DOU, Gerrit

The painting represents a fisherman’s wife, leaning out of a window, with a reel in one hand and a spool of thread in the other.

The cavernous background gives an immediate impression of a ship’s hold but there is all the detail of a still-life in the carefully painted armour, drum, saddle and guns seen in what must be an arsenal. It is only the figure of the officer with his plumed headband which makes this a genre painting. Like most of Dou’s works this picture is quite lacking in incident. The man is no more than a carefully painted object included in the picture along with the rest of the contents of the store-room.

The artist is more interested in the still-life occupying the foreground of the painting than the the stiff figure in the background whose clothing seems to be part of the still-life. The helmet, the drum and the shield can be found on several other paintings of the artist.

This painting belongs to a group of night scenes painted in the 1650s and 1660s by Dou. Here the candlelight allows the artist to demonstrate his skill in handling highlights and shadows, and to contrast the features of the old man and the young girl.

This subject was introduced to the repertoire of Dutch painting by Gerrit Dou. He executed at least three versions of the subject before Johannes Vermeer’s famous Astronomer, completed in 1668. The theme had developed out of Dou’s earlier representations of scholars in their studies. The depiction of the scholar at work, an age-old subject, was given increased attention in Leiden painting due to the foundation of the city’s new university.

The hour-glass and the burning candle are allusions to the transience of human life.

Dou can be credited with starting a hardy vogue around the middle of the century for small pictures of nocturnal scenes lit by candlelight or lanterns, which usually throw a harsh red light. In this group the incident depicted - children at school, card players, a group around a table - is usually more important than the dramatic potential of the chiaroscuro.

This small painting depicts a girl with burning oil lamp, leaning from a window.

The painting is also known as Rembrandt’s Mother.

Young Dou admired and imitated Rembrandt, his teacher, closely. He frequently used Rembrandt’s schemes and paraphernalia. A comparison of his Old Woman Reading a Bible (also called Rembrandt’s Mother) with Rembrandt’s Old Woman Reading (1631) in the same museum shows the master’s superiority and the pupil’s limitations. The face Dou painted is like a mask; it has a frozen surface which appears to have been over-exposed to the light.

The woman is reading about the entry of Jesus into Jericho, an episode from St Luke’s Gospel. The illustration shows the tax-collector Simon, who climbed into a tree to observe the event. Jesus, who is shown looking up at him, went to the man’s house despite his disciples’ objections to his visiting a tax-collector, for the profession was considered corrupt. To Protestants, the story proved that sinners are saved by faith.

The woman is reading about the entry of Jesus into Jericho, an episode from St Luke’s Gospel. The illustration shows the tax-collector Simon, who climbed into a tree to observe the event. Jesus, who is shown looking up at him, went to the man’s house despite his disciples’ objections to his visiting a tax-collector, for the profession was considered corrupt. To Protestants, the story proved that sinners are saved by faith.

Dou popularized the the compositional device of a figure engaged at some occupation at a window.

This painting by the pupil of Rembrandt and the founder of the Leiden school of ‘fine painting’ represents a type common in Leiden from the mid-1640s: the bust portrait of an allegorical figure in an architectural frame. Here the old woman is shielding a candle flame, symbol of the transience of human life.

It is assumed that the painter represented in the picture is Rembrandt, the master of Dou.

The couple was originally in an interior, which Nicolaes Berchem later overpainted with a landscape.

The subjects of old men, scholars and hermits are ones which Dou borrowed from Rembrandt at the beginning of his career and returned to again towards the end of his life.

Dou is considered the founder of the Dutch school of fijnschilders (literally translated to ‘fine painters’) and the present work reveals the meticulously detailed style of painting that he pioneered which has since become synonymous with the character of Leiden painting.

This small painting is part of a series painted of the same sitter who was probably the artist’s mother.

The painting is also known as Anne and Tobias.

This self-portrait represents the painter in a window with a pipe in his mouth. The painting is signed on the paper below the open book: GDou.

This is one of the latest self-portraits by Dou, depicting him at the age of approximately fifty-two. In the course of some forty years, the artist painted about a dozen self-portraits. Rembrandt, with his much more complex program of painting, drawing, and etching self-portraits throughout his career, exercised strong influence on Dou’s self-portraits. Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1640 was, as for other Rembrandt pupils and followers, the most important model for Dou, who probably knew some of the Rembrandt school derivations as well.

This painting is one of Dou’s eight self-portraits. He is depicted leaning on the window sill and holding his palette and brushes. His beret, his lace collar and his hand, which is resting on the window sill, are examples of exquisitely fine painting.

Dou introduced into Dutch genre painting in the mid-1640s the frame motif. The stone frame of the window in the foreground forms an optical barrier between the picture-space and the space of the beholder.

This painting treats a traditional theme of Netherlandish painting, the physician and the patient respectively associated with charlatanism and moral deficiency. Sickness of the body is but the outer manifestation of the sickness of the soul alienated from God by sin. The patient’s eyes, turned to heaven, and the “dialogue” between the Bible and the clock (symbol of the vanity of human concerns) on each side of the window underscore that meaning.

The traditional title Dropsical Woman, mistaken, is supposed to have been inspired by the illusionist ewer painted on the shutters of the box protecting the painting. The ewer is the symbol of the purification by water, but actually the physician appears to be examining the urine.

Dou was an assistant and pupil of the young Rembrandt between 1628 and 1631. He became a master of the genre painting with a lot of still-life elements. A characteristic example of his works is the Extraction of Tooth.

Dou popularized the the compositional device of a figure engaged at some occupation at a window. The earliest dated one is The Grocer’s Shop in the Louvre. Soon after, the window motif occurs frequently in the Leiden School. The window frames quickly become more elaborate, bas-reliefs are introduced under the sills, and the windows are draped with curtains.

Dou can be credited with starting a hardy vogue around the middle of the century for small pictures of nocturnal scenes lit by candlelight or lanterns, which usually throw a harsh red light. In this group the incident depicted - children at school, card players, a group around a table - is usually more important than the dramatic potential of the chiaroscuro.

This picture is a high point of ‘fine painting’. It was painted so evocatively that it seems real. The painted, arched window framing the depiction and the relief underneath it seem to be made of stone and this illusion is strengthened by the tip of the rug which hangs over the relief. Moreover, the curtain hanging in the niche has been pushed to the side as though to unveil the scene These are tricks that Gerrit Dou used to give the illusion of three-dimensionality.

This painting shows the characteristic qualities of the style of Dou and of the Leiden school he was to start: meticulously careful drawing, high finish or slickness even, and darkly shining colour - hence the name of the school: the Leiden Fijnschilders (fine painters).

In the present painting a charlatan is setting up his stand and offering miracle cures to passers-by. The work, rich in anecdotal details and offering enigmas aplenty, is the most famous treatment of this traditional subject. With his depiction of a quacksalver, Dou was partaking in a long tradition reaching back to Hieronymus Bosch and Lucas van Leyden. The subject was still popular in Dou’s time, as evidenced by paintings by Adriaen van Ostade, Jan Steen, Frans van Mieris, and Adriaen van de Venne.

Originally, this panel formed the shutters of the box protecting the Dropsical Woman.

Dou was a lifelong resident of Leiden, and his painting is close to Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro but is more superficial and conventional. His setting is also more theatrical: a great tapestry is raised to reveal this almost staged vignette of a nursing mother.

This painting provides an example of Dou’s use of a niche format in which an arched top enhances the illusion by eliminating what are normally the empty upper corners of a picture. A man, likely identifiable as a painter because of his beret, peers at a birdcage while playing the violin in a stone enclosure. He leans against a sumptuous Turkish carpet draped over a magnificent stone relief of putti playing with a goat. This relief, which Dou used repeatedly in his niche paintings, is based on a frieze by the renowned Flemish sculptor Fran�ois Duquesnoy, plaster copies of which were known in Leiden at this time. In the background another man smokes a pipe while still another grinds pigment before an easel. In light of this background scene the subject of this panel can probably be identified as that of an artist playing a musical instrument in his studio, a subject encountered in other genre paintings (and in artists’ self-portraits). Generally speaking it illustrates music’s ability to stimulate creativity.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 15 minutes):

Giuseppe Tartini: Violin concerto in A Major

Dou popularized the the compositional device of a figure engaged at some occupation at a window.

The painting is also known as The Dutch Cook.

This panel depicts a young girl at a window ledge with a cat and a mouse-trap, a hung duck and a pewter ewer beside her.

Dou’s genre paintings are often imbued with subtle emblematic meanings which would certainly not have been lost on his public. In 17th-century paintings, and in particular in Dou’s own work, certain everyday objects took on other meanings and were therefore chosen by the artist for a specific reason: a set of scales, for example, could allude to the virtues of moderation and temperance; an empty bird-cage was a conventional symbol of immorality; and the open mouse-trap and lascivious expression of the cat in this painting could equally have carried some erotic overtones.

Better known for his interiors and niche paintings, Gerrit Dou has here depicted an open-air scene, otherwise rarely found in his oeuvre. The painting was reworked in Dou’s studio.

In 1660 the States of Holland selected Dou’s Young Mother as one of the precious gifts to Charles II on the occasion of the Restoration. On receiving it, the king immediately offered Gerrit Dou a permanent position at court, but Dou declined his offer. Of this picture John Evelyn wrote that it was painted ‘so finely as hardly to be distinguished from enamail’.

Dou popularized the the compositional device of a figure engaged at some occupation at a window.