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WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
For top creative practitioners, see:
Best Artists of All Time.
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the greatest still life art, see:
Best Still Life Painters.
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.
For the greatest genre-painting, see:
Best Genre Painters.
For the top allegorical painting,
see: Best History Painters.
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Brouwer had, with the defects, also the
qualities of his Bohemianism - a ready wit, friendliness and generosity,
a scorn of pretense and hypocrisy. He sold his little pictures at very
high prices, and is said to have destroyed a picture before a haggling
patron rather than reduce the price. He had reason for such pride, for
Rubens bought no less than seventeen of his pictures,
Rembrandt, eight and a book of sketches. There could be no higher
compliment to any draughtsman than to have his sketches desired by Rembrandt.
Brouwer's brief, stormy and brilliant career was cut off abruptly towards
the end of 1638, probably by the plague. He had just entered his thirty-third
year. He lived on in local legend as a wag and boon companion.
Paintings and Style of Dutch Realism
Brouwer's early fine
art painting at Haarlem has been identified by painstaking connoisseurship.
Its feeling is drastic, even brutal, rather painty, with the edgy sort
of construction practiced by Peter
Bruegel and his imitators. It is like Old Bruegel also in a tendency
to caricature - squat proportions and incredibly bestial faces. In these
early pictures, he tends to employ the greatest variety of local colour
that the subject permits.
This early, really juvenile, manner may be sufficiently represented by
Drunken Peasants. He is unsparing in his emphasis of the ugliness
of raucous intoxication. These figures are dehumanized, have ceased to
be a company, are so many maudlin individuals. But the pictorial arrangement
is as refined as the feeling is coarse. The scene is one Brouwer always
loved - a basement tap-room with the light filtering in from above. The
shadow at its deepest is aerial and transparent, never vague or dead.
The compact group is admirably composed both in pattern and depth. The
play of light and dark on faces and headdresses is most picturesque and
expressive of form. The incidental still life is touched in with tenderness
and strength, and unobtrusively enhances the character of the scene. The
figure construction is large and simple. Paradoxically, the effect is
at once lively and stable. We have drunkenness seen very specifically,
but yet in a sort of eternal aspect. Within a few years Brouwer was to
paint with greater finesse - indeed, this picture shows nothing of his
later glorification of tavern life - but it does already give promise
of a great master.
Within an activity of only about a dozen years Brouwer's oil
painting passes through the phases that usually imply a long career.
With all the irregularities of his life, he must have studied incessantly,
or perhaps he belonged to that happy race of artists who, as it were,
without taking thought, experiment as they work. What we may call his
second manner, between his leaving Haarlem and settling at Antwerp, was
marked by a greater concentration in composition, a finer economy in the
use of colours and pigment, a swifter and lighter handling of the brush.
Since he did not date his pictures, it is fair to admit that these "periods"
are inferences from the style of the pictures.
Instead of the various colours of the Haarlem days we now find a single
focal accent - the faded blue of a peasant's blouse, more rarely a faded
rose. The rest of the picture is swept in with warm and translucent grays
and browns, the whole effect more atmospheric. The solid and energetic
construction of the figures is now effected through infinitesimals of
light and dark - no longer heavy edges. Any of the seven or eight pictures
of tavern fights or singsongs - Munich is rich in them - are sufficient
to illustrate this new aspect of his genius.
What is admirable in these pictures is the clarity and force with which
the main theme is asserted - in the fights one listens for the crack of
broken skulls. Admirable as well is the sense of place. These reeking
basement rooms, with the hint up cellar stairs of better air outside,
convey with an unsparing sense of the foulness of the scene also a sense
of strange beauty, as if all the varieties of transparent dark and half-light
had found a harmonious rallying ground. There is no mystery in Brouwer;
everything is plainly stated and accounted for. The dusk rather enhances
than veils or attenuates the drastic vigour of the action.
What Brouwer seeks and achieves is a sort of transfiguration. The planless
exuberance of revelry or drunkenness assumes a sort of demonic character
- has some kinship with the divine intoxication of the Greeks or of Dr.
Francois Rabelais. Treated from the point of view of human relations,
drunkenness is simply revolting, and no subject for art. Isolated and
unrelatedly, as Brouwer treats it, intoxication has its fascination and
even its splendour. Brouwer's superiority is that he could both be one
of his drunken protagonists and abstract himself until they became pure
objects of observation and contemplation. As he sat in the pothouse his
mood must have readily shifted from participation in its rowdiness to
complete detachment. It was, of course, in such detachment that he made
those wonderful drawings which Rembrandt coveted, and, of course, only
a completely sobre man, in full command of his faculties, could have exercised
the dark magic that inspires Brouwer's impeccable workmanship.
In the last two or three years of his life the handling grows still lighter,
the pigment still thinner and more translucent; colour
yields further to tone. We have occasionally pictures nearly on the scale
of life, character studies, caricatures, if you like, somewhat reminiscent
of Frans Hals. Such are the Bitter Draught, and the Smoker.
Singing Peasants and Soldiers playing Dice, are representative
of this last phase, in which the old rowdiness is giving way to simple
jollity. One of the best pictures of this time and type is Singing
in the Kitchen. In the Quack Doctor Operating, Brouwer treats
with racy satire and sympathy a subject to which Bosch and Bruegel had
given a more sinister interpretation. It is plain that Brouwer was incapable
either of condescension or of scorn. There is nothing of the moralist
in his work. He loves the play activities of the human animal, and since
the human animal of his day indulged play activities hardly at all except
under the influence of alcohol, Brouwer simply accepts the fact and turns
it to his artistic purpose. There were better moments when he deeply felt
the purifying loveliness of nature, and he also produced some truly beautiful
landscapes.
Adriaen Brouwer is yet another example of the apparent lack of connection
between character and genius. The artist in him was exquisitely disciplined;
the man always at loose ends. Again it seems as if the creative part of
the man was a sort of second personality - a better self. Until psychology
solves these paradoxes - and I much doubt if it ever will - we must be
content to receive great art from whatever hands make and offer it, even
if these hands are not clean.
Legacy
For his vividness, delicacy, and taste in composition, Brouwer seems head
and shoulders above the scores of excellent little Dutch masters who dealt
with the themes of his genre-painting.
His influence upon such masters as Adriaen van Ostade, Jan Steen,
and even David Teniers, was considerable, and he inspired a group
of closer imitators who are too unimportant to be considered in a general
survey. Whether as a craftsman, or conceptually, Brouwer is possibly the
greatest painter of the lowness of low life that the world has seen. Works
by Brouwer can be seen in the best art museums
across Europe.
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