Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer/High Spirits: the Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson, review

Vermeer's Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman is the show’s masterpiece, while Rowlandson's work shows he understood vice and could capture it brilliantly, says Ben Luke
Biting brilliance: Thomas Rowlandson’s A York Address to the Whale
Ben Luke16 November 2015

Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer ☆☆☆☆

High Spirits: the Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson ☆☆★★

Only one Vermeer features amid the 17th-century Dutch paintings here. The rest are by artists less famous today, all masters of genre painting, the coded everyday scenes fashionable in the Dutch Golden Age.

The most successful of these painters then was Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt’s early pupil. His remarkably detailed interiors initially appear innocuous but A Girl Chopping Onions, an apparently simple reflection of household chores symbolic of wholesome virtue, actually teems with sexual symbolism — a jug is a phallus and an allusion to a vagina; a hanging partridge is smutty Dutch wordplay.

Vermeer is more esoteric, though his Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman appears to be a modest reflection on music making. Whatever, it’s the show’s masterpiece: a spellbinding ode to light and space.

Symbolism: Jan Steen’s A Woman at her Toilet 1663

Jan Steen’s symbolism barely needs explaining. In one painting a seductress undresses for an unseen male viewer — a skull and a lute with a broken string in front of her are warnings, symbols of life’s transience.

Steen gets close to the caricature of which Thomas Rowlandson was one of the great 18th- and 19th-century purveyors. Rowlandson was a gambler and hellraiser: he understood vice and could capture it brilliantly. His profligacy meant he constantly needed commissions, from politicians from all sides, as well as the Prince Regent, who collected his works, and the Prince’s detractors.

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Much subtlety is lost today — an excellent catalogue is a great help — but Rowlandson’s searing imagination is palpable: the Duke of York pleading with a whale that had sensationally beached in Gravesend to distract the public from his misdemeanours sums up his biting brilliance.

Until February 14, Queen's Gallery (020 7766 7301, royalcollection.org.uk)

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