Enchanting the Eye: Dutch Paintings of the Golden Age
May 14 – November 7; The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse

Since the Queen’s Gallery opened at Holyroodhouse 18 months ago, we’ve been treated to Leonardo’s drawings, Fabergé’s eggs, and the illustrated pages of the Padshahnama. Now, for the first time, the paintings have arrived. Enchanting the Eye makes its debut in Edinburgh this Friday, nearly a year ahead of its stint at Buckingham Palace. Made up of fifty top quality paintings from the Dutch Golden Age – including Rembrandt and Vermeer – it’s an absolute must-see.

While you’re probably used to seeing Vermeer’s Music Lesson over your auntie’s mantelpiece, it’s not often you get the chance to see the original. The same goes for Rembrandt’s brooding self-portrait of 1642, and the glowing portrait of his mother. Alongside these, Frans Hals will be enchanting the eye, as well as Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and numerous other 17th century Dutch masters.

The exhibition is in the hands of Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Just before he started mounting the show, I asked him about that grand job title. “I was appointed Surveyor in 1988,” Lloyd told me, “and its involvement is interestingly almost exactly the same as the job description given to the first Surveyor who was appointed by Charles I in the 1620s.”

Lloyd looks after the conservation, cataloguing and exhibition of 7000 paintings and 3000 miniatures which are distributed through the various royal residences from Balmoral to St James’s. Most of the paintings in this show are from Buckingham Palace.

“That’s because in a way you hang pictures according to the date of the residence,” says Lloyd. George IV was closely associated with the development of Buckingham Palace, and he liked to keep his Dutch pictures there. While some of the paintings come from the Palace’s state apartments, a substantial number come from the private apartments of the royal family. Pictures by Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade, Adriaen van de Velde and Hobbema are all on a rare outing from their natural habitat on some of the most exclusive walls in the world.

They have been in the family for some time. Charles I acquired Rembrandt’s portrait of his mother soon after it was completed, making it the first of the artist’s paintings ever to enter an English collection. The king amassed an impressive collection of “contemporary” art, much of which was later to be dispersed by Cromwell, along with Charles’s head.

“Charles II made it his business to try and recapture the quality of his father’s collection,” explains Lloyd. “Since he’d been in exile in Holland for so many years, the Dutch were extremely generous to him in giving him pictures, so he was able to top up from source.”

Despite the efforts of Charles II, the largest number of Dutch pictures in the collection were bought in the early 19th century by George IV, famous not so much for his artistic taste as for his kingly ineptitude. While his artistic discernment can’t be faulted, his fashion sense was somewhat off the mark. The king is best remembered in Edinburgh for his state visit of 1822, when he accessorised a massive kilt with pink silk stockings. The kilt was, to be fair, Walter Scott’s idea.

Lloyd is keen to defend the much maligned monarch. “He annoyed a lot of people because he spent money and got into huge debt, and then of course he gets a lot of bad press today because he wasn’t thought to be terribly responsible in his role as monarch. But he is in a way an essential part of the Royal Collection by virtue of what he acquired, so there are two sides to George IV.”

Looking at the paintings George IV liked, you have to admit he had a sensitive side. Dutch painters of 17th century had the courage to reject the shiny pink angels of the Renaissance for down-to-earth depictions of real urban life. For the first time they painted what they saw around them, and even biblical figures were recast as homely Dutch peasants.

Included in this show are grocers’ shops, street scenes, portraits, still lifes, scenes of seduction, landscapes, seascapes and plenty of drinking and eating. “All sorts of men and women are depicted in these pictures in all sorts of conditions of life,” says Lloyd. “It is a kind of voyeuristic experience looking at a Dutch picture. You feel like an intruder – it may be on a prostitute in her bedroom or two people having a drink together or the interior of a peasant’s cottage.”

In fact you might even say that these paintings have the same inexplicable appeal as reality TV. Their popularity was certainly as wide. It’s estimated that in a 20 year period at the height of the Golden Age, around 700 painters made about 1.4 million pictures in a country of less than 2 million people. Paintings were ubiquitous, and their everyday subject matter didn’t look out of place above the dinner table, or indeed, over auntie’s mantelpiece.

Because they were made for ordinary houses, Dutch paintings of the period tend to be fairly small – what art historians call “cabinet sized”. “There are limitations of size in the Queen’s Gallery,” says Lloyd. “We have some quite big pictures which we can squeeze in but on the whole Dutch cabinet pictures lend themselves very well to this space.”

“It’s very exciting when you hang an exhibition,” he continues, “it’s like writing a play. Even moving things left and right by two inches can make all the difference. I’m looking forward to it… I can’t anticipate what the final effect will be, but I’ve seen these pictures down in the studio being prepared and they are fundamentally extremely beautiful.”

Two stunningly beautiful still lifes by Maria van Oosterwyck – the only female artist to be represented – are the only flower pieces in the show. “As a collection we are not over-endowed with flower pieces or still lifes,” admits Lloyd, “because George IV didn’t like them.” Nevertheless, they were a popular subject in Dutch art, allowing the painter to show off her mastery of colour and form, while carrying a subtle moral warning of mortality and the transience of beauty.

A defining feature of The Netherlands in the 1600s was its religious diversity, with a tendency towards the same Calvinistic morals which have shaped the Scottish psyche. As a result, many seemingly innocuous paintings (like the flower pieces) harbour hidden meanings, and the clues are still revealing themselves to us today.

“Jan Steen’s Woman at her Toilet has got six toes if you look properly,” Lloyd points out, “and nobody can quite understand it. When the Jan Steen exhibition took place in Amsterdam a man looking down a television camera suddenly shrieked and said ‘God, she’s got six toes,’ and I received a telephone call saying can you explain this and I said a) I wasn’t aware that she had six toes and b) I can’t explain it over the telephone, and indeed I can’t explain it now.”

Even Vermeer’s Music Lesson, which works beautifully as a simple image of recreation, has subtle clues woven into its content. The two musical instruments suggest shared pleasure between the young woman and her male teacher, and the painting partly visible to the right has been identified as Roman Charity, in which Pero selflessly nourishes her imprisoned father at her own breast. This puts the milk jug in a new light, but whether the two figures are bonded more by sensual love or by Christian charity remains a tantalising mystery.

It’s easy to get caught up in the quiet enigma of each painting, and Lloyd clearly feels a real sense of affection for all fifty works in the show. When I ask which is his favourite, he bombards me with genuine praise for one after the other. Perhaps least well-known of these is A Village Fair by Isaac van Ostade, who died at the age of 28. For Lloyd, the ramshackle country scene “is as good as anything else in the exhibition really.”

“It looks rather begrimed and brown,” he explains, “but once you get your eye on it you get a sense of the moisture, like the day we’ve got today – you can’t get away from the damp today. And I love that sense of being in the landscape with those people, along those muddy roads… Everyone is going somewhere in Dutch painting, and you wonder where they’re going to or where they’ve come from. It’s a nice feeling.”

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.05.04