Arts

David Bailly’s Puzzle of a Painting

LEIDEN, The Netherlands — David Bailly (1584–1657) was a distinguished Dutch painter of the era earlier than Rembrandt and Vermeer. A Calvinist, he traveled by means of Germany to Venice and Rome when he was younger. At residence in Leiden he had success portray portraits and nonetheless lifes, turning into trendy, properly related, and self-confident. He married late in life and had no youngsters. The 90 works in David Bailly: Time, Death and Vanity on the Museum De Lakenhal embody monumental portraits, together with works by some of the artist’s contemporaries. His early “Kitchen Still Life” (1616) is a powerful depiction of foodstuffs, and the portraits of sitters sporting great Dutch collars are high quality. But in any other case Bailly’s skillful portraits of distinguished Hollanders aren’t, to be trustworthy, of any particular aesthetic curiosity. What justified journey to this retrospective, other than seeing the beautiful Museum De Lakenhal, was the possibility to view his final identified work, “Vanitas Still Life with Portrait of a Young Painter” (1651). 

“Vanitas” is a showstopper. A younger man holds a maulstick in a single hand and a small portrait of an older man within the different hand. The portrait rests on a desk alongside an assortment of artworks (copies of a Frans Hals drawing and a few Flemish sculptures), books, a pipe, jewels and finery, and a portrait of a girl. The normal thought, that vainness causes issues and other people to decay, is acquainted. But who’re the person and girl within the smaller work, and the person on the left holding one of these portraits? And what do their pictures collectively say about vainness? In normal, we will determine Bally’s sitters; he was expert at capturing likenesses. His “Portrait of Christian Rosenkrantz” (1641) incorporates a small monochromatic painted self-portrait pinned to the canvas on the higher right-hand nook. Like a signature, it identifies the artist who made the bigger portrait. But in “Vanitas,” it isn’t apparent how the that means of these portraits come collectively.  

David Bailly, “Portrait of Christian Rosenkrantz” (1641); Hillerød, Nationalhistoriske Museum, Frederiksborg Castle

“Vanitas” is on the cowl of Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing: Dutch Art within the Seventeenth Century (1983), the best-known latest normal account of artwork within the Netherlands. According to her radical revisionist evaluation, “the artist fully, steadily, and with loving care undertakes a version of [philosopher Francis] Baconian experiments ….” Bailly, she says, reveals in his illustration of the science of his day how illustration offers “us the capacity to comprehend the world.” Moving from the best of “Vanitas” to the left, so she says, the artist transforms nature into artwork, displaying the phases of that exercise. “Set off against bodies of plaster, stone, and metal, the bony skull and the images in paint, Bailly and the attendant appear as living flesh.” This speculative account, cited however rejected within the current catalogue, doesn’t clarify the visible oddities. The longer I checked out this portray and reread {the catalogue}, the extra puzzled I turned. What is the relation of the younger man on the left to the older determine, whose small portrait he holds, and the girl within the portrait subsequent to it? It’s clear that the bric-a-brac on the desk pertains to vainness. But what does that must do with these portraits? 

To make issues much more complicated, a latest laboratory examine of the portray (and a 19th-century wooden engraving of it) reveals behind the glass vessel on the heart the faint picture of a girl, which appears to have been painted out. The candle to her left is flickering. Because the pigments have maybe modified, it’s not clear if Bailly’s unique work has been preserved. What then was her relationship with the three remaining figures? It appears that the artist, whose different works are visually simple, should have supposed some particular that means right here. Why then on the finish of his profession did Bailly create this fascinating, seemingly unresolved puzzle? Nothing within the catalogue, which summarizes latest analysis on the artist, nor something that I may see, instructed easy methods to reply this query — a shocking, oddly irritating conclusion to a seemingly simple exhibition. 

David Bailly, “Vanitas Still Life” (1624); Collection National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague
David Bailly, “Young Man with Fur Hat” (c. 1635–40); Collection Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
David Bailly, “Portrait of Clara van Bronchorst” (1631); Collection Brantsen van de Zyp Stichting

David Bailly: Time, Death and Vanity continues on the Museum De Lakenhal (Oude Singel 32, Leiden, the Netherlands) by means of July 2. The exhibition was curated by Janneke van Asperen and Christiaan Vogelaar.

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