Fading Memories

Timothy Wilson-Smith

I haven't seen many paintings by Caravaggio in museums; but then, I haven't been around much, I tend to go to the same places again and again, like the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem or the Stedelijk Museum in Zwolle, seeing the same paintings again and again.

Still, Caravaggio repays study, as much nowadays, as for his Dutch pupils, in the seventeenth century. He was the master of light; but as this catalogue makes clear, he was a dark master of light, a man who would be diagnosed with a mental disorder nowadays and not be allowed near anything stronger than water colours on a piece of wet paper.

This Phaidon Golden Library edition was quite cheap; and the reproductions are a bit grainy. The accompanying text isn't all that great, either. But it's a very useful introduction all the same.

(I just remember that I've bought and used a lot of other art books in the past year, too, varying from a book on Flemish paintings in the United states to a book on the process of converting a drawing into a painting (in French, no less), and a book on art in the National Museum in Washington; I should do a notice on them, if only for my bookkeeping, but I probably won't.)

We went to a great exhibition of still life paintings by Pieter Claesz in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. This exhibition will travel first to Zürich and then to Washington. Pieter Claesz is -- in my opinion -- the greatest master of the genre, even better than Heda.

I seldom buy the catalogue of the exhibition, but this book, published by Waanders, like Het Nederlandse Stilleven, and Waanders always prints excellent reproductions; there are many art books, like the Phaidon book on Caravaggio, that are much worse, with indistinct, lifeless, flat reproductions.

But Waanders' books are excellent; and the text is scholarly and thorough, too. I tend to skip the text in art books, but I sometimes got engrossed enough to skip the paintings. And then I started thumbing back, and forth.

If you like painting -- a liking for still life is not required, there's one very excellent painting of cat killing an eel -- and if you're near Haarlem, Zürich of Washington, then this exhibition is one to go to. And the book one to buy.

We had a lot of fun; the kids like this kind of thing, too, and surprised an elderly gentleman by exclaiming that they'd recognized a particular knife in a series of paintings over and over again. They discovered the reflection of the painter in a tin jar, the difference between a berkemeier and a roemer, decided that the painter in his later period began to deliver sloppy work -- and so on. Full marks for observation, those kids.

Next time we're going to Haarlem, we'll take Danitia, one of our kids' close friends and pay a long visit to the artist's materials shop, buying stuff. We have what I'd almost call a regular club; Saturday afternoon, and Sundays after Church the four girls sit down with me and we experiment with stuff, paint, ink, charcoal -- everything is fair game. They don't get any art lessons at school anymore, so it's up to the parents to make sure they know oil from gouache, ink from charcoal, wax from clay. And it gives me an excuse to buy cool stuff, and to take a bunch of kids to a museum.

When we came back from a visit to the Prinsenhof in Delft, I made a resolution that I would learn about the art of still-life. I want to be able to paint a lemon like Willem Heda...

Read more ...