A family enterprise
The De Brays are a largely forgotten family of painters, but this fine exhibition reveals their outstanding contribution to Dutch art of the golden age, writes Jörg Zutter.
Monday, 25th August 2008
There are more prominent families of painters than the De Brays of Haarlem. Every enthusiast for Dutch or Flemish art can easily recognise the style of the Brueghels or the Hals, but despite the quality of their art the De Brays – Salomon, Jan, Joseph and Dirck – are still largely unknown, even to many connoisseurs. Salomon and his oldest son, Jan, both produced a number of highly important history paintings. Salomon’s have boldness and – despite a certain acdemic quality – freshness; Jan’s can be enchanting, but also at times repetitive. Jan began by imitating his father, developed his own style and also worked as a portrait painter. His youngest brothers, Joseph and Dirck, produced a small number of extraordinary, radiant still lifes. The exhibition that opened at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem – where I saw it – and is now at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, will win admiration and recognition for the De Brays’ impressive family enterprise. Pieter Biesboer and his curatorial team have secured a group of highly important loans.
Two exhibitions, ‘Gods, Saints & Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt’ at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, in 1980, and ‘Dutch Classicism in 17th-Century Painting’ at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, in 2000, laid the ground for a new interest in Dutch Classicism. Both shows reconsidered the work of Salomon and Jan de Bray and many other history painters. Following the 2005 exhibition ‘Jan de Bray and the Classical Tradition’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Haarlem initiative marks a new beginning in the reception and understanding of the art of the family.
The De Brays – a Roman Catholic family continuously challenged in a Protestant-dominated society – were not only versatile painters, they were also architects, theorists, silversmiths and print makers. The show offers many interesting opportunities for comparison, especially between the paintings of Salomon and Jan. In Jan’s Leda Shows her daughter Helen to Tyndareus (1660; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem) the theatrically exaggerated event is staged in an unattractive, obscure garden. The scene recalls Salomon’s Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well (1660; Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai), in which the figures playfully animate a panoramic Italianate landscape. When Salomon introduces landscape elements in his history paintings, he does so with flair and enthusiasm, whereas Jan instead prefers a more summary and conventional depiction of nature. He is the man of action, not of mood. In Judith and Holofernes (1659; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) the heroine is a murderess, dramatically raising her sword to behead her ex-lover. Salomon, by contrast, had depicted Judith in a 1636 painting as a stoic and monumental figure, apparently in a trance, meditating the horrible event.
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