virgin) and then on in self-portraits, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were also the tools claimed as symbols of the trade by the guilds themselves. In sixteenth century Antwerp, the painters considered that a maker of clothes brushes and pen holders should pay duties to their guild. He disputed this: indeed, he brushed his merchandise, but he did not do so with a paintbrush !2S. Alpers, L’art de dépeindre. La peinture hollandaise au XVIIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. 198. The quality of these tools was of particular importance for some, as in Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), who did not hesitate to make his own.
Yet, both the physico-chemical analyses of the surface of the works and primary sources show that paintbrushes and brushes were far from the only tools used by painters. Rembrandt did not hesitate to use the handle of the said paintbrush to fashion details. In some of his works, like the self-portraits or the famous small painting on gilded copper called The Laughing man (1629-1630, The Hague, Mauritshuis), he used it in a manner similar to sgraffite, which consists of scrapping off a thin dark layer (here still fresh) in order for a clearer under-layer to appear. The knife used to mix colors on the pallet could also be used by artists such as Rembrandt to spread his pigments on the support. This is visible in the smooth impasto on the costume of the male figure in Isaac and Rebecca.
We also often find fingerprints on the surface of paintings, proving that painters sometimes touched up their works directly with their fingers – as was said of an elderly Titian in the 16th century. Better, according to theoretician Karel van Mander, the painter Cornelis Ketel (1548-1616), from 1599 onwards, started painting solely with his fingers, and then his toes the following years.3H. Perry Chapman, ‘Cornelis Ketel. Fingerpainter and Poet-Painter’, in H. P. Chapman & J. Woodall (eds.), Envisioning the Artist in the Early Modern Netherlands, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, vol. 59, 2010, pp. 249-273. Some of the portraits he painted are said to have been completely painted with his lower limb: he is depicted in this position in an engraving for his biography in Van Mander’s work, who was himself an admirer of the artist’s virtuosity, in all likelihood afflicted by rheumatisms.
Much more unusually, other ‘things’ could have been used as tools to build up pictorial layers. Speculation has surrounded the use by German Renaissance painters, such as Cranach or Dürer, of quills – not the part called the calamus, used to write when using a goose feather, but the vexillum. The minuscule feathers of small birds, attached to the handle, would have allowed them to trace regular and very thin lines for their Madonna’s hair.4T. Brachert, ‘Über die Nützlichkeit von Federn als Pinsel’, Restauro, sept 1996/5, pp. 344-345. Regarding the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, art historians have suggested that artists like Jan van der Heyden (1632-1712), engineer and painter specialized in urban landscapes, and Otto Marseus van Schrieck (1619/20-1678), inventor of the sotto-bosco genre – forest-floor still life – managed to represent the details of plants and moss thanks to pieces of sponge or moss imbibed in green paint.5 R. Landsman, ‘Smudges, sponges, and 17th-century Dutch Painting’, in A. Haak Christensen & A. Jager (eds.), Trading paintings and painters’ materials. 1550-1800, London, Archetype, 2019, pp. 63-76. Van der Heyden is also said to have used proofs of engraving to draw the mortar for some of the bricks in his works, that is to say he applied a freshly printed proof to the surface of the painting.6A. Wallert, ‘Refined Techniques or Special Tricks : Painting Methods of Jan van der Heyden’, in P. Sutton (dir.), Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712), New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 91-103.
Trace and sculpture on the painted surface
This quest for numerous ‘things’ to paint with shows the importance artists accorded to the material realization of the image. In a visual culture where the quality of a painting was measured, amongst other things, by its capacity for mimesis, for its imitation of the visible, searching for the adequate tool to depict what they wanted doubtlessly contributed to this.
It ought to be underlined that the medium most commonly used in this period was oil (linseed, walnut, carnation), mixed with crushed pigments. Widely used by Flemish painters in the fifteenth century, and more generally by European painters at the end of the fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, this medium allowed artist, thanks to its plasticity, to relay the texture of some materials (such as the hairs of a paintbrush, or a brush) in order to imitate others, similar ones (hair, fur).7 A.-S. Lehmann, ‘The Matter of the medium : some tools for an art-theoretical interpretation of materials’, in C. Anderson, A. Dunlop & P. H. Smith (eds.), The matter of art. Materials, practices, cultural logics, c. 1250-1750, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015, pp. 21-41. It is this ability to faithfully reproduce a specific texture that was no doubt behind the research of artists like Van der Heyden or Van Schrieck, when they used moss, sponges or proofs to leave imprints. Better still, physico-chemical analysis has shown that the latter used pieces of foliage in some of his work: indeed, he stuck fragments of leaves on his canvas.
The medium’s viscosity, its rheology, allowed for additional visual effects by artists. Rembrandt, in the second half of his career (though not solely limited to it), gave particular attention to working with and on the matter he employed. It is this viscosity that allowed him to create the wonderful impasto used to depict fabrics in many of his works. Usually achieved by the use of lead white (a pigment that, once added to oil, created a thick substance), this viscosity was strengthened by the artist by adding a recently uncovered chemical compound: plumbonacrite.8 V. Gonzalez et al., ‘Identification of Unusual Plumbonacrite in Rembrandt’s Impasto by Using Multimodal Synchrotron X-ray Diffraction Spectroscopy’, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2019. The painter could therefore truly ‘sculpt’ the surface of his painting. This way of working has been – rightly – linked to a text written by Rembrandt’s student, Samuel van Hoogstraten:
I say then that only tangible qualities (kenlijkheyt) allow for objects to appear closer, and that, on the contrary, evenness (egaelheyt) is what makes them look further away. And therefore, I wish for things in the foreground to be painted roughly (rul) and with energy, and what is in the background to be as neat (netter) as they are distant.9S. van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, Rotterdam, 1678, p. 307 [translation author’s own].
For Hoogstraten the haptic qualities of the painted surface could therefore also echo the idea of mimesis, albeit in a complex manner and taking into account the perception of the spectator.
Unlike the commonly held idea, a Dutch painter’s tools in the seventeenth century could be, in some cases, particularly extensive and allowed him to render in various ways not reality, but the visible. Whatever the artist’s statement, whatever his workshop ‘tricks’ and the ‘things’ he used to build his painted surface, they were often the focus of meticulous planning and still cry out today, just as they did before, for a closer look.
[1] A. Houbraken, Het Groote schouburgh der nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, t. 1, Amsterdam, 1718, p. 259.
[2] S. Alpers, L’art de dépeindre. La peinture hollandaise au XVIIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. 198.
[3] H. Perry Chapman, ‘Cornelis Ketel. Fingerpainter and Poet-Painter’, in H. P. Chapman & J. Woodall (eds.), Envisioning the Artist in the Early Modern Netherlands, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, vol. 59, 2010, pp. 249-273.
[4] T. Brachert, ‘Über die Nützlichkeit von Federn als Pinsel’, Restauro, sept 1996/5, pp. 344-345.
[5] R. Landsman, ‘Smudges, sponges, and 17th-century Dutch Painting’, in A. Haak Christensen & A. Jager (eds.), Trading paintings and painters’ materials. 1550-1800, London, Archetype, 2019, pp. 63-76.
[6] A. Wallert, ‘Refined Techniques or Special Tricks : Painting Methods of Jan van der Heyden’, in P. Sutton (dir.), Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712), New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 91-103.
[7] A.-S. Lehmann, ‘The Matter of the medium : some tools for an art-theoretical interpretation of materials’, in C. Anderson, A. Dunlop & P. H. Smith (eds.), The matter of art. Materials, practices, cultural logics, c. 1250-1750, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015, pp. 21-41.
[8] V. Gonzalez et al., ‘Identification of Unusual Plumbonacrite in Rembrandt’s Impasto by Using Multimodal Synchrotron X-ray Diffraction Spectroscopy’, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2019.
[9] S. van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, Rotterdam, 1678, p. 307 [translation author’s own].
Bibliography
Alpers, S., L’art de dépeindre. La peinture hollandaise au XVIIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1990.
Brachert, T., ‘Über die Nützlichkeit von Federn als Pinsel’, Restauro, Sept. 1996/5, pp. 344-345.
Chapman, P., ‘Cornelis Ketel. Fingerpainter and Poet-Painter’, in H. P. Chapman & J. Woodall (eds.), Envisioning the Artist in the Early Modern Netherlands, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, vol. 59, 2010, pp. 249-273.
Gonzalez, V. et al., ‘Identification of Unusual Plumbonacrite in Rembrandt’s Impasto by Using Multimodal Synchrotron X-ray Diffraction Spectroscopy’, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2019.
Hadjinicolaou, Y., Thinking bodies – shaping hands. Handeling in art and theory of the late Rembrandtists, Leyden/Boston, Brill, 2019.
Landsman, R., ‘Smudges, sponges, and 17th-century Dutch Painting’, in A.-H. Christensen & A. Jager (eds.), Trading paintings and painters’ materials. 1550-1800, London, Archetype, 2019, pp. 63-76.
Lehmann, A.-S., ‘The Matter of the medium: some tools for an art-theoretical interpretation of materials’, in C. Anderson, A. Dunlop & P. H. Smith (dir.), The matter of art. Materials, practices, cultural logics, c. 1250-1750, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015, pp. 21-41.
Wallert, A., ‘Refined Techniques or Special Tricks: Painting Methods of Jan van der Heyden’, in P. Sutton (dir.), Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712), New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 91-103.
Wetering, E. van de, Rembrandt. The Painter Thinking, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2016.
Romain Thomas is lecturer in Early Modern Art History at the University Paris Nanterre. He specializes in the History of Dutch Art in the 17th century, and, more widely, in technical art history. He was co-author of Les Provinces-Unies à l’époque moderne (Armand Colin, 2019, with Thierry Allain and Andreas Nijenhuis-Bescher), and is currently either a participant or a lead researcher in a variety of research projects, all at the crossroads of art history, physico-chemical science and information studies (Patrimoniochromies, EquipEx ESPADON, …).
