The past is always present: The image of early Netherlandish art in the long nineteenth century

Oud Holland 2020 3/4 volume 133 1 Wilhelm (Guillaume) Koller, Hugo van der Goes painting the portrait of Mary of Burgundy, ca. 1872, oil on panel, 59.4 x 86.4 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 81.1.662. In 1881, the American collector Stephen Whitney Phoenix bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a painting by the artist Wilhelm (Guillaume) Koller (18291884/1885) entitled Hugo van der Goes painting the portrait of Mary of Burgundy (fijig. 1). Koller, who trained in Vienna and Düsseldorf, moved in 1856 to Belgium, where he exhibited this painting at the Brussels Salon of 1872.1 The picture imagines an encounter between Van der Goes (ca. 1440-1482) and Mary of Burgundy (1457-1482), shown as a child seated on the lap of her young stepmother Margaret of York (1446-1503). Behind them is likely Charles the Bold (1433-1477), who married Margaret after the death of Mary’s mother, Isabella of Bourbon (1434-1465).2 Koller’s painting offfered nineteenth-century audiences an appealing, if fijictional, image of an esteemed northern European artist depicting a moment in the domestic life of a noble dynasty closely identifijied with the history and heritage of Belgium.3 ALISON HOKANSON & EDWARD H. WOUK

empty and stale; a new interest in forms of realism; a related esteem for art that seemed to embody simplicity, vitality, and fĳidelity to nature; and, more broadly, with the assertion of a variety of religious and political agendas and identities. 17

Inventing early Netherlandish art
Koller's painting also calls attention to some of the ways in which the nineteenth century gave rise to the concept of early Netherlandish painting as a distinct fĳield of art historical inquiry and continues to shape our understanding of artistic developments north of the Alps in the early modern period.Suzanne Sulzberger's groundbreaking La Réhabilitation des Primitifs flamands: 1802-1867 of 1961 demonstrated how overlapping scholarly, aesthetic and commercial interests raised the profĳile of this period in art history, and of its leading artists, in the context of European, and particularly German and English, Classicism and Romanticism.At the same time, Sulzberger revealed the cultural, political and nationalist implications of the shifting terminology used to describe this period. 18hese variances in nomenclature are encapsulated by two exhibitions held in Bruges about thirty years apart.One, in 1867, was organized by the English scholar W.H. James Weale (1832-1917) under the title Tableaux de l'ancienne école néerlandaise, a construction that closely resembles 'early Netherlandish' painting, the term preferred by more recent scholars, including many of the contributors to the present issue, to refer to art produced before the scission of the Northern and Southern Netherlands in the Dutch Revolt (1566-1648). 19The second and more famous exhibition, organized in Bruges in 1902 under the direction of Baron Henri Kervyn de Lettenhove (1856-1928), advertised the artists on view as the 'Primitifs flamands' (fĳig.2).The exhibition's coordinators settled on this compound term after much debate.Scholars, including the Belgian patriot Jules Helbig, opposed describing early Netherlandish art as 'primitive' -a concept associated with evolutionary models that nineteenth-century critics had applied to Italian painting before Raphael. 20Yet the committee unquestioningly approved the use of 'Flamands' , embracing a term that Belgian writers had almost universally adopted to refer to the early rise of independent oil painting and its practitioners. 21Although articulated in French, which was then the culturally dominant language in Belgium, the exhibition's title thus emphasized the 'Flemish' origins of the tradition of oil painting.It also helped to propel a nationalist discourse in Belgium that privileged 'Flemish' culture over a more expansive, pan-Netherlandish identity encompassing both the Northern and Southern Netherlands. 22As the essays in this issue attest, the term 'Flemish Primitives' still retains a degree of currency, particularly in French scholarship.
The 1902 exhibition marked a turning point in the understanding of early Netherlandish art. 23Incorporating multiple media and spanning over a century of artistic production, this major loan exhibition attracted considerable international attention, giving rise to some of the period's most important studies of Netherlandish art and culture, and inspiring exhibitions in cities including Düsseldorf, Paris, and Barcelona. 24While the 1902 exhibition sparked a wide range of critiques as well as influential scholarship, it was also hugely important for cementing longstanding rifts in the scholarly and critical reception of early modern art produced in the Low Countries.The German art historian Max Friedländer (1867-1958) emerged from the exhibition with a laudatory view of the legacy of the Van Eycks.In his eyes, these painters and their nearcontemporaries broke with centuries of stagnation by looking to the "infĳinite diversity" of nature and using their mastery of oil painting technique to examine and depict the world around them-not unlike nineteenth-century concepts of realism. 25Friedländer's writings position the Netherlandish tradition as a threshold to artistic modernity, and ascribe to Netherlandish art a positive value that does not depend on Italian ideals of perspective or classical depictions of the body. 26His interpretation largely parallels those of contemporaries including Hippolyte Taine and Louis Courajod in France, Karl Voll in Germany, and Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert in Belgium, all of whom understood early Netherlandish painting as the point of origin for a distinctly northern Renaissance.Friedländer would devote his career to studying this art and developing a multivolume catalogue that remains an essential point of reference. 27he Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) responded diffferently to the 1902 exhibition. 28His visit to the show shaped the assessment articulated in The autumn of the Middle Ages, his highly influential yet contentious study of Netherlandish culture, fĳirst published in Dutch in 1919. 29In that text, he famously identifĳied in the 'naturalism' of the Van Eycks a belated "unfolding of the medieval spirit" in decline. 30Where Friedländer invited favorable comparisons to nineteenth-century realism, Huizinga saw the decadence of a premodern society of spectacle focused on ritual performances. 31uizinga's arguments stand apart for their rejection of any explicit connection between the Netherlandish past and contemporary Dutch or Belgian culture -a prevailing view advanced by his influential Belgian contemporary Henri Pirenne. 32Yet Huizinga's determined resistance to seeing a modernist-realist character in early Netherlandish art is a measure of just how successful his nineteenth-century predecessors were in establishing the terms on which this art was exhibited, studied, and invoked as a common heritage for modern Belgian society. 33Both Friedländer's and Huizinga's projects reflect the ways in which nineteenth-century understandings of the past shaped the historiography of early Netherlandish art as a site of contested signifĳicance.The 'rehabilitation' of the masters that culminated in the 1902 exhibition was, ultimately, a deeply political efffort, enmeshed in debates about how (or if) the Netherlandish past could be brought to bear on Belgian culture in the present and appropriated in other contexts for specifĳic ideological purposes.

The past is always present
It is the intersection of artistic and art historical practice in the long nineteenth century, and its enduring impact on the development of early Netherlandish art history as a fĳield of study, that inspired this issue of Oud Holland, which originated as a panel held at the Historians of Netherlandish Art conference in Ghent in 2018.The essays examine the myriad ways in which, to quote the Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck, "the past is always present". 34They are concerned with the study, creative adaptation, reception, and active promotion of early Netherlandish art, in particular painting, in Belgium, and in England and German-speaking regions that took a keen scholarly and political interest in their young neighbor. 35The essays address varied aspects of this cultural and intellectual landscape: art historical writing and exhibitions; architecture and design; painting and drawing; and photography.Collectively, the authors illuminate how the past and the present were brought into productive interplay through a range of interconnected practices.
The essays form three thematic pairs, each highlighting a diffferent facet of the nineteenth-century engagement with early Netherlandish art.The section Documenting the past considers the deeper meanings of attempts to record and preserve the Belgian artistic heritage.Sandra Hindriks presents a case study on the impact of nationalist agendas on art historical interpretation.Examining a ceremonial goblet presented to the Antwerp painters' guild of St Luke in 1549 but now destroyed, she explores how nineteenth-century views of the city's artistic heritage may have given rise to a signifĳicant mistake in identifying one of the fĳigures portrayed on the precious object as Jan van Eyck, rather than Raphael.Correcting this error, and the historiography to which it gave rise, she exposes how nineteenth-century historians in Antwerp constructed an artistic history with more explicitly nationalist or regionalist claims than their early modern forebears, whose more international outlook has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. 36wnloaded from Brill.com 05/05/2024 10:49:54PM via Open Access.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at the time of publication.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/cc-by/4.0 Theme issue: Early Netherlandish art in the long nineteenth century Érika Wicky's contribution revisits photography's role in establishing the early Netherlandish canon.Her investigation into Belgian photographer Edmond Fierlants' state-sponsored project to create highly detailed reproductions of early Netherlandish paintings elucidates the vital part played by photography in enabling connoisseurship.Wicky's essay also highlights perceived technical and aesthetic parallels between centuries-old paintings and the very modern medium of photography, which, advocates argued, made it uniquely suitable to the task of documenting and promoting early Netherlandish art.
Appropriating the past analyzes creative borrowing and reuse as strategies for bringing early Netherlandish painting to bear on the concerns of the present.Douglas Brine examines a set of drawings by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Yale University's Beinecke Library, revealing how the distinctive vocabulary of forms that shaped Pugin's architectural practice in Victorian England was rooted in his study of Netherlandish art in private English collections, in printed reproductions, and through travel to the Low Countries. 37Brine demonstrates how Pugin tapped into the perceived religiosity of early Netherlandish art to market designs specifĳically to English Catholic patrons.
Susan Canning explores the artist James Ensor's ironic mode of citing and co-opting the Netherlandish past.Adopting the critical lens of 'flandricism' , the linguistic practice of intermingling Flemish idioms in French texts, she considers how Ensor used pictorial references to Flemish and Netherlandish art and history to express his own artistic and cultural identity, and critique contemporary Belgian society and politics.In a culture that took its art and history very seriously indeed, Ensor's irreverent and satirical approach to the exalted exemplars of the past, stands out as a marked counterpoint and site of resistance.
Interpreting the past brings together two essays that examine the important role of German art historians in shaping an international image of Netherlandish art.Henrik Karge examines Karl Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe (Letters from the Netherlands), published in 1834 -a heterogeneous volume of travel writing, personal reflections, and extensive discussions of art.By providing a close reading of a selection of passages discussing art in the Low Countries, Karge demonstrates how Schnaase developed an identity for Netherlandish art in contradistinction to Italian traditions.In doing so, he advanced an early form of comparative art history for Netherlandish painting, mapping a synthetic history of the development of art by peoples and cultures decades before such practices crystalized in academic discourse.
William Diebold examines a text written by Paul Clemen, the curator of the 1904 exhibition in Düsseldorf of paintings from the Rhineland, which came on the heels of the 1902 exhibition in Bruges.Diebold demonstrates how Clemen's musings on his era's preference for 'primitive' art of the fĳifteenth and sixteenth centuries contravene explanations of that predilection as a product of nationalism and artistic modernism.Diebold identifĳies other associations of this art, which emerge, explicitly and implicitly, in Clemen's text, including its gendered connotations and its conservative appeal to notions of piety, craft, tradition, and community in opposition to ideals of progress and modernity.
Diebold's essay is an apt conclusion to this issue.Standing on the threshold of a new century, Clemen was able to cast a critical eye over the resurgent interest in early Netherlandish art in prior decades.He began to explore the nature of the fĳield's appeal, working through its multiple and sometimes divergent signifĳications, and, perhaps most importantly, expressing an incipient recognition that the tastes and the concerns of the present conditioned understanding of the artistic past.Downloaded from Brill.com 05/05/2024 10:49:54PM via Open Access.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at the time of publication.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/cc-by/4.021 Sulzberger 1961 (note 18), pp.14-20.Although few of the artists exhibited were actually from Bruges or even the historic county of Flanders, Amédée Lynen's offfĳicial poster for the exhibition (fĳig.2) stressed the connection between this artistic tradition and the quintessentially Flemish, Burgundian city, which appears as the backdrop to, and cradle for, the Eyckian revolution.The poster's design also reflected the aim of attracting tourists to Bruges, which had refused to lend its paintings to Brussels when the exhibition was initially planned to take place there, in part for fear of losing visitors.See Haskell 1993 (note 6),  pp.445-446.22 Deam 1998 (note 4), pp.13-15.On the Great-Netherlandish movement, which dismissed the Belgian state as an artifĳicial diplomatic construction, see J. Tollebeek, 'Historical representation and the nation-state in Romantic Belgium (1830-1850)' , Journal of the history of ideas 1998 (59), pp.329-353, spec.332, with further references.On language and identity in Belgium during the long nineteenth-century, see note 9.