Painting in the Dutch Golden Age underwent remarkable evolution. In the fifty years between the 1620s and the French invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1672, established genres grew novel sub-genres, with artists specialising in each. These included ‘genre’ scenes of everyday life, with artists devoted to painting taverns, women working, festivities, markets, or domestic interiors. The latter appear to have been among the first such depictions in modern art.

During the 1650s, interiors started to become distinct from other scenes of everyday life, as the significance of their figures diminished, although few if any dispensed with them altogether.

Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681) specialised in domestic interiors, some containing open-ended narratives to encourage the viewer to speculate on their resolution. Two centuries later, those were to be become popular again, particularly in Britain, where they were known as problem pictures and featured in the press.

Ter Borch’s The Messenger, usually know as Unwelcome News, from 1653, develops his favourite theme of the arrival of a message. The young man at the left is still booted and spurred from riding to deliver a message to this couple. Slung over his shoulder is a trumpet, to announce his arrival and assert his importance. The recipient wears a shiny breastplate and riding boots, and is taken aback at the news the messenger brings. His wife leans on her husband’s thigh, her face serious.

The scene is the front room of a house in the Golden Age. Behind them is a traditional bed typical of living areas at the time, with some of their possessions resting on a table between the couple and their bed. Hanging up on a bedpost is the husband’s sword, and behind them are a gun and powder horn. Is this letter news of his recall to military service, perhaps? Will he soon have to ride away from his wife, leaving her alone to bring up their family?

Although the three figures take the limelight, ter Borch picks out the mundane details of the room behind them instead of letting them fade into darkness.

Three Figures Conversing in an Interior is another of ter Borch’s narrative genre works, and more popularly known as Paternal Admonition (c 1653-55). Standing with her back to us, wearing a plush going-out dress, is the daughter. To her left is a table, on which there’s a small reading stand with books, almost certainly including a Bible.

Her parents are young, and they too are fashionably dressed. Her mother appears to be drinking from a glass, but her father is at the very least cautioning his daughter, if not giving her a thorough dressing-down. He wears a sword at his side. Behind them is a large bed, and to the right the family dog looks on from the darkness.

Ter Borch’s half-sister Gesina appears to have been his model for Woman Writing a Letter (c 1655), which makes obvious his connection with Vermeer. Move this woman to a desk lit through windows at the left, light her surroundings, and you have a painting similar to Vermeer’s interiors. This shows a heavy decorated table cover pushed back to make room for the quill, ink-pot, and letter. Behind the woman is her bed, surrounded by heavy drapery, and at the lower right is the brilliant red flash of the seat.

The Letter from about 1660-62 returns to ter Borch’s favourite theme of the reading and writing of letters. Two young women are working together, apparently replying to the letter being read by the woman on the right. A boy, perhaps their younger brother, has just brought in a tray bearing an ornate pitcher of drink. In front, a small dog is curled up asleep on a stool. Above them is an unlit chandelier suspended from a hanging ceiling.

Other specialists in genre painting like Gabriël Metsu also ventured towards interiors. His Washerwoman from about 1650 looks authentic and almost socially realist: the young woman is a servant, dressed in her working clothes, in the dark and dingy lower levels of the house. She looks tired, her eyes staring blankly at the viewer. She’s surrounded by the gear she uses, including a rope and pitcher to the right, and an earthenware bowl on display below it. The mantlepiece in the background features a blue and white plate.

It’s easy to mistake Pieter de Hooch’s A Woman Drinking with Two Men from about 1658 for a Vermeer, and like the latter he decorates the far wall with a contemporary map. The Eighty Years’ War had not long ended, and the Dutch Republic was flourishing. Discarded objects are scattered on its black-and-white tiled floor. There’s a large and empty fireplace, and above it hangs a religious painting.

It was Jan Vermeer whose few surviving works explored interiors the most.

In his Milkmaid from about 1660, a woman servant is pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. In the left foreground the bread and pots rest on a folded Dutch octagonal table, covered with a mid-blue cloth. A wicker basket of bread is nearest the viewer, broken and smaller pieces of different types of bread behind and towards the woman, in the centre. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman (to the right of the mug) a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which the milk is being poured. An ultramarine blue cloth (matching the woman’s apron) rests at the edge of the table. There are many other intriguing details in this interior.

Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher from slightly later is another fine example, this time with more obvious control of focus effects for which his paintings are renowned. Details in this interior include the ornate tablecloth, a small lockable chest on the right of the table, the map hanging behind, and the window she is holding with her right hand.

Interiors then vanished from painting until their rebirth in the nineteenth century.

Under the academies that dominated painting as an art during the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, paintings were distinguished in genres. These consisted of history, portraits, genre (scenes of everyday life), landscapes, animals and still life. These gave rise to a twisted system of aesthetics that assigned greater artistic merit to a formulaic depiction of classical myth, than any landscape painting. The established genres were constraints that were quickly outgrown, as I’m going to examine in this new series looking at paintings of interiors.

Painting the inside of a house first flourished during the Dutch Golden Age, as a novel genre to appeal to collectors. Initially, most included some figures and were conveniently classed as genre works, but their object of interest increasingly lay in the room and its furnishings, as a still life on a grander scale.

Three Figures Conversing in an Interior is one of Gerard ter Borch’s narrative interiors, more popularly known as Paternal Admonition (c 1653-55). Standing with her back to us, wearing a plush going-out dress, is the daughter. To her left is a table, on which there is a small reading stand with books, almost certainly including a Bible.

Her parents are young, and they too are fashionably dressed. Her mother appears to be drinking from a glass, but her father is at the very least cautioning his daughter, if not giving her a thorough dressing-down. He wears a sword at his side. Behind them is a large bed, and to the right the family dog looks on from the gloom.

Interiors reached their height in the few brilliant paintings of Jan Vermeer.

Vermeer’s better-lit Young Woman with a Water Pitcher from about 1662-64 is a good example of this change in emphasis. The viewer’s attention is diverted from this anonymous young woman engaged in mundane activity, to her surroundings, the open chest on the table, the map on the wall behind her, and the play of the light coming in through the window.

Genre and interiors went into decline, before becoming more popular again in the nineteenth century, particularly in works aimed more at the less affluent.

The middle classes were able to indulge in a few paintings and framed prints of their own, although most would have been family portraits rather than anything of greater aesthetic or cultural value. Matthäus Kern’s watercolour showing A Study Interior at St. Polten (1837) gives an idea of what might have been expected among the middle class, perhaps.

Narrative painting started to turn away from classical themes, and became framed around open-ended narrative and ‘problem pictures’ to challenge their reading.

Edgar Degas’ Interior (1868-9), also known as The Rape, appears strongly narrative, but has so far defied all attempts to produce a reading consistent with its details. A man and a woman are in a bedroom together. She is at the left, partly kneeling down, facing to the left, and partially (un)dressed. He is at the right, fully dressed in street clothes, standing in front of the door, with his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.

The woman’s outer clothing is placed at the foot of the bed, and her corset has been hurriedly or carelessly cast onto the floor beside the bed. She clearly arrived in the room before the man, removed her outer clothing, and at some stage started to undress further, halting when she was down to her shift or chemise. Alternatively, she may have undressed completely, and at this moment have dressed again as far as her chemise.

Just behind the woman is a small occasional table, on which there is a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a small pair of scissors and other items from a small clothes repair kit or ‘housewife’. There’s a wealth of detail that can fuel many different accounts of what is going on in this small room.

Interiors became sufficiently established by the late nineteenth century that they were widely exhibited.

Anna Alma-Tadema’s small watercolour of The Drawing Room, Townshend House, painted in 1885, demonstrates her skills at depicting surface light and texture. This painting was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, a remarkable achievement for someone who was only eighteen at the time that it was painted.

Interiors became popular among those in the avant garde, including Neo-Impressionists like Maximilien Luce.

Morning, Interior (1890) is one of Luce’s best-known Divisionist paintings from the late nineteenth century. Although it adheres to the technique of applying small marks of contrasting colours to build the image, Luce’s marks are less mechanical than those seen, for example, in Seurat’s paintings. In places they become more gestural and varied, particularly in highlights.

Nordic art adopted the interior with enthusiasm, and the skills of some of its finest painters.

Harriet Backer’s Gamlestua på Kolbotn (Old Living Room at Kolbotn) from 1896 is an intimate view of a friends’ living room on their farm in Østerdalen, Norway. Hulda and Arne Garborg are seen, sat at the table, with Arne holding his fiddle. Behind them are paintings, among them two landscapes painted by Backer’s friend Kitty Kielland.

Some came to specialise in distinctive interiors, such as the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. His Room in the Artist’s Home in Strandgade, Copenhagen, with the Artist’s Wife from 1901 is typical of his explorations of light in rooms that effectively became large still lifes.

Thorvald Boecks bibliotek (Thorvald Boeck’s Library) (1902) is one of Backer’s few interiors that’s devoid of people, here replaced by books from floor to ceiling. The intricate detail of their many spines, furniture, and other decorations contrasts markedly with the bare floorboards in the foreground.

In France, the former Nabi artist Félix Vallotton painted a series of enigmatic interiors in the early years of the twentieth century.

His Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903 develops the framing effect of multiple sets of doors, drawing the eye deeper towards the distant bedroom. The woman wearing a red dress looks away, her skirts swept back as if she has been moving towards the three steps dividing the space into foreground and background. There are tantalising glimpses of detail on the way: discarded fabric on a settee, clothing on a chair in the next room, and half of a double bed with a bedside lamp in the distance.

In Britain, members of the Camden Town Group led by Walter Sickert headed in a different direction.

Alongside others in the group, Spencer Gore painted mundane domestic interiors such as The Gas Cooker (1913), showing his wife Mollie in the tiny kitchen of their flat in Houghton Place in London.

In Norway, Nikolai Astrup, a former pupil of Harriet Backer, provided the occasional peek into his domestic life. Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand (c 1921) shows his family home, with a tapestry hanging in the corner, an unidentified painting on the wall, potted plants, a bowl of fruit, and an articulated wooden figure leaning against a pitcher of milk.

I hope these paintings have whetted your appetite for the rest of this series, which starts next week with the Dutch Golden Age.

Wheat and cereals were by no means the only crops grown at scale by farmers, although the acreage devoted to them accounted for the majority of arable land in most parts of Europe until the nineteenth century. Other crops were adopted for two main benefits: to sell for profit as a ‘cash crop’, or to improve the soil, often as part of a crop rotation system.

Buckwheat was a traditional local crop where the land rises up from the bog of Teufelsmoor, an artists’ colony to the north of Bremen, in Lower Saxony. In Fritz Overbeck’s Buckwheat Fields at Weyerberg from about 1897, he catches a small field of the pseudocereal in full flower, the upper parts pale gold in the light of the setting sun. Buckwheat isn’t a grass at all, but is more closely related to sorrel and rhubarb, with edible triangular seeds. It thrives on the poor, acid soils in this area, provided they are well-drained. Because it has a short growing period of only 10-12 weeks, it can suppress summer weeds, and thrives best in soil with low nitrogen content.

Theodor von Hörmann’s oil sketch of a Sainfoin Field at Znaim II from about 1893 shows a crop now little-known: sainfoin, a chalk-loving forage crop which used to be important for working horses. Sainfoin is a legume, so not only feeds the farm’s horses, but also increases the nitrogen content in soil. It’s equally good food for cattle and sheep.

I’m not sure where Mykhaylo Berkos painted these Flax Blooms in 1893; they’re a particularly appropriate theme for an accomplished oil painter, as flax is the source of linseed oil, one of the major drying oils used as a binder in many oil paints, and its fibres can be used for ‘canvas’ too.

The common flax appears to have been first domesticated in the Middle East, and has spread steadily across Europe, reaching northern Europe around five thousand years ago. Unlike other sources of drying oils, it prospers in the cool and wetter climates of northern Europe. It has been used widely for the production of fabrics for clothing and many other purposes, and its seed as a foodstuff, used as an edible oil and ground into flour.

Emile Claus here shows Flax Harvesting in 1904, near his cottage in East Flanders, Belgium. Below are some flax seeds ready for pressing to make linseed oil.

Vincent van Gogh’s painting after Millet shows a Peasant Woman Bruising Flax (1889), an early part of the process of transforming it into linen. Below, Max Liebermann shows a later stage as flax fibres are spun into yarn, in The Flax Barn at Laren (1880-90).

Although grown in more limited quantities, crops used for the manufacture of dyes became important in some regions. Among those was madder, used widely to dye clothing and, after processing, in artists paints.

Jan Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary from about 1654-56 is a good example of the use of Madder Lake by one of the Dutch Masters.

One of the early challenges in the history of art materials was the transformation of vegetable dyes into pigments, in many cases, the process of laking. The need was simple: take a vegetable dye such as the Crimson derived from Madder plants, and fix it into pigment particles which can be dispersed in gum solution (watercolour) or a drying oil medium.

Neither the Romans nor the Greeks appear to have solved this on any scale, but at some time between the Classical civilisations and the pre-Renaissance, someone discovered that aluminium salts would combine with the colourants in Madder extract and make a pigment which was suitable for fine art painting: Madder Lake.

Over time, many different recipes for the preparation of Madder Lakes evolved. By using different species of Madder plant, adjusting the method of extracting the colourants from its root, and using different salts for the laking process, Madder Lakes covered a broad range of hues from pale purples through pinks to brilliant scarlet.

Another important crop was clover, a legume that fixes nitrogen in the soil, so increasing its fertility for subsequent food crops.

Jules Breton’s Blessing of the Wheat in Artois from 1857 shows more than fields of wheat. As the artist wrote to his then fiancée Élodie:
Against a dazzling background of light in which the gold of the wheat combines with the emerald green of the clover, losing itself finally in the sky in a warm, transparent vapour, a solemn and silent procession of country folk moves slowly and piously along, with the sun at their backs and their shadows in front.

Farmers in much of Britain and France didn’t appear to grow many of these alternatives until the eighteenth century, but in the Low Countries of what is now the Netherlands and Belgium they were locally common even before the previous century. This helped build the Low Countries into a great trading nation and bring on the Dutch Golden Age with its fine paintings.

Jan Bieleman has given figures for the percentage of arable land devoted to different types of crop in West-Zeeuws-Vlaanderen between 1670-1795. Throughout those two centuries, wheat and pulses (peas, beans) were most popular at 24-30% each, with barley in third place. Flax was grown on 4% until it decreased after 1720, rapeseed (a brassica crop still grown widely for its oil) on 2-4%, with madder, potatoes and carrots on even less land. Only about 15% of the area was lying fallow at any time, making it highly productive for the period. That leads us to look at crop rotation in the next article, where paintings can be particularly useful as historical records.

Reference

Jan Bieleman (2010), Five Centuries of Farming, a short history of Dutch agriculture 1500-2000, Wageningen Academic, ISBN 978 90 8686 133 0.