© Salwan Georges for The New York Times
© Nick Lachance/Toronto Star, via Getty Images
In most respects, lightweight virtualisation of macOS on Apple silicon delivers almost the same performance as running code on the host. That’s the result of having direct access to CPU cores and the GPU. However, earlier implementations in Monterey and Ventura performed poorly when accessing the Data volume in the Virtual Machine, with read/write speeds measured at 4.4/0.7 and 5.4/0.7 GB/s respectively, without FileVault or other encryption. In macOS 26.3.1 both RAW and ASIF encrypted disk images show disappointing performance particularly when writing to them. This article therefore re-evaluates VM disk performance to see if that extends to VMs.
Tests were performed on two freshly made 100 GB VMs in RAW format using the macOS 26.4 IPSW, running on a Mac mini M4 Pro in macOS 26.4. VMs were given 5 CPU cores and 16 GB memory, didn’t connect to an Apple Account, and were built and run in Viable and Vimy, both of which use the standard macOS API for virtualisation.
Performance was measured using Stibium’s ‘Gold Standard’ with 5 rather than 10 test sets, reading and writing a total of 26 GB in 80 files ranging in size between 2 MB and 2 GB. Following an initial write test, the VM was restarted before performing the read test. The first VM was configured with FileVault enabled, and the second with it disabled. In addition to those, standard read/write performance was measured as before on a 100 GB RAW disk image on the host, and on a 100 GB ASIF image, both being encrypted using 256-bit AES.
Measured read/write speeds were:
With FileVault disabled, performance in the VM was surprisingly close to that of the host’s internal SSD, with a small reduction in write speed from 7.66 to 5.91 GB/s. That’s a huge improvement on previous results, with writes being almost ten times faster.
Enabling FileVault did reduce performance significantly, particularly write speed which fell to about half. However, those are still good enough to be acceptable for most purposes.
No significant change was seen in host disk image performance from those measured in 26.3.1, though, which remains substantially slower than the VM with FileVault enabled.
VMs are vulnerable if they don’t have FileVault enabled. Without encryption, sensitive contents would be relatively easy to access if the VM were to fall into the hands of an attacker. Enabling FileVault is thus potentially more important for a VM.
Thankfully, with such great improvements in VM disk performance, those hosted on an Apple silicon Mac’s internal SSD are unlikely to be slowed much by their disk performance.
This makes it the more puzzling that encrypted RAW and ASIF disk images should perform so poorly, and it’s disappointing to see that continues in macOS 26.4. Over the same period that VM disk performance has increased so impressively, that of disk images has headed in the opposite direction.
If you tried installing the recent Background Security Improvement (BSI) in a macOS 26.3.1 VM, you were probably disappointed. In this respect, the VM didn’t work as expected. I was unable to find the BSI in its section in Privacy & Security settings. What did help was downloading it using SilentKnight, although that can’t install BSIs successfully. Instead, I restarted the VM and Privacy & Security offered to install the BSI at last.
Once installed, Privacy & Security offered to remove the BSI, but failed to do so, with SecurityImprovementsExtension reporting:Rollback failed: Error Domain=SUOSUErrorDomain Code=103 "Unable to remove Background Security Improvement" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Unable to remove Background Security Improvement, NSLocalizedRecoverySuggestion=Use Software Update to install the latest version of macOS.}
For the time being BSIs appear dysfunctional in VMs.
Like any file, a disk image can become corrupt or damaged, and like any mountable disk its file systems can also become corrupt or damaged. Although those should be very infrequent, their results can disastrous, and render the contents of that disk image inaccessible. This article suggests some solutions you can try.
In theory, if the problem is in the image’s file systems, you should be able to mount its volumes and run First Aid in Disk Utility to check and repair them. In practice that seldom works out, as macOS usually refuses to mount the image. Unless you have ready access to a recent backup, all you can do then is resort to Terminal’s command line to attempt a recovery.
Gaining access to the contents of a disk image requires two steps to complete: first the image must be attached as a device, then after probing of the file systems it contains, those can be mounted.
Read-only and compressed disk images have a checksum stored, and this is normally verified against the image file data first. If that proves invalid, then macOS will refuse to go any further.
In the past, records of checksum verifications have been stored in extended attributes such as com.apple.diskimages.recentcksum, and sometimes deleting those, or a record of the file systems being checked using fsck in com.apple.diskimages.fsck, can allow the disk image to mount. More recently those appear to have fallen into disuse.
Next you should try to attach the disk image without verification or mounting. This is best done using a command such ashdiutil attach -nomount -noverify diskImagePath
where diskImagePath is the full path to the disk image file, such as /Users/hoakley/VMs/myImage.dmg
If this succeeds, you’ll be rewarded with a list of the resulting devices, such as/dev/disk4 GUID_partition_scheme
/dev/disk4s1 EFI
/dev/disk4s2 Apple_APFS
/dev/disk5 EF57347C-0000-11AA-AA11-0030654
/dev/disk5s1 41504653-0000-11AA-AA11-0030654
The first is the disk device disk4, and is followed by its two standard partitions disk4s1 and disk4s2. The latter is its APFS container disk5 with its single APFS volume disk5s1. You can now check and repair the last two of those, such asfsck_apfs -y /dev/disk5s1
which should return a blow-by-blow account of the results. If the file system is HFS+ you may also be able to use third-party repair tools such as DiskWarrior.
When you’ve completed the required repairs, detach the disk image with a command likehdiutil detach /dev/disk4
If that fails to make the disk image mountable, some have claimed success by converting the disk image to a different format, using a command likehdiutil convert diskImagePath -format Uxxx -o outImagePath
where diskImagePath is the original disk image, outImagePath is the new image to be created, and Uxxx is the name of a disk image type, as listed in the Appendix.
If none of these gives access to the contents you require, then it’s almost certain that the only way ahead is to find the latest backup of that disk image, and use a copy of that.
One of the biggest penalties in using disk images has been their performance, particularly when they’re encrypted. Although no longer offered in Disk Utility, UDSP sparse images encrypted using 256-bit AES typically read and write as slow as 500/100 MB/s when mounted from an SSD delivering 4.7/4.9 GB/s. In contrast, UDSB sparse bundles can achieve close to that native speed.
macOS Sequoia brought a new type of disk image, Apple Sparse Image Format or ASIF, intended to deliver the high performance of sparse bundles, with their efficient use of storage space, in a single file that can be hosted on file systems beyond APFS. As this is now well over 18 months old, this article considers whether it has achieved those goals, and should become the preferred type of disk image.
Each test image was created using Disk Utility 22.7 (2510) in macOS 26.3.1 (a) running on a Mac mini M4 Pro, on its internal SSD of 2 TB. Performance measurements were made using the ‘gold standard’ method in my free Stibium on disk images of 100 GB nominal size. This writes and reads a total of 53 GB in 160 files ranging in size between 2 MB and 2 GB. As performance is likely to change with use of the disk image, the following sequence of events was used:
These provide three pairs of read/write measurements:
Disk image sizes were also measured when unmounted, using Precize or the Finder’s Get Info (for sparse bundles).
The three types of disk image tested were RAW (UDRW), UDSB (sparse bundle) and ASIF (sparse image). Each was tested fully when unencrypted, and test 1 was performed on an image encrypted using 256-bit AES.
The best and most consistent performance was achieved by UDSB sparse bundles, as expected. Their read speeds were 6.13, 6.12 and 6.19 GB/s, and write 7.62, 8.03 and 7.79 GB/s for the three separate measurements, and 5.09/5.23 GB/s read/write when encrypted. When first created, the sparse bundle only occupied 32 MB on disk, but by the end had grown to 3.99 GB even though empty.
The RAW disk image, formerly known as UDRW, also largely performed as expected. Read speeds were 6.09, 6.10 and 6.08 GB/s, and write 10.11, 9.86 and 10.11 GB/s. Initially it only required 5.78 MB on disk, rising to 621 MB at the end. However, its performance when encrypted was disappointing, at 2.84/1.58 GB/s read/write.
ASIF disk images were good, but also ran into problems when encrypted. Unencrypted read speeds were 5.99, 5.88 and 5.85 GB/s, and write 9.55, 8.93 and 9.64 GB/s. When encrypted, those fell to 2.82/1.72 GB/s read/write, no better than the RAW disk image. The image file size started at 26.8 MB on disk when empty and unused, and returned to 954 MB when empty at the end.
To confirm that ASIF performance when encrypted wasn’t an anomaly, I repeated that pair of tests on a MacBook Pro M3 Pro running 26.3.1 (a), and obtained similar results at 2.63/1.52 GB/s read/write, using a 10 GB ASIF image with one-tenth of the tests, giving 3.32/1.65 GB/s, and using Blackmagic, which gave 2.92/1.15 GB/s read/write. Although there is variation, they appear remarkably similar.
Test 2 results are summarised in the table above, for ease of comparison, and with the earlier results from macOS 26.0 below.
Although most of the test results in macOS 26.3.1 are very similar to those from 26.0, performance when using 256-bit AES encryption has fallen for all three disk image types, and most significantly in write performance for RAW and ASIF images, which have reduced from 4.3 to 1.58 GB/s (RAW) and from 3.9 to 1.72 GB/s (ASIF). The magnitude of those reductions is sufficient to have obvious impact on their use. Compared to native write performance using FileVault of 7.66 GB/s, those two types of disk image are pedestrian in the extreme, turning that blisteringly fast SSD into the equivalent of 20 Gbps over USB 3.2 Gen 2×2.
It’s possible that this dramatic reduction in encryption performance may have resulted from a change to address a vulnerability, but I’ve been unable to identify an entry in Apple’s security release notes that might correspond to such an event. I will repeat these tests once the update to macOS 26.4 has been released, in the hope it might be reversed.
When their folder-based structure is acceptable, UDSB sparse images remain the disk image type of choice, for their consistent high performance even when encrypted.
There is little to choose between RAW and ASIF disk images when a single file solution is required. ASIF images are portable to other file systems that can’t support APFS native sparse files, although curiously they too are flagged in APFS as being sparse files. As their sparseness isn’t dependent on APFS trimming habits, they are now an alternative that can be used on network storage and NAS. However, those able to use sparse bundles should continue to do so, particularly if using encryption.
A disk image is a file, or a folder containing files, that stores the contents of a physical storage medium. In contemporary usage most can be mounted as a disk or volume, so giving access to their contents. Originally developed to aid the manufacture of floppy disks, they go back long before the Mac, and now see wide use in all parts of macOS and its apps.
Since they were used in Classic Mac OS, they have come in a multitude of different formats and variants, many of which are listed in the Appendix. They’re an essential part of macOS installers, home to Recovery mode, and the basis for cryptexes. They’ve been used to burn and replicate optical disks, to archive disk contents, extensively in network backups, and for the distribution of software.
As early as Mac OS 9 in 1999, variants of formats had become complex. Here, Disk Copy is configured to create a read-only compressed .img file containing the contents of a standard 1.4 MB floppy disk. In the upper window, it has completed validating the checksum on a self-mounting .smi disk image that’s part of a DiskSet. Those could also be signed using certificates issued not by Apple but by DigiSign.
Mac OS X 10.1 Puma in 2001 brought a new standard with Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF) used in DMG disk images. Support for compression options in Apple Data Compression (ADC) unified what had previously been two disk image types, and extended support for images larger than a floppy disk. This new format enabled disk images to represent entire storage devices, complete with a partition map and disk-based drivers.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007 introduced the sparse bundle format, with its folder of smaller band files containing data. These enable the image to grow and shrink in size, and became a popular means of storing mountable Mac file systems on servers using different file systems.
In their most common use, Disk Utility or a third-party app such as DropDMG creates and mounts an empty container file, then copies a hierarchy of files and folders into its virtual file system. While the disk image remains mounted, it’s presented as a removable volume, and when unmounted it’s just a regular file that can be moved, copied and backed up like any other.
Its virtual file system can be any supported by macOS, but in recent years is most likely to be APFS. As the disk image can be hosted on a completely different file system, this enables you to store APFS volumes on systems that don’t themselves support APFS. This is essential for networked storage being hosted on a different file system such as Btrfs. SMB can then be used to access the contents of that disk image over the network.
Disk Utility offers a limited range of formats and variants, including RAW images (UDIF), sparse bundles (UDSB), optical disk masters (UDTO), and the new Apple Sparse Image (ASIF). They can be encrypted, and contain file systems in APFS, HFS+, FAT or ExFAT. Two command tools extend those formats and variants, diskutil with its image verb being the equivalent of Disk Utility, and hdiutil providing the most extensive support.
Opening a disk image in the Finder performs two distinct operations: first the file or bundle is attached, much in the way that you might attach physical storage. Once that has occurred, the image is probed by macOS for file structures and systems, and those that can be mounted are mounted as external file systems, normally in the path /Volumes. Cryptexes are an exception to this, as APFS will graft the image’s file system into arbitrary locations in the host file system.
Two types of verification can be performed during an attach-and-mount procedure. The first can compare the file’s checksum against a stored value to determine if the file has become corrupted, while the second is performed during probing and mounting of file structures and systems within the image. The command tools provide options to attach an image without mounting that can be used to attempt repairs on its file systems, although those seldom seem successful.
This ‘warning’ alert from 2020 illustrates one of the longstanding issues with disk images. Although integrity checking of disk images using checksums has been valuable, when an error is found there’s no possibility of repair or recovery as the image fails to attach, so its file system can’t be made accessible.
There are two other issues to consider before using disk images, their read-write performance, and use of storage space.
This table summarises read and write performance of the most popular types of disk image prior to macOS Tahoe, and demonstrates how sparse bundles have consistently performed best and most consistently, and sparse images (now dropped from Disk Utility’s options) fare worst, particularly when encrypted.
The introduction of ASIF in Sequoia has added another option, although sparse bundles remain fastest overall. I will be re-examining these in the coming weeks, now that new format has had more time to mature.
Before macOS Monterey, sparse bundles and sparse images were the only formats that made efficient use of disk space, as they grow to accommodate their contents, and should shrink again when some or all of their contents are removed. Monterey is thought to be the first version in which UDIF read/write images (UDRW) have been stored in APFS sparse file format. This has transformed what had previously been space-inefficient disk images that retained empty storage, into a format that can prove almost as space-efficient as sparse bundles.
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diskutil with its image verb extends those, and hdiutil is the most comprehensive.
Jules Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant protégé was a young woman who started training in Paris in 1877, and who died from tuberculosis seven years later, just three months before him, Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884).
She was born and brought up in Havrontsi (Gavrontsi), to the north of Poltava in central Ukraine, between Kyiv and Kharkiv, where she first started to learn to draw and paint. Her affluent parents split up when she was twelve, following which she travelled around Europe with her mother, eventually settling in Paris. She originally hoped to be a singer, but after an illness ruined her voice, she decided to be an artist. She then studied with Robert-Fleury from 1877, and at the Académie Julian.
A self-assured painter from the beginning, she set her sights high and had the ability and drive to paint excellently. Her early Self-portrait with Palette (1880) was painted in the same year that she first had a work accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon, and she was successful again in every subsequent Salon until her death.
While still studying at the Académie Julien in 1881, she painted In the Studio, which gives good insight into what her training was like. Her class was of course entirely female, and the Académie Julien was one of the few reputable schools that accepted women pupils at that time. The artist is seated in the centre foreground, holding her palette and knife as she looks up at one of her fellow pupils.
Her early portraits are skilful if conventional, as is The Artist’s Sister from 1881. She started establishing herself in the art scene; it has been claimed that she wrote a column for the mysandrist newspaper La Citoyenne under the name of Pauline Orrel, but that appears to be unsupported by the original edited versions of her diaries.
She became a close friend of Jules Bastien-Lepage when visiting Nice in 1882, and he acted as her mentor if not teacher, as she described herself as his pupil. She also formed a close friendship with the writer Guy de Maupassant.
As she developed a more distinctive style in her portraits, so her brushwork loosened. She was an astute observer of women’s life, as shown in At a Book (c 1882), with its emphasis on her model’s unusual hair.
Young Russian Girl (c 1882) is another delicate portrait, although I suspect the original isn’t as soft-focus as this image.
Although Bashkirtseff accepted that her mentor Bastien-Lepage reigned supreme in the countryside, she felt that she was his match when it came to depicting the urban environment of Paris. In the Mist from 1882 is a good demonstration of how well she captures the almost deserted city streets on a foggy day, with a bright plume of flame from a fire in the centre of her canvas.
Autumn, from 1883, is an impressive and Impressionist depiction of a row of trees on the bank of the River Seine in the centre of Paris, but is unusual in being devoid of people. The leaf litter, occasional rubbish, and fallen bench strengthen its feeling of desolation in the midst of the bustling city.
Bastien’s composite of detailed realism blended with more painterly passages shows in one of her best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer is quite unnerving. That year she was awarded an honourable mention from the Salon.
A Meeting (1884) finally justified her claim to paint the urban poor, and to match Bastien-Lepage. This painting was a great success when shown at the Salon that year, and is probably her finest work.
Her pastel Portrait of Madame X (1884), now in the Musée d’Orsay together with A Meeting, was also shown in the Salon that year.
By that summer, Bashkirtseff’s fragile health was deteriorating rapidly because of tuberculosis. She died on 31 October, less than a month before she would have turned twenty-six, and less than three months before her mentor died.
Her ambition was better fulfilled after her death than in life. Her huge mausoleum in Cimitière de Passy, Paris, designed by Bastien’s younger brother Émile, contains her artist’s studio complete with an unfinished painting of Holy Women by the Grave. Three years later, her copious and revelatory diaries were published, and propelled her to international fame.
References
Wikipedia.
An English translation of her journal, on archive.org.
After two unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome and become a history painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage had specialised in depicting the rural poor, to growing acclaim at the Salon.
Not all his paintings were typically Naturalist. He continued to paint landscapes, of which Snow Effect, Damvillers from about 1882, is one of his finest and most Impressionist.
The shadowy figures caught in the late dusk of his Evening at Damvillers (1882) are a reminder that people remained at the centre of his art.
Bastien pushed his compositional formula to the limit in this enchanting painting of Roadside Flowers or The Little Shepherdess (1882). The sky has been reduced to a thin sliver, and almost the whole canvas is devoted to its detailed foreground. Like the weeds behind her, this little girl has a wide-eyed and sad beauty. Although her clothing is visibly tatty, her face and hair are idealistically clean, in keeping with a romantic sentimentalism rather than the objectivity more characteristic of true Naturalism.
Going to School (1882) takes us back into the village, but again this girl is far too clean and perfect to be an objective account.
Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) is nearer the mark: a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud and laceless.
Many of his paintings from 1882 were single-figure portraits, mostly of children, but in Love in the Village he shows a young couple on either side of a tumbledown fence, chatting intimately among the vegetable patches. One early reading, by Mette, wife of Paul Gauguin, claimed the girl was under age, and the relationship accordingly beyond the pale. The girl not only faces away from the viewer, but her whole body is turned away, leaving that unresolved.
Bastien visited London, where he painted the river in The Thames, London (1882). This maintains fine detail right into the far distance, except where it’s affected by the smoky and hazy atmosphere, and its horizon is kept well below the middle of the canvas.
While in London he painted one of his most characteristically Naturalistic works, showing a young boy working on the street as a London Bootblack (1882). This could have been taken straight from the journalistic accounts of London’s streetlife by Henry Mayhew, or their fictional reworking in the novels of Charles Dickens. The documentary realism of the foreground gives way to a more sketchy and jumbled background.
His portrait of a flower seller in a Flower Market in London (1882) is The Little Shepherdess of the city, posed against dull brown stonework. In the background is a reminder of how the other half lived, as an affluent man in a pale top hat walks alongside a woman wearing an exuberant blue hat.
I haven’t been able to read the date on this portrait of The Blind Beggar, painted back in Damvillers, but guess that it was most probably painted between 1880 and 1883.
By 1880, Bastien’s health was starting to deteriorate as a result of what was most probably tuberculosis. He tried a brief stay in Algiers, but that didn’t help, and his output appears to have fallen dramatically in 1883-84.
Dated in 1883, The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers) is unusual as its subject isn’t shown standing, face-on to the viewer, but he sits and looks down at the kitten at the lower right. This young boy is also the dirtiest of Bastien’s waifs, his left hand still being black with soot from his work. He appears to be living in a hovel, with the embers of a fire at the left edge. Although signed, and presumably complete, the prominent white cat in the foreground remains very sketchy, and contrasts with the careful detail of the boy and his large bread roll.
Jules Bastien-Lepage’s declining health forced him to abandon his work in 1884, and he died on 10 December at the age of 36. His paintings continued to influence Naturalist painters well into the 1890s. Even critics like Émile Zola and Roger Fry recognised the importance of his work.
Impressionism had developed rapidly in the late 1860s, with its first buds appearing in Renoir and Monet’s paintings at La Grenouillère in 1869, and flowered in the first Impressionist Exhibition five years later. Naturalism had a slower evolution, and blossomed in the Paris Salons of 1883 and 1884 in the paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage.
Born as Jules Bastien in the village of Damvillers in the northeast of France, he showed an early aptitude for drawing, and his father taught him to paint. He enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1868, where he adopted the surname of Bastien-Lepage by incorporating his mother’s maiden name. While there he was taught the Academic and Salon tradition by Cabanel.
He fought, and was wounded, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, but managed to have his first work accepted for the Salon in 1870. Unfortunately this, and another acceptance in 1872, passed unnoticed by the critics and public. It wasn’t until 1874 that his portrait of his grandfather, painted at home the previous year, was awarded a third class medal at the Salon, and he started attracting more attention. He entered the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1875, and by public reaction would have received the award. However, the jury rejected his painting on a trumped-up technicality.
Bastien’s submission for the final was The Annunciation to the Shepherds (1875), in accordance with the prescribed subject of “the annunciation of the nativity of Christ by the angel to the shepherds of Bethlehem”, as in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 8-15. When he was unsuccessful, the jury attempted to avert outcry by awarding him a consolation prize, but it was too late, the damage had been done. He retreated to his rural village, and the pursuit of truth in his painting. He tried a second time the following year, but was again unsuccessful, so abandoned his ambition of becoming a history painter.
His Diogenes (1877) tackles human anguish in his depiction of this ancient Greek philosopher and cynic. Traditionally shown living in a barrel, Bastien gives him cruelly mutilated feet, and one of the most expressive faces since Rembrandt.
He returned to the Salon in 1878 with Haymakers (1877). It provoked debate over what was considered to be its harsh portrayal of life and work in the country. It was also a pioneering composition for him, with its high horizon and fine detail in the foreground. Together these give the impression that the whole canvas is meticulously realist, although in fact much of its surface consists of visible brushstrokes and other painterly marks. At the same time its deep recession and broad inclusion of land gives it the illusion of a wide-angle panorama, enhancing the exhaustion and desolation of its figures.
The following year, Bastien returned with what is now sometimes known as October or Potato Gatherers (1878), but was originally shown as October: Potato Harvest. He employs the same compositional scheme: high horizon, fine foreground detail, deep recession here enhanced by the distant figures, and broad land. This time, though, his rural poor are smiling and happy in their labour, and it proved a huge success.
All Souls’ Day, also completed in 1878, was a more sentimental incursion into the outskirts of the city, as a grandfather is taken for a walk by two of his young grandchildren. They are strolling through land that had been, until recently, open fields. It has now been transformed as smoky factories sprawl from the edges of the cities, with a narrow no-man’s-land of allotments and smallholdings as seen here.
Then in 1879, Bastien revisited history painting with his new formula in Joan of Arc. Its horizon is so high that little sky is visible beyond the trees. The lower half of the canvas is its intricately detailed foreground, even down to the clutter of woolworking apparatus, an ingenious link to the thread of fate, and the unkempt garden.
The corner of a house sharply divides the painting into halves. On its right is the very real and tangible figure of Joan of Arc, her piercing blue eyes staring into the distance, as she receives her call to arms. On the left are the ethereal figures of Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine, which gave rise to a surprisingly hostile reception by critics.
The Grape Harvest, also known as Harvest Time, (1880) varies the compositional formula, and doesn’t produce the same effects. Its horizon draws the eye more strongly, distracting from the foreground detail, and the land rises too soon to achieve the deep panorama of his earlier paintings.
Back in his native Damvillers, Bastien-Lepage painted portraits of the poor. The Beggar (1880) shows an old man who has apparently been knocking on doors in his quest for charity. A well-dressed young girl stares sadly at him as he walks away from her house, and she is closing the door on him.
Bastien’s The Wood Gatherer (Father Jacques) (1881) is one of the key Naturalist works of art, also one of the most successful examples of his compositional formula. Its high horizon and woodland break its thin slice of sky into fine fragments. The detailed foreground includes both of the figures, who are diametric opposites: an old man bent with his load of firewood, who at any moment could keel over and die, and a young child (probably a girl) who runs free among the wild flowers. The perception of depth is enhanced by the recession of tree forms, although here the space is enclosed rather than open.
His formula can be seen in progress in his Ophelia (1881), showing the character from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as her anguish is about to drive her body down into the water to drown her. At the time of his death, Bastien still had to paint all the foreground detail. This would have covered the lower half of the canvas, and given it a finely detailed appearance overall.
Back in Damvillers, he returned to the rural poor, now focussing on children as innocent victims. The formula is applied again, this time with the superimposition of a leafless sapling and the thyrsus-like flower-heads of the teasel. The tree is placed most unusually over the grazing cow, and the whole painting cropped as if a photograph.
The following year marks the high-point of Bastien’s Naturalism.
Before the Renaissance paintings were often decorated with precious metals, most commonly gold leaf in the process of gilding. Although this practice largely died out by 1500, it was revived in the nineteenth century and reached new heights in Gustav Klimt’s Golden Phase, shortly before the First World War.
Earliest European examples of egg tempera, such as Margarito d’Arezzo’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Scenes of the Nativity and the Lives of the Saints from the middle of the thirteenth century, often incorporate extensive gilding, although today they might appear ‘primitive’.
One of the most exquisitely worked examples of gilding was crafted by an unknown artist, most probably in France towards the end of the fourteenth century. Known as The Wilton Diptych it’s one of the greatest masterpieces in London’s National Gallery.
This painting was a luxury object intended from the outset for the personal devotions of a monarch, or someone of close rank and stature. Its interior shows on the left, King Richard II (its most probable owner) kneeling as he is presented by three saints, Saint John the Baptist (carrying the Lamb of God), Saint Edward the Confessor (holding the ring he gave to Saint John the Evangelist), and Saint Edmund (holding an arrow from his martyrdom). On the right is the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child with a throng of eleven angels, one of whom bears the standard of the Cross of Saint John.
It was painted on two small panels of oak wood using egg tempera, in a workshop clearly experienced at making such works. Each panel is made of one wider board and a narrower strip. The two parts of a panel were joined by a craftsman using simple butt joints and were glued together with such care that the joins are almost invisible. They started off about 2.5 cm (1 inch) thick, and were then carved down to form an integral frame with a recessed painting surface. The two panels are hinged together using gilded iron fittings, so that the completed diptych could be folded shut for portability.
To prepare the panels for painting, the bare wood was first covered with a thin layer of parchment, and over that a single layer of gesso was applied. This was composed, as was traditional, of natural chalk and animal-derived glue. The gesso extended over the frame mouldings to prepare them for gilding.
Much of the surface of the panels was then to be gilded. Those areas were first marked out with incisions into the gesso ground, then covered with a thin layer of red bole (clay) containing animal-derived glue. The gold leaf was then applied with dilute glue in water, and after a couple of hours the leaf was burnished into place. These gilded areas were then patterned using a range of different punches. The resulting effect is of a jewelled surface, with intricate reflected patterns from different sections of the gilding.
Some details used a different technique known as mordant gilding, in which a binding medium is applied to give low relief, and the gold leaf applied onto that without burnishing. The optical properties of unburnished and burnished gold generate additional surface effects.
Every figure in Masaccio’s early Triptych of San Giovenale from 1422 has been awarded a halo of gold leaf. Its central panel shows the Virgin Mary and infant Christ, with two angels in attendance. As is traditional, Mary is shown wearing a deep ultramarine blue cloak. The left panel shows Saints Bartholomew and Blaise, and the right panel Saints Juvenal (patron of the commissioning church) and Anthony Abbot.
Gilding had no role in the realism that came with the Renaissance, and it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that some artists revived the technique.
Jules Bastien-Lepage’s early Annunciation to the Shepherds from 1875 builds on tradition, complete with its gilded angel, who could have stepped out from an early Renaissance work. That combines with the rural realism of the shepherds, with their bare and filthy feet in a timeless image.
At about the same time, Edward Burne-Jones was applying silver and gold leaf to the summary inscription for his series on the myths of Perseus. Below the Latin words, he shows Perseus with the three Graiae (or Graeae). He has just intercepted and seized their single, shared eye, which he holds in his right hand, in order to force them to take him to the sea nymphs or Hesperides, to obtain the kibisis to contain Medusa’s head.
In Austria, Gustav Klimt had trained and worked not just as an artist, but as a craftsman too, and worked with other craftsmen to present his paintings in his distinctive style.
His painting of Pallas Athena (1898) is one of his first incorporating gold. Despite her modern appearance, Klimt remains true to tradition by showing her attributes, including the aegis of Medusa’s head over her upper chest, a spear and helmet.
His empowering portraits of women increasingly used gilding to great effect. In Judith I (1901), he portrays a woman of power, whose pleasure results from her successful manipulation of the enemy general, Holofernes, and her subsequent beheading of him, a popular theme in the art of women such as Artemisia Gentileschi. Klimt leaves the ambiguity of her ecstasy, playing on the developing link between eroticism and death.
In 1902, the fourteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession centred on Max Klinger’s Beethoven Sculpture. To raise funds to retain it in Vienna, members of the Secession contributed works to exhibit there. Klimt’s was a frieze of 24 metres in length, the Beethoven Frieze. The section shown above is that of The Hostile Powers, unusually painted using casein paints onto mortar, with added stucco, gold leaf, and other materials.
Inspired by the early Byzantine mosaic showing the Empress Theodora, in the Basilica San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, the peak of Klimt’s Golden Phase is unique in art. Much of the surface of his first Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is encrusted with gold and silver, and decorated with symbols of eyes, flowers, whorls, ellipses divided into halves, and rich textures worked into the gold leaf. To accomplish this involved a great deal of craftsmanship, using the same techniques as those for the Wilton Diptych, and took long days handling delicate leaves of precious metal.
Although seldom if ever used by others of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, the last of them, is unusual for combining it with watercolour.
Fortescue-Brickdale’s If One Could Have That Little Head of Hers from 1910 also has a curious title that appears to be a quotation. The woman shown is presumably a saint, judging by her large gold halo, but is in early Renaissance dress.
It’s not that long ago that our Macs came with internal storage that could readily be replaced when it failed. Memories of big hard disks that died almost as soon as their warranty ran out, and of keeping a bootable clone ready in a Mac Pro, aren’t easily forgotten. So isn’t it high risk to buy a modern Mac that won’t even boot if its internal SSD has failed? Are you left wondering whether that SSD will last five years, or even three?
Hard disks are amazingly engineered electro-mechanical devices that spin platters at high speeds incredibly close to read-write heads. Before you even consider all the faults that can occur in their magnetic storage, there are many horrible ways they can die through mechanical disaster. Visit a data recovery shop and they’ll show you heads fused to platters, and shards of what had been storing terabytes of data before the platter shattered. And like all mechanical devices they wear out physically, no matter how carefully you care for them.
By comparison, an SSD in a Mac that has good mains power filtering, ideally a proper uninterruptible power supply (UPS), leads a sheltered life. Like other solid-state devices, so long as its power supply is clean and it doesn’t get too hot, it’s most likely to fail in the first few weeks of use, and as it’s reaching the end of its working life, in a U-shaped curve. Modern quality control has greatly reduced the number of early failures, so what we’re most concerned about is how long it will be until it wears out, as it approaches its maximum number of erase-write cycles.
The theory goes that the memory cells used in SSDs can only work normally for a set number of erase-write cycles. This appears to hold good in practice, although there’s always a small number that suffer unpredictable electronic failure before they reach that. What’s more controversial is how many erase-write cycles each SSD should be capable of. Manufacturers make various claims based on accelerated ageing tests, and I suspect most come with a large dash of marketing sauce. Apple doesn’t offer figures for the SSDs it equips Macs with, but conservative estimates are around 3,000 cycles in recent models.
To work out how long you can expect your Mac’s internal SSD to last before it reaches that cycle limit, all you need do is to measure how much data is written to it, and once that is 3,000 times the capacity of the SSD, you should expect it to fail through wear. Fortunately, SSDs keep track of the amount of data written to them over their lifetime. This can be accessed through better SSD utilities like DriveDx, and I even have a feature in Mints that will do that for most internal SSDs.
My iMac Pro is now well over 7 years old, as it was bought new in December 2018. It has a 1 TB internal SSD (I wanted 2 TB, but couldn’t wait for a BTO), and has run pretty well 24/7 since I got it. As I work every day, even over Christmas, and it has been my main production system, it has probably been in use for over 2,500 days now.
According to the SSD’s records, over that period its 1 TB SSD has written about 150 TB in total, from its total expected lifetime of 3,000 TB, if it reaches 3,000 erase-write cycles. At current usage rates that would take another century, or 133 years if you want to be precise. In reality, it’s generally believed that most SSDs will cease functioning after about 10 years in any case.
It’s worth noting here that, had I got the iMac Pro with my preferred 2 TB SSD, its total expected lifetime would have been 6,000 TB, and instead of lasting a total of 140 years it would in theory have gone twice that period before it wore out.
For an SSD to wear out when it reaches its limit of erase-write cycles, wear across its memory must be even. If that memory were to be largely full of static data, and the SSD was only able to write to 10% of its memory, then it would wear out ten times quicker than the whole SSD would. To ensure that doesn’t happen, all modern SSDs incorporate wear-levelling, which incurs its own overhead in erase-write cycles, but should ensure that the whole SSD wears out at the same rate. You can help that, and maintain faster write speeds, by keeping ample storage space free. My current target for my iMac Pro is an absolute minimum of 10% free, and 15% as much as possible.
Given that my iMac Pro has averaged about 21 TB written to its SSD each year, that works out at just under 60 GB per day. For those who are worried that the Unified log adds significantly to SSD wear, it’s not hard to estimate that’s only likely to write around 250-500 MB each day even if you leave your Mac awake and running 24/7, less than 1% of my Mac’s daily write load.
Unless you work with huge media files, by far your worst enemy is swap space used for virtual memory. When the first M1 Macs were released, base models with just 8 GB of memory and 128 GB internal SSDs were most readily available, with custom builds following later. As a result, many of those who set out to assess Apple’s new Macs ended up stress-testing those with inadequate memory and storage for the tasks they ran. Many noticed rapid changes in their SSD wear indicators, and some were getting worryingly close to the end of their expected working life after just three years.
So the best way to get a long working life from your Mac’s internal SSD is to ensure that it has sufficient memory as to never use swap space in its VM volume. Although my iMac Pro only has a 1 TB internal SSD, which is more cramped than I’d like, it has 32 GB of memory, and almost never uses swap.
Following the early death of Thomas Girtin in 1802, there was no successor who proved as prolific in painting the cathedrals of Britain, and attention was transferred to those further south.
In 1894, Benjamin Williams Leader painted this view of Worcester Cathedral backing onto the River Severn. This was built between 1084-1504 in an unusual mixture of styles from Norman to Perpendicular Gothic, and contains the tomb of King John in its chancel. Judging by the smoke rising from the chimneys, this was painted in the early autumn.
If any artist came close to Girtin’s achievement it must have been John Constable. In about 1820, Bishop John Fisher commissioned him to paint Salisbury Cathedral from the grounds of his Palace, and Constable started to prepare sketches and studies for that medium-sized painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Garden, completed in 1823.
Constable was still battling with depression after the death of his wife when Archdeacon John Fisher, younger cousin of the Bishop, who had died in 1825, encouraged him to paint a larger and more ambitious view of Salisbury Cathedral, from the nearby meadows on the banks of the River Nadder. This late oil sketch was sold by auction in 2015 for more than five million dollars.
Constable completed his finished painting above for exhibition in the Royal Academy in 1831. It is perhaps a little over-egged with its storm clouds, rainbow and bolt of lightning. Despite several showings, it remained unsold when Constable died. Salisbury Cathedral was almost entirely built within the period 1220-1258, although its tower and spire, the tallest in England, were completed by 1330.
Although there is a Westminster Cathedral in London, it’s Roman Catholic, unlike the more famous Westminster Abbey, a collegiate church of the Church of England that has long been popular for coronations and interments of British monarchs and the nation’s most distinguished figures. The present building was constructed between 1245-1269 close to the Palace of Westminster on the north bank of the River Thames.
Samuel Scott’s Westminster from Lambeth, with the Ceremonial Barge of the Ironmongers’ Company (c 1745) shows a section of the River Thames on a windy day, with showers not far away. Teams of rowers pull their boats out to attend to the ceremonial barges in the foreground, reminiscent of Venetian boat ceremonies. The opposite bank shows, from the left, the imposing twin towers of Westminster Abbey, the old Palace of Westminster almost hidden behind trees, and Westminster Bridge.
The American history painter Benjamin West painted this view of Milkmaids in St. James’s Park, Westminster Abbey beyond in about 1801. Two cows and attendant milkmaids are providing a supply of fresh milk for the crowds in this royal park with Buckingham Palace on its edge. This remains 57 acres (23 hectares) of grass, trees and lakes.
The Church of England cathedral in London is of course Saint Paul’s, on Ludgate Hill a few miles to the east in the centre of the city of London. It was built between 1675-1710 to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren, following the destruction of its predecessor in the Great Fire of London of 1666.
Canaletto painted this imposing view of St. Paul’s Cathedral when he was working in England in about 1754. This Venetian artist lived and painted in London between 1746-1755 when the War of the Austrian Succession disrupted the art market in Venice.
Nicholas Chevalier painted ‘Thanksgiving Day’: The Procession to St Paul’s Cathedral, 27 February 1872 shortly after this royal event. Not to be confused with US Thanksgiving, this was a one-off state thanksgiving for the recovery from severe illness of the Prince of Wales. The widowed Queen Victoria and her son Prince Edward attended Saint Paul’s Cathedral (the obvious dome in the distance) to give public thanks to God. Approaching the arch is the carriage containing the royal party.
Canaletto wasn’t the only visitor from continental Europe to paint Wren’s prominent dome.
From 1880, Jules Bastien-Lepage visited London repeatedly. Blackfriars Bridge and the Thames, London (1881) is his fine depiction of this stretch of the River Thames, with his characteristic gradation of detail from its foreground into the distance. Standing proud on the skyline towards the right is the distinctive dome of Saint Paul’s.
Henri Le Sidaner also visited Britain on several occasions, and in 1906-07 painted this view of St. Paul’s from the River: Morning Sun in Winter, which may have been inspired by Monet’s series paintings of Rouen Cathedral, here expressed using his own distinctive marks.
In case you think Wren’s Saint Paul’s appears recent compared with Britain’s older cathedrals, in my lifetime I have seen two new Church of England cathedrals consecrated: Coventry in 1962, replacing an older building destroyed during the Second World War, and Guildford in 1961, built on a new site altogether over a period of twenty-five years.
Aprons are protective garments normally worn over the front of the body and upper legs, where they’re intended to prevent other clothes from soiling, and sometimes the wearer underneath. Although frequently seen in paintings, their absence must be interpreted with caution: most figurative paintings are made in the studio, where the only folk likely to be wearing aprons are the artist and their assistants. The wear of aprons is also markedly gendered; although in real life many men wear them at work, those most likely to be depicted with them are overwhelmingly women.
Aprons have been strongly associated with those in domestic service, and appear in folk tales such as Cinderella.
Edward Burne-Jones’ Cinderella from 1863 shows her reverted to her plain clothes after the ball, but still wearing one glass slipper on her left foot. She is seen in a scullery with a dull, patched and grubby working dress and apron.
Intimate Conversation from about 1892 shows a young couple talking idly outdoors in the sun. Évariste Carpentier puts a prominent tear in the young woman’s apron to emphasise their poverty.
Probably the most famous painted apron is that worn by Johannes Vermeer’s Milkmaid in about 1658-59.
This woman, seen in three-quarter view, wears working dress: a stiff, white linen cap, a yellow jacket laced at the front, a brilliant ultramarine blue apron, with a dull red skirt underneath. Her work sleeves are pushed up to lay both her weathered forearms bare to the elbow. Her strong-featured face and eyes are cast down, watching the milk as it runs into the pot.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Laundress (1761) is in the dilapidated servants’ area, probably in a cellar, where this flirtaceous young maid is washing the household linen, with her coarse white apron rolled up to enable her to lean forward and down.
Aprons were also common in women working outdoors, such as gleaners.
Those in Jules Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) are using theirs to carry their gleanings. Most are frayed and tatty, faded blue in colour.
They’re being worn by the two women in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s October: Potato Gatherers from 1878.
Some aprons could have more than one purpose, and may need more careful reading. Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest. The family group in the foreground consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground. The daughter is finely dressed under her apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in domestic service in a rich household in the nearby town.
Another painting of Brendekilde’s from this period, his Springtime; The First Anemones from 1889, shows a young woman walking with a small girl in a wood in the early Spring. The woman is unlikely to be the girl’s mother. Instead, she wears the black dress and white apron of a woman ‘in service’, in this case probably as the little girl’s maid or nanny.
Camille Pissarro’s famous depiction of Apple Picking, Éragny, from 1887-88 shows a typical country scene, with three women wearing aprons, but the man still in a waistcoat and trousers.
A Kitchen is one of Maximilien Luce’s early Divisionist paintings, dating from 1888-89. It’s an unusual motif, showing domestic servants at work in the kitchen of a large bourgeois house, both of them wearing long white aprons. Kitchens have become one place where men are also expected to wear aprons.
Jehan Georges Vibert’s meticulously realist painting of The Marvelous Sauce from about 1890 shows its rotund hero wearing an apron and tasting a sauce with his chef in a palatial kitchen.
As they were painted at work during the late nineteenth century, it became clear how many men had been wearing aprons: blacksmiths, butchers, shoemakers, coopers and many other trades.
Maximilien Luce made many paintings of people at work, as his style moved on from Neo-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism during the 1890s. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is one of a long series he painted showing those working in heavy industry in this city in the mining area of Belgium. Several of these metalworkers are wearing heavy leather aprons to protect their bodies from burns and injury.
One of Constantin Meunier’s later paintings, Foundry from 1902, shows a worker stripped to the waist to cope with the heat, while wearing a protective leather apron.
In The Artist’s Model (1895), Jean-Léon Gérôme shows himself at work on a marble figure, and wearing a faded blue apron.
There’s a popular and relatively recent myth that European painting in the late nineteenth century consisted almost entirely of Impressionist landscapes and their descendants in Post-Impressionism, or the dying embers of the Academic past. That oversimplification carefully omits many of the innovative artists of the day, who developed the social realism of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet into what became Naturalism. Among its other key influences were Édouard Manet and the novelist and critic Émile Zola (1840-1902), who were also associated with Impressionism.
Impressionism was primarily a revolt against established ideas as to how paintings should be made, and how they should look. Although the term has been extended to other arts, it’s only really meaningful in the context of painting.
Naturalism arose first and became most extensive in literature. Among its great influences was the pioneering French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878), whose writings were read avidly by Naturalists including Zola. Bernard’s approach to science stressed not only the importance of observation, but of experiment, forming the basis for his accounts of the working of the body, and the scientific foundations of medicine. Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, published in 1865, convinced Zola to use an experimental approach to writing his novels. He thus watched people in life and filled notebooks with his observations. He then set characters up in the scenario for a novel, and they behaved according to his observations. He finally documented this imaginary experiment as his next novel.
Naturalist painting made no attempt to follow Zola’s experimental approach, but aimed to document ordinary people going about their normal daily activities in their normal surroundings, with a degree of objectivity rather than sentiment. Its style is a neutral realism showing as much fine detail as necessary for its purpose, and sometimes being almost photographic in quality.
Naturalism and Impressionism were by no means mutually exclusive, but served different purposes. Some of the finest artists of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century were exponents of both. Landscapes were predominantly approached as Impressions, while figurative paintings worked better using Naturalist techniques. Here are some examples from about 1883, when both were at their height.
At that time, it was Jules Bastien-Lepage who was having greatest impact at the Salon with his Naturalist portraits of the rural poor. Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) catches this cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud and laceless. It has other traits of Bastien’s style, such as its high horizon almost shutting the sky out, and his careful control of detail. The boy’s face is meticulous, but the cottage gardens behind have been sketched in roughly.
Bastien’s Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers) from the following year is unusual as its subject isn’t shown standing, face-on to the viewer, but sits and looks down at the kitten at the lower right. This young boy is also the dirtiest of Bastien’s waifs, his left hand still black with soot from his work. He appears to be living in a hovel, with the embers of a fire at the left edge, once again sketched loosely.
Bastien’s combination of detailed realism blended with more painterly passages is seen in one of Marie Bashkirtseff best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer quickly becomes quite unnerving. This earned her an honourable mention in the Salon.
In the same year, Jean-Eugène Buland’s The Dive is set in a seedy, downmarket gambling den, as a group portrait of five hardened gamblers at their table. Each is rich in character, and makes you wonder how they came to be there. A little old widow at the left, for example, looks completely out of place, but is resolutely staking her money. Looking over her shoulder is a man, whose face is partially obscured. Is he, perhaps, a son, or a debtor? A young spiv at the far right is down to his last couple of silver coins, and looks about to lose them too. The air is thick with smoke, the walls in need of redecoration, and a pair of young streetwalkers prowl behind them, looking for a winner who will spend some of their cash on them.
Camille Pissarro was a fine figurative artist when he wanted, and had a particular liking for markets and fairs, which may seem strange for a landscape painter. He painted this scene from The Poultry Market, Pontoise twice in 1882: once using (glue?) distemper, and here in oils, where his use of tiny marks is evolving, particularly in the fabrics.
For his portrait of his partner Aline Charigot in By the Seashore (1883), Pierre-Auguste Renoir most probably painted her in the studio, and took its background from the Normandy coast near Dieppe. This shows the growing divergence in his paintings during the 1880s, with landscapes becoming increasingly soft and high in chroma, while his figures remained realist and emphasised by his “dry” manner.
Bashkirtseff’s Autumn (1883) is a thoroughly Impressionist depiction of a row of trees on the bank of the River Seine in the centre of Paris, but is unusual in being devoid of people. The leaf litter, occasional rubbish, and fallen bench strengthen its feeling of desolation in the midst of the bustling city.
Gustave Caillebotte also painted in both styles, with several of his best-known works being Naturalist. The Plain at Gennevilliers, A Group of Poplars (1883) is more formally Impressionist, although it retains foreground detail and has a relatively high horizon.
Alfred Sisley’s Willows on the Banks of the Orvanne (1883) is also more representative of Impressionism. An irregular row of pollarded willows, with well-developed heads, crosses the foreground, behind which there is the river Orvanne, reeds, and a tall stand of poplars. Behind this dense vegetation is a fence, field, and distant buildings, at the midpoint of the painting.
At the Impressionist end of the spectrum is Claude Monet’s Stormy Sea at Étretat (1883), painted from the beach directly in front of the the village, and a prototype for a small series.
For all his realist figures, Renoir’s Sunset at Douarnenez, from around 1883, is a classical Impressionist view looking into the setting sun.
I hope this small collection of paintings demonstrates there was a great deal more to French and European painting in 1883 than Impressionism. In this series I will explore the artists and paintings that accompanied Impressionism, but have now been largely forgotten. I hope you’ll join me.
This series attempts to describe how European painting changed during the Dutch Golden Age, between about 1600-1672.
Provinces that united in the Dutch Republic are shown in red, orange and yellow in this map. Its centres of art included The Hague, its de facto capital, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Harlem, and Amsterdam. To the south were the lands composing the Spanish Netherlands, notably Flanders and Brabant, including the cities of Antwerp and Brussels.
Painted fifty years before the dawn of the Golden Age, Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565) is a precursor to winter scenes of the Dutch Republic.
Origins
Life in the Republic
Historical context 1565-1643
Historical context 1644-1674
Decline and legacy
How did it happen?
Group portraits
Ordinary people
Animal painting
Chiaroscuro in Utrecht
Stories
Everyday life of Gerard ter Borch
Aelbert Cuyp 1
Aelbert Cuyp 2
Jan Miense Molenaer
Rembrandt to 1640
Rembrandt after 1640
Jacob van Ruisdael’s trees
Johannes Vermeer 1
Johannes Vermeer 2
Unique imagery of Domenicus van Wijnen
Painted over a century after the end of the Golden Age, JMW Turner’s Fishermen at Sea (1796) is a direct descendant of the maritimes and nocturnes developed by the artists of the Dutch Republic.
The innumerable paintings of the Golden Age transformed European painting from the art of the Renaissance to prepare it for the Age of Enlightenment and the major changes of the nineteenth century. Art broke free from domination by religious themes and patronage by the church and ruling elites, with the opening up of secular genres including landscape painting.
A Painted Weekend in Amsterdam: 1645-1867
A Painted Weekend in Amsterdam: 1871-1923
Interiors by Design: The Dutch Golden Age
Blur in paintings: Vermeer
Landscape composition: Dutch Horizons
Still Life History: 2 Clara Peeters the pioneer
Still Life History: 3 The Dutch Golden Age
Next to Rembrandt: In Memoriam Adriaen van der Werff 1
Next to Rembrandt: In Memoriam Adriaen van der Werff 2
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 1
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 2
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 3
The Making of Vermeer’s Milkmaid
Commemorating 300 years since the death of Jan Weenix
Distant panoramas: The 400th anniversary of Philip de Koninck 1
Distant panoramas: The 400th anniversary of Philip de Koninck 2
The Golden Home: 400th anniversary of Gerard ter Borch, 1
The Golden Home: 400th anniversary of Gerard ter Borch, 2
Adriaen van de Velde
The 400th anniversary of the birth of Paulus Potter
Many of us have more USB4 and Thunderbolt devices than our Macs have ports. In my case, I need to have four external NVMe SSDs connected to my Mac mini M4 Pro with its three ports, one of which is already committed to its Studio Display. One solution is a Thunderbolt 4 hub, but those tend to come with only three ports, so I’d need to connect two, either to both the free ports or in a daisychain from one. This article considers an alternative: OWC’s four-bay Express 4M2 enclosure.
The original 4M2 supported Thunderbolt rather than USB4. When used as a RAID array, with SoftRAID, it delivered excellent performance, but as a plain four-bay enclosure for separate disks it was slow and only delivered about 800 MB/s. The current version now supports USB4, and gives each bay a single lane of PCIe 4.0. I have just completed testing my new 4M2 with three Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB SSDs, connected to my Mac mini M4 Pro. Results given here are for the ‘gold standard’ test using Stibium.
Transfer speeds without RAID are limited to just over 1.6 GB/s for both read and write, but are sustained at that even when reading or writing simultaneously to two of its SSDs. Simultaneous transfers to three or four SSDs will reduce, though, as the total then exceeds the 3.2 GB/s available through its single USB4 connection to the host Mac. A future model could perhaps use the full four lanes over Thunderbolt 5, but that’s unlikely this year and will inevitably be more expensive.
The speed of the 4M2 is remarkably consistent compared to those delivered in practice by hubs or docks. At their best they can almost match a direct connection, but sometimes they can be surprisingly slow for no apparent reason.
As expected, the enclosure is beautifully engineered in aluminium, and has internal heat sinks to variable-speed fans that are far more protective than anything available in single-SSD enclosures. Although a little larger than a Mac mini, it isn’t overpowering, and looks petite alongside a Mac Studio.
There’s considerable cost saving to be achieved as well. The 4M2 typically sells for around $/€/£ 240. Single OWC Express 1M2 40G (USB4) enclosures cost half that, so four would come to about $/€/£ 480, to which you’d need to add two TB4/USB4 hubs, for a total of $/€/£ 880.
If you can live with a consistent 1.6 GB/s, or want the substantially better performance available with RAID, the OWC 4M2 is the best choice for connecting multiple NVMe SSDs to the minimum number of ports on your Mac.
OWC’s product page is here.
In case you’re wondering, I paid full price for my 4M2 from an Amazon Marketplace vendor in the UK.
The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic developed as a result of a combination of circumstances, some of which are made clear in previous articles in this series. This summary brings those together with a small selection of works to illustrate them.
The Northern Renaissance, that had started in the Flemish countries to the south in the 1420s, had flourished in centres such as Antwerp and Brussels during the sixteenth century. As it matured into the Baroque during the early decades of the Golden Age, it was led by Peter Paul Rubens. This gained from the early adoption and development of oil painting on canvas using realist techniques to depict increasingly secular themes, which became centred in the workshops of Antwerp.
Flanders and Brabant in the south remained part of the Habsburg empire ruled from Spain, with intolerance towards Protestant movements leading to religious conflict. Some artists who trained in those countries migrated to the north, where they accelerated the growth of Dutch Golden Age painting.
Among them was Clara Peeters, who seems to have trained in Antwerp before painting innovative still lifes in the Dutch Republic. By about 1611, when she painted Mesa (Table) above, she was selling her paintings to the Spanish royal family. Some of her works ended up in the Spanish Royal Collection, and today remain in the Prado in Madrid as a result. Dutch painters developed her themes, and settings for meals, particularly that of breakfast, later became a sub-genre.
As a secular confederation of provinces, art in the republic wasn’t dominated by religious themes or the patronage of a royal dynasty. Commissions seldom came from religious organisations, but from guilds and other non-religious groups that were flourishing in the growing cities. Most popular among those were group portraits of occupational guilds.
Although guilds had been an important part of Renaissance society, few if any appear to have commissioned group portraits, which were largely confined to noble families. In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Dutch Golden Age. These are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.
Among the groups responsible for many of these portrait commissions was the civil militia. Frans Hals’ Militia Company of District XI under the Command of Captain Reynier Reael (1633-37) shows a group known as the Meagre Company. He was commissioned to paint this in 1633, but three years later it remained unfinished, and the commission was transferred to Codde to complete the right side of the canvas and many of the hands and faces a year later.
Migration and international trade transformed cities like Amsterdam, which rapidly became multicultural at a time when much of Europe was still oppressing minority groups such as Jews.
Meindert Hobbema’s view of The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam from 1663-65 shows one of the city’s working locks with a raising bridge, with the masts of many ships in the harbour beyond.
Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Skaters from 1608 shows the many who have spilled out from the warmth of buildings to take to the ice.
Berckheyde’s The Nieuwezijds Voorburgswal, Amsterdam from 1686 shows the canal running at the rear of Amsterdam’s City Hall, built between 1648-65, and featuring the octagonal tower seen at the right. By this time the population of Amsterdam had risen to more than 220,000, many of them immigrants.
With the growth of trade came increasing prosperity, and urban populations who became avid collectors. For some it was household linen or clothing, for others Delft tiles, and for the many who wanted to decorate the walls of their houses, paintings were ideal. Those artists who had achieved recognition could sell through art dealers, some of whom were painters themselves. For smaller and more everyday works, art fairs were held, and collectors flocked to attend them in search of bargains.
A Senior Merchant of the Dutch East India Company, painted during 1650-59, is thought to show Jacob Mathieusen and his wife, against a background of the company fleet in Batavia roads. This city in what was then the Dutch East Indies is now the site of Jakarta in Indonesia.
As more secular genres became popular, painters specialised in sub-genres in an effort to appeal to new markets.
In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, shown in his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55).
The sense of Smell, from 1637, is the best of Jan Miense Molenaer visual jokes, a thoroughly secular if not irreverent scene from everyday life.
The theme of witchcraft was explored in Domenicus van Wijnen’s Witches’ Sabbath by Moonlight, set in a moonlit Italian landscape. This combines many of the now-classical symbols associated with the Dark Arts, and is taking place at an outdoor altar set up at the foot of the gallows, on which a dead body hangs.
With the driving force in painting being removed from a royal family, and professional power resting with local guilds of Saint Luke, the republic avoided adopting a privileged academy system. Painters trained first as apprentices before demonstrating the skills expected of a master, so gaining admission to the guild. These too had originated in Flanders, with the foundation of Antwerp’s by 1382. Amsterdam led in 1579, and several other cities in the Dutch Republic followed from 1609.
Taken together, the main driving forces of Dutch Golden Age painting were a rich diversity in both society and painted themes, and the popularity of paintings among the republic’s citizens. As a result, visual art thrived.
Snapshots are a simple concept that only becomes complex when you dig into the detail. One of the fundamental features introduced in APFS, they are now used extensively, to form the System volume for all versions of macOS since Big Sur, and in many backup systems including Time Machine.
As the name implies, a snapshot is a preserved copy of a volume at a moment in time. Creating one is both simple and lightning quick: APFS makes a copy of the file system metadata for that volume, and retains with it all the data of its files. From then on, the working copy of the file system metadata changes as files are modified, created and deleted. But all the original file data at the time the snapshot was made is retained. That enables you to roll back the live volume to the exact state it was in when the snapshot was made. The snapshot itself (its file system metadata) is kept in the same container as the live volume, and their file data overlaps.
Snapshots rely on another fundamental feature of APFS, a scheme called copy on write. When a file is changed, the data for that file isn’t changed in place in the same storage blocks, but written out to new blocks. This enables the snapshot to retain all the original data for its files, while the live volume consists of a mixture of old unchanged data, and replacements for those blocks that have changed since the snapshot was made.
This leads to the biggest disadvantage of snapshots: when first made, the only additional storage space they require is for their copy of the file system metadata, which is relatively small. Over time, though, as more data blocks are changed in the live volume, the size of the data the snapshot must retain grows, and can after a few weeks become enormous, depending on how active the file system is in that volume. What was initially measured in MB quickly becomes GB, and if you forget about that snapshot, it will become hundreds of GB in size.
While some operating systems allow users to create their own snapshots and maintain them, macOS doesn’t: apps that have the restricted entitlement to create snapshots are required by Apple to maintain them as well. That’s why apps that make snapshots are backup utilities, and are required to have a mechanism for automatically deleting their old snapshots to prevent them overwhelming storage.
Creating a snapshot is almost instantaneous, but deleting one is more complex and time-consuming. This is because the file system has to identify all the old retained data blocks that are no longer required, and allow them to be freed up for re-use. When that’s performed across the millions of files that could be in the snapshot’s file system metadata, it will inevitably take time. It’s also not entirely predictable, particularly when there may be multiple snapshots for that volume.
APFS snapshots are always of whole volumes, although some file systems can make snapshots of directory trees within a volume. Unlike Time Machine’s backup exclusions, each snapshot it makes of a volume it’s backing up contains every file in that volume. If you have large database or VM files, although Time Machine and other backup utilities can exclude them from taking up space in their backups, they can’t exclude them from their snapshots. If you do want to keep such large files, it’s usually better to put them in a volume that doesn’t get snapshots made of it.
Snapshots are also read-only, and once one is made, it can’t be changed. This is beneficial, as it ensures nothing can change the old files and their data. However, it also means that if something goes wrong in a snapshot and it starts throwing errors, you effectively can’t repair it. At present, you also can’t copy a snapshot, which makes it impossible to make a copy of your Time Machine backup storage, as that’s composed of snapshots.
Your Mac uses snapshots in three ways:
In addition to features provided by third-party backup utilities, you can manage snapshots using Disk Utility. Open its View menu and first enable Show All Devices, then Show APFS Snapshots. Select the Data or Macintosh HD – Data volume in the left of the window, and you’ll see a list of all APFS snapshots for that volume, together with an indication of the size of each.
To delete a snapshot in Disk Utility’s list, select it and use the Delete… command from the contextual menu (Control-click). Be careful, though, as there’s no undo. You can safely remove all Time Machine snapshots from that volume except the most recent, which is also the smallest. That latest snapshot is needed when that volume is next backed up by Time Machine. If you remove that too, then the next backup could be a full backup of everything on that Data volume, something best avoided if possible.
This is the second article setting some of the finest paintings of the Golden Age in the context of major events in the history of the Dutch Republic, and resumes the account in 1644, shortly before the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
Constituents of the Dutch Republic are shown in red, orange and yellow in this map. Its centres of art included The Hague, its de facto capital, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Harlem, and Amsterdam. To the south were the lands composing the Spanish Netherlands, notably Flanders and Brabant, including the cities of Antwerp and Brussels.
1648 The Peace of Munster was ratified, ending the Thirty Years’ War and formally establishing the Dutch Republic as an independent country (see below).
1652 The United East India Company started settling Cape Colony, later known as the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa.
1652-54 The First Anglo-Dutch War, ended with the Treaty of Westminster.
Dutch landscape artists quickly realised that, even if they had relatively little earth and water to depict, the heavens above could be equally interesting. Horizons fell rapidly down their paintings, as seen in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.
Paulus Potter, who became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke in Delft in 1646, founded the new genre of animal painting in 1647 with his almost life-size portrait of The Bull (also widely known as The Young Bull). Originally intended as a portrait of just the central bull, Potter enlarged the canvas to accommodate (from the left) a ram, lamb, ewe, herdsman, cow, and above them a bird of prey, possibly a buzzard. Beyond them are more cattle in the meadows receding to the church of Rijswijk, between Delft and The Hague.
For the thirty years between 1618-1648, central Europe had been engulfed in a bitter war between the Habsburg states, including the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, and their enemies, including the Dutch Republic. Gerard ter Borch’s magnificent painting of The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648 (1648) recorded the moment that the Thirty Years’ War ended, with the ratification of this treaty between the Dutch Republic and Spain.
The son a of Flemish immigrant, David Bailly, who lived and worked in Leiden, painted this Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols in 1651, with its multiple portraits referring to the past. The figure shows him as a much younger man, holding the maulstick he used in painting. His actual self-portrait at the time is in the painting he is holding with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and a ghostly image of her is projected onto the wall behind the wine glass.
Long before its value in preventing scurvy was realised (in 1747), or it was carbonated even later, still cloudy lemonade had become a popular soft drink. The extensive trade links of the Dutch Republic made the drink available to the middle classes, as celebrated in Gerard ter Borch’s The Glass of Lemonade (1655-60).
In Vermeer’s celebrated The Milkmaid (c 1658-1661) the maid 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 a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which she is pouring milk.
1664-71 The Second Anglo-Dutch War.
1669 The United East India Company was the largest and richest private company in the world, with more than 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, and its own private army of 10,000.
1672 The Third Anglo-Dutch War; the Dutch Republic was invaded by France and others, following which its economy went into decline and the art market collapsed.
Meindert Hobbema’s magnificent Watermill from about 1664 accommodates a family: the wife is out doing the washing in a barrel, while the husband and son walk through their garden. It’s also relatively unusual in that the water here is fed through the elevated wooden aqueducts, making this watermill overshot, so capable of generating more power with a lower flow of water, because it uses the weight of water falling against the blades of the waterwheel.
Some painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – is dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that Van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.
Johannes Vermeer experimented with optical effects in his late The Art of Painting from about 1666-68, where greatest sharpness is slightly away from the geometrical centre of the canvas, in the woman holding a wind instrument. The high tonal contrast between the marble tiles on the floor is softened in the foreground, and sharpens as they recede deeper into the picture, as would be expected in a depth of field effect.
Rembrandt continued to develop his mark-making right up to his death. It’s often at its most florid when he painted fabrics, such as the clothing of the couple shown in The Jewish Bride of about 1665. The Dutch Republic had long been a safe harbour for Jews fleeing from oppression in other European countries, and Rembrandt had cultivated close relationships with members of the large Jewish community in Amsterdam, some of whom had modelled for his depictions of Old Testament stories.
One of Jacob van Ruisdael’s best-known paintings of windmills is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering grain by barge, and shipping the resulting flour.
The Hut (1671) was one of Adriaen van de Velde’s last paintings, and has long been esteemed in the Netherlands. It’s one of his most natural compositions, sparkling with bright colour in the clothing and animals. The artist even adds the reality, perhaps as a touch of humour, of some fresh cowpats.
Gerrit Berckheyde’s view of Groote Market in Haarlem from 1673 shows one the largest of the city’s marketplaces at the end of the Golden Age.
This article and its sequel tomorrow try to set some of the finest paintings of the Golden Age in the context of major events in the history of the Dutch Republic.
Constituents of the Dutch Republic are shown in red, orange and yellow in this map. Its centres of art included The Hague, its de facto capital, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Harlem, and Amsterdam. To the south were the lands composing the Spanish Netherlands, notably Flanders and Brabant, including the cities of Antwerp and Brussels.
1568 Start of the Eighty Years’ War with Habsburg Spain.
1575 Leiden University founded by Prince William.
1579 The Union of Utrecht laid the foundation for the Dutch Republic.
1585 The city of Antwerp in Brabant was taken by Habsburg forces; to the north, Holland and Zealand started accepting migrants from southern areas under Habsburg control.
One of the driving forces behind Dutch Golden Age painting was the art flourishing in Brabant to the south. Two of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s major paintings from 1565 were formative influences on what was to come: The Harvesters above is a complete account of the grain harvest in the Low Countries, and Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap below is a pure landscape.
1602 The United East India Company (in Dutch, the VOC) was founded as a chartered trading company in Amsterdam, to profit from the spice trade.
1609-21 Twelve Years’ Truce.
1612 The first synagogue was built in Amsterdam.
1618 The first newspaper, the Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c., was published as a weekly broadsheet in Amsterdam.
1619 Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) was made the Asian headquarters of the United East India Company.
Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Scene on a Canal from about 1615 follows on from Brueghel with its rich detail. In the right of the painting are two tents with flags flying. These are popular koek-en-zopie, literally ‘cake and eggnog’ cafés, selling handheld snacks like cake and pancakes, together with alcoholic drinks such as beer laced with home-made rum.
Clara Peeters trained in Antwerp, then painted an outstanding series of still lifes in the Dutch Republic. Among those is her still life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels from about 1615, a celebration of the sensuous pleasures of food.
In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Golden Age. These are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.
1620 The Pilgrim Fathers, English families from Nottinghamshire who had fled to Leiden in 1607-08, set sail from Delfshaven for America.
1621 The Chartered West India Company was founded as a trading company in Amsterdam, to profit from a trade monopoly in the Dutch West Indies, including participation in the Atlantic slave trade.
1625 A fort was built at New Amsterdam, the southern tip of Manhattan Island, New York, to protect the West India Company’s fur trade.
Gerard van Honthorst’s The Soldier and the Girl from about 1621 is a good example of markedly secular painting and the early influence of Caravaggio. This young woman is lighting her candle from a burning coal.
1630 Dutch commercial colonies were established in Brazil.
1635 The Dutch Republic made a treaty with France against Habsburg Spain, leading to the Franco-Spanish War.
1637 The speculative bubble of Tulip mania, which had gathered pace from 1634, collapsed dramatically.
1639 The United East India Company became Japan’s exclusive Western trading partner.
1642 Abel Tasman discovered Tasmania and New Zealand.
In 1631 the young Rembrandt moved his studio to Amsterdam, the centre of trade and business for the Dutch Republic, and growing rapidly from a population of about 50,000 in 1600 to exceed 200,000 in the 1660s. Among his early commissions there is this Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp from 1632, a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment.
Rembrandt’s outstanding painting of Belshazzar’s Feast was made in about 1635-38, when he was developing his distinctive techniques of depicting decorative metals.
Artists such as Albert Eckhout accompanied expeditions overseas, and it’s thought that he painted this Study of Two Brazilian Tortoises in about 1640 when in Brazil.
Rembrandt’s vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of all those of militia in the Dutch Republic. It’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to its display in the guards’ great hall.
Simon de Vlieger was born in Rotterdam, and painted in Delft and Amsterdam, where he was best known for his landscapes. His Beach View from 1643 uses boats, many figures, and careful composition to swell the land over the bottom of its panel. It shows well, though, how important is the sky, marvellously rendered here, with a small group of white birds shown against the grey of the clouds.
The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic was a period of war and turmoil. It started in the latter half of the Eighty Years War, thrived when that came to an end in 1648, and collapsed following the Disaster Year (Rampjaar) of 1672. That year brought both the Franco-Dutch and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, invasion, rebellion, economic crisis, and collapse of the art market.
When he was just twenty, the French artist Antoine Coypel painted this Glory of Louis XIV after the Peace of Nijmegen (1681), which gained him admission as a full member to the Académie Royale.
The Treaty of Nijmegen brought an end to the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78, and was one of a series France signed between August 1678 and September of the following year. These were acclaimed a great success for Louis XIV and France, which gained extensive territory in the north and east as a result. Louis was henceforth known as the Sun King. In this elaborate allegorical flattery, the king is being crowned in the upper left, above a gathering of deities including Minerva, who is wearing her distinctive helmet and golden robes.
Painting didn’t stop, of course, and some artists continued into the following century, but the number of masters declined rapidly.
Domenicus van Wijnen continued to paint, for example his radical interpretation of The Temptation of Saint Anthony in about 1685. Although this may have appeared an outlier at the time, its symbols and composition may have inspired the ‘faerie’ paintings that became popular in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Other artists like Adriaen van der Werff reverted to more traditional themes and style, in his Judgement of Paris from 1716.
The Golden Age was revisited by artists in the nineteenth century, particularly in the period scenes painted by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate. His Soldier and Men in an Inn shows a scene from the Eighty Years War, with the walls decorated by blue on white Delft tiles. This must have been painted between 1850-80, over two centuries after the end of that war.
Early in the career of the Dutch artist Jozef Israëls, he painted The Seamstress (1850-88) as a genre interior from the Golden Age. A young Dutchwoman works with her needle and thread in the light of an unseen window at the left. In the background to the right, there’s a group of Delft tiles on the wall, and there’s a single tulip in a glass vase at the left.
The impact of Golden Age paintings on European art history was broad and deep, with secular themes becoming more popular than the religious and mythological works that had dominated the art of the Renaissance. New genres, like still life, may not have been rated as highly as history painting, but became widespread.
Late in his career, in 1766, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin painted The Attributes of the Arts and the Rewards Which Are Accorded Them, in which each object has a clear association. Painting is represented by the brushes and palette on top of a paintbox. Architectural drawings and drawing tools represent architecture. The bronze pitcher at the right refers to the work of the goldsmith. The red portfolio tied with ribbons represents drawing. The plaster model of the figure of Mercury in the centre is a copy of a sculpture by J B Pigalle, a friend of Chardin, who was the first sculptor to win the highest French honour for artists, the Order of Saint Michael, whose cross and ribbon are shown at the left.
Greatest impact was in landscape painting. Prior to the Golden Age, landscapes had primarily been used as accessories to other genres. Most were idealised rather than accurate representations of any real location, and many were mere settings for narratives.
The Dutch vogue for expressive skies spread steadily across Europe. This is reflected in Joseph Vernet’s Italianate Harbour Scene from 1749. He still retains formal compositional elements, with figures in the foreground, and scenery behind, but delights in showing us these towering cumulus clouds lit so richly.
Marine painting became established as a sub-genre, as shown by the British painter Clarkson Stanfield, whose Dutch Barge and Merchantmen Running out of Rotterdam from 1856 includes rich detail, even down to dilapidated buildings on the waterfront.
Many of John Crome’s landscapes feature skies inspired by Dutch painters. His Landscape with Windmills is one of his most remarkable, as a signed painting that appears to have been sketched in front of the motif. Others who skied include John Constable and JMW Turner.
Nocturnes were less reliable, as they underwent phases when they were fashionable, then fell into neglect for a while.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler had a penchant for nocturnes, here his Nocturne: Blue and Gold — Southampton Water from 1872. Its vague blue-greys make the pinpoints of light and the rising sun shine out in contrast, a good reason for limiting his palette, while remaining faithful to nature.
JMW Turner’s Fishermen at Sea from 1796, showing small fishing boats working in heavy swell off The Needles, on the Isle of Wight, is probably the most famous and successful coastal nocturne of all time. This was Turner’s first oil painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, when he was just twenty-one.
Paintings by artists of the Dutch Republic had been sold into collections across Europe, where many remain, influencing today’s artists.
The general rule with security certificates is that they’re only valid until their expiry date. When the certificate for a website expires, your browser should warn you if you try to connect to that site, and it will normally refuse to make the connection as a result. Thankfully, Apple’s signing certificates generally work differently.
When Apple adopted code signing using certificates that it issues, it recognised that applying that policy would result in apps having expiry dates enforced by their certificates, so applies a different rule. When a developer signs an app using their Developer ID Application certificate, a trusted timestamp is included to verify when that signing took place. Provided the certificate was valid at that time, and hasn’t been revoked since, the certificate is deemed valid by macOS.
The same principle applies to Developer ID Installer certificates used to sign install packages, only for several years they weren’t given trusted timestamps. As a result of that, those old installer certificates were only valid as long as the certificate.
Apple changed that several years ago, since when installer packages have normally been given trusted timestamps, so they now work the same as Developer ID Application certificates, and can still be run successfully after their certificate has expired, provided that it was valid at the time in their trusted timestamp, and hasn’t been revoked since. However, this has only recently been reflected in Apple’s guidance to developers, and is different from the account I gave here last week.
Trying to open the app or installer package usually isn’t the best way to check whether its certificates are valid. Although you may sometimes be given an informative explanation, in most cases macOS will simply report the item is damaged and needs to be removed, leaving you in the dark as to what the problem might be.
The best way to check the validity of Apple’s certificates is using Apparency for apps, and Suspicious Package for installer packages. They will provide a detailed explanation of why the signature is valid or not.
Apps supplied from the App Store are signed not by the developer, but by Apple. According to Apple’s current account, their signatures will remain valid as long as the developer remains a member of its Developer Program.
Apps supplied independently are signed by their developer using their Developer ID certificate issued by Apple. Provided that the app’s certificate was valid at the time it was signed, and that certificate hasn’t been revoked by Apple, that will remain valid indefinitely. The same appears to apply to notarisation, which should remain valid unless Apple revokes it.
Although there’s nothing to stop developers using certificates from third party authorities, macOS doesn’t recognise those and will normally block the app from being run. If you ever come across one, contact its developer and tell them the certificate they’re using is wrong.
Older installers are likely to have been signed without a trusted timestamp. If that’s the case, they will cease being valid when their certificate expires.
More recent installers should have a trusted timestamp, in which case their signature will remain valid unless Apple revokes their certificate.
Some certificates, most notably those used by macOS installers and updaters, also rely on the intermediate Apple Worldwide Developer Relations certificate, which underwent a hiatus on 24 October 2019 when an old certificate expired and was replaced by a new one, which expires on 20 February 2030. That expiry will still limit the validity of some old signatures.
Some apps require restricted entitlements, issued by Apple to allow them to access features that are normally not allowed, such as making snapshots and bridge networking in macOS VMs. Although those should expire well into the future, they can rarely have their own expiry problems that could prevent an app from running.
This old Catalina installer app was signed without a trusted timestamp. Now that its certificate has expired, it’s likely to be unusable.
This macOS update installer package was also signed without a trusted timestamp, its certificate expired in the 2019 hiatus, and it’s now unusable.
This third-party installer package was signed in 2017, but has a trusted timestamp. Even though its certificate expired in May 2017, because it was still valid at the time of the trusted timestamp it should still be deemed valid.
This third-party installer package was only signed last July, but its Developer ID Installer certificate expired the following month. Because its certificate was valid at the time of the trusted timestamp it’s still deemed valid.
Signing certificates (Apple)
Developer ID and provisioning profiles (Apple)
Apple Intermediate Certificate Expiration (Apple)
I’m very grateful to Quinn for drawing my attention to this.
