DUJARDIN, Karel

Karel Dujardin is renowned for his sparkling landscapes and popular Italian genre scenes, most of which he painted before his later sojourn in Italy from 1675. This gave rise to the assumption that he had seen the Italian light with his own eyes and therefore must have been in Italy prior to this, although this is not documented.

This is one of the few allegories Dujardin painted. It shows a lifesize young boy in a blue tunic, blowing bubbles. The painting has long been known as an allegory of the vanity of human life. From the sixteenth century on, a small boy blowing bubbles symbolised the brevity of life. The purely allegorical ‘homo bulla’ (man as a bubble) of the sixteenth century was later transformed in Dutch genre painting into an ordinary boy blowing bubbles.

Like Paulus Potter, Karel Dujardin succeeded in rendering animals in a masterly way. In this painting he depicted sheep and a lamb, two cows and a donkey in a Dutch meadow, surrounded by a mountainous Italianate landscape.

This painting, now in the Louvre, was bought by the French king, Louis XVI.

Dujardin was a Dutch Italianate painter. Additionally, he painted handsome portraits of famous citizens in the style of Bartholomeus van der Helst, and he also painted elegant, highly finished religious and allegorical paintings, like the picture shown here.

Hagar, the Egyptian hand maiden of Sarah was the mother of Ishmael, Abraham’s first son. When Isaac, Sarah’s son, was born Ishmael mocked his younger brother so that Sarah asked Abraham to banish him, together with his mother. Abraham provided them with bread and a bottle of water and sent them off into the desert of Beersheba. When the water was spent Hagar put Ishmael under a bush to die and then sat some way off, weeping. But an angel appeared, by tradition the archangel Michael, and disclosed a well of water near by, so they were both saved. Two scenes, the banishment, and the appearance of the angel are common in 17th century Italian and Dutch painting.

This almost comical genre scene depicts a horseman holding a roemer of wine with an ostler tending the horses. The present painting is stylistically similar to other works by Dujardin dated 1658.

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Giuseppe Torelli: Sonata a cinque in D Major No. 7

The subject of this painting is a riding party in a wide river landscape. This is a typical image of the South seen by a Dutch painter.

In many ways Karel Dujardin is the most Dutch of the Italianate painters. His bucolic landscapes are done on a small scale, and have an intimacy lacking in pictures made by Italianates who used a larger format and more ambitious motifs. Dujardin was apprenticed to Berchem and probably travelled to Italy in the late 1640s or early 1650s, but like so many other Dutch Italianate artists of his generation this early trip south cannot be substantiated. In 1652 he was in Amsterdam and during the next few years his art took an unexpected turn. Instead of settling down in Holland to paint views of the Campagna and the vita popolare of Rome, as most Italianate Dutch painters did after their documented or putative trips to Italy, he made pictures of the Dutch countryside which are closely related to Paulus Potter’s carefully executed small paintings of cattle in sunny meadows and woods. During this phase it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the hand of Potter from Dujardin’s.

By the end of the 1650s he began once again to paint bambocciate and modest Italian pastoral scenes. His Young Shepherd, datable to the early 1660s, shows him at his best. The theme is simple. A young boy lies on his back playing with his dog. The sheep, the old grazing horse, and the basket and keg appear to lie about in a haphazard fashion. In a black and white reproduction, only the mountains tell us that this is not a Dutch scene, but when the original or even a good colour reproduction is viewed, warm Italian air and the strong shimmering light of the south permeate it.

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Franz Schubert: Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock) D 965

Many of the Dutch Italianate painters concentrated less on actual Italian themes than on the bright Mediterranean light. There was evidently a demand in the 17th century for paintings of shepherds and cattle in an imaginary and hilly foreign land in which enthusiasts undoubtedly recognized Arcadia. Jan Both, Nicolaes Berchem, Karel Dujardin, Jan Asselyn and Adam Pynacker were masters of the genre.

The present painting showing an extensive Italianate landscape with an elegant company and a lime kiln was executed by the artist when he was living in Italy.

In 1675 Dujardin is securely documented in Rome. His Landscape in the Roman Campagna indicates that during this last phase he found inspiration from the classicizing landscapes painted in Rome by Poussin’s follower Gaspar Dughet.

This painting is Dujardin’s earliest known history scene painted in the year of his return from France. It was inspired by Parisian painting, particularly paintings by S�bastien Bourdon whose Roman militia scenes are stylistically close to those by Dujardin.

The subject of the painting is an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, showing the meeting between the armoured Pallas Athene and the hideous Invidia.

Around 1660 Karel Dujardin, known for his Italianate landscapes also started to paint large biblical scenes in a smooth, elegant and colourful style. St Paul Healing the Cripple at Lystra is an impressive example of history painting in classicist style.

The apostle Paul is the central figure in the composition. He towers over a crowd of sick and kneeling people. The scene depicted here is taken from the story of Paul, who had fled with Barnabas to Lystra - in present-day southern Turkey - (Acts 14:9-10). When Paul was preaching in Lystra, among those listening to him was a man who had been a cripple since birth. Paul ‘saw that he had the faith to be cured, so he said to him in a loud voice, “stand up straight on your feet”; and he sprang up and started to walk’. After this miraculous cure, the crowd took Paul and Barnabas to be heathen gods, and the people even wanted to make sacrifices to them. Appalled, the Christian apostles shouted that they were not gods and begged the people not to offer them sacrifices. In desperation they tore their own clothes. This last event was often depicted in the 17th century, but Karel Dujardin chose a more original moment.

The apostle Paul was painted from a a low viewpoint, his form looming against the cloudy sky. He stands in an elegant pose, with his weight on his left leg as he gestures expansively with his arms. Paul, dressed in a brown robe and a bright red cloak, looks at the cripple beside him. The strong red is balanced by the bright blue of their clothes worn by the women on the left. The woman in the foreground on the right, with her immaculate white headdress, is also striking. She grasps the hem of Paul’s cloak in her hand in the hope of receiving some of his power.

The needy people standing behind Paul look not at him but at the point where Barnabas once stood. Dujardin had originally portrayed Barnabas behind Paul, but later - for reasons unknown - removed him from the picture.The faint outlines of Barnabas’ head are still dimly visible.

The theme of the painting is taken from Ovid. The Lapiths, a peace-loving people of Thessaly, were celebrating the wedding of their king Pirithous to Hippodamia. The Centaurs were invited but they quickly began to misbehave. One of them, Eurytus, full of liquor, tried to carry off the bride and soon a battle raged in which drinking vessels, table legs, antlers, in fact anything to hand, served as weapons. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. Finally, thanks chiefly for Theseus, the friend of Pirithous, who was among the guests, the Centaurs were driven off. To the ancients and to the Renaissance the theme symbolized the victory of civilization over barbarism. It was used to decorate Greek temples, notably the metopes of the Parthenon (the ‘Elgin marbles’), and was popular with baroque painters.

Although the themes are not related, this painting seems to be in many respects a variant of the Conversion of Paul executed five years earlier. The two even look like pendants, although they were not made as such. They are roughly the same size, and the figure are on the same scale and in a similar type of landscape. The foreground of both pictures is dominated by a galloping horse mounted by a figure turning to look back with a large drapery fluttering overhead. And in both these tumultuous scenes a horse tramples a man on the ground. Dujardin employed the same means in both pictures, but he envisaged and achieved different results. The later painting is more reminiscent of a classical relief, its colour contrasts and chiaroscuro are less pronounced and dramatic, it is more subdued and ‘classicist’.

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Dujardin’s painting was inspired by a print of the same subject by Antonio Tempesta. He painted a couple of monumental history pieces with equally large figures in the early 1660s: St Paul Healing the Cripple at Lystra (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness (Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota) All these painting evince the masterly skill of the artist in a class of art, which, had he pursued it exclusively, might have raised him to the same distinguished eminence which he enjoys as an animal painter.

Karel Dujardin’s classically styled biblical scenes, produced mostly in his Amsterdam period between 1659 and 1674, betray the influence of the schools of Rome and Bologna in general, and, on occasion, of Annibale Carracci in particular. The Old Testament story of Tobias became popular in seventeenth-century Dutch art, especially in Rembrandt’s circle. One of the most commonly treated scenes was that in which the young Tobias, at the behest of his accompanying angel, caught from the River Tigris an enormous fish, whose gall he used to heal his blind father Tobit.

The present painting marks the start of a new period in Dujardin’s art, when he moved on from Italianate landscapes that bore the influence of Nicolaes Berchem to scenes inspired by Paulus Potter. Magisterially executed animals came increasingly to the fore, as did monumental human figures.

The duet of a milkmaid and a shepherd boy has a long pictorial tradition, stretching back at least to an engraving of 1510 by Lucas van Leyden. The subject is rendered by Dujardin as a simple evocation of everyday events. There is no communication between the characters. The cow, depicted almost portrait-like, the dog on the left, and the goat and sheep in the background, all share equal ranking with the human figures.

The bare soles revealed by the young girl as she kneels with her back to the viewer are conspicuously dirty. This motif can be related to the scandal of a few decades earlier provoked by Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto in the church of Sant’Agostino, Rome. Dujardin, however, used this “pittoresque” (rather than crudely naturalistic) detail not in an altarpiece but in a profane scene.