Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits 9780823292127

Citation preview

H a r ry

B e r g e r ,

& J r .

Manhood, Marriage, Mischief R e m b r a n dt ’ s ‘ N i g h t Wat c h ’ a n d Ot h e r D u t c h G ro u p P o rt r a i t s

f o r d h a m u n i v e rs i t y p r e s s , n e w yo r k 2007

frontispiece Rembrandt, The Night Watch (1642). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Copyright © 2007 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berger, Harry. Manhood, marriage, and mischief : Rembrandt’s Night watch and other Dutch group portraits / Harry Berger, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8232-2556-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8232-2556-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8232-2557-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8232-2557-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Portraits, Group —Netherlands. 2. Portrait painting, Dutch— 17th century. 3. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606–1669. Night watch. 4. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606–1669— Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. nd1319.3.b47 2007 757.09492'09032 — dc22 2006038241 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Printed in the United States of America 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition

W

e dance round in a ring and suppose.

But the secret sits in the middle and knows. — ro b e rt f ro s t

F

or Helen Tartar, without whose patience, loyalty, generosity, courage, and sheer brilliance the last five books I’ve written would never have seen the light of day

Contents Illustrations

xi

Preface

xv

Introduction: A Shot in the Dark

1

pa rt o n e g ro u p p o rt r a i t s a n d t h e f i c t i o n s o f t h e p o s e 1.

Toward the Interpretation of Performance Anxiety

11

2.

Portraiture and the Fictions of the Pose

15

3.

The Posographical Imperative: A Comparison of Genres

25

4.

Group Portraiture: Coming Together and Coming Apart

47

5.

Alois Riegl and the Posographical Imperative

85

6.

Performance Anxiety and the Belated Viewer

105

pa rt t wo m i l i t i as a n d m a r r i ag e 7.

Male Bondage and the Military Imperative

113

8.

Social Sources of Performance Anxiety

125

pa rt t h r e e p i c t u r i n g fa m i ly va l u e s 9.

The Preacher’s Wife

141

10.

Women with Elbows

147

11.

Families Making Music

163

pa rt f o u r ‘ t h e n i g h t wat c h ’ as h o m o s o c i a l pas to r a l

x

12.

The Night Watch: How the Sandbank Crumbles

177

13.

Evasive Action: Three Ways to Shore Up the Sandbank

181

14.

Captain Cocq and the Unruly Musketeer

185

15.

Disaggregation as Class Conflict

191

16.

Manual Mischief: The Loneliness of the Red Musketeer

195

17.

Between Stad and Stadholder: Captain Cocq’s Dilemma

203

18.

Posographical Misfires

209

19.

An Odd Couple: The Ghost of Anslo’s Wife

217

Coda: Playing Soldier

221

Notes

227

Index

267

Contents

Illustrations Frontispiece. Rembrandt, The Night Watch (1642). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. p l at e s (following page 60) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

Frans Hals and Pieter Codde, The Meager Company (1633–37). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Frans Hals, Officers of the Saint Hadrian Civic Guard (1627). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Jan Steen, The Burgher of Delft (1655). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Frans Hals, Regents of Saint Elizabeth Hospital (1641). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Frans Hals, Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House (ca. 1664). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Frans Hals, Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House (ca. 1664). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Rembrandt, The Mennonite Preacher Anslo and His Wife (1641). Photo Joerg P. Anders, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Rembrandt, Portrait of Rev. Johannes Elison (1634). Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Rembrandt, Portrait of Maria Bockenolle (1634). Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. xi

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Rembrandt, Portrait of Nicolaes Bambeeck (1641). Brussels, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium. Rembrandt, Portrait of Agatha Bas (1641). The Royal Collection. © 2006, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Frans Hals, Portrait of Stephanus Geraerdts (ca. 1650–52). Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. Frans Hals, Portrait of Isabella Coymans (ca. 1650–52). Private collection. Jan Molenaer, Family Making Music (ca. 1636). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. The Night Watch, detail. Central group, focus on Captain and Lieutenant. The Night Watch, detail. Golden girl.

figures 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

xii

Nicolaes Maes, Eavesdropper (1657). Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum (on loan from the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, Rijswijk/Amsterdam). Jan Steen, The Cardplayers (ca. 1660). Private collection. Jan Miense Molenaer, The Duet [1] (ca. 1630–31). Seattle Art Museum. Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Photography by Paul Macapia. Jan Miense Molenaer, The Duet [2] (ca. 1635–36). Coll. Eric Noah. Chapel Hill, N.C., North Carolina Museum of Art. Jan Steen, The Cat Family (1673–75). Budapest, Szepmuveseti Museum [Museum of Fine Arts]. Jan Steen, Merry Company on a Terrace (ca. 1673–75). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1958. Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jan Steen, In Luxury Beware (1663). Vienna, Gemäldegalerie, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Jan Steen, As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young (ca. 1663–65). The Hague: Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis.

Illustrations

26 27

32

33 36

37 38

40

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

Jan Steen, Twelfth Night (1668). Kassel, Staatliche Museen Kassel. Jan Steen, The Dancing Couple (1663). Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection. Image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art. J. W. Delff, Arquebusiers of the Fourth Squad (1592). Delft, Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof. Dirk Jacobsz., Civic Guard Group Portrait (1529). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Dirck Barendsz, Civic Guard Group Portrait (1564). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Frans Pietersz. Grebber, Civic Guard Group Portrait (1619). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Werner van den Valckert, Regents of the Leprosenhuis (1624). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Cornelis van der Voort, Regents of the Old Men’s and Women’s Home (1618). Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum. Anonymous, Civic Guard Group Portrait (1557). Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum. Frans Hals, Officers of the Saint George Civic Guard (1616). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Cornelis van Haarlem, Civic Guard Banquet (1583). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Cornelis van Haarlem, Civic Guard Group Portrait (1599). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Jan de Bray, Regents of Children’s Charity Home (1663). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum. Gerard Ter Borch, Officer Writing a Letter, with a Trumpeter (1658–59). Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art: The William L. Elkins Collection, 1924. Jacob Lyon, Group Portrait of Nineteen Guardsmen (1628). Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

42

44 52 53 60 61 62

63 88 92 93 95 101

107

116 Illustrations

xiii

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

xiv

Claes Lastman and Adriaen van Nieulandt, Group Portrait of Nine Guardsmen (1623–24). Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum. Johannes Verspronck, Portrait of a Man (1641). Enschede, Collectie Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Photo R. Klein Gotink. Johannes Verspronck, Portrait of a Woman (1640). Enschede, Collectie Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Photo R. Klein Gotink. Frans Hals, Portrait of Joseph Coymans (1644). Hartford, Conn., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, The Ella Gallup Summer and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. Frans Hals, Portrait of Dorothea Berck, Wife of Joseph Coymans (1644). Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Mary Frick Jacobs Collection, BMA 1938.231. The Night Watch, detail. Central group with young shooter. Jacques de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe van roers, musquetten ende spiessen, 1607. Facsimile reprint with an early English translation, The Exercise of Armes, ed. and comm. J. B. Kist (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971). Plate 12 of musket sequence. The Night Watch, detail. Old Musketeer blowing away powder. Jacques de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe. Plate 20 of musket sequence. The Night Watch, detail. Musketeer in red loading gun. Jacques de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe. Plate 24 of musket sequence. Bartholomeus van der Helst, Company of Captain Roelof Bicker, detail. Shooter. The Night Watch, detail. Boy with powderhorn.

Illustrations

117

148

149

158

159 186

187 196 197 199 201 214 222

Preface Rembrandt was born in 1606, and during his quadricentennial year he and his work have been getting even more attention than they usually do. According to the invaluable Codart Web site, eighty-six events centered on Rembrandt have been or will be held from October 2005 to May 2007—in Poughkeepsie, Melbourne, Schleswig, Braunschweig, Cambridge, Cracow, Copenhagen, Kassel, St. Gallen, St. Louis, St. Petersburg, Bucharest, Barcelona, Istanbul, and Coral Gables, to name but a few. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was among the more inventive celebrants, mounting a special exhibit that linked The Night Watch to Peter Greenaway’s forthcoming film entitled Nightwatching, about which more below. I didn’t know I would finish a book on The Night Watch and group portraiture amid all this commemorative clamor. Nevertheless, I’m happy to be part of it, even though the basic method and idea of the book aren’t likely to inspire exhibits in Hanover, Höxter, Haarlem, or Hamburg, to name but a few. The method is a practice of “close reading” remotely descended from the New Criticism and modified in my Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (2000) to make it applicable to the visual analysis of early modern portrait genres. In Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief (MMM in future references), I define and discuss the portrait as the record of an event. That event is the artist’s act of representing the sitter’s act of self-representation. I think of the portrait event as structurally similar to the lyric event in literature, because both are representations and interpretations of first-person perform-

xv

ance. In that respect both events are virtual or fictive performances (see Chapters 1 and 2), and in that respect the “portrait as a record” is really “the portrait as a ‘record.’” It pretends to imitate and preserve what in fact it creates. The analogy to lyric may seem to hold only for portraits of single individuals, not for those of pairs and groups of individuals that are the subject of this book. But in the portrait of a civic guard company, for example, each of the several sitters may perform as if he is or would like to be the lyric center of attention. The basic plot enacted by the group portrait is the drama of competitive posing. Although this drama drives the interpretations that follow, MMM is not exclusively an aesthetic study. It relies heavily on existing scholarship for historical context as well as for ideas and interpretations. It is especially indebted to the work of Alison Kettering, Nanette Salomon, and Elizabeth Honig for insights that led me to the book’s basic organizing idea: the idea that there is a close connection between (1) problems of masculine identity associated with the social construction of gender in the system of nuclear domesticity and (2) the way those problems get expressed in the drama of competitive posing. Part of the novelty I claim for this move is that it is based on the theory of group portraiture developed from the approach articulated in Fictions of the Pose. While I was waiting for the copy-edited manuscript of MMM, Greenaway’s Nightwatching appeared (Paris: Dis Voir, 2006). The script of a film to be released in 2007, it is a wry and spirited fantasy in which the circumstances that surround Rembrandt’s work on the portrait are turned into a crime scene investigation. A brief inventory of the similarities and differences between our two books will suggest that they stage a low-level drama of competitive supposing. Greenaway’s script is considerably more than CSI Amsterdam. He’s out to épater le bourgeois—not only seventeenth-century Dutch burghers but also “overwise academics” and undercritical worshipers of “the great painter.” He portrays Rembrandt’s patrons as a group of enthusiastically nasty people—dishonest and disdainful, lecherous and treacherous, materially greedy and morally needy. The two central figures in The Night Watch, Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburgh, become captain and lieutenant of their company by contriving to have Cocq’s predexvi

Preface

cessor murdered. Rembrandt is the “Sherlock Holmes” who smokes it out and reveals it in his painting. Our two books share one predictable question, one thematic concern, and one obvious perception. The question is small but central, because in each case it takes the rest of the book to answer it. Greenaway: “Where did the bullet go?” (p. 3). Berger: “Where did the shooter’s bullet go?” (p. 2, below). The shared theme is homoeroticism. Both books discuss it, but their treatments differ sharply. In Nightwatching, the foppish captain is head over heels in lust with the loathsome lieutenant. I consider a version of this argument and reject it for an account that treats The Night Watch as homosocial pastoral. The shared perception is that Rembrandt depicts the burghers in The Night Watch as “pretend soldiers,” “a collection of rich merchants’ sons playing at soldiers” (Nightwatching, 33, 63; compare the Coda below). In this connection, it’s worth noting that both books make much not only of the gunshot but also of other examples of woeful weaponry in The Night Watch. Both mention departures from the proper techniques depicted in Rembrandt’s source, Jacques de Gheyn’s illustrated manual of arms published in 1608. This isn’t surprising, because maladroit musketry is a subject often mentioned in Night Watch commentary. In my view, however, it was never satisfactorily interpreted until Margaret Carroll’s landmark essay, published in 2002 and discussed at length in Chapters 16 and 17 of MMM. I suspect from some comments in Nightwatching that Greenaway may have consulted Carroll’s essay, but her rationale isn’t as relevant to his story as it is to mine. Nightwatching treats goofy gunwork as an expression of “Rembrandt’s” contempt for characters Greenaway portrays as deserving of contempt. I try to give the painter and his sitters a little more credit. It’s difficult for critics drawn toward ironic interpretation to resist exploring the idea that group portraits like The Night Watch may to some extent be parodies or put-downs of their sitters. I was certainly headed down that road until Carroll’s interpretation saved me. The main difference between Nightwatching and MMM is that the former rushes toward the idea while the latter skirts it then veers away. Preface

xvii

Greenaway unpacks from The Night Watch an imaginary account of the conditions that might have produced it. He spices it up by presenting it as a parody of a TV genre, with Rembrandt cast as the chief crime scene investigator. In spite of—or perhaps because of—our different interests and approaches, I found the script stimulating and in places deeply moving. At the same time, it confirmed my sense that my initial view of the portrait as a put-down was both unlikely and too easy. But it didn’t disconfirm my sense that once this direct route was closed off there was still another, more meandering path toward an ironic interpretation of The Night Watch: the path I take in this book. I’m hardly an “overwise academic,” since I have no training in art history. As noted in the acknowledgments in Fictions of the Pose, I slipped in by the back door almost fifty years ago, after wandering bewildered around the streets of Florence for six months—a transcendent and terrifying experience that convinced me I better start using my eyes and, if nothing else, learn something about perspective. This led to several years of hyperventilation, or reveries, about different organizations of space: about second worlds and green worlds and virtual worlds and their relation to actual worlds. When I stopped worrying about that it was because I found something more concrete and limited and realistic to worry about: the idea of the painted portrait as a virtual performance, a second world, a fiction. The fiction of the pose. My encounters with Rembrandt and seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture have drawn inspiration from the work of several art historians. I suppose I should say in advance that they aren’t to be blamed for my shortcomings, but the important thing is to express my appreciation for what they gave me, regardless of what I’ve done with it. Chief among them are Svetlana Alpers and Margaret Carroll, whose insights, expressed both in their writings and in our conversations, have meant so much to me for so many years. In MMM, I rely heavily on their ideas and interpretations, as well as those of H. Perry Chapman, Elizabeth Honig, David Smith, and Mariët Westermann. Recent conversations with Professors Honig and Westermann have been especially enlightening, and I thank them for that, as well as for the stimulating essays and books that have sustained my thinking about Rembrandt and Dutch art. During the last few years I’ve benefited greatly from the scholarship, xviii

Preface

advice, and support of Gary Schwartz, who has never let our different ways of looking at portraits prevent him from collegial acts of generosity. The burden of obtaining illustrations would have been impossible without the kindness and assistance of Wouter Kloek, Claus Grimm, Dennis Weller, Francien Stiekema, and Esther de Graaf, all of whom went out of their way to make my task easier. Closer to home, my friends at Bay Photo labs in Santa Cruz were consistently accommodating and responsive to my often weird demands and rushed orders. I’m especially grateful to Matthew Wherity and Christie Boxill not only for their technical help but also for their sympathetic understanding and their advice in the selection of images. Once again, I’m grateful to K. Silem Mohammad for preparing an index that improved my understanding of what I thought I was doing, and to Marianna Santana who has always—for over twenty years—been there for me at Cowell College’s Office of Academic Services. The production of this book was supported by grants from the Millard Meiss Foundation at the College Art Association and from the Institute of Humanities Research and the Academic Senate Committee on Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I’m grateful to these agencies for their assistance and for their confidence in my work. And once again, I’m very grateful to Janet Wood for her brilliant solutions to the problems with which I littered her path while she was designing MMM. My deepest thanks go to three readers of MMM for their wonderfully insightful comments on different stages of the manuscript: Peter Erickson, Margaret Carroll, and Erika Naginski. They understood what I was trying to do and showed me how to get closer to the mark than I could have on my own. I began sending manuscripts out for publication during the 1950s, and so I’ve received a lot of good help and advice from a lot of smart people for a long time. But the composite of critical and constructive suggestions by Peter, Margaret, and Erika: this was as good as it gets. It gives me pleasure to acknowledge a very special debt of a more general sort. For several years, Judith Anderson and I have kept up a running conversation about our mutual interests and intellectual ventures. We began talking as Spenserians decades ago, but the discussions eventually branched out into all areas of literary theory and interpretive methodology. We read each other’s manuscripts and discuss each other’s projects. Preface

xix

Not only was Judith the guiding spirit who urged me to publish the essays now collected in Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (2005), she also interrupted work on her important study Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (which also appeared in 2005) to help me organize the essays into a sequence. When I was down on the project, she kept up my spirits, periodically explaining to me why and how it was a book rather than merely a collection. Finally, she translated these investments into the essay that now provides the introduction to Situated Utterances. For so many acts and years of true friendship I am profoundly grateful. I dedicate Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief to the person whose faith in my work on Shakespeare and Rembrandt kept it alive and whose extraordinary critical commitment to it has enabled me to keep thinking and writing even through the troubles and tremors, the tricks and treats, of octogenerity. Finally, hello again with love again to—in strictly alphabetical order— Tillie, Ezra, Cindy, Carrie, and Beth.

xx

Preface

&

Manhood, Marriage, Mischief

Politics in a work of art is like a pistol-shot at the opera, a crude affair, though one impossible to ignore. —s t e n d h a l , The Charterhouse of Parma

Introduction: A Shot in the Dark A funny thing happens behind the backs of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Wilhelm van Ruytenburgh when they are on the point of leading their company to an unspecified site of assembly or action. Just as the Captain steps confidently forward with hand outstretched and “gives the order to his Lieutenant . . . to march,” a gun goes off behind them.1 An enthusiast overresponding to Captain Cocq’s command? Or only misinterpreting it? Either way, this rash miscue might tempt a latterday absurdist to wonder whether awareness of what goes on behind the Captain lets leak into his heroic allocutionary stance the ruddy stain of embarrassed apology, the faint tincture of a plea for understanding. The temptation isn’t strong. But the thought does occur. We can see the barrel angle up from the Captain’s shoulder to the Lieutenant’s hat brim and we can make out the puff of fiery smoke it discharges perilously close to the ostrich plumes, which seem flattened back by the blast. That the officers soldier on as if they hadn’t heard or felt the shot testifies to their remarkable discipline, or insensitivity, or something else. Maybe they were in on the joke and the musket shot was part of the compositional program they worked out with Rembrandt. Were the men who commissioned and sat for their portrait actually there when the gun went off, if it went off? Did some or all or any or none of the patrons depicted in Rembrandt’s Night Watch actually sit for their portraits? If they did, did they pose one by one or all together or a few at a time? The perpetrator is a young—or at least a short—shooter wearing a large 1

antique helmet and old-fashioned clothes. One leg thrusting back and dramatically silhouetted against the golden girl behind him shows that his form is good and tells us he puts a lot of himself into this exercise.2 His other leg is almost lost behind the Captain’s right leg, but the foot is detectable (from the shadow it casts), pressing against the first of the stairs that lead up to the gateway. He is thus discreetly but not completely occluded by the Captain, who would no doubt like to make him vanish, and who succeeds in concealing at least the shooter’s face, hands, and gunstock. Yet still the light filling out his form preserves its dark luster and keeps him stubbornly in view: a participant, a sitter, a member of the group posing for its portrait. Rembrandt wouldn’t need, may not have used, a live model for this tiny terrorist. Would he need, did he use, live models for any of the other sitters? The shooter is one of six musketeers in the painting. Two are barely visible in the upper left background, and another stands behind the arm of the pointing sergeant at the right. More conspicuous are the red musketeer loading his weapon in the left foreground and the stooped older man who stands just to the right of the Lieutenant and blows unexploded powder out of the firing pan. We’ll see later that these two shooters have problems of their own, but nothing so drastic as shooting up neighbors. Where did the shooter’s bullet go? Only a few sitters are depicted as if they were or could be paying attention to the blast. They include the guardsman deflecting the gun with outstretched hand, the sergeant at the right who points in its general direction while addressing his interlocutor, two or three guardsmen at the left edge of the painting, and the golden girl who bustles by and could well be eyeing the incident, if it ever happened. Did these sitters pose one by one or all together or a few at a time or not at all? Whose idea was it to liven up this portrait by having someone fire into the group—or at least someone pose as if firing into the group? Maybe, as several scholars claim, it didn’t happen: the short shooter, along with his fellow musketeers, aren’t really doing what they seem to be doing, because they are not agents but allegories—figures, symbols, representations of the art of musketry.3 One sign of this possibility is that most of the other sitters ignore the shooter as much as they ignore the Captain, although the Captain is generally taken to be more (or less) than a repre2

Introduction

sentation of the Idea of Leadership. When he first set his eyes on this group portrait, did Captain Cocq think he was looking at allegory or at disorganization? Did Rembrandt ever manage to assemble any segment of Cocq’s company for even one group sitting? Did some or all or any or none of them pose for the painter? The iconographic purge may bleed the strangeness out of the shooter episode, but other anomalies stubbornly resist this remedy. Were patrons who paid to be included in the painting pleased when they had to squint to make out fragments of themselves struggling for recognition in a pastiche of interrupted forms, fragments overshadowed by a marvelously rhythmic but aggressive splay of diagonals that draw the gaze upward and toward the right, where they crest in an unruly crisscross of weapons? When the patrons took in the lower left sector, what did they think of the dwarflike boy in the battered oversized helmet who bears his powder horn out of the picture? Captain Banning Cocq must have approved of his overstated gesture of command, but what did his fellow sitters think about it?4 Would they have been as alert as subsequent viewers to “the surprisingly plastic and animated left glove” dangling from his gloved right hand?5 And how would they have responded to the more flagrantly subversive motif described by Benjamin Binstock as “the intriguing shadow cast by Captain Banning Cocq’s left hand onto Lieutenant Ruytenburgh’s belly”?6 Binstock’s odd choice of the word belly sets up his readers for a small flirtation with Freudian analysis that I’ll return to later.7 Finally, were the sitters surprised by the apparition of the girl who materializes, along with her drinking horn, purse, dead chicken, and dimly visible companion, in a brilliant shaft of light and stares with intensity (curiosity? incredulity?) either at the unruly shooter or at Cocq himself? She has been variously called a sutler, an emblem carrier, and “a female dwarf,” but she has often been said to resemble pictures of Rembrandt’s wife Saskia.8 Why would Rembrandt include a figure whose proper place is not in the shooters’ parade but in the household? And who possibly was—had been—a member of, the mistress of, the painter’s household? Did anyone pose for this figure, either before Rembrandt’s eyes or behind them? If this is indeed a likeness of Saskia, it is one for which she may or may not have been able to pose. She died on June 12, 1642, the year inscribed next to the painter’s signature in The Night Watch. Because affidavits Introduction

3

made much later (1659) by two of the sitters indicate that the artist was paid before Saskia’s death, the RRP (Rembrandt Research Project) speculates that The Night Watch had probably been completed by then, if not much earlier. In their interpretation of the documentary evidence, “the company is depicted as it was composed prior to December 1640,” when one of the sitters died.9 But Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann agrees with Margaret Carroll that early payment doesn’t signify an earlier completion date, since Rembrandt may have received payment in advance, while Gary Schwartz believes Rembrandt worked on the painting “from late 1640 to early 1642.”10 The consensus is that the painting must have been completed before—but not too long before—Saskia died. The question raised by the hypothesis that the golden girl may be a likeness of Saskia is whether Saskia had been ill, had been failing, for some period before the completion of the picture.11 But of course it is a question only for those who, like myself, hypothesize that the strangeness, the uncanniness, of the figure is Rembrandt’s comment on his relation to the painting as well as to the figure itself. In the pages that follow, my interpretation of The Night Watch will build toward this hypothesis. The celebratory and commemorative character of the group portrait is obvious. Beyond that, questions about the painting’s initial reception are pretty much shots in the dark. They aim in the general direction of an archive that yields few answers: statements about fees by two of the patrons and a descriptive reference to the painting, along with a copy of it, in one of Captain Cocq’s albums. Whatever else The Night Watch may have meant to its patrons remains less clear because scholarly accounts of the guilds’ changing functions—military, social, and political—are teased from so slim an evidentiary base.12 Partly for this reason, the accounts are diverse and often in conflict with each other, which renders even more difficult the attempt to imagine how its various features—its “tone,” its collective intention, the meaning of its departures from and allusions to prior militia portraits—met the expectations of Captain Cocq and his fellow patrons. Whether they did or not, we act according to the well-founded assumption that those expectations germinated in a different cultural climate and we therefore compensate for the difference with primarily historical reconstructions— reconstructions that, in addition to art history and historiography, con4

Introduction

ventionally rely on the methodologies of social, political, cultural, religious, and intellectual history. It goes without saying that reliance on historical methodologies is essential and that my reliance on those who reconstruct the relevant contexts is enormous. But to rely exclusively on such reconstructions can be risky because any hypothesis we modern viewers entertain about the way Rembrandt’s patrons responded to their image will also be conditioned by the interpretive assumptions and methods we use to analyze and discuss the painting. In commentary on The Night Watch, the premises of aesthetic interpretation are treated less reflexively and less extensively than those of historical interpretation. I include among aesthetico-interpretive issues the phenomenology of the sitter/viewer relation isolated and exhaustively considered by Alois Riegl and seldom explored in such depth or detail since the publication of his great The Group Portraiture of Holland a century ago.13 The approach to group portraits I first sketched out in two chapters of Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance is very different from but deeply indebted to Riegl’s.14 The differences will be discussed below, but differences notwithstanding, Riegl’s copiously detailed method of “reading” group portraits (a kind of New Criticism avant la lettre) remains an inspiration and still offers a fresh challenge. In the present study, I try to reanimate not so much the particulars as the general style of his interpretive procedure. My own procedure, which I discuss in the sections that follow, may be introduced by revisiting the question I asked above about the shooter: whose idea was it to liven up this portrait by having someone fire into the group—or at least someone pose as if firing into the group? The shift from “someone who fires” to “someone who poses as if firing” is intended to be corrective. In changing the emphasis from an act of musketry to an act of posing, the phrase “poses as if” registers the sine qua non of portraiture, the condition that differentiates it from other genres. Whatever else portrait sitters seem to be doing—shooting, giving orders, waving a banner, loading a musket—they are by definition holding or striking poses. They may be visibly pretending to shoot, command, wave, or load, and the phrase, “poses as if [shooting, commanding, waving, loading],” registers the pretense. These are examples of a fundamental portrait category, which I call “posing as if not posing” and distinguish from the even more Introduction

5

fundamental category “posing as if posing.” David Smith observes that “striking a pose” is “one of the commonest poses in Dutch portraiture.”15 This is neither obvious nor tautological. The implicit doubling in Smith’s statement, the pose of striking a pose, that is, posing as if posing, compactly insulates the fictiveness of the pose we see from the actualities of the sitter/painter interaction. Yet how can this insulation survive the spectacle of a smoking gun? The puff of smoke demands to be heard. Can a painter ask a sitter to pose in the act of shooting a gun—ask him to shoot his gun while posing? To ask him to pose as if shooting is one thing. But to add the puff of smoke is to take it to another level because it parodies the convention of posing as if not posing. By its unlikely overstatement, the puff signals the fictiveness of the shooter’s pose and smokes the edges of everything around it, not only Lieutenant Ruytenburgh’s fancy plume but also Captain Cocq’s energetic exhortation. Did the people whose resemblances Rembrandt “copied” actually pose? “People” begs the question: does the term refer to sitters or patrons? I use these two terms, and will continue using them, to stabilize the distinction between the likeness and its original or referent. Let the term sitter designate the painted figure, the likeness, and the term patron the nominal original and referent of the likeness.16 The patron is the person who commissioned and may have posed for the portrait, while the sitter is the “person” who poses in it (the difference in verb tenses is significant, as we’ll see below). In a subsequent discussion about genres (Chapter 4, below), the term model will be introduced to designate the originals but not the referents of painted characters in history and Genre scenes.17 Sitters are representations of figures who perform as themselves; models are representations of figures who perform, usually anonymously, as others. The distinction between models and sitters will be used to highlight the originality of artists who, like Steen, upset expectations by giving models the status of sitters. Sitters are the patrons’ representatives, by which I mean that they get portrayed as if their performances are self-willed rather than externally imposed. Sitters appear to have chosen the poses they hold, and in that sense they are depicted as independent agents. But since their acts of posing are either invented by or mediated through the painter, sitters are at 6

Introduction

the same time the painter’s representatives; creatures not of flesh but of facture, they carry out the painter’s artistic designs on the viewer. If they appear to possess performative agency it is because the painter endows them with that power. Implicitly, therefore, sitters and the agency conferred on them are the products of negotiation between painters and their patrons.

Introduction

7

Part One g ro u p p o rt r a i t s a n d t h e f i c t i o n s o f t h e p o s e

1

Toward the Interpretation of Performance Anxiety

In Portraiture, Richard Brilliant makes a point of distancing his approach from both the historian’s interest in “how individual portraits can be identified” and the collector’s preoccupation with attribution and dating. This is a modest but important methodological move because it allows him to confine his attention to the way “the oscillation between art object and human subject . . . gives portraits their extraordinary grasp on our imagination. Fundamental to portraits as a distinct genre . . . is the necessity of expressing . . . [the] intended relationship between the portrait image and the human original.” Thus his study concentrates on “the vital relationship between the portrait and its object of representation,” on “the concepts that generate ideas of personal identity and lead to their fabrication in the imagery of portraits,” and on “the relationship between the presentation of the self in the real world and its analogue in the world of art.”1 My study of Dutch portraiture is indebted to and builds on Brilliant’s account, but I plan to give these topics a spin that differs from his in at least one respect: for me, the portrait’s primary “object of representation” is not the “human subject” or “human original” tout court but its (his, her) act of posing. It is the sitter’s pose that expresses the “intended relationship between the portrait image and the human original.” Poses as self-presentations may well appeal to received ideas of personal identity, and they may even help generate those ideas. Although the Dutch “did not speak explicitly about the identity-forming functions of portraiture,” art historians educe such functions from the visual evidence.2 11

“Relatives and ancestors were depicted not only in familial roles, but also in their capacities as social and political figures. . . . Portraits helped to concretize a family’s genealogy, indicating their general worthiness.”3 They “were generally acknowledged to have . . . substitutional and exemplary functions”—to make sitters present to their viewers and to serve as models of deportment—and so they not only documented, they “actively contributed to, the development of notions of personal identity, as constituted by factors such as gender, marital status, class, kinship, profession, and place of origin.”4 In this consensus view, portraits are treated as synecdochal representations of the contexts they depict and belong to. They transmit the charge of the social, political, and cultural interests that affect their production. They not only provide more or less idealized pictures of behavioral norms; the very practice of getting oneself portrayed is itself a normative obligation or privilege. It also serves a larger purpose: every portrait adds to the widening canopy of redundancy it shelters under. Redundancy (or imitation) in poses, settings, procedures, and customs—the redundancy that makes variation (or emulation) possible and meaningful—was an essential strategy of social survival in the arriviste culture of wealthy merchants and regents who were looking for a style to call their own.5 As I note above, portrait poses may appeal to and even help constitute received ideas of personal identity. But the very performance and representation of the pose—either by sitter or by painter or by both—may also throw that appeal into question. Many of the interpretations of individual portraits in Fictions of the Pose were attempts to demonstrate this interrogatory mode. They were attempts, that is, to show how painters in the process of executing the wishes of their patrons subtly modified pose conventions so as to complicate the meaning of the pose, very often in ways that problematize what Brilliant terms “the oscillation between art object and human subject.”6 The present study carries those attempts into the field of the group portrait, with special emphasis on the portraits of the militia groups or civic guard companies the Dutch quite straightforwardly refer to as schutterijen (“shooter” groups) because they don’t have an NRA problem. My major concern is to detect the signs and explore the sources of performance anxiety in sitters. In militia groups, obviously, we can expect 12

Fictions of the Pose

the signs to point toward the issue of masculine identity formation, but it would be a mistake to approach the issue in terms that directly plug visual data either into psychological inferences per se or into historical formulations of the psychology supposedly regnant in bygone eras. A safer if more roundabout procedure is to consider the issue in two different but interconnected frameworks, that of aesthetic form and that of social structure. In what follows, I begin by rehearsing several premises that inform the method of reading portraits I developed in Fictions of the Pose and will put into play here. In the course of this rehearsal I pay special attention to the problematic encounter between sitter and viewer, which I treat as a distinctive feature in that it is peculiar to portraiture and sets it off from other genres. After exploring the third premise, which concerns the structure of group portraiture, I return to the consensus view sampled above in order to establish what I consider to be the most important context for the study of masculine identity and anxiety: the context of the nuclear family and household in the early modern Dutch Republic (especially in the cities of Holland).

Toward Performance Anxiety

13

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is— I hold it toward you.—John Keats

2

Portraiture and the Fictions of the Pose

In the study of portraiture that follows, we shall never encounter the eerie pitch, the spookiness, the theatricality, of the assault upon the interlocutor who, Keats imagines (correctly), will outlive him and suffer for it. Nevertheless, I conceive the emotion expressed in “This living hand” as the deeply repressed—or much overpainted—ground of feeling that undertones the more lustrous glazes of the motives for posing we attribute to portrait sitters. I begin here because I want to state in the starkest and most hyperbolical terms my sense that what matters most in the interpretation of portraiture is awareness of the sitter’s performance anxiety. And I mean it matters not only in the interpretations conjectured by subsequent viewers but also in the painters’ interpretations, in the very conventions of interpretation that painters use to portray sitters. This is a large and unlikely claim, but even though I think it is hyperbolical, I’m convinced that beginning with an overstatement will make it easier to return to the ideological center—that is, toward a more moderate position of resistance to the norms of art historical interpretation. One way to moderate the claim is to restate it in terms that apply more to the death of the author or artist than to that of the imaginary subject, and in terms drawn from the cooler lexicon of structuralist interpretation: In funerary and votive inscriptions of the archaic period . . . the order of discourse is quite particular and furthermore carries the force of an established notion shared by the culture as a whole. The inscribed 15

object refers to itself in the first person, whereas the writer refers to himself in the third person. . . . An amphora from the sixth century provides an example: “Kleimachos made me and I am his [ekeinos eimi].” When the inscription is read out loud, Kleimachos will no longer be there. He will be absent, as the demonstrative ekeinos makes clear. (Ekei-nos is the demonstrative of the third person, indicating that the person is not “here,” but “far away,” or even “in the beyond”: ekei.) The amphora, on the other hand, is there: no entity has a better right to lay claim to the ego¯ in the inscription. Kleimachos certainly cannot. He writes on the amphora precisely because he foresees his own absence in the future. . . . He refers to himself as “absent” (ekeinos), since it is he who will have written the inscription. Everything else will take place between the inscription and the reader, now in a one-to-one situation of “I”/“you,” which may be reversed into “you”/“I.”1 What Jesper Svenbro says of the amphora applies to the painted portrait in that both outlast their creators. But portraiture involves not only the painter and the painting; it also involves the patron and the sitter. These additions change the situation. The painter is not the only absentee. The sitter may represent the patron, but only the former remains, surviving as long as the painting survives. And since paintings often outlive their patrons, the patrons, like Kleimachos, no doubt foresee their own absence in the future. Foreseeing absence could well be one reason why they chose to commission their portraits. Yet if a premonition of this sort moves people to leave likenesses behind, it may also move them to wonder what “will take place between the inscription” of one’s likeness and the “reader” of the portrait. An interaction necessarily deferred until after the portrait has been completed, shouldn’t it be expected to arouse the patron’s concern? Shouldn’t patrons want to reach through death so as to exert control not merely over their painters but also over the acts of posing—and thus the kinds of sitters—their painters depict, and over the viewers in their future? And what do sitters want?—which is to say, what do painters portray sitters as wanting? Are they likely to portray sitters who appear uneasy about the finished product? Patrons want their likenesses to look good and expect painters to make them look good. But do they worry that painters 16

Fictions of the Pose

will show sitters wanting to look good? Can we imagine patrons who acknowledge their vulnerability to artistic mischief—the limits of their control over what their surrogates, the sitters, will become—and who either take steps to avoid that fate or, more interestingly, let their curiosity (and possibly the painter) get the better of them? Can we imagine patrons who seem willing to let their anxiety show, willing to give themselves to be seen as vulnerable?2 Ekei-nos: the prospect of absence. Does the experience of the subject of photography as Roland Barthes characterizes it in any way resemble that of the patron disappearing into the sitter in prephotographic forms of portraiture? “In front of the lens . . . I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity. . . . I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.”3 From this standpoint, isn’t a portrait always potentially a gesture toward autothanatography? Do portrait sitters betray the marks of this objectification? Which is to say, do portrait painters register or even underline those marks? Let’s assume that when a portrait asserts its claim on the viewers in its future it may be trying to compensate for the incapability of its sitter to preempt their minds and hearts. But what agency does “it” in the preceding sentence pick out if not that of the portrait or the sitter? Any scenario centered on the performance anxiety of sitters will be one the painter invents and displays. To agree to have your portrait done under whatever conditions—whether you are present or absent while the painter is at work—is to agree to have yourself represented in the act of posing for your portrait. The redundancy or recursiveness of this statement is its most important property because it reminds us that the act of portrayal in which painter and sitter collaborate is an example of what Victor Stoichita calls a “metapictorial act,” an act of representing representation.4 Portraits show sitters in the act of posing while being portrayed. The finished portrait is thus always the representation of a still unfinished act of portrayal. In Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance, I tried to construct an interpretive model that would pick out the recursiveness of acts of portrayal and thereby produce suspicious readings of their products. The portraits in question reflect or interrogate systems of techniques, patronage, and representaPortraiture and the Fictions of the Pose

17

tional ideology that interacted with each other during the Renaissance or early modern period. To phrase it in terms that were recently trendy but are now shopworn, I was less interested in the identities of the sitters portrayed than in their acts—their acts of posing, or, rather, the acts of posing depicted by the artists they sat for. Portraits are often defined, understood, and written about as pictures of somebody. I made a small addition to this formula, approaching the portrait as the painter’s presentation not simply of somebody but of somebody posing, that is, a sitter, someone who gives himself or herself to be seen, first by the artist and later by viewers of the completed portrait. Whether in the photographic or the prephotographic era, to give oneself to be seen is to see oneself “from without, such as another would see [one].”5 The idea that in giving oneself to be seen one becomes (makes oneself) the object of another’s gaze has become so trite during the last half-century that its substance has been watered down into trendiness. There is, nevertheless, a baby in this bath. Its name is the performance anxiety of sitters, and my aim is to identify its characteristics in examples of seventeenth-century Dutch portrait genres. My starting premise, then, is that the portrait imitates the likeness not primarily of a person but of an act, the act of posing. Of course this premise won’t stand up to scrutiny unless it gets qualified. Patricia Fortini Brown notes in passing that she uses the term “sitter . . . in a broad sense, since people rarely ‘sat’ for portraits in the Renaissance.”6 Since we know that in many cases patrons may not even have been present while the painters were at work, the assertion that the portrait must be the copy of a prior act of posing is easy to disconfirm. We can’t assume that the act of self-portrayal any portrait delivers resembles or conforms to what the patron actually did back then, during the time he or she was posing for the painter. We can only assume that the real studio event happening back then in some past now of posing and painting is irrecoverable, lost in an infra-historical paradise. That is not the event the portrait depicts, therefore the event it does depict falls (or ascends) from fact to fiction. It is not really a copy, only the imitation of a copy. Despite the postulate of likeness or resemblance that conventionally distinguishes portraiture, the sitter for the portrait may or may not have been doing what the sitter in the portrait is depicted as doing.7 What you see is therefore a fiction: the 18

Fictions of the Pose

portrait delivers not an actual pose but the fiction of a pose. It visualizes, as if copying from the life, a performance that may or may not have taken place.8 A portrait that presents itself as a copy “from the life” pretends to refer. It is therefore an act of pseudo-reference. Before continuing, I should make it clear that my use and definition of the term portrait has no historical purchase. “Portraiture,” Charles Ford reminds us, “is a deeply problematic category to employ in relation to pictures of people in the seventeenth-century Netherlands” because they used “half a dozen words for what we now call a portrait.” These words could denote simply “picture of,” or “‘head’ or ‘face’ (the thing itself),” or “‘illusory presence’ with strong overtones of deception. . . . Not only the terminology, but the pictures themselves, indicate that portraiture was a very uncertain category,” the formulas for which “were constantly being invented, involving numerous forms of encounter for a contemporary spectator.”9 In the study of portraiture that follows, my sense of the term may be complicated by the attempt to generate an interlocking set of premises from an arbitrary starting point. But in its relation to the categoreal uncertainty attributed by Ford to seventeenth-century usage, the present account may appear artificially stabilized and anachronistically de-problematized. I note in passing, however, that the three denotations mentioned by Ford all involve pseudo-reference. The argument of Fictions of the Pose relied heavily on the now classic distinction between theatricality and absorption Michael Fried abducted from Diderot and elaborated in a powerful revisionary critique.10 Since my project differed from Fried’s, I found it necessary to modify his formulation on the grounds that, if the fiction of the pose as I define it is basic to portraiture, then so is theatricality. If, that is, the portrait indexes an intentional act of portrayal, it follows that absorption can only be a variation on, or a conspicuous rejection of, the fiction of the pose. Theatricality is not to be set over against absorption tout court, for there is— and given my premises, there can only be—a theater of absorption, which, by implication, is to be set over against a theater of theatricality. This modification of Fried’s theory continues to inform my approach to group portraiture. A sitter may pretend to be absorbed not only in isolated acts like blowing bubbles, reading, and writing but also in the social acts group portraits depict: conversing, eating, attending a lecture or a meeting, acPortraiture and the Fictions of the Pose

19

knowledging others. Regardless of the particular scenario, so long as we decide or agree that what we’re looking at is a portrait rather than, say, a genre scene, the absorption that neutralizes the presence of the observer must be construed as a category of posing; the category of posing so as to appear not to be posing. This rationale led me to rewrite Fried’s two scenarios in an admittedly awkward and redundant form: “posing as if posing” and “posing as if not posing.” The redundancy is nevertheless important (and deceptive). Posing as if posing / not posing: the first “posing” designates the basic act of self-representation that constitutes the subject or raison d’être of any portrait; the second term, “posing / not posing,” designates the sitter’s ostensive performative intention, which is potentially variable along the range from pure theatricality to pure absorption. The first “posing” has to be expressly marked and held in place in order to release that potential variability. The “as if” that connects and differentiates the two levels of posing designates the intention we attribute to the posing sitter—that is, the intention we assume the portrait painter represents the sitter as displaying. These distinctions and reflections are deeply indebted to the work of David R. Smith, as will be apparent throughout the course of this study. Smith views portraits as personae, “masks of identity and celebrations of social ritual.” Unlike candid photographs, they “reflect moments of selfconscious encounter with other human beings.” This is not to say that portraits necessarily give “a reliable image of an individual” or that they should “be expected to yield biographical insights,” for “the understanding of character and relationship upon which they are based is not novelistic, but theatrical” and rhetorical, dependent on the portrayal of deliberate acts of self-representation directed toward potential viewers.11 Smith’s approach is expressly influenced by Erving Goffman’s studies of self-presentation. He borrows three terms introduced by Goffman in his analysis of social encounters, appearance, manner, and setting, and demonstrates their applicability to “the characters of sitters and the roles they play.”12 In the discussions that follow, Smith’s terms character and role will be conflated with another dramatistic and performative term, pose. The performative intention is central to the conception of posing outlined in the preceding paragraphs: “it is precisely the presence of the viewer that provides the necessary context for understanding even the most aus20

Fictions of the Pose

terely simple portrait.”13 To pose is to give oneself to be seen.14 Posing always implies and implicates an observer—a virtual observer, not an empirical viewer. The distinction between the observer and the viewer is comparable to the one literary critics make between the virtual and the empirical reader. “Virtual reader” names a position (the famous Dear Reader) created and addressed by a text before anyone reads it. The actual or empirical reader is anyone who subsequently occupies that position by reading the text. Similarly, the observer is a permanent position created on this side of the picture surface by the form and content of the picture—by perspective, by paint facture, by light and shade, and, most important, by the direction of the painted figure’s gaze. The viewer is anyone who happens along and looks at the picture and may (or may not) occupy the observer position. This distinction is modeled on the one Richard Wollheim makes between the spectator in the picture and the spectator of the picture. The first, the “internal spectator,” is “located in the virtual space . . . the painting represents,” while the second, the “external spectator,” is “located in the actual space . . . the painting itself occupies.”15 I reserve the term observer for the internal spectator and the term viewer for the external spectator.16 A striking example of the observer position is the vertex of a perspective construction, which theorists in the Italian Renaissance and after construed as the eye of an observer. But of course it is not so much an eye as an imaginary aperture through which a viewer would have to look to see the picture in proper perspective. This example suggests that in addition to Wollheim’s distinction there is another way in which the observer differs from the viewer: the term observer designates not an actual person or viewer but a position any viewer may occupy—a position constituted by the picture and waiting to be filled by the parade of viewers who will occupy it.17 The observer position is itself variable, for painted figures sometimes appear to make direct eye contact with viewers, while in other pictures they aim their glances in the general vicinity of the observer without making direct eye contact. In a group portrait, as Riegl demonstrates, all sitters may make eye contact with one observer or, as happens more frequently, different sitters may look outward in different directions. Therefore, in order to allow for multiple or collective viewership, we need to add still anPortraiture and the Fictions of the Pose

21

other distinction to the one Wollheim makes: there is both a virtual observer point and a more diffuse observer space within which that point is located. This distinction is important for group portraits, where different sitters may look out into different sectors of that space.18 My reason for dusting off the conventional literary distinction between the virtual reader and the actual or empirical reader is to take seriously the time difference between the act of posing and the subsequent act of viewing. The sitter’s now never coincides with the viewer’s now. This seems so obvious and trivial that it’s easy to ignore. Nevertheless, the plot of portraiture depends on our taking temporal deferral seriously, and that means taking seriously the absence of the viewer to the sitter. To imagine that when sitters give themselves to be seen they pose for a viewer who hasn’t yet materialized—in other words, to treat the observer as a question mark—is to frame the sitter/observer relation in an atmosphere of drama, tension, and uncertainty. The portrait anticipates, with anxiety, many known and unknown viewers. It anticipates unforeseen interpretations. The emptiness of the observer position in the now of posing and the deferral of viewing until after the portrait has been finished place viewers in the position of authority as sources of power and danger. To repeat, the latency and temporality implied by the phrase “waiting to be filled” is the most important part of this distinction. Under the hypothesis of the fiction of the pose, the portrait delivers an imaginary sitter’s now that we, its viewers, situate in an imaginary then relative to us. It is therefore a now open or vulnerable to our constructive interventions, a now we view through a palimpsest of prior interpretations, the oldest of which are those expressed by the sitter’s pose and the painter’s imitation of it.19 Since, according to my first two premises, the portrait is the product of intentional events in actual space time and of a virtual event in hypothetical space time, subsequent critical dialogue takes place in the region of overlap between two opposing frameworks: the diachronic field of historical interpretation and the synchronic field of fictional interpretation. In historical research, the present now of viewing is connected to the past now of posing and painting as to a partially recoverable source of the portrait. The portrait’s meaning is first circumscribed by its provenance— the documented circumstances of its production and history. It is then ar22

Fictions of the Pose

ticulated by strategically varied combinations of approaches (archival, formal, generic, interpictorial, comparative, and iconographic) that aspire to give us a better grasp of the way the image reflects or comments on the conditions out of which it emerged. In the synchronic framework, the fictive now of posing is uncoupled from the irrecoverable now of the studio event. Although the depicted moment of self-presentation remains dependent for its identity on its established pedigree, it becomes more free-floating in relation to that provenance. At the same time it becomes less free-floating in relation to its viewers. The portrait imitates a now that has become a then. This virtual from-now-to-then is synchronically coupled to the viewer’s now. The encounter between sitter and viewer is bidirectional: the temporal relation of the sitter’s virtual from-now-to-then to the viewer’s now gets charged with interpretive uncertainty on both sides. The viewer wonders and tries to determine what the sitter and painter, cooperatively or competitively, meant to show (and to what extent they may have shown more or less than they intended). This concern may be beamed through the lookingglass toward the sitter by performing the following exercise in projection: Imagine yourself as the patron posing for the painter. You may well wonder how the pose will be interpreted. You may be inclined to adopt pose conventions that send preferred messages about yourself while fending off undesirable messages; on this score, you trust the painter to actualize your wishes, and you can always exercise the patron’s power of disapproval. In short, your attempt to influence your portrait’s reception history commits you to an act of preemptive interpretation either as the patron dealing with the painter or as the sitter, the figure that represents you posing for the painter. While you pose (if in fact you do pose), there may be passers-by in the vicinity who watch the act of portrayal. Some—friends or family members—may belong to the particular set of viewers you are hoping for or worried about. The act of posing may itself be a socially charged performance, an indicator of success. But spectators in whose presence you happen to pose belong in one category. Viewers you pose for belong in another. The latter won’t materialize until after the completed painting does. They are in your future, and they are in the sitter’s future. Correlatively, to the viewers in the sitter’s future, the finished portrait offers a past moment Portraiture and the Fictions of the Pose

23

of intentional self-display, a now that happened then. Since, therefore, the portrait sitter’s now never coincides with the portrait viewer’s now, sitters can’t know how their portraits will play in the gallery of the future. The foregoing exercise factors into the sitter’s act of posing the predicament of futurity, that is, an element of concern occasioned by the belated arrival of viewers. I began this chapter with Keats’s highly melodramatic example of the predicament in order to depict representation or performance anxiety in its most hyperbolic form. I went on to speculate about the more mundane reactions of patrons concerned to exert control over the artists who will hand their likenesses on to the future. I also mentioned the possibility that there may have been patrons willing to give themselves to be seen as vulnerable. I conclude by proposing another potential source of anxiety, or at least of curiosity, if not of exhilarated anticipation: patrons may imagine that the look of the sitters who represent them will be subject to change over time—subject not only to time’s ravages but also to its revisions. Patrons tend to be men and women of the world. Why shouldn’t we imagine they were as cognizant as we are concerning the major feature of the predicament of futurity, which is that sitters are always vulnerable to “history,” that is, to reinterpretation? The look of the portrait is liable to change, for example, when viewers hypothesize a sitter as someone who gives himself or herself to be seen and whose pose displays the effects of this concern. This, at least, is the hypothesis generated by the two basic conditions of portraiture discussed above: the fictiveness of the pose and the belatedness of the viewer. I treat these conditions as theoretical constructions, or inventions, and as stipulations that guide interpretive practice. Together, they compose into a principle of interpretation, which I call the posographical imperative, and which I discuss at greater length in Chapters 5 and 6, below. Within portraiture, the deployment of this principle enables me to “map” a variety of poses and types of pose. It also helps me distinguish portraiture from other genres, and the performances of sitters from those of models. These are the distinctions to be explored in the next chapter.

24

Fictions of the Pose

3

The Posographical Imperative: A Comparison of Genres

Different genres construct different spatial and temporal fictions of interaction between figures or models and observers. From now on I’ll call the figures in narrative genres characters in order to distinguish them from the sitters in portrait genres. The element of deferral constitutes the dilemma peculiar to sitters in the scenario I imagine for them. When painted figures engage the virtual observer in scenes we take to be narrative, we don’t consider them to be sitters aware of being looked at while posing for their pictures. The sitter’s situation differs from that of the characters in such narrative modes as history and Genre painting (fig. 1).1 The effect of such figures as Nicolaes Maes’s eavesdropper, for example, is identical with that of the interlocutor in an istoria as described by Alberti: when a painted figure makes contact with spectators of the painted event, he or she transforms them into participants standing in an imaginary extension of the istoria’s space time.2 Similarly, the object of the eavesdropper’s gaze materializes as a participant, a fictional character whose complicity the painted character invites or fends off. Mariët Westermann observes that “having a character address the viewer . . . erases the border between pictorial and actual worlds.”3 It extends the pictorial into the actual world. The difference made by the qualification may be illustrated by glancing at the earlier of two paintings by Jan Steen entitled Cardplayers (ca. 1660–61; fig. 2).4 In it, one man studies his cards while another hands him a glass of wine. Behind the cardplayer stands a third man, who peers around his shoulder as if trying to 25

figure 1. Nicolaes Maes, Eavesdropper (1657). Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum (on loan from the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, Rijswijk/ Amsterdam).

26

sneak a look at the cards. A second cardplayer looks out at the observer with a knowing smile, offers visual access to the cards she holds, and flashes the ace of hearts with her other hand; the ace of spades lies face up on the floor between the cardplayer and the observer. It has been plausibly suggested that the sword hanging from the back of her chair may be “the stake that the man has already lost,” and that such details suggest a theme “common in seventeenth-century Dutch art,” the Samson theme “of a soldier being disarmed by a woman’s charms.”5

Fictions of the Pose

We’ll revisit this theme later in our encounters with gender trouble in the Dutch household and in group portraits, but my present point is strictly formal. It is that, although the woman looks out at the observer, she is no more a sitter posing for her portrait than is Maes’s eavesdropper. Rather, the virtual observer is cast as a contemporary: a kibitzer at the card game, or possibly someone with whom the cardplayer flirts. David Smith argues that the portrait and Genre genres are easy to distinguish because “people in portraits usually look out at us, as they gen-

The Posographical Imperative

figure 2. Jan Steen, The Cardplayers (ca. 1660). Private collection.

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erally do not in genre painting.”6 Yet we do find outlookers in this and several other Genre scenes by Steen (and by others); some sort of interpretive adjustment is called for. Smith goes on to an imaginative and persuasive account of the ironies produced by instances of generic transgression and convergence. But in the case of Steen’s Cardplayers and other Genre scenes with outlookers, I think that the solution of extending fictional space to include the viewer as participant is both more plausible and more compelling. The outlooker’s now becomes the viewer’s now. Her glance and gesture bring the viewer into her game, into her room, into her world, as a participant, a supernumerary character. We are part of her story; she isn’t part of ours. This is a possibility Riegl envisaged when he claimed that “external coherence” between sitters and viewers “is most clearly established when the individuals portrayed in the painting show themselves conscious of the presence of a viewer not visible in the painting but assumed to occupy the space in front of the painting, thought of as an extension of the foreground.”7 To conclude, we normally don’t perceive characters but do perceive sitters as if they were models posing for the virtual observer located in our space. This is a generic perception, a function of different codes and expectations, and it has nothing to do with whether or not painted figures make eye contact with the observer. Many sitters, and some characters, do make contact, but the meaning of this contact, and the invitation to the observer, are different for each generic code. The codes themselves are arbitrary in that they are based on emergent and changing conditions or definitions of genre, conditions or definitions that are “merely” conventional, not fixed truths. But the conventions are settled and recognizable enough to allow definitional stipulations that differentiate the properties of portraiture from those of Genre and history painting: 1. To call a picture a Genre scene is to accept it as an image taken from life in the sense that it may be “realistically depicted” as if copied from life, but not in the sense that it was copied directly from the event it depicts: “Genre pieces are scenes that look to us as if they were taken from everyday life, depictions of situations as they might have been, but in fact they were composed in the artist’s studio. They are never spontaneous

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records of a moment,” never merely slices of life but fictive events: the Genre painter “generally depicted not real people but dramatis personae: types and characters,” in an image that was usually skewed toward the status of a cautionary tale.8 Eddy de Jongh’s casual and fuzzy use of theatrical terminology is common among students of Genre, as we’ll see later in this chapter. Visually, the Genre scene may resemble a slice of theater, and the relation of artist’s models to the characters they perform may seem to resemble that of actors to their characters. But if Genre characters perform they do so for each other rather than for spectators in some imaginary offstage audience—with the exception noted above that when figures in Genre scenes make eye contact with the observer, the fictional space by implication extends outward to include viewers who, unlike those constituted by portraits, are present to Genre-characters as their contemporaries. This scheme may be complicated, however, by artists whose characters sometimes appear to be posing like models (see the discussion of Jan Steen below). 2. To call a picture a history is to accept it as the expressly imaginary representation of an actual past event. Even if it seems “realistically depicted,” as if copied from life, the history never asks us to believe that it was copied directly from the historical event it depicts. On the contrary, “expressly imaginary” means that it is presented to viewers as an image with human figures whose features and gestures are not those of the original characters; they are not transcribed from life but borrowed from the painter’s imagination, from his models, from other pictures, or from textual descriptions. Like Genre characters, historical characters differ from portrait sitters in that they are conventionally depicted as absorbed in their own lives and unaware of performing for the virtual observer. And as in the case of Genre paintings, the presence in history paintings of figures who seem to make eye contact with viewers doesn’t override this difference. The figure Alberti characterizes as an interlocutor in istoria acts as if he were in the presence of imagi-

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nary spectators of the depicted event: “he beckons them with his hand to look, or . . . challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or . . . invites you to laugh or weep.”9 The interpreter’s gaze and gesture create a crowd of onlookers standing on the viewer’s side of the canvas or panel in an extension of the moment of space-time depicted within the painting. Self-portraits of artists in this genre have a similar function: the artist looking out from a group at one side of a history painting both commemorates himself and validates the event. As Perry Chapman succinctly puts it, when Steen adopts the stance of an Albertian interlocutor, he transforms himself into “an eyewitness, giving him special authority to narrate, or comment on, a historical subject, or testifying to his faith in a biblical one.”10 At the same time, however, the presence of the artist as witness is a reminder of the fictiveness of his representation and the limits of his point of view. It thus serves as a disavowal of any magical or sacrilegious or fetishized relation to the depicted event.11 3. To call a picture a portrait is to accept its fictive claim to be an image taken “from life” in a sense that differs from the claims to lifelikeness made by Genre and history: the portrait by definition is the record of the act of self-presentation we call posing, and to be a portrait sitter is by definition to acknowledge the observer. This holds even for sitters who gaze into observer space but studiedly avoid the observer point, an avoidance characteristic of the classic aristocratic or royal pose, in which sitters give themselves to be seen but don’t deign—conspicuously refuse—to return the attention they invite.12 In contrast to narrative genres, the primary message of any picture identified as a (commissioned) portrait is that the sitters are downstage performers who give themselves to be seen by an observer they acknowledge but can’t see, and by viewers who haven’t yet materialized, viewers whose attention the sitters perpetually solicit and patiently await. Thus our response to portraits gets modified if we allow ourselves to be governed by the two stipulations of the posographical imperative, the fictive30

Fictions of the Pose

ness of the pose and the belated arrival of viewers. The latter is especially significant. To stipulate temporal deferral as a feature of the sitter/observer relation is to generate a source of performance anxiety for sitters. Their claim on the observer begins to appear less hegemonic than that of characters, more conditional, more fraught with uncertainty. It should be noted, however, that these stipulations don’t prevent portrait sitters from posing as characters in another generic scenario. Militia portraits by Hals have been treated as Genre scenes, and The Night Watch has been treated as a history painting.13 But such performances belong to a well attested fiction of the pose: posing as if not posing. At this point a caveat is in order. Generic attributions are contingent on our accepting previous classifications that are not set in stone. It is always possible that the connoisseur’s exquisite discriminations, the historian’s discoveries, the wonders of conservatorial science, or the whirligig of the market will lead what has been analyzed as a self-portrait to be transformed into a portrait, or a commissioned portrait into a head study, or a genre scene into a family portrait. But to reclassify an image from one to another genre entails a change of interpretive protocol. If we call it a portrait we read it one way; if a narrative, we read it another because the structure of sitter/observer relations in portrait genres differs from that of character/observer relations in narrative genres. One posible antidote is to guarantee categoreal flexibility by putting into play a conditional if/then procedure, a logic of “if x, then y.” A painting by Jan Miense Molenaer, for example (fig. 3) has been entitled The Duet and classified as a Genre scene, most recently by Dennis Weller.14 It has also been identified as a (self)-portrait of the artist posing with his wife, the painter Judith Leyster.15 Weller’s assertion that this identification is incorrect is verified by several other portraits of the artist and Leyster, including a second painting entitled The Duet.16 But the casual conflation of two genres in his frequent use of the phrase “genrelike portraits” garbles a useful theoretical distinction.17 If it is identified as a Genre scene, then the two characters are performing music and attentive to the effects of their performance on an audience present to them and located roughly in the observer’s space. If it is identified as a portrait, then what they, as sitters, perform is not music but posing—posing as if playing, and holding that pose for the painter while they pleasantly, patiently, and quizziThe Posographical Imperative

31

figure 3. Jan Miense Molenaer, The Duet [1] (ca. 1630–31). Seattle Art Museum. Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Photography by Paul Macapia.

cally court the approval of the still absent spectators who (they hope) will replace the painter when they are replaced by their image. The Duet Weller identifies as a self-portrait with Leyster is melodramatically heightened by a curtain that casts its shadow over a map of Italy (fig. 4). Curtain and map together convey the staginess and hazy dis32

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tance of Romance toward which the pudgy cavalier and his partner aspire. The painting is remarkable for the way it flickers stroboscopically back and forth between the effects of Genre and those of portraiture. In the Genre framework, the man sings and the woman accompanies. She inclines her head to listen as she plays, and the two seem to sway as if in the throes of music. Viewed posographically, the sitters at first seem frozen in midmotion, as if in the throes of posing. But the aesthetic forces of the The Posographical Imperative

figure 4. Jan Miense Molenaer, The Duet [2] (ca. 1635–36). Coll. Eric Noah. Chapel Hill, N.C., North Carolina Museum of Art.

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composition set them astir. From the footwarmer and the map’s peninsular boot to the lutenist’s hat to the still life in the corner, the forms arc energetically rightward, downward, and forward to their climax in the brilliant spiral of lemon peel, which registers with its curlicues the effects of the motion initiated by the lutenist’s crossed leg and pulsing through the hip-shot pose of the citternist. The lemon, however, sets its open face against this storm. It offers the sitters the precarious immobility and archly ornamental self-insistence of still life’s bravura performance. This threatens to transform them into nature morte studies. The threat is forestalled by the way the main action both of the paintwork and of its subjects is crowded in a conspicuously gratuitous manner into the right half of the long format. There, the still life competing with the sitters intensifies the sense of crowdedness, which, in turn, accentuates the stress of competitive posing, as he impinges on her space and she leans away, with a half-turn into the depth to accommodate his aggression.18 The most sustained interpretive study of the effects of categoreal flexibility remains Riegl’s detailed account of relations between Genre and portrait effects in The Group Portraiture of Holland, which will be addressed in Chapter 5, below. In the artistic practice of the seventeenth century, Steen’s experiments in generic transgression have in recent decades been the subject of a series of exceptionally rewarding analyses. These studies raise basic questions of method and theory that make it possible for me to reconsider my own attempts to theorize the fiction of the pose. I therefore conclude my comparison by exploring Steen’s mischievous boundary breaching through the lens of their achievements. In both his individual self-portraits and his many Genre scenes with participant self-portraits, Steen displays an “innovative blend of the conventions of portraiture with those of genre.”19 Scholars discuss the participant self-portraits with appropriate caution. Some insist that since Steen’s contemporaries didn’t have collections of artists’ works at their fingertips or on their coffee tables, they could not be expected to recognize the artist’s likeness as such.20 Others make a persuasive case for early if limited recognition.21 Steen’s likenesses must have been recognized by his first biographer, Arnold Houbraken (1660–1719), who emphasized the merry innkeeper’s 34

Fictions of the Pose

self-indulgence and equated his way of life with the content of his paintings.22 Since then, the same realist assumptions have often colored accounts of the participant self-portraits as true reflections of Steen’s “jocular spirit.”23 But Houbraken also initiates a line of inquiry that diverges from the realist proposition when he alludes to the theatrical quality of Steen’s paintings.24 During the last fifteen years this quality has been copiously and insightfully discussed in the work of Perry Chapman and Mariët Westermann. They demonstrate that the painter depicts himself not as a sitter posing in his own right but as a model playing a character. And, as we’ll see, the emphasis on the artist’s performance of a role gets extended from Steen to his other models in a manner that injects the question and fiction of the pose into discussions of Genre and history scenes. Chapman succinctly characterizes the distinction between Steen the painter/model and “Steen” the character: “There are in effect two Steens. One invites transgression, the other admonishes because of it”—and by means of it (fig. 5).25 Similarly, but with a different emphasis, Westermann argues that Steen’s “laughing presidency over his households sharpens their bite, as he at once invites viewers to join and to censor,” a move that “throws responsibility for judgment onto them.”26 Steen dissociates himself from “Steen” and reaches through the self-portrait to confederate himself with the observer at the expense of “Steen.” By “peppering” viewers with clues that “the painted transgressors”—including “Steen”—miss, Steen encourages them to distance themselves from the direct engagement of participant viewers and to adopt the detached position of censor, critic, or judge.27 At the same time, the “real” Steen competes with “Steen” by inducing viewers to abandon themselves to the delights of his painterly virtuosity (fig. 6). The now of the act of painting encroaches on “Steen’s” territory: “(when it is recognized) the self-portrait inserted into a history brings a particularity of the moment of production into the narrative.”28 For Westermann, the particularity of that visible encroachment is a vital element of Steen’s “poetics of comedy”: “Steen painted base pleasures with delicate care and with intimate knowledge of the Renaissance codes of painting.”29 This virtuosity prevents the comic spirit from degenerating into what David Smith calls “a fully satirical stance.”30 In the standard Genre scenario, as I’ve been arguing, the activity or The Posographical Imperative

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figure 5. Jan Steen, The Cat Family (1673–75). Budapest, Szepmuveseti Museum [Museum of Fine Arts].

agency of outlookers like Maes’s eavesdropper and Steen’s cardplayer implies contact with participant viewers who are their contemporaries. But such direct contact is neither implied by portraits nor available to their sitters because the act of posing registered by a portrait occurred before the completed work became viewable.31 The sitters in portraits are denied contact with the viewers whose attention they solicit.32 Thus in Genre the participant viewer is “inside” the depicted event, but in portraiture the absent viewer of the act of posing is both temporally and spatially “outside” the depicted event. Steen takes advantage of this opposition. He gives “inside” and “out-

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Fictions of the Pose

figure 6. Jan Steen, Merry Company on a Terrace (ca. 1673–75). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1958. Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

side” the values of “engaged” and “detached,” respectively, by staging mischievous parodies of the fiction of absorption: posing as if not posing. There are of course scenes in which “Steen” does not make eye contact, remaining unaware that (or how) he is being depicted and viewed—and victimized. But when Steen portrays “Steen” as an outlooker, he produces an ambivalent scenario: “Steen” makes eye contact with participant observers, while Steen provokes detached viewers of his finished self-portrait both to laugh at his self-portrayal and to disapprove of “Steen.” These participant self-portraits receive a thematic charge from their contribution to a larger transgressive project: the “curious conflations of

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figure 7. Jan Steen, In Luxury Beware (1663). Vienna, Gemäldegalerie, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

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inn and home” reflected in Steen’s conflation of Genre conventions with those of family portraits.33 The effect of the conflation is to make loose women, along with sleeping or drunken wives, mothers, and daughters, infiltrate the home. Fathers are often dissolute and absent.34 In Luxury Beware, for example, features a mother conspicuously lost “in drunken slumber, a father is difficult to identify” (fig. 7).35 Nanette Salomon has shown how Steen’s formulation of the topic of the dissolute household, with its careless and improvident (zorgeloos) father, derives from sixteenthcentury prints of tavern life, which he transposed to “the locale of the sanctified Dutch home.”36 She metaphorically equates the father’s dis-

Fictions of the Pose

soluteness, his “aberrance” and ethical vagrancy, with his absence—with his alienness to a concept of “fabricated bourgeois domesticity” in which “Woman and home are interchangeable concepts, only confused by the presence of man.”37 The general significance of the absent or ineffectual father figure exemplified by “Steen” will be discussed at greater length in Chapters 7 and 8, below. Because Steen portrayed himself and members of his family, his paintings of dissolute households have been viewed as parodies of family portraits (fig. 8). The ambiguity this produces has been well characterized by Chapman: in “boisterous families” like those that populate As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young and The Cat Family (fig. 5), “Steen features himself and his kin” and “comically subverts the family portrait tradition by creating works that are at once portraits and not portraits.”38 The question, though, is what the word features connotes. Are the paintings “portraitlike” but not portraits because, although they use recognizable likenesses, they don’t represent sitters in the act of posing for their (own) portraits? Because family members whom we would expect to be sitters presenting themselves instead do the work of models who pose as others? Or is it because they don’t represent the sitters as they really are but portray a family performance in which members of a household better than the one depicted are pretending to be worse? These questions suggest that we should distinguish between portraits and portrayals, reserving the latter term for the exemplary or parodic representations characteristic of the Genre genre. The portrait of a family differs from a portrayal of The Family, a portrait of the Steen household from the portrayal of the dissolute household, the portrait of a sitter from the portrayal of a character.39 If any portraits of dissolute families ever existed, they must be lost. According to Chapman, one of Steen’s early biographers wrote that the painter’s “wife was irked by his repeated portrayal of her as a loose woman.” Would these portrayals have been nae t’leven (from life) or uyt de gheest (from memory mixed with fantasy)? Chapman adds that “we can only guess how his children would have reacted to seeing themselves or . . . [seeing] the extent to which Steen painted with them in mind.”40 Does this mean that his children did or did not pose for him? Did he use other models, painting them with his family “in mind” but not in sight? The Posographical Imperative

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Paintings Mauritshuis.

Chapman later acknowledges more forcefully that Steen’s family was complicit with him in his portrayal of subversion: although “enlisting identifiable actors”—family members—“attests to the experiential veracity of his comic paintings, it also raises the possibility that his actors are dissembling.”41 To me, this suggests that he used family members who didn’t pose as themselves. But when she concludes by emphasizing the theatricality of Steen’s project—“Steen’s troupe of actors is his family”—

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figure 8. Jan Steen, As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young (ca. 1663–65). The Hague: Royal Cabinet of

a different opinion emerges: by repeatedly “casting” them in his paintings he manages “to convince us that . . . [he] and his kin are actors who play themselves.”42 Presumably, given the behaviors they enact, this is a comment on their identity—his family are identifiable as his models—rather than on their characteristic deportment. The question initially raised by Steen’s participant self-portraits was whether he posed as a sitter who represents himself or as a model who represents another (“Steen”; fig. 9). The current consensus in favor of the second alternative does not eliminate the residue of ambiguity, nor does emphasis on the sitter’s self-performance entirely give way to the more self-effacing alternative in which the model disappears into a character. On the contrary, the sensitivity with which art historians have isolated and discussed Steen’s participant self-portraits throws light on the conflation in his work of sitters and models. Normally we don’t attend to models as such in history and Genre. But this has been changed by commentary that correlates the self-portraits with Steen’s more general attachment to theatricality. The result is to encourage viewers to focus as much on the role of models in Genre as we do on the role of sitters in portraiture. That is, when we shift from characters to their models, we become aware of models posing as characters. And even if there were no models, if Steen painted uyt de gheest, his insistence on theatrical effects diverts attention from hell-raising characters to the way his models pose as hell-raisers. Thus Chapman comments on the “exaggerated theatricality” and “stagelike setting” of these scenes, and routinely uses expressions like “Steen has cast himself in a role.”43 In the late Merry Company on a Terrace (fig. 6), which features a similarly indecorous woman in a similar position, she emphasizes its “theatrical and imaginary mode” and the “sixteenth-century garb that would have evoked the stage.”44 Chapman’s attention to theatricality puts us on the alert for signs that the Genre characters are being performed by models who dissemble their spontaneous merrymaking, and who may in fact be playing stock characters or “quoting” proverbial motifs.45 The effect of this is or could be to lay bare the constructedness of their spontaneity, its origin in a preformulated scenario of collective posing. At this point we begin to feel the intrusion into Genre of “the edges of portraiture,” as Westermann The Posographical Imperative

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figure 9. Jan Steen, Twelfth Night (1668). Kassel, Staatliche Museen Kassel.

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memorably phrases it, and to consider the similarity between the posing of models who represent others and the posing of sitters who represent themselves.46 Imagine, for example, that the young woman balancing a glass of wine and making eye contact in the center of Steen’s In Luxury Beware (fig. 7) addresses us not only as a Genre character but also as a model “dissembling” indecency. The figure then opens itself to two different interpretations. On the one hand, her glance and expression appear glazed, or dazed. Fictions of the Pose

Her slovenly attitude, her “alluring smile,” and “indecorously assertive gaze” befit a personification of Luxury.47 On the other hand, hers may be the fixed and unfocused stare of a model who, like a portrait sitter, has for some time been struggling to sustain a difficult and precarious pose while holding onto the last vestige of her sprezzatura.48 The second alternative may be illuminated by Westermann’s witty fantasy about the monkey that interferes with the clock mechanism at the top of the painting, “It is as if the monkey stopped time just long enough for the painter to record this mess in progress: the bowl is forever falling, the violin keeps playing, . . . the wine never stops pouring,” and the model never stops posing. “Yet this is no momentary snapshot.” It must have taken Steen “at least several days and probably weeks or months” to finish so large and busy a picture.49 And through it all, the model patiently and gallantly performs her complex, icon-laden balancing act. Hers is one of the stories In Luxury Beware tells. No doubt she would have preferred the much easier task, assigned to the model behind her, of playing the sleeping mother for days and probably weeks or months. The upshot of the emphasis on theatricality in Steen’s Genre and history scenes is this: the scenes look staged. They feature models wearing out-of-date costumes. A “repertory of codified poses and rhetorical gestures” directs attention to models as models pretending to be characters.50 What isn’t perhaps emphasized as much as it could be is the way this effect displaces the viewer’s attention from the episode being depicted to the way it is being played, presented, performed by models posing as characters in a theatrically charged atmosphere. It’s nevertheless important to remember that this is painting, not theater. There is a limit to the fit between theater and painting. The interrelated ideas of self-fashioning and theatricality have swept the academic nation since the early 1980s, and at times the enthusiasm with which art historians resort to the analogy between theater and painting leads them to overlook obvious structural differences.51 Posing is not acting. To model is to pose as if acting, as if playing a role, but stripped of the temporality of drama. A pose is putatively a cross-section of an unfolding performance. It can have synecdochal force as a segment that evokes and represents a whole. But it can also be sequestered and monumentalized The Posographical Imperative

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Trustees, National Gallery of Art.

by a style that pretends to represent movement and activity only to transfix them in a brilliant lapidary stasis. The rommelpot player in Twelfth Night (fig. 9), for example, poses as if in midmotion but looks immobilized. The stiffness of his poncho at once signifies and belies the feint toward motion indicated by the turned-up edge in back. His performance is not of an act but of a pose.52 Behind him his moral contrary, the wall-eyed pastor, wears the fixed gaze of someone who studiously disengages himself from the celebratory excesses. He manages exotropically to divide his gaze between the performer and the viewer. On the other side of the rommelpot player, Steen’s tightly controlled treat-

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figure 10. Jan Steen, The Dancing Couple (1663). Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection. Image © 2006 Board of

ment of the drunken woman’s skirt produces a sculptural effect of classicizing drapery so that even as her form slides lazily across the tile-marked orthogonals toward the vanishing point, she is anchored in place like a statue.53 Similar variations appear in The Dancing Couple (fig. 10). Sharp contour lines make the male dancer a three-dimensional cutout. They accentuate the outlines of the seated women at the left and right so that even though their attitudes are informal their poses stiffen and verge on the literally statuesque. The treatment oddly recalls the monumentality of such figures as those in Piero della Francesca’s Arezzo frescoes. Where there should be blurring to indicate motion, Steen lays in fine details that tempt the eye to dance restlessly about from one lovely touch to another, while the figures agreeably and considerately freeze in their poses. The frustrated expectation of activity in the figures is intensified by displacement of that activity from the figures to the eye. This effect is also produced by scenes in which relatively large groups of characters engage in a complex range of negotiations and activities that take place under the rubric of a titular narrative (e.g., The Feast of Saint Nicholas, cat. 30; The Wedding of Tobias and Sarah, cats. 32 and 45; Twelfth Night, cats. 18 and 33 and fig. 9, above; Merry Company on a Terrace, cat. 48 and fig. 6, above). The viewer is challenged to scout out the diverse cues to meaning and assess their contributions to the narrative. This takes time, and the time it takes makes us appreciate how patiently the models pose and how still their characters are. Steen’s “metapictorial” project, then, is to sharpen the viewer’s awareness of the predicament of models holding poses while pretending to interact among themselves. Such awareness triggers the inevitable genetic question: how did these pictures get made? If we project from characters to models, from the finished scene to the act of painting and posing, what kind of situation do we imagine? A “realistic” answer to the question might be that the scene was copied nae t’leven. The painter’s interest in theatricalizing his scenes places the emphasis on a group of models performing characters as if they all posed together while the painter copied them. Realism dictates the following scenario: the models file into the studio, take their places, and assume their poses, whereupon the painter sets to work copying them. As Westermann suggests about In Luxury BeThe Posographical Imperative

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ware, it may have taken Steen “at least several days and probably weeks or months” to finish one of these ambitious productions. Did the models file into the studio, take their places, and assume their poses, day after day for weeks, perhaps, or months, so that the artist could portray the group nae t’leven? Could this be the hypothesis proposed by realism in any world other than the one turned upside down?

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4

Group Portraiture: Coming Together and Coming Apart

Imagine an outdoor scene in which a large number of people are getting ready to be photographed. The photographer is encouraging them to settle down and arrange themselves in proper formal pose, a pose appropriate for The Big Happy Family the picture is supposed to represent. He waits patiently as they squeeze together or space out and try not to get in each other’s way, so that everyone will be in the picture with minimal overlap. Next, imagine that while this is going on, the photographer has hidden his assistant in some bushes behind him. The assistant’s assignment is to take candid snapshots that show each sitter doing his or her own thing. The snapshots show that doing one’s own thing consists chiefly in making sure one isn’t going to be occluded or upstaged by someone else’s thing—by the adjoining sitters or by any of the others. A scene something like this (but lacking the assistant in the bushes) occurs at the beginning of a very bad and silly film entitled The Office. The result of all the tiny little space-making acts of pushing and shoving is that the film’s protagonist gets elbowed out of the picture. I begin with this fantasy to illustrate my view of the (never fully) repressed subtext of Dutch group portraits—the subtext I imagine painters to imagine and to be tempted to reveal. Painters of group portraits obviously resist the temptation. But pieces of their wicked fantasy always find their way into the finished work.

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The aim of the account in Chapter 3 was to articulate an approach to the reading of portraits that distinguishes the structural conditions of portraiture from those of other genres. I have tried to situate portraiture within a field of divergent but interactive (transgressive) generic structures, forces, and relations. Among these are the acts of portrayal with which the present study is chiefly concerned: the painting and posing of different kinds of human groups.1 When we turn from individual to group portraits, we confront a genre that dramatically foregrounds the fictiveness of the pose. Did some or all or any or none of the patrons depicted in Rembrandt’s Night Watch actually sit for their portraits? If they did, did they pose one by one or all together or a few at a time? During his extended meditation on Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s Three Scenes from the Legend of St. John the Baptist (ca. 1490–1500), Riegl identifies two clusters of figures in this strange composite image as the first Netherlandish example of group portraiture, a genre whose antecedents he locates “in religious paintings that portray more than one donor.”2 For him, the significance of Geertgen’s altarpiece lies in its being “an early witness to a decisive evolution toward subjectivity in art,” which would be the hallmark of the Dutch group portrait’s achievement.3 For me, another characteristic is more indicative of the very different line of interpretation to be pursued in the present study: instead of trying to unify the action in the altarpiece, Geertgen “did everything in his power to disrupt this unity of the action [diese Einheit der Handlung] and to portray each figure as mutually [or reciprocally] independent of the others.”4 The odd collision of mutuality or reciprocity with independence in Riegl’s phrasing (“wechselseitig unabhängig voneinander”) encapsulates the structural conflict that energizes the performances of group portraiture to be investigated in this and the following chapters: the conflict between the norm of collective unity and the individual sitter’s play for attention. Let’s approach this conflict by returning to the hypothesis I mentioned at the end of the preceding chapter. A group portrait represents the painted record of an event that must have occurred before the painting was finished. In this event, several men entered a room and assumed their places as sitters. The painter proceeded to paint, while the sitters patiently held the poses that are registered and preserved in the image we see. The picture is copied from life. These are likenesses of real peo48

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ple and this is the likeness of a real event. In short, what you see is what they did. But that, as Groucho Marx would say, is a likely story. Does anyone believe that the men who commissioned and sat for their portraits in The Night Watch were actually there when the gun went off, if it went off? Or that they just stood there posing together at the same time in the same place for hours, days, however long it took, while the painter painted away? Granted, the group portrait feints in the direction of this story. It pretends to deliver the likeness of a collective event. That is surely part of its message. The other part of its message is that the first part is sheer nonsense. The end product must largely have been the result of sessions involving the painter and individual sitters or their likenesses.5 In some of those isolated acts of portrayal, they may have pretended to pose as if interacting with others. The safest definition of a group portrait is that it is a picture in which sitters pretending to pose together actually posed separately. Only a handful of preliminary sketches survive from this period, and there is not much textual or archival evidence. But it isn’t hard to figure out what the basic procedure must have involved. The patrons choose a painter, who proposes a format for their approval. The format may be a lineup or a group around a table, in which men pose as if participating in a meeting or a banquet or an anatomical demonstration. Each sitter pays to have his likeness included, and since it is customary for some to pay more than others, payment as well as rank seems to have determined whose head gets to sit atop which body.6 Presumably those negotiations lead to modifications of body shape and thus of the compositional format. Presumably also the painter does most if not all of the faces from life, which would require individual sessions.7 The best surviving clues to this procedure are to be found in the record of Frans Hals’s dispute with his clients over the completion of the Amsterdam militia portrait. According to the clients, he had agreed to do the portrait heads in Amsterdam and finish them in Haarlem. Hals responded that he had indeed agreed to visit Amsterdam to make initial portrait sketches both in individual sessions and in a group session that never materialized. He agreed, that is, to copy nae t’leven. Furthermore, he assumed that the officers wouldn’t mind coming to sit for him in Haarlem Coming Together and Coming Apart

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so that he could finish the portraits, but if six or seven were unwilling he would “fill in the remaining heads” in Amsterdam.8 Copying nae t’leven was thus a staple of practice, at least in piecemeal fashion and perhaps ideally in the occasional group session, which in Hals’s case seemed difficult to organize. But whether or not—or to what extent—copying from life actually occurred, it is not so much a prescription as a desired effect: the premise of the fiction of the pose is that the pose preceded its representation; the portrait is a record of reality. All portraits pretend to be copies of those who sat for them, but the group portrait as a genre foregrounds the element of pretense. That scholars take this for granted is suggested by their disinclination to overstate the symptomatic importance of banquet portraits as testimonies to the reallife propensities of sitters. Evidence of those propensities occasionally crops up. Seymour Slive cites civic ordinances, passed in Haarlem during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, that prohibited members of the militia from partying on for more than three days at a time.9 Later evidence was uncovered by G. Hellinga, who found a note in the 1672 register of Amsterdam’s St. Peter’s Hospital that “revealed that for more than seventy years it had been a tradition among the regents and their guests to weigh themselves before and after” the annual Easter banquet.10 Nevertheless, what went on in banquet portraits probably had less to do with the influence of gluttony or alcohol than with that of precedents like Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Compositional priorities were more likely to reflect artistic ideals than recreational excesses—especially since, as the foregoing speculations suggest, sitters probably posed separately and serially (if they posed at all) for a picture that would pretend they posed together. Until more evidence to the contrary shows up, it seems safest to assume that the picture of a posing group is not the result of a group posing. The group portrait as such is always a fiction. If we accept this premise, we won’t be surprised to find the representation of collective posing so often transgressed by representations of individual posing—to find that sitters’ attention to and interaction with each other is often overridden by their separate and competing claims on the observer’s attention. There is a superficial resemblance between the tensions that affect visual relations among Dutch citizens as sitters in group portraits and those 50

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that affect their sociopolitical relations as members of institutional groups in the cities of the Dutch Republic. In Fictions of the Pose I tried to characterize this resemblance with the help of two terms borrowed from Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: the first is embarrassment; the second is disaggregation. Schama uses the phrase “the embarrassment of riches” to designate both economic well-being and an uneasy sociocultural reaction to it, a reaction I associate with performance anxiety. As for disaggregation, Schama cites Paul Claudel’s characterization of both Dutch still life and Rembrandt’s The Night Watch: “an arrangement in the process of disintegration [en train de se désagréger].”11 More generally, disaggregation is a threat built into the very constitution of the Dutch Republic, which rejected tyranny, eschewed monarchy, and settled for a decentralized coalition of provincial and urban governments. “Embarrassment” and “disaggregation” name symptoms of structural tensions in the Dutch Republic. Embarrassment is an index of strains in the republic’s social, economic, and religious orders; disaggregation, an index of strains in its political order. Obviously, the occasion of group portraiture as an institutional practice is intended to promote and commemorate the kind of solidarity that defends against the threat of disaggregation. But the form of group portraiture as a representational practice is infiltrated by that threat, and reactivates it—as when, for example, the sitter’s position in the portrait is determined not only by rank but also by competitive payment. In other words, the institutional desire for exemplary collaborative performance is activated in a practice that stimulates the conflicting desire for exemplary individual self-representation. Sheila Muller refers to speculations about “a practice by which families of retired regents took back the portraits they had paid for—in most cases by cutting up the whole and dividing the individual portraits among the various relatives.”12 Whether true or not, this is a perfect emblem or caricature of the competitive motive responsible for the push toward disaggregation. Painters of group portraits tend to accentuate the conflict. By concentrating attention on the cusp of the delicate balance between these attitudes, they bring the performance anxiety of sitters into sharper focus. They seem to recognize that since competitive posing is the project common to all sitters, it is the feature that most unifies the group. Thus the Coming Together and Coming Apart

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figure 11. J. W. Delff, Arquebusiers of the Fourth Squad (1592). Delft, Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof.

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rivalry that threatens to demystify the pretext of collective posing ultimately reinforces and justifies it. The sitters in group portraits are like the Provinces in the Dutch Republic. Devices that reinforce unity are often given a comedic form by their reliance on gestural conventions. Nothing could be more sociable, more gracious, than a hand resting on a neighbor’s shoulder, or pointing toward a weapon, or a colleague, or a corpse, or inviting the observer to take in the scene (figs. 11 and 12).13 J. W. Delff’s Arquebusiers of the Fourth Squad (1592) carries the multiple acts of pointing introduced in Dirk Jacobsz.’s militia portrait of 1529 to hilarious excess. Such acts may be objective, reflexive, presentational, or collegial—directed at an object, at oneself, at

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another, or generally at the group. According to Riegl, pointing “always had the function of drawing the viewer’s attention in an eye-catching way to something that was contributing to the unity of the group portrait.”14 That may be its function, but it is not necessarily its effect. An argument can be made that pointing contributes to disaggregation. In the context of the competition that repetitively isolates each sitter, such presentational gestures archly signify the sociability and graciousness of the presenter’s self-presentation. Very often, pointing fingers appear to point at nothing and thus suffer reflexive backlash: they point primarily to the sitter’s act of pointing. This reminds you that if the sitter was painted in isolation from the group, he may not have been pointing

Coming Together and Coming Apart

figure 12. Dirk Jacobsz., Civic Guard Group Portrait (1529). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

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sociably at anyone or anything in particular; he may only have been pretending to participate in a scenario of mutual acknowledgment. In short, pointing in group portraits is not necessarily reducible to the act of directing attention per se. It often seems to be the act of directing attention to the performance of directing attention. Manual gestures are one marker of sociable interaction. Another is the attentive exchange of gazes—often reinforced by manual gestures—that supposedly links sitters in conversation or in some other act of mutual acknowledgment or activity. But what frequently happens is that the gazes don’t quite connect with their putative objects. Scopic and conversational misfires occur in group portraits whenever sitters pretend to be socially engaged even as they or their painter seem unable or unwilling to conceal the fact that their primary attention is on themselves pretending to be socially engaged in a vacuum. Sometimes, though, they don’t even pretend (pl. 1). “Feast your eyes on moi” is the message beamed at the observer by the world’s two most gorgeous runway performers: the ensign and officer forming the parentheses that enclose the group on the left in the full-length militia portrait begun by Hals in the 1630s and finished by Pieter Codde.15 The so-called “Meager Company” contains a veritable manual of elbows and is enlivened by some smashing conversational misfires. Sitter 1 (numbering from the left) is all Hals. The ensign smiles and shimmers with self-assurance as he bestows his lustrous presence on the observer.16 In his enthusiasm, he ignores his fellow sitters and all but steps on his captain’s foot. The ensign’s parenthetical partner, Sitter 8, fares less well. He tries in vain to mirror the ensign’s pose and sprezzatura, but his ham-handed arm akimbo goes awry and stiffens up the body to which it is awkwardly attached. The angular and planar modeling accentuates his aggressive pose, but the aggressiveness is theatrical enough to border on the effete. His gaze, whether fixed on the ensign or lost in the self-absorption of one preoccupied by the pose he struggles to hold, reflects his emulative attitude. This stance is complicated, perhaps motivated, by the tasseled partisan dangling over his head. The officer’s attempt to lean back in order to avoid it—which is why he is a reverse parenthesis—can hardly be called successful. But it is influential. It stirs up a powerful diagonal force-field that threatens to upend several of the sitters behind him. It tilts Sitter 9, 54

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sways Sitters 11 and 12, and rocks Sitters 14–16 back on their heels. Only Sitter 13 puts up resistance. He aims his elbow at the officer and stubbornly stands his ground. The contrast between the optical/textural treatment of the ensign and the graphic treatment of the officer increases the former’s vitality and immobilizes the latter, who gives the impression of aspiring to the condition of sculpture.17 If the officer was blocked in by Hals and finished by Codde, the competition between sitters may reflect that between painters, and the verdict of the experts is clear: “when the inimitable brushwork of Hals’s ensign . . . is compared with the touch he [Codde] used for the . . . officer . . . , the difference between their handling is obvious. Codde . . . never again tried to paint . . . portraits in Hals’s manner.”18 Within these striking parentheses cluster six more soberly dressed sitters, four or five of whom pose as if socializing. While the two seated leaders (Sitters 3 and 6) pretend genially to converse, the four sitters standing behind them aren’t content to play second fiddle either to their leaders in the political order or to the ensign and officer in the aesthetic order. Next to the ensign, the elbow of a musketeer juts forth belligerently as Sitter 2 ports arms and addresses the observer. With mouth half open and face ruddied by light reflected from the orange standard, he seems to protest his parsimonious allotment of space. To his left, Sitter 4 struggles to keep a piece of himself in the picture and appeals more abashedly to the viewer. His neighbor, the halberdier standing between the seated officers, puts up a bolder front. Sitter 5 thrusts his hand forward as if to compete with the speaker for the listener’s attention. Of course, who is or has been speaking isn’t actually clear. The captain could be listening while the lieutenant makes a point. Or the lieutenant and halberdier, as well as Sitter 7, with his hand on his heart (echoing but varying the captain’s gesture), could all be responding manually to something the captain just said. What makes such narrative and conversational confusions or misfires interesting in dramatic terms is that they feature the basic tensions of the fictions of the pose. In a genre whose subjects are by definition sitters posing, such misfires or disconnects add uncertainty and ambiguity, which liven up the conventional portrait scenarios. Painters invent flexible disegni that allow sitters to vary their performances along the continuum that ranges from posing as if posing to Coming Together and Coming Apart

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posing as if not posing. Nevertheless, the feints toward moments of narrative, scopic, and manual interaction never go all the way. They are always preempted by the painter’s insistence that the subjects of portraiture are not characters but sitters engaged in competitive posing. Thus they are conspicuous as feints and misfires. They belong to the repertory of invenzioni that provide painters, sitters, and group portraits with the means of variation and innovation. The symmetry and relative compactness of the six figures on the left, enclosed within their colorful parentheses, may lend them compositional elegance and, in Riegl’s phrase, internal coherence (innere Einheit). Yet in the context of the whole painting they seem crowded together, and that makes it easier to see that each sitter is “doing his own thing.” Their apparent coziness only underlines the disconnects among the self-isolating or conflicted scenarios of ensign, officer, musketeer, and the “conversationalists.” Things change when the action moves toward what is mainly Codde’s territory.19 A small knot of three pikemen (Sitters 9–11) behind Sitter 8 have their own problems with attentiveness.20 Their conversational pretenses are rendered half-hearted by each sitter’s obvious interest in locking onto the observer.21 The sitter with the blue sash seems more or less to be engaging the sitter to his left. I say “more or less” because, in spite of his explanatory or indexical gesture, exotropy once again trumps scopic contact. Although he glances toward his possible interlocutor with one eye, the other wanders toward the observer. Behind him, trapped between the blue and orange sashes, the third member of this trio has been granted too little space to do anything but cock his head genially, either at the observer or in response to an interchange he does his best to seem part of. Sitter 11’s gaze, hand, and dancelike posture—enlivened by dramatic chiaroscuro and an incipient contrapposto—indicate a transitional pose, a response in the making. Is he in the process of raising or lowering his hand, or of shifting his weight, while turning an ear to the speaker? Is he getting ready to point? Or is his performance more keyed to and directed by the backward lean of the statuesque officer? Does he envy the officer’s parenthetical function? Would he wish to appropriate it and become the ensign’s partner? He has the sash for it. But he doesn’t have his performative act together. What seems clearest and most interesting about this sitter is that he ter56

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giversates. Should he pose as if posing and simply bestow his noble physiognomy (or three-quarters of it) on the observer? Or should he pose as if not posing and pretend to take part in an interchange that would distract him from giving his all to the potential fans and viewers who await the completion of his portrait? Sitter 11’s dilemma is registered by the signs of the effort his pose requires: the stiffness of the extended hand and arm, the furrowed brow, the splayed feet. But his predicament pales in comparison to that of Sitter 12, who is on the verge of being blocked out of the picture by the inconsiderate elbow of another ham-handed sitter, the musketeer intent on out-performing the officer and ensign in the contest for best Renaissance Elbow.22 Sitter 12 leans tentatively (timidly?) forward, in the attitude of one who requires more light, more respect, a better billet than the one he paid for, but whose hopes or disappointments can be measured by the limply presentational gesture of a hand the vivid shading of which only calls attention to its slackness. Below the waist, however, he is easily identifiable as a member of Codde’s Patrol, which includes the five sitters on the right. Their sturdy calves, their sensible shoes, their stolidly planted feet, proclaim them manly men. They can be counted on to stand watch even if distracted and in some cases obviously, literally, taken aback (as Codde undoubtedly was) by the Hals coloratura, which two or three of them seem to gaze at in admiration or envy. Our knowledge that The Meager Company is the product of two painters makes it difficult to decide whether the scopic and conversational misfires described above are intended or unintended effects. In general, however, the structure of the group portrait together with the conditions of production hypothesized for it suggest that there were opportunities for representational mischief by which painters (within limits) could be tempted. Such opportunities seize the day in Hals’s 1627 Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard (pl. 2). The composition enforced by the play of opposing diagonal vectors produces a simple and orderly format: twelve sitters (eleven guardsmen and their servant) are arranged around the banquet table in two irregular but clearly pyramidal groups, which overlap as they diminish beneath the rear window. Formal as well as social linkages between the two groups are established by the captain behind the table and the beverage service taking place beComing Together and Coming Apart

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hind the captain.23 This format chastens but by no means deflates the effect of spontaneity admired by Pierre Descargues: “all these big fellows kicking up a rumpus in their club room,” only two of whom make eye contact with the observer.24 Yet against this emphasis on absorption he acknowledges the claims of theatricality, comparing the scene to “an operatic finale with all the singers joining in one of those tutti which draw on all the resources of the voice.”25 That may well be. But Descargues elsewhere emphasizes “their interrelated isolation”: “This is not an orchestra trying to play in unison, these are musicians each playing solo,” in a group that “seems to consist not of united, cohering figures joined in a common action, but of separate beings whose individual personalities stand out clearly.”26 The problem, to stay with the music metaphor, is that as soon as we compare the scene to an operatic finale with its tutti, we’re forced to acknowledge that each singer is a bar or two behind or ahead of all the others. Consider the captain seated at the table, with his hand in either a rhetorical or a blade-testing gesture. He seems to be engaging the man to his right, who in turn appears to be having his own manually punctuated conversation with someone across the room, who may or may not be the attentive guardsman standing at the right edge, may or may not be the man amiably offering (or showing) him (or someone else, or no one in particular) food with his fork. Turn next to the standard-bearer on the right, who twists about as if to eavesdrop on a downstage conversation that may or may not be taking place, for although one of the two potential interlocutors at the table works on the other, the other is busy working the observer. Turn, finally, to the leader of this well-coordinated ensemble, the seated colonel on the left. His complex repertoire goes well beyond the standard elbow job. He fixes either one or two eyes on either the ensign or the colors to whom or to which he may be offering a toast, if he isn’t merely distracted by the space they take up. Even though I assume that the colonel’s pose is a ready-made and his head was pasted into it like a decal, Descargues’s phrase “interrelated isolation” prompts me to imagine him, like the others, holding the pose for the painter all by himself in the privacy of his home. Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard is wonderfully insane. One of the things that make it so is the cramming together of figures whose heads and limbs turn in all directions within an arbitrarily parsimonious utiliza58

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tion of space. Several features of the painting conspire to render the arbitrariness conspicuous: the dimensions of the canvas, which is both too high and too narrow for the arrangement it contains; the size and height of the window at the rear and the free space above the sitters; the pointed downward pressure exerted by the shape and diagonal shadows of the window at the upper left; the two sitters cut off by the right edge and leaning left as if to avoid further damage; the less seriously cropped ensign at the left, who gracefully accommodates himself to his peril in a manner that cramps the colonel’s style. As a result, in what seems to be a considered effect, the sitters are more closely packed together than is necessary. Hals is hardly alone in striving for this effect (figs. 13 and 14). From the early sixteenth century on, militia portraits like those of Cornelis Anthonisz., Dirck Barendsz., Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, and Frans Pietersz. Grebber “grow into crowd scenes,” and indeed crowdedness becomes a conspicuous motif, a motivating effect, as painters depict individual guardsmen gesturing “with or toward objects that refer to character traits, talents or skills intended to identify them among the crush of honored colleagues.”27 Sheila Muller emphasizes the way such portraits illustrate a change from religious to secular criteria of self-display. My emphasis is on “the crush” itself: on the consistent depiction of crowdedness as a visible influence on self-display and, more specifically, as the context that motivates, justifies, and enhances strenuous campaigns of competitive posing.28 Effects of crowdedness are often coupled with manual and scopic gestures of sociability that individualize sitters while purporting to bind them together, as in figures 11, 12, and 14. As we’ve seen, the reliance on gestural conventions can be carried to ironic lengths that may suggest something either about the way conventions blind the patrons who commission pictures of themselves, or about the games painters play, or about the open-eyed wit of patrons who expect their portraits to compete with and differ from (and possibly send up) the portraits of others. But it would be a mistake if this discussion of group portraits left the impression that the genre as such is unavoidably comedic or farcical. Militia portraits obviously vary in this respect depending on the extent to which displays of manliness are the targets and not only the subjects of the painters’ representational skill. In addition, there is another category of group portraits Coming Together and Coming Apart

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figure 13. Dirck Barendsz., Civic Guard Group Portrait (1564). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

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that occupies a more somber tonal range: the pictures of regents of charitable institutions. But even here, painterly irony can generate unexpected effects because the complex structure of that category features an odd collision of social requirements and aesthetic preferences. Officials of charitable institutions generally have an easier time of it in their portraits than do militiamen in theirs (fig. 15). There are fewer sitters, they have things to do with their hands, and the signs they make or objects they handle signify more than administrative activity. They signify the care, the caritas, the charitable works of good Christian souls pursuing the Active Life.29 In Riegl’s extensive analysis of regent group portraits, the conflation of portrait effects with Genre effects plays a central role. He argued that Genrelike interactions among sitters increase the internal coherence of the portrait while displaying both the institutional functions and the general virtue of officials who perform important roles in a vital sector of Dutch public life (fig. 16). He also invests considerable stock in the idea that the portrayals of these interactions often included addresses to participant viewers who were imagined to be recipients of the regents’ largesse. Since the characteristics he picks out are partly determined by the institutional context, I preface my discussion of regent portraits with a profile of that context. Fictions of the Pose

Charitable institutions in the Dutch Republic were designed to cope with two closely interrelated effects of a thriving economy on its chief beneficiaries: an embarrassment of riches and (to put it bluntly) an embarrassment of beggars. “Morally, the indigent and beggary constituted vexing problems as well as resources for prosperous Dutch citizens,” who converted their two embarrassments into a system of charitable institutions sustained by both private investment and public monies.30 The system was a response to more than caritas and guilt. It was also motivated by fear of the uprisings and riots that were a threat to burghers domiciled in the middle of towns whose prosperity “attracted tens of thousands of immigrants from all over northern Europe. . . . The streets of the towns began filling up with beggars whose presence undermined the confidence of the charitable rich that things were under control.”31 Dutch urban society was “by modern standards a violent society” in which “men carried knives and used them particularly under the influence of drink.”32 Caritas, guilt, embarrassment, fear: Muller acknowledges the complexity of motive, “the deeply felt ambivalence of rich toward poor which the Dutch of the seventeenth century sought to control through charity,” but which limited the scope of their institutional responses to the problem.33 The townships of Holland Coming Together and Coming Apart

figure 14. Frans Pietersz. Grebber, Civic Guard Group Portrait (1619). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum.

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figure 15. Werner van den Valckert, Regents of the Leprosenhuis (1624). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

were not equipped to run the institutions of health and welfare as divisions of government, and had no desire to do so. Rather than assuming direct, city-wide responsibility for the welfare of the orphaned, the aged, the sick and the needy, they committed them to the care of boards of burgher regents, such as those that already ran other, non-church charities. The regents would supervise the institution’s estates, invest its funds and use them for the good of their wards. The day-to-day running of the institutions was left up to paid administrators.34 The first residential home for orphans in Amsterdam was the Burgerweeshuis or Municipal Orphanage, founded in the early 1520s. It was not open to members of the urban underclass or to the children of non-

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citizens. It accepted only the orphaned children of citizens of the middling classes, children whose parents had left property and assets. As Anne McCants observes in her excellent study of this institution, “the social position of the Burgerweeshuis children’s deceased parents continued to influence the care of these children long after their parents had died.” The orphanage offered “preemptive” rather than “ameliorative” poor relief, protecting “the social hierarchy not only from the usually hypothesized fear of social insurrection from below but also from the potentially destabilizing effects of downward social mobility.”35 Coming Together and Coming Apart

figure 16. Cornelis van der Voort, Regents of the Old Men’s and Women’s Home (1618). Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

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Popular chronicles attest to “a general policy of self-preservation” that began to prevail in response to the “unfavorable economic and political events” of the 1560s. Thus, even as charitable institutions were being granted public status and funding, most of them “closed their doors to all but poorters and demonstrated favor for those with the patrimony to subsidize their own upkeep.”36 Poorters designates not merely those within the city gates but specifically persons “with inherited citizenship from parents or grandparents who had also been poorters.” The telling feature of the restriction, which discriminated against new immigrants unrelated to citizen families, was its ascriptive, or crypto-dynastic, character. Its objective was “to preserve the benefits of the institution for persons whose families had, by donation, contributed to its establishment and support in the past.”37 In 1613 the Amsterdam burgomasters and town council belatedly founded the College of Almoners (Aalmoezeniers) to supplement the work of charitable institutions after a period during which expanding urbanization had expanded the population of the indigent and compounded “the effects of poverty and unemployment.”38 The College was “the closest approximation in the city to a public welfare department.”39 It turned out not to be a forward-looking institution. It resisted modernization and followed outdated procedures that were basically conservative and religious. Muller cites evidence that at the time of its inception the College was expected to have only temporary interest in poor relief. Its main objectives were “to control a reserve immigrant labor force through poor relief . . . and . . . to enforce employment of an idle native work force and the most disruptive part of the immigrant group through coercion disguised as an idealistic attempt to rehabilitate the criminal element in society.”40 By this time, a combination of strategies and good fortune—restricted admission, prudent investment, the confiscation of Catholic property— had made the other institutions wealthier and added prestige to the boards of the burgher charities. It was at this juncture that a new artistic tradition was born: the group portrait of charity regents. In 1617 and 1618, the first three such paintings came into being: the regents of the Amsterdam male house of detention, those of St. Peter’s Hospital and of the home for the aged . . . were all

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painted by Cornelis van der Voort [fig. 16]. The sitters had themselves shown sitting and standing at their work table; around them were deeds, documents and account books referring to their administrative responsibilities.41 Muller argues that van der Voort’s table format conspicuously alluded to and cancelled the image of lavish feasting associated with the portraits of civic guard at their banquets. The painter replaced foodstuffs with signifiers of the Active Life that referred not only to the sitters’ “business acumen” but also to their virtue, and this convention, a variant of “older iconographic formulas,” persisted into the middle of the seventeenth century.42 In addition, according to Riegl, van der Voort introduced a participant observer, an “unseen party in the viewer’s space,” to whom the regents must be imagined as offering assistance.43 “The painted view of charity . . . avoids the real faces of the poor in the seventeenth century.”44 Jan Steen’s wonderful Genre/portrait of 1655, The Burgher of Delft and his Daughter (pl. 3), depicts a conspicuously idealized, or utopian, version of the wealthy burgher’s relation to the rabble (the grauw, the drab and snarling mob). By “conspicuously idealized,” I mean that signs of stress or trouble are not flatly excluded but depicted in muffled or displaced form. This is not a prelude to an ironic reading. We can assume with Perry Chapman that, rather than being “ironic criticism of the elite,” The Burgher of Delft conveys “the burgher’s moral imperative to act in the public realm” and that “to Steen’s contemporaries this image would represent the natural social order.”45 But perceived in the light of charity, the natural social order is a complex representation. Its hierarchic form is influenced by such motives as the fear of the rabble and of their potential violence. Charity is the entrepeneurship born of embarrassment. Impelled by caritas, condescension, and selfprotective avoidance, it reflects a desire to find means of control more positive and less drastic than the impossible ideal expressed by Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate the brutes.” Means of control include means of legitimation, and what lies behind “the burgher’s moral imperative” is, appropriately, visible behind Steen’s burgher: “most prominently, the tower of the Oude Kerk on the right and, above the burgher’s shoulder, the Delflands Huis and the Prinsenhof,”

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which, since 1597, had been “the headquarters of . . . the municipal organization charged with overseeing charitable giving in Delft.”46 This iconography may be obvious to viewers familiar with the neighborhood, but it keeps a respectful distance. It contributes to the diffidence Westermann finds in the painting: “a narrative that is not spelled out entirely,” an “evasive technique” that “draws viewers into a creative mode of looking.”47 To cite one example, the townscape is devoid of other people except for a single well-dressed man on the bridge. Viewed creatively, his lonely presence accentuates the bizarre sense of emptiness and, as in the sparsely populated townscapes of de Hooch, Berckheyde, and Vermeer, suggests what has been excluded. The “evasive technique” also informs Steen’s portrayal of the petitioners. Although the positions of both express deference, the woman’s stance is more complex: she seems simultaneously to importune and to keep her distance, leaning forward and extending her hand but not her arm. The burgher strikes an even more complex pose of authoritative condescension and defended vulnerability. His stance is wide open toward the observer, and at the same time he seems to incline sympathetically toward the petitioner. But his foreshortened left shoulder, with its cramped collar, the elbow on the railing, and the hand holding the paper, conspire to stiffen his demeanor and shield his openness from her. The burgher’s diffidence is reinforced by the way the young, welldressed woman turns her back and steps gravely away from the intrusive petitioners. She holds her left arm in a manner that echoes his, and lifts up her skirt as if to avoid contamination from the pavement—a needless gesture, given the spotless appearance of the tiles, and thus a repetition that both underlines and displaces his attenuated gesture of recoil. While the steeple confines the cumulus masses to the background, a few dark clouds breaking loose cast their shadows across the autumnal foliage and dapple the figures and trouble the young woman’s face. Steen’s portrayal is idealist or utopian in part because the “humble yet respectable supplicants probably belong to the ranks of the rechte armen (right or deserving poor), as opposed to the vagrants, vagabonds, and the like, who were prohibited from begging.”48 His burgher’s express attention to the poor is an informal and domestic version of what goes on in regent group portraits. If we tentatively accept Riegl’s hypothesis about 66

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imaginary participant viewers as recipients of the depicted regents’ charity, the burgher’s relation to the beggars is a variant of the regents’ relation to such viewers. Finally, the touch of self-protectiveness Steen gives the burgher seems associated with a regent’s positive sense of—and concern for—prestige. Unlike painters in van der Voort’s tradition, however, Steen doesn’t bestow on his sitter an aura that transcends prestige and derives from conspicuous allusion to the scriptural exemplar of charity. Van der Voort and his successors include scriptural allusions that play up the connection between the term charity and another term to which it is lexically if not etymologically very close: charisma. The portraits contribute to campaigns of self-representation aimed at transforming charitable activity to charismatic authority. The campaigns were not disinterested: In general, the members of the governing boards were appointed for life by co-optation, and came, needless to say, from the richest families. They saw their function more as a pious duty than a public trust. In the exercise of this duty, they were moreover in a position to safeguard the interests of their relatives in the clans which were the basic unit of the patriciate which ruled the towns. “Charity begins at home” is also a Dutch proverb, although couched in the somewhat obscure expression “The shirt (that is one’s own) is closer (to the body) than the robe (of public office).”49 Such pragmatism has made Anne McCants skeptical about the traditional explanation that members of “the regent patriciate” were impelled to served as officials by such altruistic motives as “the strong hold of both Christian and civic duty.” Her disenchanted alternative is that they were motivated primarily by prestige: charitable service provided the candidates with “a launching point to the highest echelons of Amsterdam politics and society” and at the same time gave those who selected them “a way of testing their suitability for later appointment to the city council.”50 But there were cultural reasons why the traditional and disenchanted alternatives were probably easy for regents to conflate. Dutch Calvinism may have had only marginal success as a proselytizing ideology. But it played a central role in the moral life and culture of local communities as both a disciplinary force and a rhetorical framework. Coming Together and Coming Apart

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In the Burgerweeshuis, in other orphanages, and in all Dutch schools, education was suffused with religious concepts and practices, and overseen by predicants and rectors. Therefore, given the cultural environment McCants describes so well, it couldn’t have required special knowledge or rhetoric to identify one’s self-interest and career advancement (sincerely, unhypocritically) with “the fulfillment of religious and social obligations to the less fortunate.”51 Whether or not “charity wounds him who receives,” it places the recipient under moral as well as political obligation.52 It thus empowers and elevates not only the donor institution but also those who exercise its authority. This is transparently evident in “the regent portraits that hung in the orphanage” and “were commissioned and paid for privately by the regents themselves.”53 They celebrate terms of service dedicated to the Active Life and, as gifts to the regents’ institutions, they remind viewers that the sitters they depict are also gifts to those institutions. The portraits obviously served as markers of prestige. But they were also instrumental in lending their sitters the aura of institutional charisma.54 I use the term charisma in its classic Weberian sense: charisma is personal magnetism that operates as a source of institutional authority. Its essential conditions are, first, that it be recognized as a gift from sources transcending human power and, second, that it be recognized as the embodiment of transcendent power in a human figure.55 Those conditions make it a religious concept. Weber’s account also makes room for institutional authority—a kind of derivative transcendence—that operates as a source of personal magnetism. Such functional reversibility is relevant to the roles and representations of regents not only in their supervision of charitable institutions but also in their group portraits. As noted above, van der Voort’s sitters preferred portraits that showed them performing good deeds, which meant that their portraits were not restricted to lineup or table formats in which they simply posed as if posing. They posed as if in Genre scenes, pretending to interact with each other and with someone in observer space. Hals attempted the first serious challenge to this format in his 1641 portrait of the Regents of St. Elizabeth Hospital (pl. 4). Riegl cites it as an illustration of the tendency in the early 1640s to treat “group portraits like genre scenes.” At the same time he finds it unusual because it is entirely 68

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self-contained: no sitter looks out; no unseen participant viewer or beneficiary of caritas need be hypothesized.56 These sitters may have elected to foreground their regential prestige. But the scenario they worked out with Hals departs from the models established by van der Voort and van den Valckert, who focused their scenes on acts of charitable donation and added symbols that gave them scriptural resonance. Hals’s sitters seem instead to have opted for an image in which prestige was dissociated from charismatic authority—dissociated, that is, from the more powerful aura generated by a behavioral rhetoric expressly imitative of good works in the scriptural tradition. The dissociation is effected by having the portrait feint toward and then studiedly ignore a Genre interaction, a business transaction: The gallery of his early group portraits of officers gathered around a banquet table has been replaced appropriately by a new dignity and sobriety. An unspecified business matter, not a spectacular performance of eating and drinking, is the order of the day. An inkpot has replaced the roemer, and a ledger, instead of a dish of oysters, is found on the table. A few coins lying before the regent seated on the right may identify him as the treasurer of the group.57 Like Riegl, Slive finds the portrait unusual in its treatment of internal coherence: “Some of the regents [Regents 2 and 3, numbering from the left] glance at the man in the front plane, but the latter appears quite unaware of their attention.”58 Regent 1’s gaze is less focused and its direction less certain because it is affected by a contorted or dyspeptic posture, which Regent 5 seems to be placidly contemplating. But the conspicuous disconnect between Regent 4 and the two who eye him sets the tone for the whole portrait and makes us wonder how seriously to take the evident indications of Genre action. The sheer theatricality of posing as if not posing stands out in a manner that both questions and freezes any pretense of Genre. At first sight, the viewer seems invited to enjoy the sitters’ vivacity, their congeniality, and their communicative openness. But the invitation is rudely canceled at the door. In the fantasy Riegl concocts, Regents 1 and 3 listen excitedly as 2 speaks to 4, who looks to his “left with a thoughtful expression” and

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“passively” resists 2’s argument, while 5, “obviously the treasurer,” sits “calmly awaiting the results of the others’ deliberation.”59 Degrees of tension are registered by the variety of knuckles on tightly or loosely clenched hands, including those of the more detached figure of Regent 5. The repetitive triangular tilting of hats, collars, hands, glances, and halflit faces adds intensity to the rightward surge of Regents 1 through 3, but Regent 3 reflects by his uprightness the jolt of the opposing force of Regent 4, who seems to hold them off even as Regent 5 appears ready to push back his chair. Regent 5 may seem, as Riegl says, to be “calmly awaiting” something, but there’s no reason why that should be a Genre outcome (“the results of the others’ deliberation”) rather than a portrait outcome, that is, the results of the painter’s “deliberation.” The difference between the anxiety of prestige and the aura of charismatic authority is sharply focused by the question of the profile. Riegl finds the profile view of Regent 4 “inappropriate for a portrait” and necessitated only by the demands of the Genre scene Hals invents: “to provide a strong contrast to the other three men who are pressing him for a reply.”60 Slive, who mentions the “Dutch bias against the profile view,” concurs: patrons and artists “must have felt there was something archaic about stressing the topographic contours of half a face. . . . Moreover, it sharply limits the range of a sitter’s glance, a serious restriction to portraitists who want their subjects to appear to make direct contact with the beholder.”61 Obviously, this was not what Hals wanted here. He wanted the beholder to make direct and sustained contact with Regent 4 so as to derive pleasure from Regent 4’s delight in refusing to return the compliment. For this reason, profile notwithstanding, his expression surely has as much portrait value as Genre value. If he is the observed of all the observers on the left, he ignores them, just as Regent 5 ignores Regent 4 and observes Regent 4’s observers. The gestures of Regents 1, 2, and 3 are rendered all the more operatic, more dyspeptic, because so blithely ignored by Regent 4 and so coolly measured by Regent 5. Descargues’s comment comes closer than Riegl’s to what we see: although two of the sitters seem to be addressing him, Regent 4 “looks away with smiling indifference, as if thinking of something else.”62 What could that something else be, if not the pleasure with which he presents his profile to the painter and basks in the radiance of his self-regard? Self70

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fascination is what the painter chooses to accentuate, and if we center our attention on Regent 4’s face and hand—the hand brightly but lightly poised at the edge of the table—another look at the three regents on the left shows them shrinking back as if the power of the fascinum lurks in the luminous hand. The variable rhythm of spacing adds resonance to that strange undertone. Regents 4 and 5 comfortably occupy their half of the painting; in contrast, Regents 1, 2, and 3 are crowded together in their half. Crowdedness here, as always, sharpens the accent on competitive posing and shifts the balance from the Genre state (posing as if not posing) to the portrait state (posing as if posing). On the one hand, the Genre situation features sitters who pretend to engage in the good works that signify not merely their institutional authority but also the charisma they derive from doing the Lord’s work. On the other hand, competitive posing is flatly oriented toward prestige. Here, a shift of emphasis from the first to the second is decisively marked by the focus on Regent 4, a shift that belies the pretense of Genre and confronts the group with the threat of disaggregation. The threat arises partly because, although the signifiers of charitable work are on display, the sitters ignore them, as well as the observer. Some twenty years later, Hals returned to the subject in the portraits of the Regents and Regentesses of The Old Men’s Alms House (plates 5 and 6). This time there is less to hold the sitters together, and the threat of disaggregation increases: in one, the isolated, pyramidally self-enclosed figures of four regentesses accompanied by a matron or housemother; in the other, acts of self-presentation restlessly dispersed by a busy play of hands and a scatter of glances under five space-consuming hats tilted at different angles, as if pressed to make room for each other and for the housefather crammed against a wall beside a window. Slive is surely justified in criticizing the portraits for “lack of compositional coherence.”63 Two interrelated characteristics set these portraits off from portraits that feature the Genre-type interactions analyzed by Riegl. First, they disavow any pretense of collective sociality. Each sitter poses for and by herself/himself and against the others. Competitive isolation is conveyed by the separated, pyramidal forms of the regentesses and by the overlap and clash of disconnected poses among the regents. Second, they conspicuously refuse the Genre option. Riegl nevertheless insists that the conditions Coming Together and Coming Apart

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of Genre once again apply: the officials in both portraits “are deliberating with an applicant who is assumed to be standing in the position of the viewing subject.”64 This is more imaginable in the case of the regentesses (in part because three of them pick out the same observer point) than in the slightly mad circus of regent poses. But as we’ll see, even the regentesses don’t pose as if working. They pose as if posing. The two servants archly displaying messages highlight this alternative by the irrelevance of their offers of messengerial service. Their diffident postures are justified: they present reminders of the Genre scenario the other sitters abjure. In all three of his regent portraits, Hals seems to have included the symbols of charitable activity only so that they could be disavowed (see below) and the viewer’s attention more strictly redirected toward the drama of posographical negotiations. But the spirited portrayal of 1641 has been easier to like and praise than the relatively constipated poses populating the later group pendants. At one time, the unflattering details and supposed grimness of the pendants were rumored to have been the product of artistic malice, payback by a painter who had been badly treated by the represented officials.65 But P. J. Vinken and Eddy de Jongh successfully debunk that rumor while accounting for the negative qualities on historical and generic grounds. They locate the misreading in an anachronistic attempt to compensate for the relative impassivity of the portrait as a genre, and to explain Hals’s apparently unflattering portrayal, by injecting into his two group pendants novelistic scenarios that are more appropriate for nineteenth-century art.66 Here and elsewhere, De Jongh emphasizes the taciturnity or reticence (zwijgzaamheid), the “limited communicativeness” (beperkte mededeelzamheid), of “old portraits” in general and of Hals’s two regent pieces in particular.67 His work has cleared the path for critics who acknowledge this effect but try to come to grips with it in ways that build toward a less reductive evaluation of Hals’s achievement in these late portraits. Christopher Wright finds that although Hals made “no real attempt at a conversation piece,” he managed to produce “a series of . . . exceptionally powerful [single] portraits in two pictures.”68 Similarly, Descargues comments on “the aloofness and solitude imparted to each figure,” and Muller sees in the regents’ portrait only “a collection of rhetorical posturings that do not follow from any depicted stimulus (e.g., from each other, from ob72

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jects, from a child or other visitor), except perhaps the occasion of posing for a portrait.”69 In Muller’s excellent account, Hals gives that occasion a suspiciously polemical turn by having his sitters pose in formats that allude to other institutional group portraits, but do so in the rhetorical mode of disavowal that I call conspicuous exclusion:70 for example, Christopher Wright is content to describe the regentesses as “gloomy old women, responsible for the administration and dispensation of public charity.”71 But Muller points out that this particular group of officials is not exactly putting its responsibilities on parade. She alludes to institutional group portraits by Hals’s contemporaries (van den Valckert, Bol, Verspronck, de Bray) in which “busy women” sit at tables filled with conventional items that identify their official duties.72 Some pretend to discharge those duties. Others strike poses that emblazon their domestic virtue, their industriousness, and their commitment to the Active Life of public service. In contrast, Hals’s regentesses, posed around a “noticeably uncluttered” table, seem “strangely unoccupied” and unapologetically “inactive.”73 This inactivity is most dramatically enacted by the regentess on the right, whom I’ll refer to as Regentess 4, numbering from left to right. The book that signifies her administrative role is closed and securely tied, and, as Muller observes, she “makes no move to open or close it.” Instead, she eyes the observer and keeps “her right hand pocketed in her apron,” a gesture dandified by the modest if defiant Renaissance elbow it produces.74 But her other hand, however conventional it is as a gesture, is remarkable.75 In the posographic contest, the perpetual risk for sitters is that the artist will compete with them by decentering attention from the displays of their virtue to the play of his virtuosity. Regentess 4 anticipates this danger. She keeps his brush at bay by exposing her long slender skeletal left hand to its caresses. Hals has duly set the hand apart from the busily clenched and gnarled and stubby extremities of her colleagues. The same hues brushed smoothly over the book have been crumbled into the daubs and slashes and flakes of her painted flesh. It barely sustains its form against the pecking of the birdlike brush that eats away its contour. Seen in those terms the hand is grotesque as an object but it remains eloquent as a gesture. And Hals has made it beautiful in its confident inactivity. Coming Together and Coming Apart

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The inactivity of her colleagues is equally strenuous. Regentess 1 may rest “one hand on a crucifix as though claiming her preference . . . for the Contemplative Life,” but with her parted lips and the expressively obscure gesture of her other hand she is the most active of the four in her demands on the observer.76 It has been suggested that her manual gesture is traditional and conspicuously alludes to a prior portrayal of service and the Active Life: “Verspronck had already used it in 1641 to identify the treasurer.”77 If so, the allusion may be urged on the viewer only so that it can be cancelled, conspicuously excluded by the absence of the symbols of treasure.78 The gesture now serves the anecdotal rhetoricity of a portrait sitter who displays her respect for Christ’s good works but who invites auditory attention and visual curiosity more as a sitter than as a treasurer. Confronted by such pious showmanship, Regentess 2 stolidly opposes the closed fist to the open hand as she looks toward but not necessarily at her neighbor. One of the effects of the conventional exotropic or walleyed glance in portraiture is to suggest abstracted attentiveness. If Hals depicts Regentess 1 pretending to speak and Regentess 2 pretending to listen, he may have wanted to show the latter fixed in unseeing audition. But it is easy to translate that behavior into the aesthetic correlative it resembles: the patience of the long-term Rembrandt sitter whose body continues holding the pose from which his or her attention has begun to lapse. The touch of rigidity and tightness in the pose, with left arm more fully extended and left fist more tightly clenched, registers the threat from the other side. She inclines slightly toward Regentess 1 to make room for the upright Regentess 3, against whose territorial encroachment her arm and fist provide a barrier. Regentess 3 is Muller’s scapegoat, or, rather, her candidate for Hals’s scapegoat. She chastises her for yielding to worldly desire: accoutered with both fan and gloves (an embarrassment of symbols), her “concern . . . extends only to her own fashionable dress and fancy collar.”79 It’s true that she excels in wimpled cuffs and that her collar, with its two butterflyshaped ties, is a more elaborate production than the casually tied circlet within which Regentess 4’s head is pilloried. But to judge the sitter in isolation is to shear away the context of the competitive group dynamics that gives her figure its meaning within the ethics or politics of posing. What her outfit and demeanor may suggest about her moral condition is a mat74

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ter of conjecture. What they tell us about her role in the dynamics of the group pose will no doubt be more trivial in psychological terms, but they lend themselves to a form of impressionistic description that is, if not fully disconfirmable, at least open to debate over the meanings to be educed from a limited array of visual effects. Within these limits, we can say that although Regentess 3 appears, relatively speaking, dressed to kill, she also appears less complacent than Muller implies because she is hemmed in by the dogged posture of Regentess 2 and by Regentess 4’s aggressive elbow. Everything about her becomes more tentative, less resolute and definite. Compare, once again, the relatively smooth, stiff, and starchy collar worn by Regentess 4 with the gauzy off-white undulations that seem to dissolve Regentess 3’s sloping shoulders. Even the blurred pentimenti transfer uncertainty from painter to sitter. Compare also the decisiveness of Regentess 4’s hand and elbow with the wavery contours, the puffy shape, of her neighbor’s hands as they awkwardly manage a display of fan and gloves.80 The two sets of properties are dynamically interconnected: an overall awkwardness is introduced into Regentess 3’s pose by the way she turns her body and pulls in her left elbow to accommodate the intrusion into her space not only of 4’s elbow but also of the matron’s message-bearing hand. Hers is a collegial performance. It deserves respect, even sympathy, rather than censure. Muller’s moral judgment on Regentess 3 supports her argument that Hals’s sitters reject the Active Life in rejecting the Genre performances featured by other group portraits. The only vestigial gesture toward institutional activity is assigned to the matron, and once again, Muller illuminates its parodic force: this is “a device observed in many portraits where it is intended to give the impression that a meeting of the group is under way.”81 Here, it serves as a trope of conspicuous exclusion, a reminder of the sort of business meeting the Regentesses usually have but aren’t having now. The sitters are gathered together for another purpose. The role assigned the matron—the awkward tilt of whose body signifies arrested forward motion—is to intrude on a portrait session. Both formally and symbolically, her folded message competes with Regentess 3’s folded fan. The qualities that distinguish Regentess 3 and make her vulnerable to Muller’s indictment also distinguish Regent 3 in the other portrait. There are compositional similarities between the two portraits. Regentesses 1 Coming Together and Coming Apart

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and 2 correlate positionally and gesturally with their male counterparts. Generally, however, the two groups perform under very different conditions. Descargues comments on “the cruelty of Hals’s delineation of these charitable old ladies” yet finds them more “stern” and “serene” than the men and “more harmonious” as a group.82 On the one hand, if they seem calmer it is partly because they have more room to pose in. They are five instead of six and economically organized in four separate pyramidal forms with very little overlap—a compositional economy capped by tightly coiffed heads.83 On the other hand, the men, with their aggressively widebrimmed hats and flowing hair, are larger, closer to the picture surface, and crammed into a smaller space. They are forced to overlap in a manner that increases the need for competitive posing. So, for example, unlike his counterpart, the Regents’ housemaster is pushed back into the shadows. Patiently, genially, deferentially, he doffs his hat and accepts his place.84 But—with the same patience and deference—he continues to exhibit his message, as if hoping for the painter to move him onstage and into the wonted messengerial pose of aggressive delivery. Descargues concedes that “this portrait of six solitudes is indeed the work of an old man who no longer cares about what it is that brings his sitters together.”85 Presumably he means that Hals ignores the desire of the sitters to be portrayed interacting as a collective group with a particular institutional identity. His “no longer” may imply a contrast to the practice or attitude of the younger Hals. But it may also suggest the old painter’s careless response to the durée of this commission: the task of planning, scheduling, and executing by the painter, presumably in accord with the wishes of his posing subjects. The comment recalls the correspondence concerning the Amsterdam militia group portrait completed by Codde.86 And Descargues’s lurking question is, how could they possibly have wished for this? David Smith arrives at a comparably perplexed judgment by way of a different itinerary. Taking issue with Vinken and de Jongh’s minimalist conception of portraiture, he distinguishes between two modes of portrayal, “rhetoric and prose—between figures who present and, in effect, perform themselves before an audience and figures caught in the midst of an ongoing narrative.”87 His readings of a variety of portraits (of individuals, couples, and families) demonstrate in impressive detail how these 76

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modes exist in tension and dialogue with each other. But when he comes to Hals’s portraits of the Regents and Regentesses, his verdict is unclear. At one point Smith seems to claim that the criticism of de Jongh and Vinken was preempted by Hals’s portrayal: “Hals has intentionally obscured their rhetoric.” Usually in the portraits of officers of charitable institutions, sitters “engage in active, explicit gestures that allude to their good works,” but in these portraits the sitters’ hands “are pointedly inexpressive. Only the regent with the cocked hat makes a rhetorical gesture, and its effect is almost entirely cancelled by the man in the center of the composition.”88 A few sentences later, Smith’s own rhetoric shifts responsibility from painter to sitters: “their rhetoric is half-hearted”; although they “could have acted out their parts in a narrational mode,” they adopted “a rhetorical stance” and failed “to commit themselves to it.”89 Is this an observation about what the painter did to the sitters or about what the sitters failed to do on their own? Is it a criticism of what Smith sees (the sitters in the now of posing) or of what he infers (the patrons posing then for the painter)? Confronted by these questions, my preference is to rewrite all the above statements, some of them critical, as strictly descriptive insights into an unorthodox scenario. It is unorthodox for the reasons persuasively laid out by Muller: the portraits are institutional performances that conspicuously exclude the usual signifiers of administrative responsibility and commitment to the Active Life. The scenario is also unorthodox because the sitters display varying levels of responsibility and commitment to their acts of posing. Several pose as if they have been posing—as if they have been patiently sustaining, and in some cases are now relaxing, the effort to hold the pose. In Smith’s terms, they appear to have become halfhearted about their commitment to the rhetoric not only of institutional responsibility but also of collective posing. This, at least, is the narrative on which they collaborate. And it is a narrative that makes them more than functionaries with ordinary faces in repose. It makes them individuals striving—within a restrictive conventional framework—to differentiate themselves at two levels: first, from sitters in other institutional group portraits, and second, from each other as they try to compete for the viewer’s attention by variations in dress, posture, gesture, or expression. The conflict between the claims of institutional representation and Coming Together and Coming Apart

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those of personal self-display is suggested by the fact that although the table contains more evidence of their responsibilities as governors than does that of the regentesses, the additional evidence (a tray of writing materials) is partly concealed and flamboyantly ignored by Regent 3. There is nothing half-hearted about his performative rhetoric. Muller sees in his excessive and awkward double gesture (arm akimbo and hand over heart) “no more than a fashionable pose struck for the moment with the portrait occasion in mind.”90 But “no more than” is too dismissive, since the remainder of the sentence expresses portraiture’s normative motive or rationale. Regent 3 has his own portrait occasion more fully in mind than the occasion, say, of his colleague, Regent 4. Since the latter appears to be presenting Regent 3, it seems a shame that his manual gesture “is almost entirely cancelled by” Regent 3’s showboating.91 But maybe it isn’t. Regent 4 is famous as the supposedly drunk or neurologically challenged regent.92 Riegl gives him little respect: he infers from the “dissipated expression of the unkempt speaker . . . with his crooked hat and disheveled hair” that these sitters are “aging bon vivants.”93 In their survey and convincing refutation of such views, Vinken and de Jongh conclude that his strange appearance could better be explained by medical than by moral or physiognomic diagnosis. They also try to domesticate his performance by noting that his is not the only dangerously cocked hat in art history: Hals gives a similarly rakish tilt to the same kind of hat with very different effect in two single portraits produced during the 1660s.94 We can acknowledge the persuasiveness of their defense against the malignity argument without letting it diminish the strangeness of Regent 4’s role in the collective performance Hals depicts. Whatever the cause of his physical abnormalities (paralysis of the nervus facialis, lagophthalmos, ectropion, etc.), they conspire with a crazy hat to draw the viewer’s gaze past Regent 3 and toward his shadowy form. Even his presentational gesture is so conspicuously diffident that it calls attention to itself. To present another is to compete with another. The longer we fix on the claims these two Regents make on the observer, the more intense their conflict seems. In this conflict, the angle of Regent 4’s hat is decisive. He might otherwise appear to be patiently posing, as if the task of self-presentation has been prolonged until he has begun to withdraw into himself while holding onto the pose. But the obvious need to sustain a balancing act over 78

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time transforms the message his gaze sends from introspective withdrawal to proprioceptive effort. The effort is underlined by details that stiffen the pose: the set of his chin in its collar, the way the occasionally thick, masklike contour lines around face and forehead contribute to an effect of rigid self-immobilization, and the highlights on the knuckles of his left hand, which indicate that the hand exerts pressure on the table. Ironically, the only sign of relaxation, of forgetfulness or distraction, is the curling of the fingers with which he presents Regent 3. Regent 4’s act of presentation is one of three such manual gestures— Regents 1 and 5 perform the others—and all three could be construed as presenting Regent 3, which may be the dominant motif of the portrait, especially if Regent 3 is also construed as presenting Regent 3. The gestures of Regents 1, 4, and 5, but surely not that of Regent 3, qualify as members of Smith’s category “half-hearted.”95 The adjectives tired and flaccid also come to mind. In all three cases, the presentational gestures exhibit incipient or advanced relaxation—signs of extended posing. They remind us that “a fashionable pose struck for the moment” may take many moments to produce. And they increase our admiration for the sustained enthusiasm, the patience, the focused energy, with which Regent 3 tirelessly gives of himself to his painter and posterity. Regent 3’s most spirited competitor is Regent 2—spirited in the sense that, like his counterpart among the regentesses, he doggedly faces left, though why he does so is not clear. Either he offers the painter a threequarter view of his noble countenance by looking posefully past Regent 1 into observer space, or he plays the auditor whose attention to Regent 1 confirms the latter’s half-hearted attempt at a conversational demeanor.96 In contrast to Regents 3 and 2, the red-legged Regent 5 has begun to show signs of the wear and tear of posing. Hals helps the process along with his brushwork. On the left, he makes the regent’s waterfall of a shirt terminate in one of two gloved hands destroyed by the paint that builds them up. On the right, slapdash fingers of paint applied in a scrupulously careless manner double as the dangling gloved hand of a straw man. The vibrant hatchwork for which Regent 5’s upheld sleeve provides an excuse shatters solid form and transforms linen into origamilike fantasies. Within that burst of energy, the sitter’s gesture is not fully legible. It hovers between sprezzatura and fatigue. And as all this “happens” before Coming Together and Coming Apart

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the viewer’s eyes, Regent 5 casually but fixedly sustains the most awkward of the five poses: a travesty of midmotion frozen into the stillness of the field over which the painter’s brush restlessly starts and stops and flickers and darts. “Slapdash” brushwork: the metaphor conjures up the painter’s haste to catch and fix a momentary pose. It conjures up the fiction of a sitter who may be restless or in need of a rest or about to interrupt the pose. When the art historian speaks of “rapid brushwork on the cuffs and collars,” he picks out a conspicuous effect, the representation and souvenir of the painter at work; in particular, the representation of the rapidity and haste that signify painterly bravura.97 But Hals’s painting also features a kind of granular chiaroscuro that animates small areas like the surfaces of hands and at the same time models and solidifies them. These passages of “careful,” therefore “slow” painting are juxtaposed to areas of “careless” and “rapid” painting. Together, they enhance the effect of temporality—the effect of the durée as well as the work of posing and painting. To focus on these effects is to bring the now of painting and sitting, the situation of painter and sitters, into the picture. It is to make oneself aware that something has been happening since the sitters first gathered together to plan and sit for their portrait. Hals’s sitters are not only setting up for the observer in their future. They are also waiting now for the painter to finish. They appear to be patiently posing, as if the task of selfpresentation has been prolonged until some have begun either to hold onto the pose or to sign off and let the painter do as he likes. Their communicative gestures are stalled or frozen (as the paint flickers about) in the time warp produced by our decision to focus on the act of sustaining the pose. Nevertheless, something has happened. The pretext of corporate occasion has lost its hold. The fabric of collectivity has eroded. For Descargues, only “six [or eleven] solitudes” remain, but Christopher Wright elegiacally confabulates a context for them in their life beyond painting: “we sense the quivering hands, the bleary eyes blinking, the mutterings about questions of finance, and the indomitable gazes of men and women who have had seventy years of having their own way.”98 Here it will help to recall Vinken and de Jongh’s caveat: we might “sense” these quiverings, blinkings, and mutterings, but we don’t see them. The portraits are 80

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not synecdoches—stills extracted from the film of life—nor are they stoppages in the passage of time. Portraits represent special events of one kind only—the event of posing. But this event may take either or both of two forms: posing as if posing and posing as if not posing. These two alternatives frame Muller’s important contribution to the debate about Hals’s portraits. She would prefer less of the former and more of the latter, and she bases this preference on moral grounds. In citing Riegl’s “pioneering work,” she states her intention to go beyond him by documenting the impact of the Christian humanist concept of the Active Life on a series of group portraits made for charitable institutions.99 The strength and novelty of her position derive from the attempt to correlate moral critique with formal analysis, as when she imagines that Hals must have intended to underscore the subversion of the Active Life “by depicting sitters who are inactive—almost torpid,” and who have thus let him down by giving him too “little with which to work.” She goes on to speculate metapictorially about his reason for inserting an Italianate landscape painting into the women’s portrait: it is to suggest that an adornment like this portrait, “commissioned by the regentesses to decorate their institutional boardroom, has little to do with the true meaning of caritas.”100 This may add a new twist to the sorts of negative judgment Vinken and de Jongh criticize (as Muller herself notes), but it falls within their range and in so doing it veers away from the more profound question that lurks in her argument, the question about the portraits’ ambivalence of motive. Do they—does Hals—emphasize the perverseness of the sitters’ refusal to show themselves productively occupied? Are they being wicked to insist on posing as if posing? Or do they present posing, self-commemoration, as a productive activity that needs no apology? Muller opts for the former and casually dismisses the latter in the description of the regents I cite above: “a collection of rhetorical posturings” with no apparent motivation other than “the occasion of posing for a portrait.”101 Given her emphasis on what can only be called the flakiness of the sitters portrayed by Hals, she has to work hard to explain why the patrons might have approved of the painting. She decides that they must have enjoyed seeing themselves in his “immediate and vivid images of real characters appearing to comport themselves naturally before the viewer.”102 Coming Together and Coming Apart

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Yet her concluding opinion contains an odd throwaway: Hals is less “engaged in sending up his sitters” than in “revealing what they perceive the Active Life to be.”103 But she had previously argued that Hals reveals their perception of the Active Life to be frivolous and to have “little to do with the true meaning of caritas.” How could he not be sending them up? The answer isn’t complicated, but it presupposes a return to the first principles of the fictions of the pose. Although posing as if posing is the signature stance of portraiture, during the first half of the seventeenth century it was often partly masked or varied by the tendency of painters of group portraits to experiment with Genre situations that featured sitters who pose as if not posing. Sitters in regents’ portraits from the time of van der Voort and van den Valckert on have been interpreted as pretending to engage with participant viewers in the discharge of their charitable responsibilities.104 This scenario supplies the pretext of a corporate activity more altruistic and important than that of the portrait activity through which it is being represented. Muller convincingly shows that Hals’s sitters refuse this scenario. The contents of the Regentesses’ table are reduced to the cross under the hand of Regentess 1 and the closed account book under the cuff of Regentess 4. Does the fact that the account book signifying charitable activity is closed comment on the cross signifying Christian activity? Have both been “demoted,” rendered conspicuously vestigial by the transfer of the locus of charismatic authority from symbols of Active Life to sitters actively posing? In the case of the regents, the single attempt to index institutional activity, Regent 1’s manual gesture toward the closed book, deserves David Smith’s epithet “half-hearted,” in part because the gesture could just as well be aimed, or half-aimed, at Regent 3. Finally, the gestures with which the matron and housemaster offer messages appear incongruous because the motivating Genre context is missing—and because the other sitters ignore them so completely. If, then, Hals is not “sending up his sitters,” if it seems unlikely that they have commissioned him to portray them sending up the Active Life of caritas, and yet if scrutiny of the portraits doesn’t justify the opinion that they reveal what the sitters “perceive the Active Life to be,” what possibilities remain? My preference, predictably, is not to dispense with the idea of a sendup but to redirect it toward a more reflexive scenario: 82

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Hals and his sitters have decided to send up the pretense of Genre and along with it the pretentious display of participation in the Active Life that earlier regents’ portraits featured. They conspicuously reject that option, conspicuously refuse to pose as if not posing. Hals’s sitters have chosen instead to acknowledge their investment in what they are actually and self-interestedly doing at the moment. They pose as if posing. Their prestige doesn’t have to be demonstrated by displays of good works. They have required the painter neither to demonstrate their caritas nor to visualize their claim to charismatic authority. They prefer to concentrate on doing what figures of authority eventually and inevitably do, sit for their portrait and for posterity. Yet eventually and inevitably the painter has the last say, and his statement is at once strangely perverse and deeply respectful. Hals betrays his sitters’ tired attempts at institutional and social gestures. He assigns them different levels of attentiveness. Some, like Regent 3 and Regentesses 3 and 4, are still making the effort to hold the pose. But all have the look of sitters who have been posing for a long time. Most have begun to drift into themselves. The gestures of Regentesses 1 and 2, and of Regents 1, 2, 4, and 5, are studiedly vague or indeterminable. It is as if the pretext of corporate occasion has lost its hold and posing has lost its edge. Partly, then, what makes the pendants so poignant, so powerful, is their stark refusal to transcend the swerve toward disaggregation. Hals’s groups are on the verge of falling apart. Nevertheless, the sitters persevere. They will not let the painter or themselves down. Even when small explosions of restless white facture indict the contentious or pretentious performances of Regents 3 and 5, Hals accords them the respect the painter owes to the long-term sitter: one bravely holds onto the pose (and to himself); the other tries to maintain contact amid signs of imminent relaxation. Charismatic authority can come in darker, more distant, and haunting shades than those that surround the energetic agents of caritas in earlier regents portraits. I conclude this chapter with a methodological caveat. The drama and the psychology of posing may not loom very large in the economy of human life. Posographical interpretations of sitters are at once more limited and more expressly hypothetical in their claims than those we associate with general psychology. They are more likely to produce comic than Coming Together and Coming Apart

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tragic interpretations. They may not shed much light on the physiognomic or psychological or emotional makeup of the person portrayed— on his or her soul, character, or personality. Vinken and de Jongh’s emphasis on the pragmatic limits to the disclosure of inwardness encourages a healthy skepticism about these sources of revelation. The methodological limits placed on interpretation by the “rules” of the fiction of the pose support that skepticism, but at the same time they mark out a field within which it becomes possible to say something specific about the sitters’ demeanor, their expressions, their gestures, and their attention or inattention to each other and to the observer. Whether we can say more depends on the possibility of expanding the interpretive field so that our accounts of the act of posing include reference to the institutional and social scenarios it performs—or betrays. Some of these scenarios will be discussed in Part Two of the present study. It should be obvious by now that the foregoing account of the way sitters in group portraits interact with each other and with viewers is heavily indebted to Riegl’s The Group Portraiture of Holland. Something else may also be obvious: I am indebted to Riegl’s great study not only for the ideas I borrowed but also for the chance to resist some of his formulations and find my own way. In Chapter 5, these debts and resistances will be registered at greater length.

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5

Alois Riegl and the Posographical Imperative

In turning from my account of group portraits to Riegl’s in The Group Portraiture of Holland, I plan to consider his approach to two topics already discussed in the preceding chapters: first, the problem of disaggregation; second, the relation of the concept of the participant viewer to my basic distinction between posing as if posing and posing as if not posing. I begin with an outline of his evolutionary scheme, which is organized along several overlapping sequences. The sequences are structured by changing relations both among sitters and between sitters and the observer: politico-formal relations of coordination and subordination, socioformal relations of internal and external coherence, and affective relations or attitudes dominated sequentially by will, feeling, and attention. The basic motor driving the sequence is provided by the distinction and dialectic between internal and external coherence, the former referring to the organization of relations among sitters within the portrait, the latter to the organization of relations between sitters and viewers. Riegl uses this distinction in a quasi-Hegelian manner to chart a three-phase evolution of Dutch group portraiture from 1529 to the 1660s. During the first period (1529–66), artists relied on the external agency of the observer to supply coherence; during the second (1580–1624), they improved and expanded the means of depicting internal coherence; during the third (1624 to the 1660s), the most successful artists managed to synthesize the two modes.1 Riegl made changing sitter/observer relations the conceptual center of his master narrative, which was shaped by the conviction that the genre’s 85

defining characteristic was the subjective factor of attention or attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit), the third in the triad of attitudes that constitute his “psychological typology.”2 Aufmerksamkeit is the attentiveness of the sitters to each other and to the viewer, and the attentiveness of the viewer to the sitters as a group and as individuals. (Riegl doesn’t expressly include the attentiveness of the artist in this scheme, though he writes about it all the time.) It was above all the importance given to attentiveness in sitter/ sitter and sitter/observer interactions that distinguished Dutch art from its Italian and Flemish precursors, with their focus on compositions oriented toward the representation of acts of will and the expression of feelings. His attitude toward Aufmerksamkeit was generally positive and has been well described by Sheldon Nodelman: “He regarded this state of inner quiet and respectful openness toward the other as characteristically Christian and Northern, as opposed to the self-regarding paganism of the South, which expressed itself as a will to dominate. Beyond its significance as civic virtue, Riegl considered such attentiveness an ethical and religious value of the highest importance, as spiritual attunement to other human beings, to Nature and to God.”3 But Riegl’s understanding of attentiveness is more complex. After Margaret Olin expresses a view similar to Nodelman’s in her excellent chapter on Riegl’s “ethics of attention,” she adds a reservation, and Margaret Iversen does the same when she observes that Aufmerksam[keit] is “a curiously double-edged term. On the one hand, it means watchful, vigilant, or alert; on the other, it has connotations of courtesy or kindness. It seems to balance within itself, then, self-love and empathy.”4 What Iversen refers to as “self-love” could be more specifically described as anxiety and suspicion.5 In the context of the group portrait, we may not find such reactions carried to the level of high drama. But we do find them—and, more to the point, Riegl finds them—present. Despite the positive connotations of attentiveness and selfless attention, he directs his attention to the drama of competition and the politics of subordination. He identifies as foundational, or structural, the threat of disaggregation (my term, not his), in which the obligatory emphasis on individual portraits interferes with the compositional integrity of the collective portrait. His frequently cited address to the problem has been succinctly characterized by Olin in the following paraphrase: “As a portrait, its job 86

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is to present individuals. As a ‘group’ portrait, it must present the union of these individuals in a group. The coherence of the group creates pressure toward increasing subjectivity, or union; the necessity that the individuals remain portraits placed obstacles in the way of union.”6 Riegl manifests his sensitivity to this problem in the third paragraph of Group Portraiture, when he oddly goes to the trouble of disqualifying the family portrait from consideration on the grounds that it is no more than a variation on the portrait of an individual. On the one hand, family resemblances guarantee “a natural unity . . . that precludes the need for any special tricks of pictorial conception or composition.” The group portrait, on the other hand, represents “completely autonomous individuals who associate themselves with a corporation solely for a specific, shared, practical and public-spirited purpose, but who otherwise wished to maintain their independence.”7 The contrast picks out the privative character of mere group affiliation compared to the bonds of family membership. Riegl’s emphasis is on the competitive egocentrism of individuals with limited attachment to the corporate group and on the consequent importance of the “special tricks [besonderen Mittel ]”—artistic devices or methods—necessary to compensate for the absence of unifying natural resemblances. The whole of Group Portraiture can be seen as an account of the development of the besonderen Mittel, which he articulates into the three stages outlined above, and which I now describe in a little more detail. The first or symbolic phase is characterized mainly by lineup and table formats, in which some figures may hold symbols that identify the company or the individual’s function, while some may point their fingers either at symbols or at each other (fig. 17). But rather than showing attentiveness to each other with their eyes, all the sitters look out into different sectors of observer space. Their common and explicit attention to the act of giving themselves to be seen constitutes the observer (or, more properly, the possible positions in observer space) as the external source of the group’s coherence and unity. Internal coherence was produced in the second or Genre phase by turning the sitters’ gazes toward each other and showing them “united by a common action: not, however, by a unique, ‘historical’ action that took place at a specific time and place, but by a recurring event that was Alois Riegl

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figure 17. Anonymous, Civic Guard Group Portrait (1557). Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

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significant precisely because it occurred time and again. In a word, this is ‘genre.’”8 The recurrent event usually involved some common professional, commercial, or social transaction. The danger of this solution was that it could always jeopardize the requirement of external coherence, the interaction between sitters and viewers. According to Riegl, this danger was reduced and a decisive step taken forward when Cornelis van der Voort secured “the unity of a genre paintFictions of the Pose

ing” by introducing a participant observer into his regent group portrait of 1618 (fig. 16): since “the men in the portrait were regents of an almshouse for old men, we can imagine the unseen party in the viewer’s space as a needy elderly person (or several of them) who is seeking some form of assistance.”9 Riegl goes on to qualify van der Voort’s overall accomplishment in the portrait, but during his account of the painters of the third stage—preeminently Rembrandt and Hals—he recurs often to the centrality of the participant viewer in their work.10 Outlookers in militia banquet scenes may be acknowledging the appearance of “arriving guests whom some of them have just spotted, but who are invisible to the viewer.”11 In the portraits of regents of charitable institutions, the unseen participant may be a new inmate, whom the sitters are in the process of vetting or admitting. If the artists of the second period succeeded in “depicting perfect internal coherence,” they left to their successors in the third phase the task of embedding the internal coherence of the Genre phase in “perfect external coherence . . . by making the scene within the painting, though self-contained in its own internal coherence, nevertheless seem like a product of the subjective experience of the viewer.”12 This was best achieved in Rembrandt’s versions of the “dramatic group portrait,” which “first tightens internal coherence through subordination and action,” and then “sets the depicted figures in an immediate temporal and spatial relationship with the spectator.”13 In The Night Watch, for example, Captain Cocq’s “attention is entirely taken up with the intent of the words he is speaking rather than anything outside the painting,” so that “it seems as if the figures in the painting have no connection to the unseen viewer.” But the connection is made by his hand, which, “extended straight out toward the viewer, is the clear signal that the whole troop of guardsmen, in the next instant, will dutifully carry out the given command and march out into the space of the viewing subject.”14 I note in passing that this prospect is as terrifying as it is unlikely. Such formulations may account for Olin’s perception that there are “almost sinister overtones” in Riegl’s account of the “last, ‘novelistic,’ phase” of attentiveness: “External coherence was created by so engrossing the beholder in an analysis of the psychological ties between the characters that the scene becomes his own inner experience.”15 In general, the Alois Riegl

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definition of the third phase is the least clear aspect of Riegl’s exposition, and it has produced a broad range of explanatory paraphrases.16 My own interest in the identification and transgression of generic conventions leads me to focus on the participant-viewer hypothesis, which Riegl applies again and again in his interpretations of regent and militia group portraits from van der Voort’s 1618 performance on. The riskiness of this hypothesis has been astutely characterized by Wolfgang Kemp: if the regents, who “are engaged in admitting a new inmate,” direct their attention outward toward the viewer, the portrait demands that the viewer place himself or herself in the position of the new inmate. Kemp states the obvious objection to this hypothesis: the idea that the viewer is expected to identify with the sick, poor, and helpless outcast could be justified only if we were to suppose that the portrait was painted for the inmates of the institution. The evidence suggests nothing of the sort. Militiamen and regents alike had these group portraits painted for the places where they officiated and feasted, and for the benefits of themselves and their peers. Very often the work was commissioned to mark the retirement of one functionary by showing the group, for one last time, as a complete entity. The sitters’ externally directed attentiveness was thus for the benefit of the newcomer, the successor to the retiring member; or else it was intended to convince an ideal, putative observer that those present meant business.17 Yet this doesn’t quite deal with the problem. Kemp’s objection is that it makes no sense to identify the unseen spectator with a victim rather than with those who will actually see the portrait: the sitters’ colleagues, successors, friends, family, and admirers. But this is valid only for group portraits of charitable organizations, and it is based on a social difference between the implied patient and the likely viewer. What about drapers’ guilds and militias? In a portrait painted for members of the militia guild, we could more easily accept Riegl’s idea that the viewer is expected to identify with lately arrived guardsmen, whom the sitters acknowledge and greet. My objection to both Riegl and Kemp is based on the hypothesis that different genres conventionally establish differences in the structure of 90

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sitter-viewer relations. In portrait genres, the outlooker’s attentiveness is directed toward observers whose presence to the sitter is deferred until the act of posing has been completed. But in history and Genre, contemporary participant viewers are created by implication when outlookers in effect extend their spatial enclosure to include the viewers as participants. There are no sitters in history and Genre, only models and characters: Steen’s participant self-portraits are exceptions that prove the rule. Returning to my previous observation about regent and militia portraits, if viewers find it easier to identify with militiamen than with pathetic candidates for health care, does that social difference affect the theoretical validity of the hypothesis? Riegl holds, for example, that when the sitters in Hals’s civic guard portraits make eye contact with the observer, the contact signifies that they are “communicating with . . . implied newcomers” to the group. This allows him to argue that the “overall pictorial conception” of the 1616 portrait “establishes . . . not just . . . a display of posing and posturing [Paradieren und Posieren] but a genuine, completely self-contained genre scene” (fig. 18). Since at least half of the sitters gaze into observer space, this “echtes und rightiges, völlig geschlossenes Genrebild” must include more than itself. As Riegl goes on to say, the orientation and expression of some of the sitters make it necessary to postulate an imaginary (hinzugedacht) “someone in the viewer’s position,” who, although “admittedly unseen” by the viewer, is being acknowledged by those sitters.18 Even if this interpretation is acceptable, the dismissive tone of “no mere parading and posing [kein bloßes Paradieren und Posieren]” must be resisted. In portraiture, posing is all, and posing takes place in the dark. Portrait sitters can’t directly acknowledge participant viewers; they can only pretend to do so by posing as if acknowledging those viewers. Riegl prefers group portraits that aspire to the condition of narrative, especially a narrative in which sitters seem to interact with observers. In other words, he likes portraits that make it easy for him both to minimize their generic commitment to the theatrical fiction of the pose and to accentuate their absorption in Genrelike social activity. Although he frequently acknowledges that Genre effects jeopardize portrait quality, he insists that they are more conducive than portrait effects to the artistic goal of integrating internal with external coherence. Both the strengths Alois Riegl

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figure 18. Frans Hals, Officers of the Saint George Civic Guard (1616). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum.

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and the limits of his approach are clearly inscribed in his account of Haarlem artists of the second and third periods, and the remainder of this chapter follows the path he takes from Cornelis Cornelisz. of Haarlem through Frans Hals to Jan de Bray. Cornelis van Haarlem’s 1583 portrait of the Haarlem militia carries the effect of crowdedness to a bizarre level, in which what seems at first glance to be high spirits quickly changes into high anxiety (fig. 19). Twenty-two sitters interact so busily around a banquet table that, as Riegl observes, it resembles a portrait less than a Genre scene. Taking a motif that had been used at least four times, beginning with Teunissen’s 1533 militia portrait, men sitting or standing around or behind a banquet table, Cornelis turns it into what Riegl calls a “turbulent scene” and what we today would call a cocktail party.19 Riegl applauds Cornelis’s originality in unifying the picture by staging a roomful of reciprocal, Genrelike interactions. Nevertheless, he uses this work to illustrate his theorem that “the more genre Fictions of the Pose

character a given portrait head contains . . . the less effective it is as a portrait,” for “whenever genre wins the upper hand, portraiture ceases to be portraiture.”20 “The only reason we can spot the [portrait] theme” in this painting, Riegl claims, “is because of our specialized historical knowledge,” which consists in this case primarily in van Mander’s identification and description of the portrait and secondarily in its resemblance to earlier pictures called portraits.21 This is a good reminder that our accounts presuppose not only specific information as to how the sitters and their contemporaries identified, judged, compared, and classified their images but also such generalized historical knowledge as the distinctions among genres and the ways pictures signal their membership in one or another genre. When the portrait flag goes up, the fiction of the pose assumes interpretive primacy. Riegl concedes, for example, that “the various groups of men swearing fraternal allegiance” in Cornelis’s portrait “are showing off Alois Riegl

figure 19. Cornelis van Haarlem, Civic Guard Banquet (1583). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum.

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for the benefit of the viewer,” which means that, although the Genre orientation is strong, the painting finally doesn’t “overlook the portrait likenesses of the sitters and the attempts made to interact with the viewer.”22 To acknowledge these attempts is to become aware of the obstacles they both create and confront. Flurries of hands accentuate the impossibility of posing with any facility or grace when so many sitters press together in often strained postures made necessary by inadequate space. The oversized ensign smashes the two drinkers on his right against each other. On the other side, the diagonal force of his tightly furled standard and expressive left hand seems partly responsible for the way the man in the light doublet shrinks backward and the man above him ducks forward as if to preserve his visibility. Figures at either end worriedly push in or look out to assure themselves they will catch the painter’s and the observer’s eye.23 This group portrait does more than simply commemorate the militia’s personnel, their sociability and good morale after a term of service. It commemorates their attack on the dilemma of posing in cramped quarters. In Cornelis’s 1599 militia portrait (fig. 20), the number of sitters is reduced to twelve, while the composition is less busy and more decorous. The sitters form an egg-shaped perimeter, which resembles a bouquet whose flowers have been replaced by heads. A group of six facing right takes up almost two-thirds of the panel. The other six face left. They include the four guardsmen packed two atop two at the right, flanked by the two ensigns, and spatially challenged by a bulky furled standard. At each end of the table, Cornelis depicts a figure who stares or glares at the observer and seems squirmingly aware of the danger of being partitioned by the guillotine of the picture edge. One of these unfortunates is the hatless ensign on the right. Although he garnishes his self-presentation with a balloonlike elbow that floats toward the viewer, the complacency of this gesture is compromised by the way he arches his back and pushes toward the table as if to avoid being cropped.24 As we’ll see below, Hals’s gorgeous ensign standing at the far right in his 1616 portrait of the Saint George Militia evokes this figure not so much to pay homage to it as to demonstrate the painter’s bravura and sitter’s chutzpah that Cornelis and his ensign clearly tried for and sadly failed to achieve. 94

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At the other end of the table, the ensign’s partner in pain huddles like a Siamese twin against the sitter in the plumed cap, whom Riegl identifies as captain. The captain has his own problems. Squeezed between his twin and a rhetorically expansive guardsman looming over him, he has no place to go but forward. To this fate he resigns himself with a gesture that only increases his cornered neighbor’s predicament, “delicately [or daintily],” in Riegl’s fine and acerbic phrase, “holding a glass in his right hand and staring off into the blue.”25 Riegl notes that the 1599 sitters “are now grouped much more freely Alois Riegl

figure 20. Cornelis van Haarlem, Civic Guard Group Portrait (1599). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum.

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around the spatial center of the table.”26 But he doesn’t take into account the effect of the different dimensions both of the figures and of the panels. The 1599 figures are larger and closer than those in the 1583 panel; the 1599 panel is shorter by 11 centimeters and higher by 21.5 centimeters. Its shortness is lightly dramatized by the partly occluded sitters at either end. Its additional height is marked by the window at the top and the free space around the standard. And, as Riegl observes, “the baldachin over the chair of the captain” also creates “free space within the interior.”27 These unfilled areas have a definite effect on the composition: they accentuate the arbitrariness of the crowding signified by the serial overlap of the paired figures around the table. In moving from the first to the second of his militia portraits, Cornelis again plays up the drama of posing in cramped quarters. Rather than soften the impact of crowdedness on the posing figures, he organizes it in a manner that renders it more unnecessary and therefore more perverse. Riegl underestimates the focus on competitive posing because his master narrative (the unfolding development toward a synthesis of external and internal coherence) leads him to concentrate at this point on the means by which Cornelis fights tendencies toward disaggregation and tries to impose unity. First, Riegl claims, Cornelis provisionally resolves the conflict between internal and external coherence: although “a full-fledged genre scene in the background” is uncomfortably coupled to foreground sitters carrying on their own “genrelike interaction” with multiple participant viewers, a transition is created by having the two foreground sitters turn their backs to the viewers Second, in his drive toward unity he sacrifices “the portrait quality” by creating “stereotyped heads” that “show little character,” partly because their clothing, hair, postures, and gestures are conventional, partly because they all resemble each other. Like a true band of brothers, they have “the same elongated faces, pointed beards, long noses, and smooth cheeks.”28 These things, Riegl concludes, “contribute something to the unity of the group,” but they “further reduce the figures’ individuality.”29 And that, precisely, is what seems to trouble the sitters Cornelis depicts: an anxiety about redundancy and occlusion that moves some of them to strike “intriguing” or “different”—and, in one or two cases, wonderfully ridicu96

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lous—poses. The two sitters with their backs to the viewer are a case in point. As they pretend to offer a chair to someone in observer space, the brio, the cortezza, of their dancelike repetition is undermined by contour lines that freeze them in place and leave them holding the pose. To their right, another outlooker “seems to be pointing to a dish of poultry,” as if “inviting someone outside the picture space to join in the feast.”30 But the dish and his hands are in shadow; it is his face, not the dish of poultry, that he offers to the light and to the viewer. And once again the hint of exotropy gives the portrait effect priority over the Genre effect because it suggests diffuse attentiveness: the attentiveness of a portrait sitter preoccupied with his visibility. He hunches forward to avoid being cut out of the picture by the ensign trying to save himself from the same fate. Riegl’s description of the central pair of sitters on the far side of the table illustrates his ambivalent response to this portrait. As he charmingly describes their one-sided interaction, the “active member” on the left “shows his keen interest in his neighbor . . . by placing his hand on the other man’s shoulder,” offering him a glass of wine, and turning in his direction. The “passive” partner’s only response to such consuming attentiveness is “to lay his right hand on his chest” and continue staring into observer space. Riegl doesn’t deduce from this that the active partner is being spurned. Rather, he sympathetically attributes the sitter’s “slightly forced” profile pose to “the conflicting demands of portraiture and genre.”31 In this brilliant and dangerously hilarious interpretation, our handsome sitter is torn between the sheer pleasure of giving himself to be seen and the obligation to acknowledge the partner who steadfastly ignores him in return. When he describes the influence of this portrait on Hals’s 1616 militia piece (fig. 18), and the differences between them, Riegl cites some motifs Hals borrowed from Cornelis but goes on to show how “the two works are worlds apart.” He praises Hals’s superior ability to integrate “selfcontained genre scenes” while including figures who actively engage the viewer.32 Though Hals admittedly resembles Cornelis in breaking his groups down into smaller units “that do not relate to each other,” in the 1616 portrait “the representatives of internal and external coherence are intimately connected.” Finally, Hals lightens the subject matter in a way that shifts attention from narrative entanglements to the kind of “conAlois Riegl

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vivial” Genre setting in which the “camaraderie of collective good humor and good nature . . . always wins out over self-centered individuality.”33 Although Hals’s militia portraits generally trouble Riegl because they too blithely conflate or intermix theatricality with absorption, he treats the 1616 portrait as a study in social absorption undisturbed by theatricality. He does so in spite of the drapery on the left, which is drawn aside like a stage curtain and deflects the eye into the picture across the echoing diagonal of the standard in the center. That operatic note is harmonically reinforced by the figures clustered at stage right. There, the viewer is pulled in by one of the seventeenth century’s most spectacular Renaissance elbows. Its owner (the ensign, Boudewijn van Offenburg) angles his head to balance an equally spectacular hat. As he gives himself to be looked at, he eyes the observer steadily, though not directly: he doesn’t quite make direct eye contact. Claus Grimm picks up this hint of uneasiness in the ensign: he finds him “reserved,” “cool,” and “defiant,” and notes that he leans back “as if to keep the beholder at a distance.”34 But his failure to do so is guaranteed by the ostentatiously brilliant brushwork with which the painter ignores his sitter’s diffidence and pulls the observer in to gawk at the elbow. Van Offenburg is the tenor of an operatic trio. Without doubt, the ensign he partly overlaps is the baritone, while the seated figure overlapped by the baritone can only be the bass. It is clear that neither the baritone nor the bass takes these power plays lying down. The baritone strenuously doffs his hat perhaps to the colonel (second from left), who may be raising his glass in acknowledgment, if he isn’t absently holding it up while the sitter beside him bends his ear. Meanwhile the bass fights off the baritone’s offensive intrusion into his space with a manual gesture of presentation, a gesture his expansive neighbor barely gives him room to execute. In this portrait, overlap and interlock intensify an effect produced throughout the painting by the fact that figures, furniture, and accoutrements aren’t comfortably contained within the picture edges. Because both the horizontal and vertical edges arbitrarily cut off parts of bodies, banners, weapons, windows, and chairs, we get the impression that the scene is at once too large for its canvas and too small for the bulky forms it contains. Other features contribute to this effect. The portrait heads on their doilies are too large and all the same size, regardless of their dis98

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tance from the observer. The table is too small. The perspective is out of whack because, although we view the faces at eye level, we look down at the table, where the brilliant luster of still life diverts attention from the human subject of the portrait to the painter’s art. There, as one can see, the large object of the carver’s attention—an object that has been variously identified as a “pig’s head,” “a fowl,” and, more cautiously, “a roast”—bears an odd formal resemblance to the head of the conversationalist above it. These anomalies work to increase the sense of crowdedness and busyness the scene gives off. Consider, for example, the extra trouble caused by the central standard. Its bearer sustains a difficult pose in order to play his part as an auditor in one conversation, but at the same time he jeopardizes another by putting the animated ear-bender below him in a tight spot. Luckily, the latter has a listener of his own to incline toward because the end of the flagpole is about to unfix his ruff. Of course it’s just possible that Hals had him lean into conversation in order to make room for the standard. However you read it, this is one of several touches of strain that trouble the acts of rhetorical self-display, the varied posographical inventions, with which sitters compete for attention. In this as in so many other militia portraits, conspicuous crowdedness provides a dramatic challenge to each sitter’s easy control of the space allocated to him. It thus motivates the competitive posing and the effect of performance anxiety that pervades the group portrait as a whole. The effect is sharpened by the efforts of some sitters to appear attentive to each other without jeopardizing the claim each makes to the lion’s share of the observer’s attention. Finally, the fixity of each pose is intensified by the contrast between the dynamic brushwork in sashes, ruffs, and other fabrics, and the graphic rendering of detail in faces and hands. Even the earbender’s face, the one most animated by the play of light, is frozen in pose by contour lines that accentuate the theatricality of his absorption. The effects I have been trying to describe are substantive, not accidental, properties of the drama of posing. So long as a picture is classified as a group portrait, this posographical drama will be its primary business. If features of other genres get put into play, the mixture doesn’t demand us to transform sitters into characters or virtual viewers into virtual characters. Rather, it asks us to see sitters posing as if not posing, that is, posing Alois Riegl

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as sitters who pretend to be Genre characters. This brings us back to Riegl, for whom the kinds of misfires I discuss here remain below the radar of his interpretive system. They can be ignored or, at most, minimized as distractions from narrative exchanges between on- and off-stage characters. The limits of Riegl’s approach are most clearly apparent in his accounts of group portraits he deems unsuccessful. One of these is Jan de Bray’s 1663 portrait of the regents of the children’s charity home in Haarlem, in which sitters pose together for their portrait arranged around—and behind—the central motif of a relatively modest if assertive elbow (fig. 21).35 Because one of the two central figures looks up while writing, the sense of his being interrupted by someone or something in observer space rubs off on the elbow man and makes him seem to pivot in his chair. But all six of them look outward, and Riegl has a problem with this. Although he finds the figures “physically and psychologically uniform” and emphasizes the formal indications of “a single, particularized moment of time,” he notes with disapproval that all six sitters look outward and gaze into different sectors of observer space.36 Each, he notes, is so intent on interacting with his own “unseen party” that there isn’t “much room left over for storytelling” in the fashion of a unified narrative or genre scene.37 In his view, then, the dispersal of gazes is both monotonously repetitive and disjunctive. In my view, the dispersal crackles with competition. The feint toward integration only intensifies the force of the contrasting disaggregation, while the variously repeated indicators of competition confederate the sitters in mutual rivalry. There are local clashes in the center of the picture and on the right, for example. The two central figures may be interpreted as responding to a common directive: “face outward and pretend that you had just become aware of—or had just been interrupted by—the observer.” To imagine this scenario is to heighten the sense that these two sitters conspicuously contend with each other in their attempts to pose as if not posing. Riegl comes very close to describing it as posographical competition: the sitter who looks up while writing—Riegl calls him “the most startling [die lauteste, literally, “the loudest”] figure” in the painting38—“fixes his gaze on the unseen party, and the man across from him turns so emphatically to face the viewer that he stands out equally strongly.”39 It is as if the one sitter’s pretense of being interrupted by someone or something in ob100

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server space challenges the other to emulate his performance. The two competitors virtually butt heads. Just as the elbow man’s hat partly obscures and partly fuses with the writer’s hat, so the open hand of the figure at the extreme right partly presents and partly blocks his neighbor’s manual choreography. Although that presentational gesture is momentarily checked by the opposed hand above and behind it, its deictic force moves the eye leftward past the elbow man’s resting hand and generates a vector of expansiveness from which the figure on the far left seems to shrink away. Each self-isolating Alois Riegl

figure 21. Jan de Bray, Regents of Children’s Charity Home (1663). Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum.

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pose registers its awareness of and difference from the others, defends or asserts itself against them. As you read the de Bray portrait from left to right, the poses get more rhetorical and flamboyant; the two busy-handed sitters on the right are operatically competing for attention, and because of this, when you move your eyes back to the left, you feel even more keenly how intent each sitter is on performing his own presentational invention. You can see, for example, how the figure with folded hands at far left now seems, by comparison with the others, to be aggressively subdued, defiantly antitheatrical, huddled within himself. Behind them all lurks the deferentially hazy figure of the servant, who (like the servantfigures in several other group paintings) directs his watchful gaze outward as if to monitor—or to weigh, or to assess—the viewer’s attentiveness to the agon his betters are performing. This alternative to Riegl’s account is based on a commitment to the two premises of the posographical imperative I discussed earlier: the primacy of the fiction of the pose and the corresponding absence of the viewer to the sitter—the belatedness of the viewer’s arrival. Riegl characterizes group portraits as first-order Genre interactions or narrative fictions, which imply participant viewers. I resist this view on four counts. First, posing as if not posing may well produce the anecdotal Genre effect even to the extent of suggesting action that involves participantobservers. But the mistake Riegl made in drawing attention to it was to ignore the “posing as if”—the continuing resistance to the second-order Genre effect put up by the portrait effect, which fixes our attention on the now of posing, in which the only participant-observer is the painter.40 Second, Riegl’s account of group portraiture elides a prior and more basic pretense: the painter of group portraits depicts sitters who, although in actuality they posed separately, pretend to pose together. Third, if sitters pretend to be characters, that pretense needs to be bookmarked, not ignored: what we observe and interpret are sitters who pose as if not posing, who pose as if pretending not to pose. Thus, where Riegl imagines sitters as characters holding meetings, I imagine sitters as sitters holding poses, in some of which they may present themselves performing as characters holding meetings. Fourth, Riegl imagines observer space peopled by virtual viewers invisible to us but not to the sitters—participant-viewers that sitters as charac102

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ters pick out and interact with. I imagine viewers who are as invisible to the sitters as we are because sitters blindly—but studiedly—present themselves to be looked at by viewers who don’t yet exist. In sum, where he locates drama in the social interactions of sitters depicted as characters, I locate drama in the way sitters as sitters vie with each other in their efforts to strike attitudes of social attentiveness and to enact a pretense of collective posing that may well include the further pretense of Genre interaction.

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6

Performance Anxiety and the Belated Viewer

Under the pressure of the posographical imperative, the interaction of sitters comes to seem more contestatory. The painter of group portraits doesn’t merely acknowledge this conflict. He accentuates it. The real purpose of the fiction of collective posing is to pretend to overcome, but actually to feature, the separateness of the individual participants who vie for the observer’s attention. Painters depict sitters posing both with each other and against each other, sitters who vie with each other in their efforts to strike attitudes of social attentiveness—sitters, in short, whose pretense of collective posing is itself conspicuously competitive, By concentrating attention on the cusp of the delicate balance between these attitudes, painters bring the performance anxiety of sitters into sharper focus. If this presents them with a challenge, it’s a challenge they seem willing to thematize, which may say something about their patrons. Perhaps they recognize that the varied repetition of self-preferring performances is precisely what unifies the group; it emphasizes the common activity, competitive posing, that most vividly displays corporate consciousness. The formal and social disaggregation that threatens to demystify the pretext of collective posing thus ultimately reinforces and justifies it. Did some or all or any or none of the patrons depicted in Rembrandt’s Night Watch actually sit for their portraits? If they did, did they pose one by one or all together or a few at a time? To repeat a phrase I used in Chapter 2 above, did they have any sense at all of how their portraits would play in the gallery of the future? The gallery of the future: the phrase has a nice ring but as a metaphoric 105

turn it is wildly misleading. It evokes an image in which generations of visitors parade by as portraits change residence and disseminate until they end up in our latter-day collections, museums, and publications. If that were the future in question, it would be relatively easy to factor in the effects of deferral on the sitters portraits represent. Signs of performance anxiety could then be interpreted in terms of the premonition of the unknown: the premonition of public display in unimaginable alien spaces and of exposure to unimaginable alien gazes. Westermann mentions a related worry, the fact that the “attrition over temporal or spatial distance of sitter identity is . . . inherent in portraiture.”1 But of course the future that confronts Rembrandt’s sitters and their contemporaries isn’t the unknown long-term future but the uncertainties and pitfalls lurking in the too-well-known short-term future. The viewers they anticipate and hope to impress are not the unborn hordes of anonymous museum visitors but the inhabitants of the sitters’ neighborhood: their peers, family, friends, associates, constituents, and descendants. Portraits are expressions of conservative desire: sitters give themselves to be seen as—transformed by painters into—talismanic household presences, guardian spirits who preserve and protect the ways of the past from the estranging uncertainties of future change. If, then, performance anxiety is to be read into or out of portraits, it has to be keyed, not to the vague parameters of the universal viewer, but to the social, political, economic, and cultural pressures of that local neighborhood. Preeminent among the pressures that may contribute simultaneously to competitive disaggregation and to embarrassment in the pose are those discussed in Alison Kettering’s perceptive and important study of Gerard Ter Borch (fig. 22). Kettering comments on the loosening up of the stereotypically rigid “male-female divisions . . . assumed in the literary debates about women” that had prevailed in sixteenth- and earlyseventeenth-century “discourse about gender.” Alluding to earlier debates, broadsides, and visual expressions dealing with “such themes as the Battle for the Pants and the Power of Women,” while discussing Ter Borch’s “non-stereotypical” treatment of these themes, she observes that by “the seventeenth century, the framework for this discourse was largely sociological and political, at least in the Netherlands. The focus of attention was marital: men’s ultimate authority and domination within a fam106

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figure 22. Gerard Ter Borch, Officer Writing a Letter, with a Trumpeter (1658–59). Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art: The William L. Elkins Collection, 1924.

ily structure that featured increasingly strong wives as the separation between work and home along with separately defined roles for men and women developed in middle-class society.”2 Kettering convincingly shows that Ter Borch’s “pictures demonstrate the instability lodged at the core of constructions of masculinity.”3 I suggest that this in turn contributes to the instability lodged at the core of The Belated Viewer

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constructions of all-male group portraits, especially the portraits of militia companies. The suggestion was prompted by the coupling of Kettering’s essay with Paul Knevel’s compendious account of militia portraits, which precedes hers in the same volume. Taken by itself, his brief characterization of the militia portrait is unobjectionable: “a highly idealized image of the schutterijen, in which military virtues, preparedness to defend one’s own city, self-assertion, and ‘harmony and brotherhood’ play a prominent part.”4 But if the following passages, in which Knevel develops this opinion, are filtered through Kettering’s more sophisticated analysis, they suffer the unintended irony of saying more than they want to say: In these paintings, the men were portrayed in full regalia and selfconscious postures. . . . the uniforms, richly decorated weapons, hand gestures, and setting were conceived to demonstrate each individual’s place in the pecking order of the civic militia. In their highly idealized and frozen image of the position and role of the painted burghers, these imposing group portraits can be regarded as a collective form of what Erving Goffman has called impression management, the projecting of better-than-real images of oneself in the conviction that others will respect these. The military element in many paintings is further underlined by the proud, assertive, and aggressive postures of the lieutenant and the ensign with their arms akimbo, that typical military macho gesture.5 The first passage damps down the threat of disaggregation built into the competitive structure of group posing, but the threat is clearly indicated in the second passage. The argument Knevel makes would be better served by translating it into Kettering’s terms, for the inventory of qualities he attributes to the militia portraits in these and other passages suggests precisely the form of embarrassment or performance anxiety she picks out: a posographical posture that protests too much in defending against, and therefore demonstrating, “the instability lodged at the core of constructions of masculinity.” But what is the “core,” and where do the “constructions” come from? In the sections that follow, I’ll explore the sources of performance anxiety in the two institutional settings discussed by Knevel and Kettering, the 108

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militia and the family. As to the first, scholars still disagree about the range of functions exercised, and the changes undergone, by civic guard companies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—about the roles they collectively enacted, and the roles available to individual guardsmen. As to the second, the hypothesis to be expanded from the valuable comments of Kettering and Knevel is that whatever the militias were supposedly doing in this period, their portraits take on a different complexion when staged against the gender-sensitive backdrop of domestic life and culture.

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Part Two m i l i t i as a n d m a r r i ag e

7

Male Bondage and the Military Imperative

The Dutch Republic “was the creation of war and war was its primary raison d’être.”1 No one doubts this proposition. Nevertheless, it hasn’t kept scholars from questioning Dutch Republican manhood. In 1998 Gary Schwartz reported the complaint of J. B. Kist that “in the course of the nineteenth century Dutch history was demilitarized.” Schwartz noted that this tendency has persisted (“Huizinga wrote offhandedly of ‘the unwarlike character of the Dutch people’”) and that Kist was “waiting for the balance to be restored, for a new recognition that the United Provinces was a militaristic state.”2 On this topic, historians have been less scandalous than art historians: “If the history of the Netherlands is a history of war, . . . all of Dutch art history is one big DMZ.”3 In a subsequent essay Schwartz chides historians of art and culture who have promulgated the picture of a people famous for “their anti-heroic bent, . . . their love of domesticity and their quiet civic pride.”4 Schwartz goes on to discuss the adverse effects of such quietist opinions on regnant interpretations of both militia portraits and the militias themselves. His intervention is very important, and I’ll return to it after setting the stage with a brief survey of scholarly debates about the militias. The institution of the militia guild or civic guard company has a pedigree reaching back to the fourteenth century in the northern Netherlands. These guilds had always had ceremonial, peace-keeping, and social-club functions, and although early in their history their relations with city authorities were harmonious, the authorities kept tight control over them 113

because an armed force within the city was always potentially disruptive. There seems to be little evidence to show that they functioned well in times of civic unrest, and during the first two decades of the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, the consensus among historians is that they were politically unreliable. “Their political role,” in J. C. Grayson’s opinion, “was latent and unclear” before 1566, when they used force in the iconoclastic riots, as they did again during the revolution of 1572.5 In general, between 1560 and 1581 they “were thrust into a prominence they had not sought, and confronted with decisions for which their traditional values rendered them unfitted.” After surveying their activities during this period in several Holland cities (Leiden, Haarlem, Delft, and Amsterdam), Grayson concludes that their influence “was vital, but negative, and after 1572, their political and social roles declined.”6 Grayson’s conclusion has been modified by other scholars, who point out that after 1572 the militia guilds in a number of Holland’s cities began to acquire political influence precisely because they didn’t interfere when city authorities declared for William of Orange.7 But this power was short-lived. During the 1580s, as the authorities regained control of the cities won back from Spain, they reorganized the guilds and placed them under the stricter direction of “a rigidly hierarchical officer corps” with strong links to the regent governments: In order to ensure that their wishes were actually put into practice, the authorities increasingly appointed military officers who were drawn from the ranks of the political elite. A logical consequence of this policy was the aristocratic character of the militias’ officer corps: the function of military company officer was annexed by the ruling elite during the seventeenth century, and grew to become part of the expected career pattern that future political leaders were supposed to follow.8 The “function” of military officer, or merely the name? There is considerable disagreement among scholars about the extent and importance of the militia’s military function. Some insist that although the militias may have played a heroic role (in the defense of Haarlem, for example) during the opening years of the Revolt, even as early as 1596 they “had

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taken on something of the character of sport clubs, and evidently the Dutch military leaders who conducted the war against the Spanish were not very impressed with the fighting ability of the reorganized Haarlem militia companies.”9 Historians often use the militia portraits as evidence for their characterizations of the militias, and even here there are disagreements. On the one hand, Schama calls them “pseudo-military ensembles” because they “are emphatically group portraits of civilians in martial fancy dress. Their . . . regimental insignia and emblems and colors are closer to those of the civic corporations and guilds than to battle dress (which had no uniform at all).”10 On the other hand, the “increasingly military nature of the civil militias during the second quarter of the seventeenth century” has been inferred from the fact that in militia portraits after 1580 weapons become more noticeable and “are highlighted in all their glory. The painters did not limit their interest to everyday weapons such as pikes and muskets, but also painted richly-decorated weapons of other kinds which reflected the rank of the figures portrayed bearing them.”11 I agree that the weapons may indeed reflect the sitters’ rank but not that they express an increase in preparedness or any other military value. Knevel compares the portraits of militia companies to “the yearly parades” in which they “demonstrated the military force on which the town could rely in times of trouble.”12 But parades are by definition overstatements, demonstrations in the theatrical rather than the operational sense. After 1607, portrait poses were “often borrowed from . . . de Gheyn’s . . . Wapenhandelinghe,” as in the case of The Night Watch’s three musketeers.13 This influential manual of arms was an analysis of the weapon handling necessary to the execution of the classical maneuver of the countermarch revived and perfected by the Dutch army, under Prince Maurice’s supervision.14 Sydney Anglo speculates that it may have been the first pictorial drill manual.15 (See figs. 30, 32, and 34, below.) It contains three sets of plates, each of which consists of a sequence of illustrations that breaks down the operation of one weapon into consecutive steps: forty-two plates show how to carry, load, prepare, fire, and clean the caliver (klover), forty-two more do the same for the musket, and thirtytwo show how to handle the pike. Each set is followed by verbal instructions and a list of commands for every step. Male Bondage and the Military Imperative

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figure 23. Jacob Lyon, Group Portrait of Nineteen Guardsmen (1628). Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

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What I find especially weird, or hilarious, about de Gheyn’s figures are the fancy-pants attire and the tippy-toe choreography. Once again, the theatricality of the demonstrations competes with their operational function. Most of the demonstrators look like grandees or military CEOs dressed up for a ball or a parade, and it must have seemed important to de Gheyn to let them show off their be-ribboned pantaloons and splendid calves, not to mention the occasional stylish boots. As Anglo observes, de Gheyn’s is a not too distant cousin of manuals of dance and of fencing.16 Because his record of drilling “is a completely closed activity” unlike dances and serious sword fights, the “visual repertoire” of postures or “frozen movements . . . [is] wholly stylized” in a manner that recalls Anglo’s references to the conspicuously “arty” punctilios featured in fencing manuals.17 Traces of this stylization, which produces poses that manage to be faintly effete and pretentiously manly at the same time, appear in the militia portraits of subsequent decades (figs. 23 and 24).

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The sitters in group portraits don’t seem to be soldiers. Rather, they seem to play soldier. Kettering notes that the “sitters for these portraits often imitated the dress, the gestures, and the virile postures of their professional counterparts”—not, of course, the unruly counterparts represented in popular literature and the guardroom scenes but the officers idealized by such treatises as de Gheyn’s and “embodied in the Republic’s reformed army leadership.”18 Although guardsmen were not soldiers in the sense that the members of the professional army were soldiers, they weren’t averse to military simulations. Similarly, Wolfgang Kemp observes that these “citizen companies” came to be “organized on the same lines as the professional army.” The chain of command, for example, included the military ranks of colonel, captain, lieutenant, ensign, and sergeant. In that respect at least, “the standards and structures of the military world . . . began to find their way into bourgeois life.”19 This doesn’t necessarily mean that the militias became more militaristic; it could just as well signify that they wanted to appear more militaristic. According to Kemp, they were considered “entirely unsuited” for real military action by the “military high command,” and this reputation diminished their “importance . . . in national military policy.”20 Displays of militancy could

Male Bondage and the Military Imperative

figure 24. Claes Lastman and Adriaen van Nieulandt, Group Portrait of Nine Guardsmen (1623–24). Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

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be a predictably compensatory defense against the charge of unsuitability, a charge the militias in several towns seem to have incurred during the events of 1566 and 1572 described by Grayson.21 Those who argue that the militias were or became social clubs—that the guardsmen were or became more noteworthy for their use of the drinking horn than for their use of the powder horn—nevertheless acknowledge their political usefulness. In one of the more nicely balanced assessments of the issue, Kemp reminds us that soldiering was only one of the several functions of the citizen militias; and it is a theme of their group portraits only in an indirect sense. We do not see them engaged in defending their city or their country; at most they are making preparations to do so and presenting themselves in a state of general combat readiness. . . . [But even] straightforward formulations of this kind are rare. . . . In most cases, the occasion that brings the guardsmen together—where indicated at all—is a festive rather than a warlike one.22 Kemp insists that this tendency in group portraits does not corroborate “the view that the companies . . . [were] less concerned with the defense of their country than with shooting matches, parades, feasts, and drinking bouts.” Even these occasions did, after all, contribute to “the establishment of a sense of community” in an urban constitution that generated “considerable turnover. Representatives, new and old, needed to assert their legitimacy, advertise themselves, and communicate politically. The militias functioned as organs of political integration.” They also continued to exercise their centuries-old peace-keeping function, and they were often a force to reckon with in times of political controversy.23 A less positive account of their political function has been given by J. L. Price, who emphasizes its disaggregative rather than integrative character. Price begins a chapter on the schutterij with a reference to the “vulnerability of the regents”: “public disorders and rioting were an important component of political life in [seventeenth-century] Holland,” and the regents, who “lived in the center of their densely populated towns,” depended on their schutters to deal with “the reality or threat of public violence.”24 Yet he goes on to argue that, since relatively few regents ac-

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tively participated in the militia—the personnel of the guilds being drawn largely from “the relatively well-off middle and lower-middle classes”— the militia as a body must have represented the interests of “the broader middling groups of society as against the regent élite and its close allies.” This remained its “latent role . . . throughout the seventeenth century.”25 Were the militias integrated or factionalized? Warlike or unwarlike? To what extent do their portraits illuminate their status and function? Conflicting opinions among scholars have made it hard to get a clean fix on the institutional character of militia groups, on their changing historical profile, and on the collective self-understanding of their members. But the recent intervention by Gary Schwartz, mentioned above, proposes an ingenious criterion in terms of which to resolve some of these questions. In “City Fathers as Civic Warriors,” he contests the opinion that the militias had declined into sport clubs by the turn of the seventeenth century or that they were, at best, “pseudo-military ensembles.”26 His argument is grounded in a statistical survey of the fifty-seven surviving Amsterdam militia group portraits painted between 1521 and 1660. Schwartz found that in those done before the Eighty Years’ War guardsmen posed in civilian dress and that after the war ended the number of militia group portraits dropped off drastically. But all the portraits painted during the war featured military poses. He concludes that Amsterdam’s patricians (men like Rembrandt’s Captain and Lieutenant) preferred to be portrayed as officers “for as long as . . . [membership in the guard] was a meaningful military function” and that the civic guard portraits illustrate the warlike spirit of both the Dutch people and their militias.27 Schwartz’s argument is difficult to refute, and in the following discussion, I don’t intend to refute it. My aim is only to reframe it in a manner that accentuates some of its latent implications. Let’s concede Schwartz’s point that the shooters preferred to look warlike and that their war-time portraits communicate a “meaningful military function.” Nevertheless, the assumption that because they looked warlike they were warlike overleaps a middle term: his evidence is drawn not from militia companies per se, but from their portraits, and here the question is not simply Do the shooters look warlike? but Do they look like they’re pretending to be warlike while posing for their picture? In this context, their effort to look warlike could as easily indicate that they Male Bondage and the Military Imperative

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aren’t really warlike as that they are. Their decision to strike militant poses may reflect their respect for a culturally valued attitude. It may also reflect their anxious effort to arm themselves in the attitude. What the decision reflects would depend on the degree to which it was colored by the institutional environment of militiamen as burghers (regents or otherwise) and as merchants, householders, and husbands. In the same essay, Schwartz begins to deal with this question during a critique of the standard view of Pieter de Hooch’s genre paintings. He shows that, far from devoting his entire career to representations of “a quiet domestic domain, indeed a feminine domain, with no place for war or its effects,” de Hooch began to emphasize this motif only in the late 1650s, well after the end of the war. Before then he had not yet discovered the woman as housemother. She was still an unattached female, available for the distraction of the soldiers who were so much a part of Dutch city life during the war. . . . While the war was on, there was a preponderance of good-time girls, procurers, and camp followers among women in Dutch painting, above the relatively rare examples of housekeepers and mothers. The shift in favor of the latter which commenced after 1648 was not, however, a clean break. From the 1650s on the work of de Hooch shows a continuum between women we would perceive as available to soldiers and women who were not.28 In many of the scenes of the 1650s and 1660s set in domestic interiors and courtyards, de Hooch depicted interactions similar to if more restrained than those characteristic of inn and guardroom pictures. The boundaries between household and bordello, “between private and public spheres, between a civil and a military society,” were quietly but definitely transgressed. Schwartz notes that this transgression or overlap “is constantly in evidence . . . and the military side of life is its most apparent manifestation. The household, even the boudoir, is frequently visited in his paintings by army officers . . . [and this] belies a clear dichotomy between the virtuous domesticity of the household and the loose morals of the outside war-torn world. Whether or not soldiers are actually present or husbands absent in such scenes, the war and its ways are never very far.”29 If even a reputedly quietist painter like de Hooch featured soldiers act120

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ing up during and after the war, Schwartz argues, the Dutch can’t be as lacking in martial spirit as scholars have assumed. The argument is both important and persuasive. My only question is whether the social psychology of the “martial spirit” is more complex or uncertain than he suggests. The restriction of his focus on this theme leaves in shadow issues connected with the problem of transgression other scholars have considered. Richard Helgerson, for example, observes that during the 1650s and 1660s “the Dutch produced a great many paintings of women, almost always without a male householder, engaged in activities of often morally ambiguous significance in domestic or domestic-like interiors,” and in many of these “the domestic space is shared by a soldier or other young man of soldier-like appearance.”30 These were the decades of the Stadholderless period called “The True Freedom” (1650–72), which followed the 1648 Peace of Münster, and Helgerson explains the ambiguities in terms specific to problems and apprehensions connected with the absence of a Stadholder. He argues that scenes with soldierly intruders dramatize anxieties posed for the domestic microcosm of republican order by the political instability of a more or less acephalous regime.31 “Merchants and soldiers, burgher fathers and knightly officers,” sober householders and swashbuckling interlopers, belonged respectively to opposed republican/mercantile and monarchic/military interests and cultures. Therefore, when “the intruding soldier stands in for [or is confused with] the missing brother, husband, or father,” this blurring of categories was precisely what “opponents of a monarchic regime feared,” namely, that the “preeminence and authority” of these householders “in the affairs of the Dutch Republic—their political home—would be supplanted by a military-based monarchic regime.”32 “Substituting soldiers for merchant householders, as the genre painters of the 1650s and 1660s do, was tantamount to replacing one form of government with another.”33 Helgerson’s readings of images are astute, illuminating, and nuanced. In addition, his focus on the specifically political anxieties connected with the twenty-two years of The True Freedom imposes a valuable constraint on the interpretation of those images. But that very concentration of focus prevents him from engaging broader issues of social structure that surface, however obliquely, in the genre subtypes he examines. Suggestive Male Bondage and the Military Imperative

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clues to those issues appear in Kettering’s study of unstable masculine identity in Ter Borch’s soldiers. Her general comment on two paintings in which he depicts trumpeters with letter-writing soldiers—“they call into question traditional Dutch stereotypes of masculinity”—is specified in the brilliant observation that the trumpeter in these pictures “takes on something of the role of the satin-clad ladies in Ter Borch’s contemporary high-life interiors.”34 The instability discussed by Kettering is keyed to the organization of gender promoted (or provoked) by the institutional contrast discussed above—in Schwartz’s terms, “between private and public spheres, between a civil and a military society”—and by its transgressibility. Schwartz’s observation that “the war and its ways are never very far” from domestic genre scenes is ironically reaffirmed, as we’ve just seen, by studies that relate the significance of soldiers as intruders to the absence of the father or husband in so many of those scenes.35 This institutional contrast is a central concern of Nanette Salomon, who argues that the subcategory of genre called bordeeltje features the woman-on-top trope: it encourages the viewer “to empathize with the women rather than the men, who are alternately described as stupid, unknowing, and an easy mark for deception and degradation.” Her approach to the topic resonates with Kettering’s in that both implicitly treat soldiers and intruders (no less than the absent husbands and fathers they threaten) as figures of castration. Although Salomon claims that “Dutch genre painting after 1650 . . . [defines] domesticity as a sort of representational opposite, a countersign, as it were, of tropes of public interior spaces such as guesthouses, taverns, and bordellos,” she doesn’t draw the obvious logical conclusion that men are on top at home. The domestic power relation, as she describes it, is more uncertain: Woman and home are interchangeable concepts, only confused by the presence of man. . . . primary among the visual tropes of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, which fabricated bourgeois domesticity (as opposed to that of the peasantry), is the singular absence of the father. Seventeenth-century bourgeois domestic scenes, for the most part, reinstated the sign system of virginity in a form of metaphoric

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purity, which is shared by the monogamous Dutch housewife and the urban interior space she inhabits. This system was so pervasive that it appears ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ to us and, consequently, inflects the visual conjunction of a man and a woman in a bourgeois interior as compromising, as in paintings by Pieter de Hooch . . . and others.36 Salomon has gone so far as to claim that in the visual arts “images of women dominating men,” whether in or out of marriage, whether in households or in bordellos, contributed to a popular myth of national identity during the long period of time in which “a politically determined national Netherlandish identity remained problematic.” I don’t think she means to claim that castration was the form given national identity. But it’s true that the institutional sites of performance she discusses present difficulties that affect the social construction of gender. For males, the problem she raises has less to do with the task of achieving manhood than with that of properly representing it while performing the overlapping roles of husband, householder, and citizen.37

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“[W]omen give birth to babies, but men give birth to adult human beings.”1 The phallus is artificial, and it may be that—like Pinocchio’s fabulous nose—the bigger it is, the more it lies. It signifies the desire for a power its bearer lacks and must try to control in the domestic perimeter dominated by woman’s productive and reproductive powers. It is through woman’s “natural” power that the domestic group reproduces itself, but the power structure of male corporate groups is not “naturally” reproduced. They cannot easily avail themselves of the body of reproductive practices, the practices of the reproductive body, which constitute an implicit ideology of ascribed norms that diminishes the need for more explicit fictive supplements. Mothers do not need ancestor-centered ideologies or other imaginary appurtenances to keep the domestic system of reproduction going. But male cults have to resort to intergenerational myths, sending factitious lines of filiation back into the past, making their ancestors their children. And since the phallus is not a penis, since the male body is not a socially ascribed source of intergenerational power, since the body as such has been appropriated by the domestic group, corporate groups are forced outward to seek their ideological resources not in the bodily center of nature but in the spatio-geographic regions that lie between the domestic perimeter and the cosmic horizon. They plant the phallus in the omphalic or vaginal center of what by that very husbandry they constitute as their world.2 “The dignity of marriage is . . . not based on the satisfaction accruing 125

to the couple; rather it derives from the vital social function marriage fulfills in bringing kin groups together and in preserving peace among them.” So David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber paraphrase the view stated in 1053 by Peter Damian in “De parentelae gradibus.”3 Expressly organized in terms of this rationale, the ancestor-focused patrilineage constructed along agnatic lines of descent became a kind of fellowship of males stretching backwards and forwards over time.4 In this fellowship, women were marginalized.5 But more subtly, as Klapisch-Zuber describes it in a memorable essay, they were socialized to police gender boundaries by managing the induction of new wives into the lineage.6 Such controls were much less available to the general run of householders in Reformation England and Holland. “The predominance of the nuclear family, a household shorn of a coresident older generation or coresident siblings and other relations of the married couple, had established itself in much of western Europe, certainly by the late sixteenth century.”7 Actually, this pattern of residence had been established in northwestern Europe by the late Middle Ages. What changed was that Reformation clergy began to promote it. They endorsed the ideal of a domestic unit centered not on the extended family’s “band of brothers” but—to borrow a phrase that has been thrown around a lot lately—on the bond between one man and one woman. During the Reformation even the Catholic church was caught up in educational and social reforms. “Catholic and Protestant churches alike sought to tighten and enforce rules governing sexuality and marriage. Marriage ordinances were publicly promulgated, and for the first time baptisms and marriages were recorded in church and parish registers.”8 Taking advantage of the disseminability of scriptural and priestly power made possible by printed Bibles, the clergy seized on “the ideal of the affective nuclear family” as “a new way of perfection” that would “replace the now discredited monastic celibacy. Family values became the object of intense propaganda, and of the anxiety that the reconstruction of any value system necessarily creates.” We today “are the direct heirs” to this reconstruction and to the anxieties structurally built into it—anxieties partly fueled by the specious “proposition that there is only one proper [‘natural’] way to arrange our sexual relations.”9 Two closely interrelated consequences of this development were cen126

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tral: one was an increase in the status accorded the role of the individual male householder; the other, ironically enough, was a correlative increase in the power and authority of the role of the householder’s wife. As to the first, in England during the sixteenth century “the phrase ‘A man’s house is his castle’ became proverbial. . . . The state designated the individual household, in the absence of the old authoritarian church and of a national police, as the primary unit of social control. It identified the householder as responsible for the maintenance of moral order in his immediate sphere.”10 In seventeenth-century advice books, the family was referred to as a “little church” and “little state.”11 Thus, as Catherine Belsey puts it, the nuclear family built on “the institution of permanent marriage . . . becomes quite explicitly an ideological apparatus” through which the state strives to organize, control, and maintain surveillance over its population.12 As to the second, when the clergy aimed its ideological searchlight at the nuclear household, the resultant illumination cast a strange pattern of lights and shadows over the domestic role of wife/mother. On the one hand, Reformation discourse continued the old tradition of the head-body and Adam’s rib symbolism; the rib may not have been bent, as it was in witchcraft lore, but it was only a rib. On the other hand, the discourse paraded the reciprocity of desire and affection as family values. The positive message was reinforced by several existing practices in Dutch society. Marriages were consensual rather than arranged, people didn’t usually marry until their middle or late twenties, and there was usually little or no age gap between partners.13 As a result, the wife was normatively perceived as a kind of secunda inter pares and the old expectations based on the residual inequality of women to men and of wives to husbands came into conflict with the new ideals. The ideal of reciprocity was easy to confuse with the ideal of equality, and this put pressure on the husband to be mindful of the need to reinforce his authority at the wife’s expense.14 In her attempt to situate the origins of this “sad history” in the early modern ideology of family values, Belsey develops an ingenious and generally persuasive argument about the cultural displacement of desire. I abstract it here because it throws an ironic light on the emergent eminence of the individual male householder. Belsey begins with the reminder that desire in the form of romantic love was not a property of the conjugal bond in the literature and culture of the medieval romances: “both senSocial Sources of Performance Anxiety

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sual and rhapsodic . . . it has as yet little to do with social institutions or political stability.” The significant tension was not the Victorian one between adultery and marriage. Rather, it centered on “the contradictory imperatives of love and honor.” Love no less than chivalry was a secular “value,” and both had distinct if conflicting “codes of appropriate behavior.” And if it was “dangerous and destructive,” it was not “domestic,” because at that time the operative unit was the dynastic family, instituted for reasons or functions that often demanded husbands to be older, sometimes much older, than their wives.15 Twelfth-century romances “show no sympathy with loveless marriages: jealous old husbands who lock up their wives deserve to lose them, and in these circumstances no guilt appears to attach to an adulterous wife.”16 In this “absolutist version of marriage,” women were formally and structurally (if not actually) marginalized, expressly reduced to “objects of exchange and the guarantee of dynastic continuity.”17 “Part of the project of the early modern romance of marriage,” therefore, was “to bring desire in from the cold: to moralize and domesticate a destabilizing passion, confining it within the safety of the loving family. Dynastic marriage must have been an anxious business, especially with so many adulterous love stories in circulation idealizing unfaithfulness.”18 The shift from the absolutist patrilineal/agnatic version to the more compact and narrowly circumscribed conjugal family unit involved a change in which the position of woman/wife/mother as equal but inferior became formally and structurally (if not actually) central. Although there has never been sexual equality in any regime, the inequality of women to men and of wives to husbands becomes more conspicuous and thus more problematic in a model that promises or demands a measure of equality because it makes the reciprocity of desire, affection, and romantic love normative. In this liberal-humanist version of marriage, women are represented as “autonomous subjects freely exercising their power to choose a husband”—an exercise putatively conducted “on the basis of romantic love”—“and becoming partners in the affective family.” But, Belsey styptically continues, the plays and the domestic conduct books of the Restoration period show “women as free to choose to the extent that they are free to acquiesce,” and the price they pay for the apparent upgrading of their position in the family “is their ex128

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clusion from the political,” since after 1660 “the family progressively becomes a privileged private realm of retreat from a public world increasingly experienced as hostile and alien.”19 They are not, however, excluded from the male imaginary, for it seems that only when desire in the guise of romantic love was co-opted as the affective guarantor of family values, only when the state designated and registered the individual male householder as a local site of its authority, only when women were formally allocated their proper place and unequal rights “in the bosom of the family”—only then were they structurally placed in the position to function in cultural fantasy as “dangerous familiars.” Belsey thus sees “a direct connection between the emergence of family values and the increasing perception of the loving family as a place of danger.”20 Such ironies of structural change were not restricted to northwest Europe. In her landmark essay on early modern Italian family portraits by Van Dyck and others, Diane Owens Hughes confronts Philippe Ariès’s argument that, while the links between the conjugal family and the lineage were weakening, “a new structure of authority” emerged “within the reduced family, as husbands seized authority to become domestic monarchs.”21 For Hughes, the situation is more complicated than Ariès represents it. From the Genoese family portraits she examines, she deduces that the positive ways in which women were represented did not reflect a new access to power by wives in more nucleated forms of domesticity. On the contrary, they were a compensatory response to “a steady erosion of their right to an equal share in the family [i.e., lineal] estate.” Hughes nevertheless finds “hints in the paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only that the domestic world was a creation of women, but also that men may have viewed it as a threat to their former authority.”22 Barbara Correll has discerned the same threat both in England and on the Continent during the Tudor period. After noting that “Erasmus’s discourse on civility and the fashioning of secular male selfhood . . . discloses an insistent concern for beleaguered masculine identity,” she goes on to propose a broader and more structural interpretation than the one she attributes to studies focused on Queen Elizabeth’s ability to upset her male subjects. Correll insists that “women became a cause of concern . . . because the conflict between hereditary and . . . bourgeois claims . . . calls Social Sources of Performance Anxiety

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attention to women as designated subordinates who . . . might threaten the uneasy dynamics of power.”23 Since, as Diarmaid MacCulloch observes of the nuclear family in northwestern Europe, “people married relatively late” and there was a “very small gap between the age of husband and wife,” marriage was “open to constant negotiation between patriarch and supposedly deferential wife.”24 Keith Moxey mounts a similar argument in his trenchant account of the various ways the battle of the sexes was depicted in illustrated broadsheets produced in sixteenth-century Nuremberg during the Reformation. He attributes the popularity of the motif to the effects of the long-term change from the medieval pattern in which women were married at puberty to a system “in which partners married when both were in their late twenties or early thirties—the man usually being older than the wife.” Moxey oddly speculates that “This change . . . would have enhanced the husband’s authority at the expense of the wife’s,” but as his subsequent comment and general argument indicate, he probably means that because the change structurally produces greater equality between partners it creates the need for the husband to reinforce his authority at the wife’s expense: The violence of the broadsheet imagery would thus have promoted male supremacy in a situation that was psychologically loaded. It seems unlikely that women who were entering marriage at a mature age would have found that their personal and social views coincided with their husband’s in every respect. As a consequence of their maturity, as well as the differences in age that separated them from their husbands, the potential for conflict must have increased.25 Such a “potential for conflict” is familiar to historians of the Dutch Republic: “Customary male markers of patriarchal dynasticism, the residue of a feudal warrior ethos or the accumulation of a territorial estate all being less important in the Republic, the aura and status of a family household assumed correspondingly more significance. And within that household, it was the wife that was held responsible for the contentment or disarray of the domestic regime.”26 Lacking the internal resources furnished in the older system by the elders and women of the lineage, the responsibility for policing the new

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faultlines had to devolve onto extradomestic cultural agencies. These agencies were generated from within the “new force of Calvinism” that developed strength in northern Europe as a reaction to the “ruthless repression of Charles V’s later years.”27 The story is familiar, and my emphasis in the pastiche of citations that follows falls on the connection between the Calvinist ministry and the domestic order. “The persecutions of the 1540s” produced large numbers of refugees who settled abroad, banded together, and “fell into the intellectual orbit of Calvin and his new church at Geneva.” Calvinism “proved an ideal creed” for such groups. The “Genevan church order,” with “its strong sense of discipline,” offered them “a clear and appropriate model of church organization.”28 The years leading up to and following the iconoclasm of 1566 were the crucial period in the development of this model, especially in Holland. An explosive mixture of religion and politics produced lasting shifts of social alliance and class power in a surprisingly short time. These included the emancipation of “the Dutch Calvinist communities . . . from reliance on their noble patrons,” many of whom were Catholic, and their increasing reliance on a well-educated merchant class, for whose members control of the local political and administrative machinery became essential to the successful conduct of their expanding commercial empire.29 By the 1590s, the role of Dutch Calvinism “in the struggle for freedom had ensured the church a central place in the life of the new state.” Its ministers “enjoyed regular and reasonably generous salaries.” Nevertheless, there was cause for disappointment. “Although a large proportion of the population frequented their services, only a relatively small number became full members of the church, placing themselves under its discipline and attesting their faith through an examination of doctrine.” And in such crucial areas as schooling and poor relief, “where the ministers hoped to establish their influence, the town magistrates frequently withheld their cooperation.”30 But if the people didn’t, in the fullest sense of the phrase, “go to church,” the church “went” to the people. In The Disciplinary Revolution, Philip Gorski asks how “the intensification of religious discipline in early modern Europe contributed to state strength.” His answer is that in a decentralized republic disciplinary power exercised at the local level of urban Social Sources of Performance Anxiety

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institutions produced a national moral culture: “the Reformed consistories and their various sister institutions” were among the most important “mechanisms of moral regulation and social control which permeated Dutch social life.” These mechanisms operated locally and were focused on the maintenance of “domestic order and stability.”31 Consistory elders, for example, “often went beyond their formal roles as moral policemen” in their efforts “to reunite married couples, reform abusive husbands, or locate missing fathers.” They “served a preventive as well as a punitive function and often behaved more like modern day social workers than early modern policemen.”32 The central state in the Netherlands may have been weak, but “the political and religious mechanisms that the churches and town councils used to enforce marital norms” and socialize the young made for an extremely strong “local state.” Gorski illustrates the power of the domestic model by noting that “the structure and routines of the orphanage were meant to mirror the structure and routines of an ideal family, with a house father and house mother . . . , a daily regimen of work and worship, a gendered division of labor, a strict accounting of income and expenditures, clean clothes and linen, and so on.”33 Gorski’s study provides a gloss on the conventional wisdom that, in Steven Ozment’s words, “More than any other single force or institution, the Protestant Reformation” not only supplied a “new concept of marriage” but also developed mechanisms for its local regulation.34 Ozment notes that “some gender specialists” consider the development of this model of “domestic partnership”— “mutually respectful and functionally sharing” yet “still legally unequal”—to have been a historical catastrophe for women.35 To this he mildly objects that married women seem “to have relished the authority they wielded as ‘housemothers’” despite “the drawbacks of marriage (frequent pregnancy, child rearing, deference to a husband),” and, like the authors cited above, he adduces “woodcut depictions of the ‘battle for the trousers’” as evidence for married women’s “self-perception as co-workers and co-earners with their husbands.”36 The question is whether their husbands viewed this self-perception with equanimity. When we add to the work of the consistory elders described above by Gorski the voluminous writings of Holland’s most industrious moral policeman, Jacob Cats, the answer may not be Yes. Cats’s 132

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influential book on marriage, Houwelyck (Marriage, 1625), was addressed to women and told them how to comport themselves through the six stages of life (maiden, girlfriend, bride, housewife, mother, widow), a sequence of roles defined in terms of their relations and responsibilities to men, family, and household. In other words, it was primarily women who needed to be policed, in part perhaps because they “exercised enormous power within the home, with or without their husband’s consent. Their authority was reinforced by legal protections that greatly exceeded those accorded women outside the Dutch Republic.”37 Commenting on the stereotype of the “obedient Dutchman, who allowed himself to be ruled by his wife,” van Deursen remarks that Cats offered his work “as a corrective for both spouses, but especially [for] wives.”38 The peculiar status of women in Dutch society has been illuminated by the work of Sherrin Marshall on gentry and burgher families. Marshall mobilizes an impressive array of archival evidence in support of her thesis that in the northern Netherlands between 1500 and 1650 a culture of reciprocity suffusing political, social, and legal interactions advanced the autonomy of women: “women and children in early modern Dutch society had legal rights that made them appear remarkably liberated, at least to many of their contemporaries. European opinion of the time considered Dutch women overly outspoken and independent.”39 The travel journals of several English visitors to the Netherlands in this period all agree in finding the Dutch housewife unusually independent, which is to say, big, voluble, and bossy.40 The power women exerted with their husbands’ whole-hearted consent was noticed in 1673, for example, by Sir William Temple, who wrote that whether it was owing to the dullness of the air in the United Provinces or that of the inhabitants’ “Appetites and Passions,” their “Married Women” were reliable household managers. They were trusted with “the whole care and absolute management of all their Domestick,” and they justified that trust.41 Eddy de Jongh cautions that if many foreign observers found Dutch husbands henpecked, the consensus may testify less to the truth than to the influence of a “contagious cliché.” But in his sensitively balanced comments on the topic, he goes on to acknowledge “the great independence of Dutch women” and to emphasize its connection to the active participation in business of women whose sea-faring husbands were often Social Sources of Performance Anxiety

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away from home.42 Men’s anxiety about women’s economic behavior is the subject of an excellent recent study by Elizabeth Honig: The women who come to market as buyers may be young flirts . . . or . . . established housewives. . . . But in either case they become part of a spectacle of available femininity at the market. They create desire (in men) even as they fulfill their own desire (for goods). In fact, they can manipulate the former in order to further their own pursuit of the latter. . . . Wifely purity and physical attraction are not easily reconciled when the context is public and economic, where cultural fears, desires, and demands exist in a heightened state of tension, contradicting one another.43 Other observers devote less attention to a woman’s powers of husbandry than to her worrisome ability to influence the selection of a husband. As Perry Chapman points out, although marriage choices in seventeenthcentury Holland were constrained by criteria of “social and religious compatibility,” matches “were made more for love and friendship than was the case in other and earlier societies where marriage remained primarily an economic and political contract between families.”44 Thus the women involved could have more influence on the outcome. Behind Cats’s injunctions, David Smith remarks, lies “a deep concern for the character of a couple’s relationship that would be merely incidental if dynastic interests were . . . [his] main concern.”45 This concern has been characterized by Agnes Sneller as the anxiety of a worried male strategist. Sneller cites one of the narratives in Cats’s Touchstone of the Wedding Ring (1637), which features the agency of a woman who initiates the relation of courtship and, in the end, “gets what she wants, for she can marry the man of her choice.”46 Nevertheless, the very words she uses to declare her love and to promise fidelity reestablish her subservience: “I will be faithful,” “I must be yours,” “I wish to be your servant.” Thus, Sneller observes, “the headstrong female . . . is no longer there. The strong young woman will disappear as soon as the marriage takes place.” Her independence “only meant that she was allowed to choose . . . to whom she should become subordinate.” So Cats’s moral is not only that the wife “will be the servant of her husband” but also that “she herself is the one who formulates this as her wish.”47 His moral, in 134

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short, is that all women should be willing to say the words (if not think the thoughts) of Shakespeare’s Rosalind in As You Like It: “To you I give myself for I am yours.”48 “To make the strong young woman disappear” expresses the reaction to a fantasy of male impotence that is at the source of the anxiety and precaution inscribed in the structure and routine of wedlock. “Cats used the authority of the Bible” to support the idea that “if women [are] inferior to men,” it is “not because men wanted it so, but because . . . it is women’s own choice”: “the moral attitude of women is shaped in such a way, that women themselves formulate their oppression . . . [by] men, especially their husbands, as the most desirable state of life.”49 Sneller’s “deconstruction” (her term) of Cats shows how a classic defense mechanism drives his argument and rhetoric: men imagine what women desire and then displace these fantasies onto women as their fantasies and desires.50 Recent studies of Dutch domestic ideology have explored this move with great sophistication. For example, Bryan Wolf argues that among the destabilizing transformations generated by the successes of early modern Dutch market society, the most important was the feminization of culture produced by economic specialization and the emergent divisions between commercial and domestic realms. The resultant specialization of labor “was figured within the cultural life of Dutch society through the language of gender. . . . Nation building was joined to trade and international finance, and both stood in contrast to the domestic virtues practiced not only in, but for ideological purposes confined to, the world of women and the home.”51 Wolf goes on to suggest that the efforts at policing women were symbolic displacements of unsuccessful efforts to police the market. The Dutch traffic in women consisted not “in the literal bargaining for wives” but in the symbolic procedure of “addressing a variety of issues tied to the period’s social and economic upheavals as if they were matters of gender. Talk about relations between the sexes, which tended to occur among preachers, authors, and other male custodians of civic morality, slid quickly into a moralizing discourse directed against women.”52 This generalization finds support in odd developments like the one described by John Loughman and John Michael Montias. Their investigation of inventories leads them to conclude that “divisions between ‘front Social Sources of Performance Anxiety

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stage’ and ‘backstage’ areas of home” became more marked during the seventeenth century, and that “Home-entertaining and the meeting of friends and business associates became a feature of household life in the second half of the century.”53 In other words, the domestic household became more important as a staging area for social gatherings in which affairs of business and government could be conducted. Suppose we deduce from this that the problem of public or professional self-representation moved into the home, and that during this period the proper policing of the family as a behavioral space therefore became more critical. Such a surmise adds ballast to Wolf’s assertion that the Dutch redirected the anxieties aroused by a volatile market economy to “a safer and better controlled arena: the world of women, children, and domestic virtue.”54 In the course of a stimulating essay about genre painting and gender, Elizabeth Honig remarks of “the space that genre painting defines as ‘domestic’” that it “is more intensely feminine than the home was in reality. . . . the ‘home’ as pictured in Dutch art is—like the female body—an internal, enclosed entity, possessed by one man, whose precarious entrances must be protected against (other) male invasion, yet which, precisely because of this nature, provokes a desire to penetrate, to know that which is hidden within.” Hence the question posed by “much Dutch painting”: “Is the bourgeois woman failing to guard the purity of her sacrosanct world from male penetration as she invites the entrance of his gaze?” Genre painting thus “plays with the anxieties of its male beholders.”55 This kind of play has been brilliantly theorized and explored by Wendy Wall in her study of early modern drama in England, Staging Domesticity. Wall reads domestic guides and manuals as male-authored fantasies “about fantasies devised by women”—for example, “an imagined moment when housewives, busy . . . [doing what they’re supposed to be doing] mask their production of invisible delights.” “Once housework is imagined as a site of fantasy,” Wall asks, “might it not have unexpected resonances for a culture where domesticity provided the template for political order?”56 And she goes on to argue that “the fear of a libidinal domestic space begins to speak to more than female sexuality in isolation.”57 Citing Elizabeth’s 1561 proclamation aimed at institutionalizing “the divide between the cross-gendered world of domesticity and the scholarly world of men,” Wall insists that it is “cross-gendered domestic 136

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life rather than sexuality per se that threatens the order of university students and faculty. . . . Elizabeth’s order cordons off universities not from the influence of women, generally, but from the domestic practices of ‘particular households.’”58 In addition to Wall’s and Honig’s common emphasis on male anxiety, the former’s account of normal housework as the site of possible illicit fantasies perfectly mirrors a familiar theme emphasized by historians of Dutch art: the famous hidden meanings that lead them to interrogate the disinterestedness or “realism” with which domestic interiors were depicted in so many Genre paintings and some family portraits.59 It isn’t inconsequential that “nearly all paintings of domestic interiors were done by men.”60 The fictiveness of such items as fancy floors and tapestries, sequences of rooms en enfilade, and radiance that ignores the limitations of indoor illumination have often been noted.61 As Westermann observes in an important essay, “these striking illusions of a domestic actuality can be highly tendentious” because they play an “active role in echoing, reinforcing, and even shaping powerful ideals of the family and its perfectly designed shelter.”62 But among the genres of Dutch portraiture I discuss in this study, the structural tensions that beset “the cross-gendered world of domesticity” are most strikingly and consistently manifested by the poses of wives and husbands in double portraits and in the paired marriage portraits called pendants.

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Part Three p i c t u r i n g fa m i ly va l u e s

9

The Preacher’s Wife

“Pendant pairs were much more common in seventeenth-century Holland than double portraits (where a husband and wife are shown in the same painting). This may be because pendant portraits maintained the autonomy or individuality of both husband and wife.”1 The explanation implies that wives got a better deal in pendants simply because they occupied their own picture space, and it also implies that they had enough input and influence to affect the production ratio. But David Smith has shown in his wonderfully illuminating “Rhetoric and Prose in Dutch Portraiture” that painters often treat the wife in a double portrait reasonably well—so long as her pose demonstrates appropriate support and devotion, a condition that by no means excludes emphasis on her autonomy.2 Because the degree of autonomy is a central question posed by Rembrandt’s great 1641 double portrait of a Mennonite preacher and his wife, Cornelis Claesz Anslo and Aaltje Gerritsdr Schouten, I begin with a discussion of that work (pl. 7). Responses to it tend to focus less on Schouten’s autonomy than on her passivity: Anslo’s wife plays a passive role.3 Rembrandt shows her under the spell of her husband’s words. It is a brilliant characterization of a person in thought.4 His wife stands model for the Christian audience. With her ear, rather than her eyes, turned towards him, she is absorbed in his words.5 141

These characterizations fully accord with the comment on the portrait written in 1767 by the couple’s great-grandson. After remarking on the commercial success reflected in the sitters’ clothes and the table covering, he emphasizes “the fruits” not of Anslo’s wealth but of his piety: he was so dedicated to his ministry “that the fruits of his faith and religion . . . nourished, and were relished by, his listeners,” so that, like a good husband and father, “he deposited the seed within his wife and children as well. And this is how he is portrayed . . . in the . . . painting, speaking to his wife about the Bible lying open before him on a table.” She “listens to him attentively and with visible concentration.”6 A much harsher account of the interplay between the preacher’s demeanor and the wife’s reaction appears in Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes. He begins with the suggestion that Rembrandt’s portrayal of Anslo is not entirely complimentary: “The preacher garbed in his fur-trimmed wealth and doctrinal certainty leans heavily toward his wife, benevolently overbearing, just short of bullying, and looks directly at her as if expecting acknowledgment of some error.” He goes on to factor this aggressive posture into the portrayal of the wife: Aaltje Schouten’s face is “brilliantly” lit as if it were illuminated by her correction. A little cowed, the wife stares at the book rather than at her husband, her head slightly cocked like an obedient pet or a contrite child, . . . a picture of patient and, Rembrandt makes us feel, accustomed compliance. But if her face speaks of patient resignation . . . her hands say something else. The left hand in particular, with its veins standing out, the knuckles tensed, kneads and crumples the handkerchief, conveying the hard work of being perpetually on the receiving end of the Word. Which is not to say that there is anything even mildly skeptical or subversive about Rembrandt’s painting. The mood he has conjured up, it’s true, is a long way from the mutual companionship implied in the double portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit or even that of the ship’s architect and his wife. But it is nonetheless a portrait of a partnership, even if a markedly unequal one. More to the point perhaps, Rembrandt has once again sized up the essential human truth in a relationship and made it monumental.7

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Schama reads the visual interaction between the sitters as “a portrait of a partnership,” that is, he reads it not merely as the iconic sign of an act of posing but as the index to a more enduring “relationship” (a habitus, a marital scenario) and to its “essential human truth.” I have two objections to the interpretive procedure that generates this reading. The first is that in jumping directly from inferences about sitters to inferences about their originals, Schama leaps over the posographical event—the imitation of the act of posing—to speculate about the effect on the sitters of a long-term relationship. The second is that having thus characterized the marital scenario he turns around and lets this determination limit the range of detail he considers relevant to the scenario’s “essential human truth.” As a result, he minimizes the significance of visual information that may complicate or depart from the scenario, information that affects the viewer’s response to the more immediate drama of the pose. In the disposition of the two figures, for example, cues to scale contradict cues to depth. Although Anslo’s face and figure are notionally behind his wife’s in the spatial composition, they are nevertheless larger, and the space occupied by his body is hyperbolically deepened by the contrasting treatment of his two hands. The massive hand in vivid chiaroscuro (which is twice the size of hers) projects forward much closer to the picture plane than she does, making her appear smaller, while the sketchy treatment of his other hand flattens it back into shadow, even though its blocklike form pressing the table suggests how important it is to the maintenance of his oratorical pose. The books on the table seem to be the source of the light that bathes part of his face and hand in a golden glow—an effect that visually suggests the textual source of his charismatic authority. If we register the way the scalar disconnect between their two sizes accentuates the impression that he is crowding her, we may decide that she gathers herself in as if recoiling from his aggressive gesture—that the cost of “being perpetually on the receiving end of the Word” impinges on the pose she holds for the painter. As his elbow angles obtusely toward her, she folds her hands and handkerchief over the otherwise exposed interior of the corresponding angle formed by her lap. Because my modifications of Schama’s reading depend on that reading, they’re vulnerable to the criticism leveled by Stephanie Dickey in her important new study of Rembrandt. Dickey objects that interpretations like The Preacher’s Wife

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Schama’s frame the portrait in the wrong context—a stereotypical domestic context in which the figure of Anslo’s wife is “nothing more than a long-suffering housewife who listens patiently while her husband rehearses his sermon or rebukes her for some minor failing.”8 She shows that when the portrait is placed in the more precise historical setting of Mennonite theology and practice, it emphasizes “spiritual companionship”: “Rembrandt portrays Aaltje Gerritsdr as a personification of inward illumination and deep spiritual response.” Her “slightly parted lips” and “unfocused gaze” convey “the sense that her thoughts are turned inward, meditating on what she hears. The intensity of her response is conveyed by her hands, tightly clutching the handkerchief in her lap.”9 Her “active silence” testifies to an “experience of inward revelation” that “complements his demonstrative enunciation.”10 I prefer Dickey’s version of the scenario to Schama’s, but I would qualify it by placing more emphasis on the double structure of the portrait situation. A portrait represents the interaction of posing per se as much as it represents any interaction additional to posing that sitters pretend to engage in. If Anslo and his wife are posing as if not posing, they are also visibly posing (as if not posing). The posographical drama lies in the relation (tension, accommodation) between these two registers of performance. Neither Schama nor Dickey distinguishes between the registers consistently enough to characterize the relation. Both articulate scenarios in which the additional drama stands clear of, or is unaffected by, the performance of posing. Schama treats the moment as symptomatic of a general condition: the inequality of their partnership and its cost to the wife. Dickey picks out a rhetorical moment: the wife is portrayed listening and responding positively to her husband’s words. Similarly, Mariët Westermann describes him as “leaning away from his desk to speak to his wife and his imaginary audience,” a statement qualified two sentences later: “Reaching a universal congregation, he does not regard his wife or anyone in particular.”11 Dickey’s scenario builds on two plausible and mutually reinforcing suggestions. The first is that Anslo practices an oration in his wife’s presence. The second is that, contrary to Schama’s assertion that Anslo “looks directly at” his wife, he gazes beyond her into observer space—as if addressing his imaginary audience.12 However, when we consider Rem144

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brandt’s rendering of his hand, this rhetorical moment transparently gives way to the act of posing that sustains it. The hand poised above and in front of Schouten’s much smaller figure is frozen in a clarity of contour. Its immobility of form is contrastively accentuated by all the cues to movement in the surrounding areas: the fluttery treatment of the book pages and the indefinite depiction of his robe and the tapestry on the table (depiction that signifies visual data registered in a fleeting glance). Thus rather than presenting Anslo in the midst of a rhetorical gesture, Rembrandt presents him holding a pose that may be interpretable as “pretending to gesture.” Similarly, Schouten poses as if listening intently and as if visibly moved by Anslo’s words. Her parted lips suggest the attitude of sympathetic auscultation Dickey terms “active silence.” She seems to be cocking her head and gazing past him as if pretending to listen. But she too is immobilized: her head, neatly inserted into her collar as into a life preserver, is outlined by the darkness that frames it. In each figure the immobilizing contours signify the holding pattern of the sitter’s pose. The light that gives Schouten the hue and tone of delicate china differs in quality from the more flame-tinted light by which Anslo is illuminated, and it seems to come from a source higher and closer to observer space than the light bouncing from the books onto Anslo.13 This could indeed signify the light of “inward revelation.” But it also contributes to another effect, an effect that nudges my sense of the portrait away from Dickey’s more positive account and toward Schama’s reading. The differences in scale and light suggest that the sitters posed in two separate spaces, as if Rembrandt had compressed the two acts of posing and thus produced the effect of a catachrestically collapsed pair of pendant performances.14 This makes for high posographical drama. Anslo looms toward Schouten, invades her space, and speaks past her. His aggressive pose, which indicates that he still finds it necessary to police boundaries, affects the tone of her attentiveness. It makes her seem to lean away to give him room. Shrinking back toward her corner, she makes herself small. Rembrandt’s double portrait suggests the danger to wives of sacrificing the protection offered them by the separated spaces of paired pendants. The form this protection takes is the subject of the next chapter.

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the elbow in its most perfectly evolved form—the arms akimbo— . . . [came] close to achieving the status of a national attribute as an integral aspect of the imagery of the alert, on guard, proud regent class who managed so successfully to inform the values of seventeenth-century Holland.1 Both women and children in seventeenth-century Holland were viewed by foreigners as “overly outspoken and independent.”2

10

Women with Elbows

The pendants reproduced in figures 25 and 26 were painted by the Haarlem portraitist Johannes Verspronck and dated 1641 (his) and 1640 (hers). A popular genre in seventeenth-century Holland, pendants feature a limited repertory of poses or pose conventions that reflect—reassert, rather— the assumptions, laws, and interests of gender, class or rank, and status: The paintings would have faced one another, perhaps on either side of a chimneypiece. Almost invariably, the woman’s portrait would hang at right, the man’s at left. From the perspective of the sitters, this convention placed the woman on the man’s sinister (left-hand) or lesser side, according to theological and social formulas which valued the dexter (right-hand) position more highly. This rule conformed to seventeenth-century Dutch views of marriage as a partnership based on mutual affection but steered by the man.3 The repertory of poses gains or maintains its authority by being constantly repeated, albeit with variations. Sitters, painters, and images imitate prior sitters, painters, and images, and (as I note above) this sameness, this redundancy, by itself produces ideological and rhetorical reinforcement, broadcasting a consistent message about burgerlijk style and virtues. These may be trite observations, but they take on special meaning when applied to the portrait subgenre of pendants. The word pendant, whatever its actual etymology, suggests that the ideal relation between any pair of figures is achieved when each figure is 147

figure 25. Johannes Verspronck, Portrait of a Man (1641). Enschede, Collectie Rijksmuseum Twenthe. Photo R. Klein Gotink.

shown to depend on and lean toward the other. The space between the frames is part of this relation: a marker of separateness, of relative independence, of confinement, but also (as we’ll see) the marker of a site of public scrutiny, of exposure, and therefore of vulnerability; a reminder that the two sitters are never merely a dyad. The space marks the interruption of each partner’s turn toward the other as both their bodies fol-

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figure 26. Johannes Verspronck, Portrait of a Woman (1640). Enschede, Collectie Rijksmuseum Twenthe. Photo R. Klein Gotink.

low faces that rotate out toward the indispensable third party, the virtual observer who completes—and who disrupts—their symmetrical acts of self-presentation. Whether in public or private installations, pendants on display create behind and around themselves a mural area that represents the domestic setting in which the images first hung and their subjects lived. It is as if

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they carry a section of the original household interior with them wherever they wander—so long as they aren’t separated. Since the portraits are separate, they’re separable, and this means their future is uncertain. Many pendant pairs end up divorced, in different domiciles of display. No wonder the occasional sitter looks a little tense. Pendants generally, and generically, advertise two things: harmonious domestic life and comfortable social standing. Once again, the force of this advertisement is amplified by the sameness manifested at two levels: first, the family resemblances among all pendants that constitute them as a genre and, second, those between the partners in the individual pair of pendants. The great majority of sitters wear roughly the same clothes and strike roughly similar poses. In any pair, for example, both partners turn inward toward the center and toward each other, with the outer arm (his right, her left) closer to the observer than the inner arm. In spite of variations and different angles of pose, their figures tend to mirror each other. Obviously, not every sitter wears only white-on-black. When you draw closer you find aggressive emulations as well as deferential imitations, and you also find variations and attempts at novelty—new inventions, new departures—by sitters and painters alike. Neverthless, these only testify to the need for difference in the face of the repetitiveness imposed by a relatively restricted code of class self-definition. Predictably, an important feature of the code is the failure of pendants to advertise the harmony and well-being of married life under the rule of equal rights. The husband’s dominance is marked not only by position but also by size and proximity: in addition to occupying the right side, his body tends either to be larger than his wife’s or else to be closer to the picture plane. It may project more aggressively than hers toward the observer, as when Verspronck’s husband thrusts an elbow through the picture plane. Sometimes, when the husband’s relation to the observer is more oblique and the wife’s more frontal, he may appear to be presenting her as his prize and pride. A coyly muffled or restrained version of this gesture is often produced by the mere direction of the husband’s hand, which may seem to point toward his partner while actually being used to hold a glove or hat. By such means the painter presents him as mediator between his wife and the world. Her part is graciously—and gratefully—to acknowledge her place and, in effect, to all but curtsey. If the pair’s symmetrically 150

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mirroring poses express domestic harmony, they also express the normative difference between the authority he gets from his role as male spouse and the obeisance, the obedience, inscribed in the role she’s expected to perform. He claims responsibility for the domestic harmony he bought and supervises; she maintains it, exercising a separate role within whatever he claims for himself. These comments apply to the majority of examples in what Westermann calls “a voluminous genre, which did not change significantly over the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century.” She describes pendants as the portrait painter’s “bread and butter,” and she uses the Verspronck pendants reproduced in figures 25 and 26 above to exemplify the standard emphasis on the way “the man’s active stance and the woman’s physical reticence” contribute to “the harmonious balance of their union,” as the partners produce an impression of “effortless concord by conforming to their preferred roles.”4 Concord doesn’t rule out contrast or competition: “Not only do paired portraits of husbands and wives implicitly relate to the larger theme of marriage, but the contrasts between the sitters often help to define further the character of each. The imagined interplay of two personalities and, on a broader plane, the dialectic of masculinity and femininity itself play a crucial role in the meaning of the companion piece.”5 Traces of resistance to “effortless concord” begin to make themselves felt in Verspronck’s pendants as soon as you notice the effect produced both on the relation of the figures and on the positioning of the observer by a phenomenon these sitters share with many others: exotropy, or walleyedness. The man’s right eye wanders toward his right, the woman’s left eye toward her left. In her case this reinforces an effect already produced by the turn of her head and body: she seems to be viewing the observer over her shoulder, and the shoulder itself, resplendent in its layered collars, demands your attention. If his aggressive elbow keeps you centered—prevents you from following the wandering eye to your left—her stance pulls you to the right, away from him. And something vaguer but more interesting happens when you try to read the ensemble of her facial expression and bodily gesture. The ensemble delivers an impertinently pertinent message about the wifely prerogative: “It’s not my role to talk. Therefore, although I Women with Elbows

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have something to say, I won’t say a word.” Notice also how the background lighting increases the projective or aggressive thrust of his body, while she is drawn by the lower intensity of ambient lighting into the shadows as a more withheld—I would even say a more mysterious—figure. His pose is contorted and affected by its concentration on the performing elbow and seems even more affected and strained in the neighborhood of her quietly self-assured composure. The elbow is a famous bone (or joint) of contention. Several languages celebrate both its defensive and its aggressive behavior, and so does Shakespeare: recall Kent’s reference to King Lear, “A sovereign shame so elbowed him,” or the English lesson in Henry V, when the French princess is turning the body into an armory and the elbow becomes a bilbow (a sword) or an ill bow. In her fine and funny essay on the topic, Joaneath Spicer explains that the elbow began to stick out of certain male bodies and proclaim their manliness in Western European portraits of the late fifteenth century. The bodies in question belonged typically to aristocratic and military persons interested in “registering self-possession and control.” By the early seventeenth century, especially in the work of Italian and Dutch artists, “an explosion of male elbows” rocked the burgher class.6 Like the sword, the codpiece, and the plume, the Renaissance elbow is a symptom of the dis-ease, the anxiety, the representational pathology, of status and gender, especially in the members of a nonmilitary, nonaristocratic, lately arrived class like the regents. From an array of male sitters in the different portrait genres, one could easily assemble a manual of elbows, whose function would nicely reinforce or supplement that of a manual of arms. Verspronck often depicts his male sitters seeking the protection of this pose, but it takes a Rembrandt to imagine women with elbows. Plates 8 and 9 are his 1634 portraits of a Calvinist preacher and his wife. Both place their right hands on their chair arms and their left hands on their bodies. Her hand rests on her bodice, with fingers closed or loosely cupped, but positionally it follows his and points across the divide toward his manual profession of faith or avowal. David Smith notes that the angle of the chair forces the male sitter to turn his head more sharply to face the viewer, lending the image “a slightly restless angularity, a theme . . . also picked up in the clutter of books on his desk.”7 To this I 152

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add that the same details register a touch of impatience with the work of posing, which takes the scholar away from his research. They might also register something else. The preacher’s chair is angled toward his wife in a manner that conforms to a conventional feature of the genre: the husband mediates between his wife and the world as her presenter. This places him closer to the picture plane. But here the convention is invoked only to be violated. Although his hand, with its fingers spread apart, may signify marital or religious faithfulness, it is also a gesture of emphatic self-identification. And even as he leans more toward her than she does toward him, his leaning becomes assimilated to the selfidentifying gesture, which is secured by the way his compact and defended form coils tensely about itself. Because his gaze is slightly diffused rather than direct—one eye wanders leftward—he begins to appear selfconsciously dutiful. I don’t mean he looks like a dutiful husband, though. I mean he looks like someone dutifully holding a pose. The accent in this pair of pendants is mainly on him. His space is so busy with the signs of his calling that it makes hers, by contrast, seem vacant. They pose in separate rooms, yet although she is excluded from his work space everything in her pendant slips downward and leftward toward him and reinforces the visual crossing that reaches its climax in his expressive hand. Similarly, the folds of her gown, flowing loosely down and fanning out, indicate that her knees and lower body are positioned closer than her head and upper body to his pendant. So far, then, the signifiers of male dominance seem to be doing their conventional thing, and she, at first glance, is predictably both cooperative and deferential. More frontal and open, calmer and less dynamic, her figure sits farther back, an effect enhanced by the broad-brimmed hat that shadows her eyes. Nevertheless, the very openness and frontality of her pose contribute to a countermovement that subversively resists her subordinate role. The resistance centers on the subdued but noticeable contrapposto produced by the tilt and shading of her collar, which accentuates the turn of her upper body away from him and toward the observer. This conflicts with the angle of a chair that seems to have been aimed in his direction, in accordance with the standard scenario of mirroring poses. She now appears awkwardly positioned in the chair, as if she had departed from the standard plan in order to stake a claim to equal rights and compete with her Women with Elbows

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husband for the observer’s attention. Of the supporting props, the use of the curtain is the most important contributor to this seditious effect: the curtain framing him and looping over the books directs attention not only to them but also toward her. The echoing direction of her curtain, drawn aside as if to display her, completes that movement. My sense of the sitter builds on Smith’s comment that the play of horizontals culminating in the hat works “to turn passivity into deep, quiet stability. The shadow cast over her eyes by . . . the hat and her calm enigmatic smile suggest that the outward conventionality of her pose veils inner resources of strength and will. Rembrandt may even have wanted to suggest that she was the stronger of the two.”8 Her hat, which is essentially a man’s hat, contributes to this effect. She is one of a very few women in pendants and pair portraits who wear one (Rubens’s wife is the only other example I know).9 In 1641 Rembrandt produced his intricate and haunting pendants of Nicolaes van Bambeeck and Agatha Bas (plates 10 and 11), pendants famous for the illusionistic trick produced by the painted ebony frames beyond which both sitters project (her thumb and fan, his right elbow). Schama’s sensitive reading of these pendants takes into account the fact that van Bambeeck’s social standing was inferior to that of his wife’s family, and that this “made the concern to balance display and reticence within the portraits of the married couple an even trickier calculation than usual. The husband had to appear to be the authority figure, but Agatha Bas’s illustrious pedigree made it imperative that she should show off the splendor of her fortune and rank, yet without going beyond the bounds of wifely duty.”10 Having noted this, Schama goes on to describe the subtle devices by which Rembrandt visualizes the harmonious interaction between husband and wife: the fact that van Bambeeck stands within the framed space but still in front of another wooden door behind him gives a sense, simultaneously, that he is both master of his house and yet hospitably approachable. . . . His wife’s portrait . . . retains this strong sense of a figure both inside and outside the domestic space. . . . Both her hands, like those of her husband, protrude through the frame, and they too carry simultaneous messages of modesty and show.11

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It’s true that the vectors drawing the eye from the viewer’s left toward the right, from the husband toward the wife, accentuate a conventional pattern in pendants: he is turned toward her more than she toward him to signify that he is the mediator and superior who presents his wife as his property, and who claims credit for the splendor in which she’s attired. Even though she is placed higher in her frame than he in his, suggesting that he is either seated or shorter, the formal triangle that has its base in her head and fan converges on his head and thus maintains at least his compositional primacy. Schama’s benign emphasis on analogy and complementarity nevertheless underplays another set of effects that accord equally well with the logic of the social disparity he reports, for the harmony he ascribes to the couple is no sooner registered than it’s challenged. Look first at the significant difference in the rendering of detail. On the one hand, his arms and hands encircle a deeply shadowed area. You may be inclined to peer into the shadow, but since you can’t make anything out, you keep your distance, especially because of the stiff manner in which he looks you off and fences himself in while demanding your respect. She, on the other hand, more directly and even invitingly engages the viewer with her unfolded fan, giving herself to be seen and watching herself being watched. David Smith comments on the ambivalence with which Agatha Bas leans against the frame as if “buttressing herself from the audience,” while she extends the fan in a quietly discreet and delicately understated but still obvious gesture of “feminine appeal.”12 Her husband seems closer to the viewer than she is, but her presence is more tangible.13 The finely painted and textured surfaces of her fan, bodice, sleeves, and collar may at first create the effect of armor, but they pull the viewer in close to admire the detail, which means to admire both the painter’s skill and the sitter’s sartorial panache. She seems on the verge of stepping into the observer’s space and threatens to monopolize your gaze. When you become aware of this and look back toward him, he too starts to edge nervously forward and push his nose through the picture plane. His pose modulates into a more intense and tightlipped effort to reclaim priority of place. This contrast further accentuates the oddest feature of his pose. The hand that tightly holds the glove is a discernible feint toward the conventional gesture of presentation. But because the glove points stubbornly Women with Elbows

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downward and his other arm and hand swing around to obstruct the presentational path, the gesture—like the sitter—seems blocked, as if he can’t quite force himself to display the courtesy he know he’s expected to perform. Maybe this is why the pendants have separated. He now languishes in Brussels, while she’s appropriately domiciled in Buckingham Palace. Although I have considered only three sets of pendants in this brief interpretive sketch, it’s obvious to me that the sketch has left itself open to a charge frequently leveled at my work in the fields of literary and dramatic criticism: the charge that as a reader of texts (and now images) I am indiscriminately suspicious and view everything in the same skeptical or even cynical light. Where a certain school of Dutch art historians see only vanitas in every bird, bud, or brick, I see only irony. Isn’t it possible to find paired sitters whom the painter portrays as innocently and wholeheartedly contributing, in Westermann’s words, to “the harmonious balance of their union,” sitters who produce an impression of “effortless concord by conforming to their preferred roles”?14 Or to rephrase this in a more cautious manner, sitters in whose poses the signifiers of unalloyed affection shine through in spite of the inducements to competitive posing that are structural components of the genre? A shining that neither the vanitarian nor the ironist can fully extinguish? My favorites in this respect are two related pairs of pendants painted by Frans Hals, the first of Joseph Coymans and Dorothea Berck, dated 1644, and the second of their daughter Isabella and her husband, Stephanus Geraerdts, painted some time between 1650 and 1652 (figs. 27 and 28; plates 12 and 13). Berck and Coymans are depicted in restrained and sober poses well described by Westermann: “Hals subtly suggests the near-equal relationship between the spouses by gently inclining the figures toward each other: their forms are approximately mirrored, although his is more solidly expansive and taller than hers. He raises his gloved left arm and gazes out in a posture suggesting the quiet confidence of the household head,” whereas she “appears in gentler mode, with her arms folded demurely and her lips curved in an incipient smile.”15 Rather than actively raising his arm, he appears to suspend it in his cloak as in a sling. A muffled version of the Renaissance elbow, this motif is frequently found in male pendants. At this level of detail, there are bound to be small differences among in156

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terpretations of a particular sitter’s physiognomy. Westermann’s terms— “gentler,” “demurely,” and “incipient smile”—pick out qualities and an attitude that are more ladylike, more complaisant, than those I see. Berck’s demeanor and its context suggest a tougher-minded performance, one clearly gauged both as a contrast and as an accommodation to the “quiet [or aggressive?] confidence” with which Coymans gives the observer his right shoulder. In a compensatory move, she turns diagonally and gathers herself in behind her folded arms and hands: if he juts forward, she will pull back; if his form is convex, she will make hers concave. This is especially noticeable in the way she appears to tuck in her chin. Hals brilliantly uses differences of depth and articulation to choreograph their competition. On the one hand, the wall signified by Coymans’s coat of arms (which oddly resembles an abstract or mask of his features) appears close to the picture plane and squeezes his bulky figure forward in a shallow space. This effect alters the meaning of his expression; now he seems to draw back as if from an observer who stands too close. On the other hand, the small and dim coat of arms behind Berck positions her in a deeper interval of space. The open pose keeps her forward shoulder respectfully behind his, but at the same time it puts her in more direct contact with viewers than with him. His figure is closer and larger than hers. But she is rendered in such vivid detail that, even as viewers are pushed back by the assertive volume of Coymans’s form, they are drawn in by the graphic and textural bravado with which Hals explores Dorothea Berck. Of the contrast between these pendants, Westermann notes that it is conventional for women’s faces to be “painted more smoothly, less ruddily, and less vigorously than those of men.”16 Nevertheless, the bravura treatment of detail pulls us in toward Berck, while the economic and impressionistic treatment of Coymans keeps us at a distance. A more intimate and dynamic attraction draws the observer’s attention past his gaze to settle on hers. The climax and turning point of the interplay between them occurs in the dance of their gloves. As his gloved hand moves forward, hers moves back to close protectively, deferentially, over her wrist. Yet if the glove on her right hand is mate to the glove on his left, hers becomes a more positive and richly symbolic gesture—at once independent and submissive— Women with Elbows

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figure 27. Frans Hals, Portrait of Joseph Coymans (1644). Hartford, Conn., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, The Ella Gallup Summer and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund.

of connectedness: it signifies that she has freely chosen to acknowledge his authority. She presents herself “wearing” his presentational gesture on her hand. If we then read his pose as a response to hers, we see him quietly but supportively gesturing toward that gesture in acknowledgment of her acknowledgment. Hals’s depiction of love in the next generation is more playful, and the

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figure 28. Frans Hals, Portrait of Dorothea Berck, Wife of Joseph Coymans (1644). Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Mary Frick Jacobs Collection, BMA 1938.231.

joyous intimacy of Isabella Coymans and Stephanus Geraerdts has been sensitively characterized by Chapman, Slive, and Smith: For all their markers of status and wealth, from coats of arms to lavish clothing, Frans Hals’s remarkable pendants . . . convey, above all, this couple’s sheer joy in each other. Geraerdts has eyes only for

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his wife, whom he presents to the viewer. She, in turn, meets his gaze and, smiling, offers him a rose.17 When juxtaposed, the glances they exchange, their smiles, and their gestures create a tension that psychologically and rhythmically binds them together.18 Usually, amorous relationships of this sort have aristocratic overtones of courtly love and the husband is cast as the suitor. At least one might have expected Stephanus Geraerdts to have the courtesy to stand up. That he remains seated indicates that their relationship is no more bound by such conventional rituals than it is concerned with husbandly authority. . . . They are wholly bound up in each other and in the passing moment, and neither makes any attempt to establish a rhetorical relationship with the spectator.19 I take issue only with Smith’s final statement. I think Hals portrays both sitters in the act of establishing a strong rhetorical claim on the observer. Both, to use theatrical jargon, are hamming it up. Self-consciously, flirtatiously, and with marked amusement, each meeting the other’s eyes and matching the other’s pose, each delighting in and responding to the other, they are indeed “wholly bound up in each other and in the passing moment”: the moment of posing. “How do you like this?” What each affectionately enjoys, in mutuality and trust, is the other’s performance of affection. “A tension that psychologically and rhythmically binds them together” (my emphasis): Slive’s phrasing, perhaps inadvertently, glances at some divisive pressure they have to overcome. With this cue, small pockets of resistance materialize and testify to the diffidence that inhabits the conventional offsets of the pendant genre. As he extends his arm to present her, she seizes the initiative and converts the standard lordly gesture into a reaction to her offer of the rose.20 And as her head turns toward him, her body stubbornly refuses to follow, a resistance emphasized by the direction of Hals’s fine and restless slashes of paint. They propel the viewer’s gaze from her foreshortened right sleeve across the bow at her waist toward the more subdued form of the left arm and gloved hand that hang inertly and seem to anchor her in place or even tug her away from her partner. When we take this resistant motion into account, his gesture 160

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comes to seem more importunate— until we look again and realize that he too gestures toward her from a fenced-in position, reaching his hand across the barrier of his left arm, which rests on a chair. As their right arms converge, their left arms rhythmically balance and perhaps resist the convergence. Enveloped in Hals’s gorgeous skein of ambages, his two sitters register their love as best they can: by posing as if acknowledging and delighting in each other’s pose. Sitters wouldn’t be satisfied if their poses were carbon copies of the pendants already in their neighbors’ houses. Painters can add this motive to their own desire to surpass their peers and predecessors. No doubt, the differences within sameness only reassert and multiply the power of generic conventions to produce new examples of the old genre. This holds true of all forms of production, but within the pendant genre the play of antithetical forces resonates with special intensity. More often than not, pendants register a pull between the two sitters’ positional reciprocity and their performative competition. On the one hand, within the limits of a differentiated gender hierarchy, there is the scenario of cooperation, in which husband and wife present themselves as companions, as company for each other. They also form a company in another sense: they’re members of a legal and contractual partnership—a limited corporation. On the other hand, this companionate scenario opens up the possibility of resistance, difference, competition, challenge. It opens up the possibility that the wife will pose so as to perform resistance to her place, will pose so as to assert her presence and demand more attention from the observer, will lay a subversive claim to equal rights. She may, for example, insist on your undivided attention by turning her body and arranging her gestures in a manner you can’t ignore. Every time she makes a claim for equal performative rights, she challenges the terms of the marriage contract. The paired pendants may well have turned out to be more separable than the couples they represent, but the separability of the material images itself underlines a structural danger in their sitters’ coupleness. I conclude with an observation prompted by Westermann’s comment cited at the beginning of this chapter: “Almost invariably, the woman’s portrait would hang at right, the man’s at left. From the perspective of the sitters, this convention placed the woman on the man’s sinister (leftWomen with Elbows

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hand) or lesser side, according to theological and social formulas which valued the dexter (right-hand) position more highly.”21 But it doesn’t help the husband’s cause that the “convention” is contravened by perceptual fact, which accords symbolic dominance to the wife: viewers see the wife on the right and the husband on the left. The irony of reversed orientation is the greatest formal and symbolic challenge to the proper display of domestic hierarchy in pendants because it is the most obvious and least eradicable. It is a constant reminder of the vulnerability and anxiety inherent in the demand to be treated as a superior. And it registers a pressure on the male spouse which can be translated into an advantage for his wife at least in the activity of posing. Finally, it enhances the power of the deferred viewer, who is obliged to make the correction that will restore the husband to his rightful place.22

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The concert has not obstructed posing. . . . On the contrary, one can with some justice claim that posing predominated.1

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Families Making Music

Pendants are a synecdoche of the nuclear household and family. In representing the domestic center, they not only emphasize its two normative features, hierarchy and companionship, but also exploit the possibilities for competition and resistance inherent in the conventions used to depict these features. But they are confined to the spousal couple. What happens when the couple are depicted as parents with children and other members of their household in family group portaits? More specifically, what happens in the rare instance in which pendants are part of a family portrait?2 The instance in question is a group portrait painted in the mid-1630s by Jan Miense Molenaer (pl. 14). It shows “a group playing music in a domestic interior, on the rear wall of which hang pendants of a man and woman with eight smaller portraits arranged beneath them. The members of the musical company range from middle age to childhood, which suggests that they belong to the same family and are immediate descendants of the people portrayed on the wall.” The pendant parents hold prayer-books and wear costumes that “place them about a generation earlier.”3 All in all, the picture seems to be doing what family portraits are supposed to do: reinforce “values of domestic order, familial harmony, and the continuity of generations.”4 It represents the sort of “wellmanaged nuclear family” of which Jan Steen’s dissolute household is “a transparent send-up.”5 The portrait has been variously called Family Making Music, Family Portrait, and Self-Portrait with Family Members.6 Dennis Weller supports 163

his choice of the third title by giving reasons why the standing figure— from now on, let’s call him “Molenaer”—must represent the artist and the other sitters members of his immediate family. Weller deduces from documentary evidence that the man grasping a skull in the pendant may be the artist’s “recently deceased father,” while the other pendant probably represents the father’s second wife. He adds that the mother must be “very much alive . . . : the sand in the hourglass sitting next to her has yet to run out.”7 These inferences would account historically for the tonal difference between the pendants. The figure of the father seems dim and faded compared to that of the wife. Having won in the battle of the pendants, she projects authoritatively forward into the next generation and competes with “Molenaer” for the viewer’s attention. Weller’s explanation supplies a hyperbolic comment on the social dominance of the wife and matriarch. But it doesn’t go much further; it doesn’t confront the details and consequences of the complicated group pose. The row of smaller half-length portraits in black frames under the pendants, for example, arouses curiosity for several reasons. They are equal in number to the foreground sitters, though only five are fully visible. Are they portraits of those sitters? The visible portraits appear to show sitters in fancy dress, some with coats of arms. But their dimness teases the eye. They are as faded in quality as the pendant father (though lighter in tone). Do they commemorate the living or the dead? Do the musicians imitate, commemorate, or compete with these dead images? Questions of this sort speak to an ambivalence in the portrait that has been perceptively explored by Berthold Hinz and David Smith. Hinz criticizes the formality of pose that makes the sitters resemble sitters more than musicians. He complains (in Smith’s paraphrase) that “these people do not behave truly like musicians, but have instead adopted the decorous, restrained poses found in the portraits of their ancestors, as if expecting eventually to be seen as ancestors themselves.”8 Smith defends the need for decorum in family group portraits on moral and social grounds: if “Molenaer and his colleagues . . . rejected informality . . . in favor of a more public image . . . rooted in the ideals of the Renaissance court,” they did so in order to “give shape to marriage and domesticity”—in order, that is, to join “the image of marriage to public social rituals” and thus tie “the meanings of domesticity . . . to the larger purposes of soci164

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ety.” He nevertheless concedes that the resultant formality, the tendency “to mask the momentary flow of personal experience in Dutch portraiture, and in group portraits like those of Molenaer . . . , leads to awkward and incohesive compositions.”9 Smith uses the terms “awkward and incohesive” to express his aesthetic evaluation, or devaluation, of aspects of the painting. But suppose we decide that the painting “devalues” itself—that it invites viewers to interrogate it by highlighting moments of awkwardness and incohesiveness in the action it represents? Wouldn’t it then be tendentious or premature to use “awkward and incohesive” as terms of aesthetic judgment rather than as terms of narrative description? That, however, is a “meta-” move often used in literary interpretation and often discredited as a way to let the artwork off the hook. It is, we say, aesthetically deficient, awkward, incohesive, and to try to make a virtue of that is to commit what the literary critic Yvor Winters once called “the fallacy of imitative form.”10 Maybe so. But we should at least allow for the possibility that our “devaluation” is to some extent anticipated, dramatized, and controlled by the painting itself. The evidence for this possibility follows. I begin with an example picked out by Weller. Nothing is more awkward and incohesive than the figures he describes as “two somewhat older, conservatively dressed men positioned behind a virginal at the far left.” Each of them, in his own way, competes with the musicians. “One of them holds a small oval portrait of a woman.”11 Better, he holds it up, above the virginal—takes pains to make it visible. The other repeats in reverse a truncated version of “Molenaer’s” manual gesture of self-avowal. “The positioning of this pair is at odds with the overall balance of the composition and may have been added later. Their inclusion may be accounted for by the fact that Molenaer’s father had two sons from a previous marriage.”12 Weller’s genetic reflex (“may have been added later”) and his narrowly documentary concern divert him from inquiring into the strangeness he notices. Whoever they are, their “positioning” is indeed weirdly uncomfortable—“awkward and incohesive” in its effect. They aren’t so much “positioned” as confined behind the virginal and fenced off from the foreground scene. Their costumes, their tonality, the chiaroscuro dappling their collars, even their angles of pose affiliate them with the pendants and give Families Making Music

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them the look of interlopers trying to join the musicale and escape from the shadowland that obscures the father. They participate in an ironic crossover: the musicians stiffen their poses as if mindful of the portraits behind them; the two step-brothers seem eager to leave their Cimmerian realm of painted shadows and rejoin the living. Crammed anomalously into a corner of the painting, they heighten the effect of crowdedness and competitiveness. This effect is conspicuous enough to raise a question about the most obvious theme the painting purportedly illustrates: in Westermann’s words, “Molenaer” and his family “play music to signify their harmonious relationships.” I can be expected to rewrite this assertion: they pose as if playing music. But Westermann takes the distinction into account while contrasting the harmony of Molenaer’s family to Steen’s disorderly family in In Luxury, Beware (fig. 8), a Genre scene that pretends to be a portrait and includes several generations whose members play music. She astutely observes that we can tell Steen “does not portray an actual family” because “All the characters except one ignore the viewer, a rarity in portraits.”13 Westermann’s observation highlights the structural constraint built into any picture that presents itself as a group portrait. In Molenaer’s portrait, all the sitters except the boy gaze into observer space, show themselves aware of posing, give themselves to be seen. The attitudes they strike indicate a normative desire or intention to symbolize family harmony by posing as if making music. This message seems at once to be confirmed by the compositional format of the painting and to be challenged by its details. Harmony is geometrically expressed by the basic scheme organizing the foreground group. It is an obtuse scalene triangle, whose three corners are formed by the three young women.14 The singer at the back presides over the obtuse angle as she presides over the music. Hers is a strangely hieratic, frontal pose, appropriate for the image of one who commands, disposes, or blesses. The side that joins her to the decorously reserved young woman in the right corner is partially blocked by the standing “Molenaer.” The side that joins her to the citternist who forms the left angle all but cuts the violist out of the triangle. His proportionally larger face registers a protest. The citternist is herself shaped as a more or less pyramidal right triangle. She displays an elegantly pleated apron as her form stretches comfortably toward the right in a manner that diminishes the 166

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space available to the lutenist and perhaps motivates his awkward, crosslegged pose. The painting’s compositional principle of order is thus anchored in the settled composure of the women and disrupted by the men, who either threaten or are threatened by this schema. Gender conflict is sartorially intensified by the contrast between the women’s hairdos and the men’s hats. The angles are manned by the three women, whose tightly coifed heads and round, masklike alabaster faces resemble knobs on newel posts. But the wide-brimmed cocked hats worn by the male figures are distributed in an intrusive S-curve that disregards the decorum of triangulation upheld by the women. It may be significant that the only hatless male is the man in the pendant whom Weller identifies as the dead father. If we agree with Westermann that the painting is a riff on the theme “playing music signifies social harmony,” we can hardly avoid wondering about its strange insistence on showcasing such obstacles to harmony as those between male and female sitters—obstacles, more specifically, to conventional expressions of male authority. In the context of a family portrait, such gender tensions are to be expected; they help give meaning to the need for and the emphasis on harmony. But when we consider the group-portrait action at the pseudo-referential level of collective posing, other kinds of obstacles come into view: for example, the way each sitter vies with the others for attention, or the way the sitters’ attempts to look decorous and portraitlike are foiled by the obvious difficulties of posing in so busy and crowded a scene. The difficulties are formidable. This family making music is also a family making faces. While its members pretend to engage in such familiar Genre activities as playing instruments and singing, they flag the factitiousness of the pretense. Their ocular appeal to the observer is too arch. It marks them as theatrical rather than absorptive. The musicians do not simply pose as if playing music. They also play as if posing. The lutenist, for example, draws attention not only to his musicianship but also to his garters.15 And as each of the players concentrates on giving himself or herself to be seen, all of them freeze into the holding pattern of the pose. The conspicuous exception to this is the boy in the red hat blowing bubbles, which vanish on sight. At first glance, his absorption promises both iconographic contrast and the relief of realism: it opposes vanitas to the musiFamilies Making Music

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cians’ harmony and pure spontaneity to their postural starch. But a closer look puts an end to that fantasy. The elegant contrapposto of his stance would warm a Mannerist’s heart and take a balletomane’s breath away. He puts the splay-footed “Molenaer” to shame by pretending to execute (simultaneously!) an epaulement above and a turn-out below. Apart from such particular pleasures, the group as a whole is perspectivally challenged. The orthogonals marked by the floor pattern dynamically emphasize the diminution of space and produce a visual illusion: a sharp convergence that seems to squeeze together the five central figures in the foreground group. This heightens the effect of crowdedness, which in turn—as I note above in discussing militia portraits—sharpens the appearance of competition among sitters. Furthermore, because it tilts the ground plane on which they pose, the perspective threatens to destabilize them and throw them into a gravitational crisis. They have to lean back to resist a pull that could send them all slipping and sliding forward, downward, into the viewer’s lap. A dog afloat on the cushion at the lower left is in special jeopardy. The skewed perspective has thematic force: it privileges the pendant mother because the bird’s-eye effect propels the viewer’s gaze beyond the foreground group toward the back wall, where it bounces off the winding mechanism of the clock toward her more luminous face. Within the pendant itself, another radical discontinuity reinforces the same effect: the even more pronounced tilt of the table-top with the hour glass sends the gaze vaulting upward again to the level of the mother’s face. This double distraction from the foreground drama discernibly affects the status of “Molenaer.” Weller remarks that “His elaborate costume and cavalier pose reflect a sense of self-confidence largely missing in the others.”16 I think the maternal challenge modifies that impression. It makes him seem to protest too much, as if he feels the strong presence behind him of the mother, who monitors the musical offering and demands to be acknowledged. “Molenaer” reacts badly to the maternal challenge. He uses both elbows to clear out an area in which he can display himself to the viewer while preferring himself to his fellow sitters. If anything, to vary Weller’s statement, his “cavalier pose” is the cause that self-confidence is missing in the others. His right foot and elbow jutting outward cut into their per168

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formance space, stir up a small commotion, send a wave of postural adjustments and small collisions pulsing through the group. The cellist leans sideways as if trying to duck the elbow and claim his full visibility. In doing so, his bow hand all but bangs into the lutenist’s foot, whereupon the lutenist with furrowed brow elbows the citternist and collides with the violinist (or violist), whose pursed lips and even more furrowed brow reflect the difficulty of posing in so cramped a corner. Even the manual gesture of the young woman is momentarily contaminated by this context: Is she merely marking time or also fending off the fretboard of the lute? To return to the formulas of Smith and Westermann, Molenaer’s portrait may indeed promise an “ideal of decorum” that privileges “qualities of sobriety and moderation”; its sitters may indeed pose as if “to signify their harmonious relationships” by playing music. But at the same time, the portrait seems not merely to suffer from but actively to feature “awkward and incohesive” passages.17 Whether this detracts from or increases the power of the statement it makes depends in part on the credence one gives to the concept of the fiction of the pose and its effect on interpretation. In my view, the strain between the fiction of collective occasion and the emphasis on competitive posing gives the group portrait its major dramatic interest. But this interest becomes legible and legimitate only when we decide to interpret the portrait as a pseudo-referential act. That is, if we agree to accept or designate a picture as a group portrait, we view it as the “copy” (not simply the copy but rather the fiction of a copy) of a prior act of collective posing. We do this even though we know or assume that the act may not or could not have occurred as depicted. Reading portraits in this manner is hardly a conventional procedure in art history. The insistence on pseudo-reference and fictions of the pose may therefore seem counterintuitive, or simply jargonistic. But let’s see what light a more familiar and predictable alternative throws on Molenaer’s portrait: Making music together symbolizes the harmony in the family. Other symbols of harmony are the two clasped hands and the burning heart with two arrows on the harpsichord. The little dog on the cushion symbolizes fidelity. Moderation is important to a harmonious family

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life: the clock and the young singer beating time are allusions to this. On the right stands a little boy blowing bubbles. In one hand he holds a dish of soapy water (a shell on a stick), in the other a bubble pipe. Children blowing bubbles in seventeenth-century paintings are reminders of the brevity of life. The boy may already have been dead when this family portrait was painted.18 Harmony, fidelity, moderation, mortality: all visual details obediently recompose themselves into patterns that resonate with normative sentiments. Moral pentimenti get brushed over the many mischievous touches that interfere with the delivery of this message. Elided from the account is any mention of the act of posing, which could give the symbolism a justifying dramatic function. I’m not suggesting that the iconography cited above does not describe or should not be applied to the program Molenaer’s sitters have agreed to perform. On the contrary, the program is present as a conventional ideal the sitters are expected to embody. And perhaps they seem to many viewers to be trying to embody it—for a viewer to acknowledge the presence of the ideal by taking note of the iconography may be necessary as a historically accountable move. My point is that it isn’t sufficient as an interpretive move because it ignores the essential question posed by approaching the portrait in pseudo-referential terms: Do the sitters succeed in expressing the ideal? Acknowledging its presence is only a first step. But it’s an important step: it enables us to determine whether the sitters deviate from the ideal they have agreed to present. And my reading has, in effect, presented an inventory of deviations from the ideal of harmony toward which the portrait expressly gestures. Deviations from the norm assume importance in direct proportion to the seriousness with which one regards the linked premises that underlie the fiction of the pose: first, pseudo-referentiality, the premise that a portrait pretends to be the copy of a prior event of posing, and second, reflexivity, the premise that the portrait is about its sitters as sitters engaged with each other and the observer in acts of self-representation. In Family Making Music, what gets lost when iconography trumps pseudoreferentiality is the reflexive drama of the pose, especially the quirkiness produced by the farrago of small touches with which Molenaer punctu-

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ates the fiction of collective posing—and punctures the portrait’s pretense to behavioral decorum. The painting violates the decorum it simulates not only by crossing generic boundaries but also by emphasizing a clash of affective modes. There are comic touches of competition in the foreground group but darker and more complex effects in the shadowland behind them. The contrast between the “real” and the “painted” figures is illuminated by Hinz’s idea that the former emulate the latter. This contrast overlaps that between the living and the dead. While the “real” or living figures pretend to make music, they engage in their comically competitive struggle for coexistence as sitters. More poignantly, the painted and the dead seem to emulate the living. Like the two sitters behind the virginal, they struggle to emerge from the shadowland of death or painting in order to participate in the portrayal of family life and the celebration of family harmony. Molenaer’s Family Making Music is compositionally organized to portray and celebrate a “realistic” notion of harmony, one that includes tensions between genders and between generations in a family dominated by a strong maternal presence. Within the geometric order secured in the foreground by the triangle of three calm female figures, the male sitters compete for the viewer’s attention in more restless and constrained poses indicative of performance anxiety.

* The foregoing account of three domestic genres—pendants, double portraits, and family portraits—is intended to provide a gender-sensitive backdrop against which to view The Night Watch and other images of all-male association. My aim is to give competitive posing the additional value of male bonding and to whet the comic edge of such phenomena as the sitters’ preferences for sharply pointed elbows, fancy footware, and well-turned calves. The upshot of this reorientation is to confer on the militia portrait the character of male homosocial pastoral. I use the term homosocial roughly in the sense elaborated by Eve Sedgwick in Between Men, and specifically in a sense that accords with Heidi Hartmann’s definition of patriarchy: “relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate Families Making Music

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women.”19 It goes without saying that, although Sedgwick argues for a variable structure of male “homosocial continuums” in which the degree of continuity or discontinuity between homosocial and homosexual desire is “culturally contingent,” the distinction between homosociality and homosexuality is always clear.20 Thus to consider the militia portrait as homosocial pastoral is simply to consider it as a form of institutional escape from a cultural fantasy that Witold Rybczynski has characterized as the “feminization of the home,” escape from “a place under feminine control” and, according to contemporary observers, a place afflicted by “strong wives.”21 Alison Kettering describes the genre of guardroom and related “soldier pieces” as “pictorial constructions of a world of males bonding.”22 This description may be extended to the militia portraits. The term homosocial has brushed up against The Night Watch before, but in the context of a half-hearted disclaimer that occurs in Benjamin Binstock’s excellent essay on Riegl and The Night Watch. For Binstock, the shadow of Cocq’s “surprisingly plastic and animated left glove” provides a target of Viennese opportunity. He converts Riegl’s interest in subordination into a tiny Freudian meditation on the uncanny character of this “shadow-hand,” which “appears to act independently of the captain’s real hand.” A “wayward double,” it “can be read . . . as reaching for the lieutenant’s private parts, symbolically represented by his phallic partisan: it could thus illustrate the dark side of the captain’s subordinating authority or, conversely, his own psychological subordination as the object of the lieutenant’s gaze.”23 This is pretty scary stuff, and I mention it only to mark a boundary beyond which the present study fears to tread as it prepares to turn instead toward the more prosaic territory of domestic relations. Binstock mentions homosociality while backing gingerly away from the unheimlich possibility. He insists he isn’t claiming “that the shadow-hand must be read in this way or that the objective immanent meaning of The Night Watch is an erotic connection between the captain and the lieutenant, the homosocial dimension of the militia, or the relation of sexuality, power, and authority in general.” In the next sentence, however, he concedes that “these are inextricable aspects of Rembrandt’s project: to engage the attention of the beholders by addressing their experience, provoking, challenging, perhaps even confusing them, and to represent the militia 172

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not only in its self-understanding but also through the contradictions arising from its increasingly ceremonial character.”24 Since the italicized demonstrative (these) looks backward as well as forward, it orients the beholder’s experience and the militia’s self-understanding toward the very claims Binstock finds dubious. His prior image of the shadow as a “wayward double . . . reaching for private parts” encourages just the sort of reading from which he tries to dissociate himself. It makes “homosocial” seem either synonymous with or classifiable as “an erotic connection.” If Binstock’s assertions provoke, challenge, and perhaps confuse the reader, it may be because his facile gesture toward Freud evades the more circuitous evidentiary route that would better allow him to support the claims from which he demurs. In my view, at any rate, whether or not his claims have been simplistically formulated, they are interesting and worth exploring. We can do this without reducing militia portraits to representations of “the instability lodged at the core of constructions of masculinity.”25 We may, however, detect occasional glimmers of this motif among other more centrally focused forms of instability, the most purely “formal” of which has been memorably characterized by Paul Claudel in a passage I glanced at above: “an arrangement in the process of disaggregation . . . is the whole explanation of the Night Watch. The entire composition from front to back is arranged on the principle of an ever increasing movement like a sandbank beginning to crumble.”26

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Part Four ‘ t h e n i g h t wat c h ’ as h o m o s o c i a l pas to r a l

12

The Night Watch: How the Sandbank Crumbles

The most famous and certainly the weirdest of all shooter portraits, the one that most fully tests the limits of disaggregation, was not originally known as The Night Watch (frontispiece). It acquired that title in the late eighteenth century, partly because the picture had darkened and partly because by then night patrol was virtually the only function the militias still performed. In accordance with the standard practice of identifying militia portraits by their leaders, the title scholars prefer is something like Portrait of the Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant William van Ruytenburgh. Having said this, I’ll continue calling it The Night Watch. This very large picture was completed in 1642 and cut down on the left side in 1715. The uncut version contained full or partial views of thirty-four human figures and one barking dog. Eighteen of the former are the sitters named on the framed shield in the background. Some brandish pikes or partisans or double-edged swords, while others load or fire muskets. Cresting toward the right, the guns, swords, and pikes, which cut or push or interfere with each other, converge in an abstract pattern of the violence that is otherwise concealed by, congealed in, the tightly managed ceremonial rhetoric of the leaders. But, like the gun going off behind the captain, the violence is only partly concealed. The Night Watch contains a full yard-sale display of costumes and props like those in Rembrandt’s storeroom, as well as antique clothes and armor that (inventories show) belonged to the identified sitters. He seems 177

to have persuaded a few of his patrons to wear funny hats and pretend to be Rembrandt sitters. Haverkamp-Begemann concedes that the patrons “probably could not anticipate many specific features of their representation in the Nightwatch,” but he follows this judiciously indefinite speculation by assuring us “there is no reason to believe that they were startled by the varying degrees of their visibility.” We know at least that “no discontent on the part of the sitters has been recorded.”1 Yet, as Gary Schwartz notes, there has always been “a certain discontent with the visibility of the painting.”2 Two complaints appeared before the end of the seventeenth century, one by Rembrandt’s pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten in 1678, and the other by Filippo Baldinucci (based on information from another pupil, Bernhardt Keil) in 1686. Van Hoogstraten had praised the unity of the painting but thought Rembrandt paid too much attention to “the large picture [het groote beelt]” and not enough to the “individual portraits he was commissioned to do.”3 Baldinucci/Keil judged that, although the sitters appeared to have been studied from life, one was hard to distinguish from the other; this was not the effect of The Night Watch’s overall unity but the cause of its overall confusion.4 In an ironic (because inadvertent) illustration of this confusion, when Baldinucci/Keil distinguished the bravura treatment of un Capitano from that of the other sitters, he fused the two figures of Captain Cocq and Lieutenant van Ruytenburgh, “conflating the Captain’s marked step with his Lieutenant’s protruding partisan.”5 These two passages are the source of the myth that The Night Watch was considered a failure when it first appeared and that it was (i.e., must have been) rejected by those who paid and sat for it. Modern commentators have routinely, though at times nervously, mentioned and dismissed the story.6 Haverkamp-Begemann’s more upbeat characterization makes good sense: to the extent that Rembrandt’s contemporaries “read the painting as a group portrait, they saw the Captain and Lieutenant as regents and the men as successful, well-to-do merchants,” and they knew “that all of them were ambitious citizens striving for power while carrying out their civic duties.”7 But Simon Schama, citing criticism by Joachim van Sandrart, Rembrandt’s contemporary, and by Eugène Fromentin in the nineteenth century, advises against the tendency “to overcorrect the ‘myth.’ . . . The Night Watch, after all, flouted two sets of conventions: 178

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the rules of art and the rules of muster. In a work supposed to commemorate discipline, it seemed a garish chaos.”8 He nevertheless concludes that the last thing on Rembrandt’s “mind was to deliver to the kloveniers something they would find unintelligible, daring them to figure it out and then chuckling to himself at their obtuseness.”9 Schama sets a good but challenging example by refusing to dismiss the patrons as dumb natives or “cultural dopes” who possess “no worthwhile understanding of . . . the circumstances of their action.”10 Schama’s cautionary advice persuades me to confer symptomatic value on the myth of rejection. It can stand as a reminder of features that continue to puzzle commentators, features that have made it possible to believe—and still make it necessary to dismiss—the myth. The explicit cause of their bewilderment or uncertainty is a question about the painting’s generic status: “Is the Night Watch an evocation of a real event, an allegory, a group portrait, or a mixture of the three?”11 Implicitly, however, modern accounts are troubled by nagging uneasiness that the myth of rejection may not be implausible: How were the patrons who saw the finished painting able to ignore or tolerate or rationalize—much less enjoy— the disruptive features enumerated in my Introduction? To ask what the patrons thought of all this may not be a serious historical question, since we lack the evidence that would satisfy our curiosity. But it is a serious rhetorical or possibly theoretical question. It is rhetorical in that it presupposes an answer or nonanswer: we don’t know, we assume they mainly liked what they saw; it must have met their expectations. It is theoretical because it directs our attention to a stipulated relation between what we imagine the painter was expected to do and what we see and say he did; a relation we interpret as surprising, improbable, unlikely, strange.

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13

Evasive Action: Three Ways to Shore Up the Sandbank

In recent times, three major interpretive scenarios have been proposed, primarily in order to identify and assess the means by which Rembrandt unified the portrait, but also to reduce or neutralize the painting’s strangeness. 1. Although The Night Watch is a portrait, the conventions of portraiture are subordinated to those of the history genre in that the company is shown participating in a particular event: falling in at the Captain’s command and preparing to set out at night to guard the city gates or to greet a visiting dignitary.1 A few years ago, for example, the curators of the Rijksmuseum put the following explanation on the wall of the room adjacent to the great hall that houses the painting: The Night Watch is an exceptional portrait. A group of civil guards or militia men are on the point of marching off. The Captain steps forward and holds his hand out. The drummer beats his drum. A militia man loads his musket. A girl walks between them. This painting has nothing of the posed portrait about it. It is a snapshot of a group in action. That is what makes the Night Watch so spectacular.2 “A snapshot of a group in action”: this response places the emphasis on unity and spontaneity, an emphasis the painting encourages by a device that further threatens the primacy of 181

individual portraits: attention is diffused by the presence of sixteen unidentified sitters distributed among the eighteen that represent the men known to have paid to be included.3 2. According to the first scenario, subordinating portraiture to narrative makes the painting more cohesive; it diminishes the threat to unity inherent in the generic emphasis on individual and competitive posing. In a modified version of this view, Haverkamp-Begemann concedes that what unifies “the entire painting” and sets it apart from other militia portraits is its representation of a particular action: responding to their Captain’s command, “the militiamen are in the process of forming company.”4 But he insists that in spite of this emphasis The Night Watch isn’t entirely unified: the unity of action is breached by “the girls in yellow and the musket-shooting boy in the center,” who are “exclusively symbolic” figures. The girls are emblembearers who “personify the company” while the “purely allegorical” shooter “personifies musketry.”5 Rembrandt “emphasized their symbolic nature by giving their action a direction contrary to that of the citizens.”6 This fusion of portraiture with action and symbolism produces a coherent message at the thematic level: The Night Watch “expressed forcefully the preparedness of the individual men represented and thereby of Amsterdam’s citizens to defend the independence of the city against any adversary, including the Dutch republic itself.” “Banning Cocq’s company, strong and ready to act, was a visual metaphor for the might of Amsterdam and its willingness to protect its rights.”7 3. The members of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) question even Haverkamp-Begemann’s moderate concession to the narrative thesis. They look at the little shooter and try to hide the unsightly blemish under an interpretive pentimento. They brush a layer of allegory over it and treat The Night Watch as a predominantly symbolic representation. Its “cohesion,” they insist, depends not on a unified narrative but on “the manifestly symbolic character” of “a number of interrelated themes”— “the handling of firearms” and “the group of musketeer-symbols”

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that “has as its center the girls and takes in the figures surrounding them,” including the ensign, the colors, coats of arms, and uniforms, and also the two sitters near the right edge, one of whom points to “this symbolic center.”8 Rembrandt reconciled “the essential contradiction between the portrait commission and the action-filled picture he incorporated this into” by subordinating the diachronic values of narrative action to the synchronic values of a symbolic construction that integrates “a number of interrelated themes.”9 Because the proponents of these approaches all premise or assume that unity was a desideratum, either they ignore the disruptive features of the painting or else they allegorize them away. They acknowledge the problems Rembrandt’s compositional choices place in the way of the demands and conventions of the portrait function. Nevertheless, their affinity for the scholar’s panacea, iconography, keeps them from having to confront the interpretive difficulties generated by anomalous poses at the problematic ground level of collective and competitive posing. And these are the very difficulties that motivate the myth of rejection. Recourse to the allegorical solution occasionally produces amusing results. The militia guilds were called not only Schutters but also Kloveniers, because in 1522 the original fourteenth-century weapon, the crossbow, was replaced by a primitive firearm called a klover. From the fourteenth century on, the guild emblem was a claw, the synecdoche of a bird of prey, and in the seventeenth century the word klovenier was falsely derived from the word klauw. When Haverkamp-Begemann claims that the girl in gold is an emblem carrier and the personification of the Kloveniers, he bases the claim on the assertion that the object at her waist is included for the sake of its claws, which are “a late and reduced derivation of the larger claw of a bird of prey.”10 But if this is so, why is she carrying a dead chicken rather than, say, a dead eagle, a symbol of consumption rather than one of martial valor, of impotence rather than of power? Why (as these alternatives suggest) should the golden girl symbolize a decline in military prowess? Haverkamp-Begemann and the RRP mention another interpretation, in which the chicken is just a chicken, and the girls are sutlers, or kitchen

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maids.11 What could the iconographer do with that? Perhaps the girls are rushing to the kitchen to prepare the feast that will reward the shooters after their arduous and heroic campaign of posing. The most important function of the company may be to dine together, which is no doubt why the chicken is their emblem. Allegorically, of course, the substitution of a chicken for an eagle, a prey for a predator, signifies that instead of preying on enemies, the guardsmen are preyed on by their appetites. The connection between the chicken and Captain Frans Banning Cocq is visually secured by the way the claw echoes his glove. Iconographically, then, the chicken must be his emblem. Finally, anyone familiar with Eddy de Jongh’s classic study of the vogel/vogelen (bird/copulation) motif will recognize in the chicken at least the potential threat of an erotic signifier that would tarnish the chicken girl’s aureole.12 My resistance to this possibility is opportunistic rather than principled: I have other plans for the corona of meanings that encircles her, but they won’t be divulged until the final chapter of this study.

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14

Captain Cocq and the Unruly Musketeer

The tendency to allegorize is facilitated by the fact that the actions of the three shooters in the plane just behind the captain and lieutenant correspond roughly to movements depicted and described in Jacques de Gheyn’s Wapenhandelinghe.1 Since earlier group portraits allude to de Gheyn’s figures, it’s possible that The Night Watch contains allusions to those allusions—allusions that may glance ironically at the bravado of pseudomilitary postures.2 If Rembrandt’s musketeers evoke three of the manual’s illustrated positions, it seems relevant to wonder how the painter and his patrons evaluated poses that recall those de Gheyn designed primarily for the appreciation of aristocratic sponsors, members of the house of OrangeNassau that still (in the person of Frederik Hendrik) held the reins of republican rule.3 Perhaps because Rembrandt’s three musketeers are outlandishly dressed in sixteenth-century costumes, commentators don’t consider the possibility of ironic allusion to predecessors. Instead they caution us to ignore what we see and to think of his shooters as figures that “allegorize concepts like the art of musketry and armed protection, and . . . allude to the traditions and glorious history of Amsterdam’s militia.”4 The central shooter nevertheless gives Haverkamp-Begemann pause (figs. 29 and 30). He can’t believe the musketeers “were really shooting their firearms while . . . starting to march,” and so, confronted by the shooter’s “seemingly erratic” and “unbridled action,” he tries to defuse it by redescribing it as an allegorical (and therefore non-narrative) effect: it “may suggest the disruptive deadly forces inherent to the weapon, forces 185

figure 29. The Night Watch, detail. Central group with young shooter.

. . . tamed by the art of musketry” and “kept . . . under control” by the Kloveniers who “served this art.” The embodiment of Klovenier order and discipline is “the dignified musketeer” partly visible between the captain and lieutenant: his effort “to redirect the line of fire” gets converted to a symbol of “the reasoned and artful manipulation of the weapon by the Kloveniers.”5 But there’s no point stopping here. Allegory begets allegory. The unruly shooter is young; the red musketeer loading his weapon

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figure 30. Jacques de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe van roers, musquetten ende spiessen, 1607. Facsimile reprint with an early English translation, The Exercise of Armes, ed. and comm. J. B. Kist (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971). Plate 12 of musket sequence.

is in the prime of life; the one blowing powder from the firing pan is old. Rembrandt undoubtedly intended to depict the Three Ages of Man, or, to be more cautious, the Three Ages of the Art of Musketry. In the list of identifications he adds to Claessens’s 1797 etching of The Night Watch (see Chap. 13, n. 3), Haverkamp-Begemann refers to “the dignified musketeer” as “Man Trying to Divert Musket,” but in Gary Schwartz’s revised version of the list he is described as “Man supporting

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musket shot.” Schwartz views him as a kind of gunfork: he “seems to support the angle of the musket being fired in front of him.”6 To me, this attributes to the musketeer a more “reasoned and artful manipulation” than does the phrase, “Trying to Divert.” Thus in their relation to the benign allegory of musketry Haverkamp-Begemann imposes on a disorderly episode, Schwartz’s version is more supportive and Haverkamp-Begemann’s more diversionary.7 Since I think the musketeer’s expression and the backward tilt of his head indicate deflection rather than support, I’m more inclined to focus on the narrative substance of the “unbridled action” that the allegory struggles to explain away. What would happen, for example, if we dropped our allegorizing guard long enough to imagine that the chicken girl actually does what she appears to be doing as she passes through—that is, staring? The direction of her glance would then sharpen the effect of a narrative moment, for she can easily be construed as staring at the unruly shooter. This reinforces the diversionary gesture of Haverkamp-Begemann’s “dignified musketeer.” It could even call for a modification of the attribute from “dignified” to something more like “surprised,” or “alarmed.” These two responses conspire to remove the unruly deed from the safety of symbolic isolation and expose it as a “real” threat in the common space of narrative action. If you take the threat seriously, it becomes harder to take with equal seriousness the view, shared by Haverkamp-Begemann and the RRP, that the interaction between the shooter and the dignified musketeer illustrates “the musket drill needed to fit the militia to its task.”8 Amen to the need for more musket drill. Even Schama, who at one point sympathizes with critics of The Night Watch—he acknowledges that “In a work supposed to commemorate discipline, it seemed a garish chaos”—absolves the musketeers from complicity: Rembrandt “flattered” the Kloveniers by representing them “as if they were performing their duties as shooters to the perfect letter of the instruction book: one, two, three, LOAD, SHOOT, BLOW!”9 In her excellent account of the painting, Westermann justifies “the misguided shooting” by speculating that it may serve “to emphasize the company’s right to bear arms.”10 Yet once the effect of the misguided shot is taken into account (its threat to the Lieutenant’s hat and plume, not to mention his head), it seems less to emphasize than to 188

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jeopardize that right. If anything, it serves to emphasize the danger of letting young civilians play with firearms. We’ll see later that this is only one of three examples of “misguided” musketry in The Night Watch. Separately and together, they allude to comparable maneuvers illustrated by de Gheyn in the manual whose objective was to analyze and demonstrate the sequence of individual maneuvers necessary to produce an integrated collective action. To the degree that the mistakes depicted by Rembrandt remind the observer of the manual’s ideal of weapon handling, they perform a travesty of that ideal. Rembrandt sharpens the edge of this performance by making failures in collective shooting coalesce with failures in collective posing. Why would the patrons who commissioned the painting approve the inclusion of episodes of maladroit musketry in their group portrait? Did they think it an engaging departure from the norm of gravity expected of institutional commemorations? And what did they think their portrait stood to gain by the addition of as many supernumerary figures as there are guardsmen (sixteen)? Schwartz observes not only that “no other artist before or after Rembrandt made such liberal use of the device,” but also that four of these “extras”—the drummer, powder boy, chicken girl, and unruly shooter—play “significant roles in the action.” They even compete “for attention with Frans Banning Cocq’s Kloveniers themselves.”11 Indeed, they compete with Captain Cocq: since three of them are either mischievous or puzzling enough to arouse the viewer’s curiosity, they exert a wry force on the painting’s sober center of gravity and leadership. But for some reason Banning Cocq seems to have liked the painting so much that he had it copied in one of the albums that document his accomplishments. Although Captain Cocq has an impressive career profile, latter-day commentators occasionally express doubts about the man depicted in these verbal and visual sources. Before telling us that the captain was “undoubtedly . . . gratified . . . by the manner in which it [The Night Watch] paid tribute to his own achievements” as a successful leader, HaverkampBegemann notes that in commissioning the portrait “he must have been motivated by pride, vanity, and political ambition.”12 Of Banning Cocq’s albums, he drily remarks that they recorded “honors he had received, deeds he had performed, and other noteworthy facts (some of them imagined) from his life and his—and particularly his wife’s—ancestry.”13 These Captain Cocq and the Unruly Musketeer

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judgments contain muffled echoes of Kenneth Clark’s more straightforward expressions of disdain. Clark’s assertion that Banning Cocq “remained proud of his act of patronage” is qualified by the judgment that precedes it: the captain’s “pink, inarticulate face does not suggest a high degree of intelligence.”14 Elsewhere Clark takes off the kid gloves and lets Banning Cocq have it: “he is said to have been the stupidest man in Amsterdam and he looks it.”15

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15

Disaggregation as Class Conflict

Captain Cocq performs his pose with authority, as if he knows it derives both from “the tradition of Amsterdam guard Captains” and from a predominantly aristocratic tradition of full-length individual portraits. But his performance only makes his relation to what goes on around and behind him more peculiar.1 He seems unaware of the confusion behind him as he exhorts and leads his troops onward, while people run about in different directions, shoot off or clean their guns, stare dreamily at their banner, and, in general, pay him no attention whatsoever. According to Norbert Schneider, the confusion is what makes the painting special because it enables The Night Watch “to break down boundaries between the portrait and the history painting.” No one, Schneider goes on to say, denies that it “refers to a particular event in history,” and the only problem is that “The event to which the painting alludes has never been established.”2 This makes it an archival problem; if we find the right document, we’ll know what the event was. Yet it’s conceivable that the painting sends up documentary desire by pretending to be history and conspicuously alluding to an event that never happened. It’s also conceivable that the event to which the painting alludes is the painting itself. Schneider’s interpretation differs from the others I’ve been considering in that it enlists the help of allegory to motivate rather than explain away the unruly episodes. He argues that Rembrandt’s purpose is to “impart nobility to his bourgeois clientele by showing them as historical agents, a role hitherto considered above their station.”3 Their nobility consists in 191

their active resistance to their rulers. In other words, whether or not The Night Watch represents a historical event, it represents Rembrandt’s intention to register the contradictions of a historically specific political structure. Thus, while staying within the limits of the history hypothesis, Schneider gives the hypothesis a more sophisticated spin by shifting from event to structure. In spite of his reliance on the clichés of class conflict, he remains sensitive to the complexity of what he describes: Rembrandt may ennoble his bourgeois sitters, but he doesn’t deprive them of “their spontaneity, a quality indicating bourgeois lack of restraint: a musket going off behind the Lieutenant, for example, or a man loading a gun, another beating a drum or boisterous children dressed in a burlesque martial style.” But if their spontaneity “initially suggests their autonomy” and the “bourgeois lack of restraint” encouraged by the new democratic order of the Dutch Republic, closer “scrutiny reveals the opposite”: since Rembrandt stresses “the dominant positions of the Captain and the Lieutenant,” the society he depicts “remains rigidly hierarchical” in structure.4 Schneider concludes by embedding his interpretation in a familiar (and by now pretty dehydrated) political parable: “With the old feudal system shaken off, hierarchical structures continued to exist, only now they were based on a consensus achieved by the new principles of bourgeois democracy. The problem was how to reconcile the new power structures with individual freedom of development.”5 This contextualization gives him permission to call the sitters “historical agents,” and he identifies their agency with their unruliness, even as he praises Rembrandt for not “depriving his figures of their spontaneity.”6 I have two quarrels with this reading. The first is that the global insight into structural change and the emergence of the bourgeoisie flies too high to respond to more particular and relevant contexts: those of the genesis and structure of the Dutch Republic or those of the decade preceding the completion of The Night Watch. The second is that, although Schneider mentions the agency of sitters, he mislocates it. Because he implies that Rembrandt is solely responsible for the political commentary, he denies the sitters the agency they possess in another order, the aesthetic order— the agency of sitters as sitters, figures whom we imagine to have collaborated with the painter in the production of their posographical perform192

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ances. As Haverkamp-Begemann puts it, “every detail” Rembrandt created “said something about the sitters and the role they had chosen to play.”7 But what was this role? Did they decide they would like to be portrayed posing as if spontaneously falling in (Haverkamp-Begemann) or acting up (Schneider)? More generally, was it their decision to be depicted in the act of posing as if not posing—posing as participants in an event that differs from the event of posing? How or why did so indecorous an arrangement appeal to, much less flatter, the patrons who posed as sitters? These questions have nothing to do with whether or not the patrons actually sat for the painter, whether they sat one by one or all together or not at all. Rather, the questions direct us toward the fictions of the pose: What does the portrait reveal about the sitters’ performative choices? Does it depict sitters who intend to be seen posing as if posing, or posing as if not posing? The questions reflect my commitment to the idea that the representation of sitters as motivated figures who are agents of selfportrayal constitutes the true plot of portraiture. But they don’t by any means commit me to eliminate the signs of Rembrandt’s agency in the characterization of his sitters’ agency. On the contrary, I need to take account of Rembrandt as the agent who inscribes motivation and agency in his posing sitters. I need that move if only to allow for the possibility of an ironic perspective on the sitters. The possibility depends on a dialectics of double agency that works like this: I have to endow Rembrandt with enough agency to let him endow sitters with enough agency to enable him to comment on it. The painter may represent agency in the sitters in order to interrogate its institutional as well as personal sources. That’s what I think Schneider is trying, not very successfully, to say. He is after the political message in the portrait, but he reduces it to an allegory produced solely by the painter over the heads of his “figures,” his shadows, his puppets. I resist this move because I consider the fiction of the pose to be a fiction of agency: sitters are depicted as voluntarily assuming their poses, as giving themselves to be seen. Posing is a form of agency, and where you have agency you have politics. The politics of militiamen as sitters supervenes on the socially embedded politics of the militia guilds the portraits represent. Commentators on militia portraits—Haverkamp-Begemann, the RRP, Knevel—tend to treat them as idealized versions of the groups Disaggregation as Class Conflict

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they represent. No doubt that reflects what the sitters expected. But what happens when you view the portraits against the backdrop of domestic life and convert them to versions of homosocial pastoral? As soon as I entertain the idea that The Night Watch belongs in this category, that it performs a parody of militant manliness, I’m faced with an obvious difficulty, which is: How could Rembrandt have gotten away with it? How stupid could Frans Banning Cocq and his company have been? And my answer will be that the artist was less stupid, or more canny, than his patrons: he submerged the homosocial parody within another that would be more congenial to Rembrandt’s sitters, one in which they may be the agents rather than the targets of parody. For my sense of this second level, I’m deeply indebted to a wonderful essay by Margaret Carroll on the specific role of politics in The Night Watch.

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16

Manual Mischief: The Loneliness of the Red Musketeer

Carroll resists the traditional view that unity was a positive value and that Rembrandt achieved it by “conveying the present-day activities of Amsterdam’s militia companies and at the same time recalling their historical role as armed and trained troops in service to the city and the republic.”1 In particular, she mounts a compelling argument against the claim (quoted and discussed above) that The Night Watch “expressed forcefully the preparedness of the individual men represented and thereby of Amsterdam’s citizens to defend the independence of the city against any adversary, including the Dutch republic itself”—the claim, in short, that “Banning Cocq’s company, strong and ready to act, was a visual metaphor for the might of Amsterdam and its willingness to protect its rights.”2 Carroll’s leading question, “what if Rembrandt wasn’t trying to impart a sense of unity to the group, but in fact the very opposite?,” is prompted by “a puzzling discrepancy between the actions of one of the men demonstrating the proper handling of a musket in Rembrandt’s painting and those of the exemplar in de Gheyn’s drill manual” (figs. 31 and 32). Behind the lieutenant, a gray-bearded musketeer performs an operation that follows the firing of the musket: he blows residual powder away from the firing-pan. Both de Gheyn’s and Rembrandt’s figures hold burning wicks between their fingers as they blow, but Carroll notes that, unlike de Gheyn’s musketeer, Rembrandt’s holds the burning wick dangerously close to the firing mechanism.3 She acknowledges that the discrepancy could well have been accidental on Rembrandt’s part. But she insists that it acquires the195

figure 31. The Night Watch, detail. Old Musketeer blowing away powder.

matic resonance from the neighboring blast of gunfire behind the lieutenant. The two details taken together suggest “that Rembrandt was trying to create the impression of a volatile, potentially dangerous situation.”4 Other details confirm that impression: the crosscutting movement of figures, the two girls, and the barking dog increase “the sense of confu196

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figure 32. Jacques de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe. Plate 20 of musket sequence.

sion in the murkier areas of the composition” and “enhance the explosive, centrifugal vectors of movement” instead of binding “the figures into a unified group.”5 The peculiar spatial construction of The Night Watch contributes to the effect. Kenneth Clark notes the “basically Raphaelesque architecture” of the painting, more obvious in Gerrit Lundens’s Manual Mischief

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copy of the uncut original, which reveals that Rembrandt “uses central perspective as the best means of controlling such a large, crowded composition.”6 This comment is inaccurate for two reasons. First, as the copy shows, and as Otto Benesch has remarked, the Captain “originally stood in the exact center of the picture” but not of the archway, and the archway in turn is not depicted as “an exactly symmetrical span.”7 The orthogonals visible in the vault converge asymmetrically, as if seen by an observer standing closer to the left edge of the arch, roughly in front of the red musketeer and the golden girl. The spatially and thematically marked centricity of the Captain is thus challenged by perspectival emphases that produce competing centers of attention. Second, there are at least two perspective systems, one implied by the archway and the other by the ground plane. In the former, the barrel vault is depicted da sotto in su: it looms up from back to front as if viewed from a point close to the ground, a point that emphasizes the visual authority of the captain’s figure.8 The subjacency of this viewpoint is rhetorically driven home by the fact that we see his outstretched hand from below and also, more generally, by the fact that we see most hat brims as if from below. In the latter system, which Van Eyck and his contemporaries had made familiar, the ground plane ascends as it recedes, inviting the observer to rise above the worm’s-eye view and make direct contact with the ensign and his neighbors in the top row.9 But to accept the invitation is to discover that the figure of the ensign tilts backward as if caught in the perspectival updraft of the foreshortened vault. This reaffirms the first system, in which we observe the captain and the other foreground sitters from a position somewhere below his hand.10 The sitter whose posture and demeanor are most affected by these perspectival variations, most vulnerable to interpretive vertige, is the red musketeer pouring powder from a cartridge into the barrel of his gun (fig. 33). He is one of four sitters who are fully visible. The others are the boy with the powder horn, the captain, and the lieutenant. But whereas their figures and gazes indicate attentiveness either to each other or to the event they all participate in, the musketeer stands alone, entirely absorbed in his task. With one side silhouetted against the brighter golden girl and the other stippled by highlights that set him off from the shield, the guardsmen, 198

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figure 33. The Night Watch, detail. Musketeer in red loading gun.

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and the parapet on the left, his is the only figure seen unobstructed and in full isolation—more so, even, than the overlapping figures of the two officers. Nesting between hat and collar in an orbit that circles back in space from his foreshortened upper arm, his head is modeled in more depth than his lower body, which is attenuated by the diminishing contrast of light and shade, and which terminates in phantom feet splayed apart (one planted, the other raised), on a ground plane that inclines downward toward the right.11 When viewed against the foreshortened form of the ensign behind him, these cues to instability make his figure appear to tip top-heavily forward, and the relation of his feet to the tilted ground plane reinforces this effect. As his form oscillates between two systems, the worm’s-eye view of the vault and the bird’s-eye view of the ground plane, it seems to sway.12 Supposedly this is an action pose, and the red musketeer is caught in midmotion: he poses as if in the process either of executing a maneuver or of demonstrating its execution: loading or reloading and preparing to shoot. Yet the chiaroscuro that models his form here, and flattens it there, doesn’t conceal the improbability of those suppositions. It turns the demonstration of martial art into a reverie. His attitude is trancelike. Where contour lines isolate the musketeer’s hand, they freeze the exquisitely precise movement of the painted fingers pouring powder from the cartridge into the barrel. Light bouncing back and forth between hand and face illuminates the narrow area within which his attention is chiefly confined. A translucent veil of shadow spreading over the remainder of his body conveys the inattention that relaxes it. Inattention and self-absorption are suggested by other means. There is lack of coordination not only within the figure—between the slackness of the lower, gun-bearing hand and the finicky finger-work of the upper hand—but also between this sitter and the others. Rembrandt emphasizes the visual interaction between the red musketeer’s figure and those of the captain and ensign, for example: the diagonal of his musket rhythmically repeats that of Cocq’s baton, that of the shadow of Cocq’s hand across the lieutenant’s doublet, and that of the ensign’s staff above him; the color of his outfit picks up the color of Cocq’s sash. The shape of the shadow under his foreshortened arm eerily repeats that of either of Captain Cocq’s extended arms.13 200

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figure 34. Jacques de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe. Plate 24 of musket sequence.

These repetitions may well add force to the “armature” of “radial spokes” by which “the complicated élan of the painting . . . is pinned together” and unified.14 But the very repetition that draws these figures together points up their isolation from each other. As Captain Cocq energetically steps forward, the meditative musketeer floats dreamily in place. Manual Mischief

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His trancelike attitude is underscored by the contrasting treatment of the two guardsmen above the shield that circles his right arm. Although the shield-bearer stands behind him in pictorial space, his more sharply delineated features and insistent gaze project him forward toward the viewer. He demands attention. Meanwhile soft focus enables the red musketeer with downcast eyes to withdraw further into his mystery. Like the proverbial cheese, he stands alone, dutifully holding his pose as if oblivious to his fellow sitters. But his ability to keep holding his pose seems more assured than his ability to keep holding his musket, for the shadow that flattens the form of both the left hand and the musket leaves us with the impression that the hand doesn’t so much grasp the gun stock as rest upon it. When compared to the similar position depicted by de Gheyn (fig. 34), it is difficult to understand why the red musketeer’s weapon doesn’t drop from his hand. That it doesn’t do so when it is so lightly held suggests weightlessness.15 Schwartz and Wouter Kloek notice this problem, and both attribute it to Rembrandt’s ignorance. The former calls it “an erroneous pose.”16 The latter speculates that Rembrandt “had no idea how much . . . [the musket] weighed, for it is impossible to hold one of those heavy firearms with one hand while carrying out the delicate task of charging it with powder with the other.”17 Yet by this time we suspect Rembrandt is up to no good. Each of the three musketeers whose poses imitate and evoke de Gheyn’s exemplary figures—the shooter, the graybeard, and the red musketeer—is doing something wrong. It becomes difficult to dismiss these effects of errant science and practice as isolated mistakes. They call for an interpretation that takes them into account in a manner that modifies the meaning of The Night Watch. The obvious problem to avoid is an interpretation that reduces the sitters to unwitting targets of Rembrandt’s satire.

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17

Between Stad and Stadholder: Captain Cocq’s Dilemma

In the preceding paragraphs I have been discussing sitters, not the patrons they represent—have been trying to characterize sitters on the basis of their posing performances. But the questions with which this study began were oriented toward the hypothetical reactions of the patrons who commissioned the portrait and saw themselves represented in it. If interpretations that defend the unity of The Night Watch and sweep its disorder under the rug of allegory fail to persuade us, and if we premise that the patrons could see what we see, why should we think The Night Watch gave them what they wanted? Kloek raises this question in the form first advanced by van Hoogstraten: “It would not be surprising if some of the guardsmen were unhappy with Rembrandt’s decision to make the parts of the scene subordinate to the whole . . . and it is also understandable that not everyone would have been able to appreciate the qualities of the military activity.”1 It’s easy to imagine that, after the patrons were bowled over by its size and scale, its unparalleled technique, and its generic novelty, they would begin to examine whether it did justice to both their individual likenesses and their collective project. What they wanted in general was no doubt a group portrait that would outdo all its predecessors in the genre and would avoid, for example, the often stilted poses congealed in and encouraged by the lineup format. But would they be flattered by a mode of avoidance that goes too far in the opposite direction? Would they approve of the “lapse of martial decorum” emphasized by Margaret Carroll 203

—“the careless manner in which the men on both sides of Lieutenant van Ruytenburgh mishandle their weapons reflects poorly not just on the two individuals, but on the officers having authority over them”?2 Carroll herself is not concerned with speculating about the patrons’ reactions. Rather, she wonders why Rembrandt would “opt for such an arrangement,” and she hypothesizes that his emphasis on “the subtle intimations of disaster” may serve an “emblematic purpose,” namely, “to challenge whatever confidence a viewer might have in the military competence of Amsterdam’s militia men and of the officers appointed to lead them.”3 But why would Rembrandt want to mount such a challenge, which seems to imply a programmatic critique not of previous militia group paintings but of previous militia group actions? In fact, Carroll turns to recent episodes in political history to clarify her emblematic hypothesis. She suggests that the challenge she describes may have been at least indirectly motivated by the changes of policy and interest that caused relations between the Stadholder Frederik Hendrik and the Amsterdam regents to deteriorate during the 1630s. The story of these changes is familiar; every scholar of Rembrandt dutifully rehearses it. But what Carroll does with the material in connecting it to The Night Watch departs from other accounts and produces a radically new interpretation. The familiar story centers on the diminishing support given the Stadholder’s “military projects” by previously sympathetic Remonstrant regents, who demanded that he reduce their military and “financial contributions to the army” because they “were better served by peace” than by his campaigns in the southern provinces.4 After 1633, in Schama’s version of the story, “Amsterdam and Frederik Hendrik parted company on the most critical issues dividing the Republic.” The Prince “had become an advocate of belligerence, while the regents . . . wanted a negotiated peace and a sharp reduction in the size of the army.”5 Toward the end of the decade, his declining military fortunes combined with new successes of the East and West India companies to increase the Holland regents’ assertive demands “for troop cuts and reductions in spending.”6 Nevertheless, prominent Amsterdam regents either continued to favor or were forced to support the prince’s cause. Schwartz states that in the 1640s, even though “association with the house of Orange became a political liability . . . , [they] were not allowed to drop it.”7 He notes that several regents were 204

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patrons of Rembrandt: Joannes Wtenbogaert, the brothers Cornelis and Andries de Graeff, and Cornelis’s brother-in-law, Frans Banning Cocq. He goes on to suggest, however, that they may have stonewalled and resisted doing (or returning) favors for Frederik Hendrik.8 It was during this period and in this climate of political ambivalence and tension that Rembrandt appears to have been working on the oil sketch known as The Concord of the State. Its “bias,” as Schama puts it, “seems to lean more decisively toward the House of Orange than to the city of Amsterdam.” Because it suggests “the aloofness of the city’s government from the war,” it “could well have been seen by the burgomasters as offensive to themselves.” Noting that it was still in Rembrandt’s possession in 1656, Schama drily concludes that “someone didn’t want it.”9 The question raised by Carroll is whether The Night Watch displays the same bias. She cites evidence suggesting that by the late 1630s “Amsterdam’s militia companies had largely abandoned their military function” and now “served in a more purely ceremonial capacity. . . . After 1633, there is no record of Amsterdam’s militia companies marching out to relieve military garrisons; and there is no evidence that they resumed the practice of drilling at marching and at weapon handling until the second half of the seventeenth century.”10 From this she concludes that in his depiction of “historicizing costumes, weaponry, and imagery” Rembrandt “was deliberately exposing a contradiction between an ideal of military conduct and its flawed execution.”11 In both The Concord of the State and The Night Watch, he nostalgically evokes “the military accomplishments of the country’s former citizen-soldiers; at the same time both works call into question the military ethos and effectiveness of Amsterdam’s present-day heirs to those earlier heroic traditions.”12 This conclusion extends beyond the specific relation of Rembrandt’s group portrait to its more orderly predecessors—Carroll compares it to Lastman and van Nieulandt’s Group Portrait of Nine Guardsmen (Company of Captain Abraham Boom, 1623–24; fig. 24), which commemorates the expedition of 1622 to Zwolle, and to Werner van den Valckert’s Company of Captain Alber Coenraetsz Burcht (1625), which alludes to de Gheyn’s 1607 Wapenhandelinghe.13 Although, as I noted, Carroll’s argument remains nominally focused on Rembrandt’s achievement, it suggests to me that The Night Watch’s conspicuous “lapse in martial decoBetween ‘Stad’ and Stadholder

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rum” represents a programmatic decision with political (and not merely aesthetic) consequences, a decision to engage in an act of ironic portrayal, a decision we could imagine to have been jointly arrived at by Rembrandt and his patrons. In such a fantasy, or hypothesis, the patrons would be agents rather than targets of the irony. They would participate in the mishandling of weapons because they wished to satirize the pretension to militant manliness many of The Night Watch’s predecessors highlight. They would understand their task as sitters to be the representation of a theatrical performance in which Captain Cocq and his company stage a parody of ineffectual guardsmanship. But if The Night Watch stages a critique of the role of the militia as a protective institution in recent decades, and at the same time a critique of the performances of painters and sitters in recent group portraits, we may still ask why—on behalf of what cause or faction—the military ethos was called into question. As Carroll notes, the issue was not the literal preparedness of the militia as a fighting force. It was the political will of the city in its negotiations with the Stadholder. The militia is only “a visual metaphor” that represents the city’s “willingness to protect its rights” and defend its interests.14 What was the symbolic value of this image of ineffectual guardsmanship? Was it intended to make a statement about Amsterdam’s disputes with the Stadholder over troop support and finance? If so, which message did it convey? That Amsterdam (whose economic interests were better served by peace with Spain) should no longer lend its support to Frederik Hendrik’s military campaigns? Or that it should no longer continue to resist the Stadholder’s demands? Both messages could signify the loss of the warlike spirit that secured the formation and independence of the Dutch Republic. In that respect, both could equally be taken to disparage “the military ethos and effectiveness of Amsterdam’s present-day heirs to those earlier heroic traditions.” And both messages could be sharpened by the possibility of allusion—the possibility that The Night Watch mimics the pretentiously military posturing of sitters in recent militia portraits. We don’t know enough about Cocq, van Ruytenburgh, and their fellow patrons to position them on one or the other or, ambivalently, both sides of the issue. But we don’t have to. It’s enough that the parodic elements in The Night Watch can be kept in play as effects for which there 206

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is a plausible rationale. In providing this rationale, Carroll obviates the need for allegorization and encourages viewers to enjoy the way Rembrandt renders his portrayal of ineffectual guardsmanship gorgeously and ironically visible (and, occasionally, risible). The rationale activates and limits a range of possible motives that could induce Rembrandt’s patrons to embrace a representation of themselves as sitters dominated by the major structural problem of the genre: the threat of disaggregation, the tension between corporate and competitive posing.

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18

Posographical Misfires

Schama no doubt remembers Paul Claudel’s description of The Night Watch as a crumbling sandbank when he adverts to the danger of its “Rabelaisian inclusiveness,” the rule-breaking conflation of genres that makes it “a noise, a brag, a street play. . . . But because it’s all that, it’s a picture that keeps threatening to disintegrate into incoherence, for it takes the chance that all the picture types that it wants to bring together will end up, not in agreement, but at war with each other. Instead of a sublime synthesis, there might be a dissonant rout.”1 The appreciation and apprehension aroused by the picture’s inclusiveness divert Schama from still another source of danger, one that is simpler and more radical because basic to the conflicted structure of group portraiture: the normative tension between competitive and collective posing is exacerbated in this case by the divergent generic claims of portraiture and history. Are the sitters posing as if posing or posing as if engaged in a proto-military action? Some seem to have elected to do it one way, some the other. In several cases, sitters could be doing either or both. There are stagy poses in this picture, but there are also several disconnects—sitters whose gazes don’t go anywhere. The drummer, the red musketeer, and the musketeer who blows into the firing pan seem inwardly focused on what they are doing. But what are they doing? Is each concentrating on his separate task, or are all concentrating on the common task of posing-as-if? The poses of the ensign and his neighbors in the upper row evoke the same questions. 209

Is the ensign more absorbed in his banner and its meaning or in the pose he holds for the painter? Even though he stands well back in the central archway, luminous striations of light and shade embossed by facture accentuate both his substantiality and his proximity to the viewer. From the banner through the foreshortened arm to the other elbow, he takes up a lot of space. The arm akimbo that counterposes the standard-bearing arm is none other than the famous Renaissance elbow, displayed in The Night Watch only by the ensign and the lieutenant. That ubiquitous flourish of manliness and danger is expressly a manifestation of sprezzatura. But since such manifestations often fail to conceal the effort required to conceal effort, they seldom fail to arouse the suspicion that they are motivated by emulative desire and performance anxiety. The ensign’s expansive figure diminishes the posing space available to those around him. It meets with resistance only when it bumps up against the sword wielded by a militiaman who is squeezed between the arm akimbo and the shield that circles Captain Cocq’s head like a dark halo gone awry. The militiaman gamely and genially, if a little stiffly, soldiers on. He weathers the ensign’s obtrusion like a trooper and fully deserves his reward, the brightest highlight in his row. But the two sitters on his left (the viewer’s right) and the two whose faces alone are visible behind them fare less well. They seem more pressed for posing space than they should be, given the amplitude of the area enclosed by the arch. Two additional figures barely visible to the left of the ensign increase the effect of crowdedness, an effect that has positive value in group portraits because it sharpens the edge of posographical competition among sitters. So too does the relatively even and fugitive light that “seems to drift along the lines of heads at the rear of the painting.”2 Schama’s term “drift” perfectly describes its meander as it glances past each of those five heads and pauses only long enough to keep their features from dissolving into shadows. In this twilit zone the treatment of the three sitters to the right of the ensign is particularly complex. Each is differently accoutered: one holds a sword and shield, the second a clumsy and fusty lance, and the third a pike.3 At first glance they appear to be looking leftward as if their attention has been caught by something in the neighborhood of the drummer and pointing sergeant. The impression of concerted focus quickly fades, however, because each sitter seems enclosed in an invisible bubble of self210

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concern, within which different motives are in play. Is the sitter with the stovepipe hat who holds up his weapon assuming a ceremonial pose for his portrait? Or is he making room in a crowded space for the sitters and activity below him?4 If the pikeman beside him affects a warlike posture with weapon at the ready, what is his target? His position most closely resembles those depicted in plates 13 and 15 of the pike sequence in Wapenhandelinghe.5 But it has no functional relation to either position, and once again, as with our three musketeers, this may be a parodic touch, a posographical misfire. Rembrandt’s pikeman is much less businesslike than de Gheyn’s. The attenuated rendering of his grip on the pike matches the cursive treatment of a face economically limned in the half-light.6 His expression, like that of the red musketeer, can best be described as dreamy. Of the musketeer and the pikeman, as well as of the pikeman’s neighbor in the archway, it seems less accurate to say that they “hold” their weapons than that they “have been holding” them.7 Both seem to be staring vacantly—not looking but giving themselves to be seen. Their attention is fixed on their sustained acts of posing. In Fictions of the Pose, I named this introverted pose the fiction of distraction: “posing so as to make it appear that after setting up to be portrayed and observed, one’s body holds the pose but one’s mind has wandered.”8 Although the red musketeer’s action is self-contained and the dreamy pikeman’s outer-directed, both are poster boys for this fiction. That the musketeer and the pikeman differ in their engagement with others makes the latter’s introverted demeanor even stranger. He extends his pike before ten of the thirteen pikes discernible on the right, only one of which is clearly in a sitter’s hands. From this Wouer Kloek infers that his gesture bars the entrance of “a large number of pikemen.”9 According to this attractive inference, the gesture defends against crowdedness—against the unruly desire of too many guardsmen to be part of the picture, which would jeopardize both the captain’s marching orders and the painter’s posing orders, and would inflate The Night Watch into a Grebber-size extravaganza (see fig. 14).10 Kloek ascribes a decisive maneuver to the dreamy pikeman. Nevertheless, his fixed, half-obscured gaze testifies less to an act of blockade than to the symbolic gesture of a sitter who only pretends, in his distracted fashPosographical Misfires

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ion, to be aggressive. Along with several of his fellow sitters, he contributes to a general atmosphere of manual activity and scopic inattentiveness. Only two, or possibly three, sitters make direct eye contact with the observer. One is the man who deflects the musket, but, as I note above, the meaning of his look is obscured by his action as he extends his arm under the gun barrel.11 The others are the pikeman with the feather in his hat and his neighbor, both of whom stand behind the pointing arm of the sergeant at the right edge. The former enacts another Wapenhandlinghe position, “the first motion in advancing the pike.”12 Indeed, he appears ready to advance the butt of his pike into the dog. As to the second, so much of his face is obscured by the sergeant’s arm that if he paid to be portrayed he should have demanded a refund. The dog-poker seems to have foreseen this danger: he ducks toward his right so as to avoid being occluded by the arm. The liveliest conversation-piece, the purest example of posing as if not posing, occurs at the right edge, where the owner of the offending arm seems with parted lips to be addressing his neighbor. Once again, it isn’t clear whether the sergeant’s animated gesture responds to the captain’s command or to the shooter’s commotion. Because of the flaccidity of the pointing hand, the gesture seems simultaneously decisive and unfocused, as if it were performed in a vacuum.13 This lends support to the RRP counter-narrative view that, although the sergeant may appear to be commanding “his squad” to move forward, in actuality he’s directing his interlocutor’s attention toward the general cluster of “symbols placed in the center” of the picture.14 For those who agree with Carroll that the object of the sergeant’s advertence is less symbolic than catabolic, less an allegorical tableau than a chaotic event, the narrative force of his gesture assumes different values. It may be more admonitory or exclamatory than explanatory. If you were to draw a balloon over his head and inscribe within it his response to the event, what would you be inclined to write? “Behold the past and present glory of Amsterdam’s citizen soldiery!”? “Follow our noble Leader!”? “Who is that short girl?”? or—with special reference to the central shooter—“What a mess!”? Or would you shift your attention to an event in a different register, the register of posography, and fill the sergeant’s balloon with a variant of the complaint recorded some twenty-five years 212

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later by Samuel Pepys about his portrait session with the painter, John Hayls: “I . . . do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by.”15 The anomalies I’ve been describing in this section offer a good reason to cling to the helium-filled balloon of allegory that carries viewers safely above the ground plane of unruly detail. But given a choice between a theory that encourages us to ignore cues to visual mischief and one that encourages us to acknowledge their existence and confront them on the ground, why should anyone hesitate to adopt the latter alternative? At least two hypotheses may be advanced against the tendency toward allegorical evasion. One is weaker because it is purely a general and aesthetic speculation, the other stronger because it engages a possible historical motive. The weaker hypothesis is that the unruly shooter sends up the fiction of the pose. The Night Watch parodies the central convention of the group portrait by including a figure, a motif, that dramatizes both the impossibility of the fiction of collective posing and the blandness of its product. If the gun is going off, how can you say the shooter only poses as if shooting? In van der Helst’s Company of Roerlof Bicker, the ancestor of Buffalo Bill poses as if aiming or firing (fig. 35).16 But Rembrandt’s central shooter poses as if he has just fired, and the puff of smoke is there to prove it. He outdoes Buffalo Bill and highlights the essential silliness of the latter’s pose.17 Firing gives the lie either to itself or to the fiction of the pose. It is a hyperbolic expression of the fictiveness of posing. The stronger hypothesis incorporates the weaker one into Carroll’s historically sensitive account, which supplies a limiting context for the irony that edges not only particular wild effects like the ones described above but also more general “lapse[s] in martial decorum.” Whether or not The Night Watch represents a collective event, a historical episode, or a military moment, there is a conspicuous feint in that direction: following their leader’s command, “the militiamen are in the process of forming company.”18 But the process is foiled by the equally conspicuous disconnect between the captain’s gesture of command and the guardsmen’s inattention to it. The feint toward order enhances the impression of comic disarray, of ineffectual guardsmanship. If The Night Watch is eventful it isn’t because its sitters pose as if not posing—as if pretending to participate in a particular action (preparing Posographical Misfires

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figure 35. Bartholomeus van der Helst, Company of Captain Roelof Bicker, detail. Shooter.

to fall in and march out). Rather, it is because so many of them seem to oscillate between the two major posographical possibilities, posing as if posing and posing as if not posing. The drama of the scene gets recentered on that problematic state, the state in which sitters pose as if pretending not to pose but without committing themselves fully to that pre214

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tense. That is, they appear to want to be recognized as sitters who are posing, but whose pose is the pose of pretending not to pose. The pretense of ineffectual guardsmanship must, after all, be marked as merely a pretense, a theatrical performance. The sitters thus give themselves to be seen making a divided commitment to the demands of portraiture and to those of narrative action. The painter’s commitment, however, does not entirely conform to that of the sitters he depicts or to that of the patrons the sitters represent. This is because there are things the painter’s hand, working in cahoots with the medium, does and “says” on its own. If there is a level of irony or parody the sitters collaborate with the painter in realizing, there is another level they may not be party to. In The Night Watch, that level is most apparent in the details of the visual relation between the captain and the lieutenant, a relation Carroll suggestively describes: “the contrast between the two officers is . . . dramatic . . . : on the one side, the sober, commanding figure of Captain Banning Cocq; on the other, the cavalier and dandyish figure of Lieutenant van Ruytenburgh. . . . The ominous shadow that falls across his body further encourages the viewer to wonder whether this triumphal parade of a militia company in Amsterdam might at any moment dissolve into disaster and disarray.”19

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19

An Odd Couple: The Ghost of Anslo’s Wife

Riegl praises Rembrandt for the discipline with which he maintains the pattern of subordination that foregrounds the two officers and isolates them from the remainder of the company: Large in stature, towering well above the others in the exact center of the painting, . . . [the captain] steps straight toward the viewer, his left hand extended authoritatively in the direction of the line of march, his head half-turned toward the lieutenant who is walking beside him on the right at a shorter pace. The lieutenant is receiving orders, his head held at a deferential angle, his eyes directed respectfully toward the captain. The lieutenant thus truly looks as though he is subordinating himself directly to the captain on a psychological level.1 Riegl goes on to emphasize the division of the group into two parts: “What is new and surprising . . . is that the subordinating effect of the spoken word (in this case, the command) operates directly on a psychological level for only one figure [the lieutenant]); for all the others, it takes the form of physical activity.”2 Having isolated the captain and lieutenant in the foreground and coupled them more closely together in psychological terms, Rembrandt treats “the remaining figures . . . as a uniform whole in the background.” In effect, according to Riegl, he reduces them to the status of staffage. “The captain’s command to the lieutenant

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is the main theme; the troop of men is something incidental, comparable to a background interior or landscape.”3 Opinions subsequent to Riegl’s have been more sensitive to the element of competition between the two officers (pl. 15). Haverkamp-Begemann remarks that, although physically and positionally the Lieutenant is “no match” for the Captain, in painterly terms he “outshines him.”4 Schama is critical of the lieutenant because his “getup, beside the relatively sober apparel of the Captain, was outlandishly glamorous,” and he censures him for “choosing to advertise, possibly a little too loudly, his station and fortune.”5 This misses the point inscribed in the very terms and structure of his sentence, which reflect the fate Rembrandt confers on his two sitters: to be locked forever in the struggle for posographical preeminence. Their struggle oddly resembles the spousal competition that enlivens pendants and double portraits. They seem to be dancing in step, but in fact they are jockeying for position. As the captain strains forward and upward, the lieutenant marks time and defers, while his costume seizes the light, which facilitates our noticing that Amsterdam’s coat of arms is embroidered on his jacket, not the captain’s. The lieutenant’s face is a profile, not a frontal view, and he poses as if listening, one step behind. But he steps decisively forward; his is a more fully modeled and rounded figure; and his warm colors bring him even further forward. Captain Cocq’s response to this challenge is to stretch his hand across the finish line, so that its shadow darkens and besmirches the Lieutenant, neutralizes his modest elbow-work, and threatens his manhood. Several commentators have noted resemblances between Cocq and the figure of Cornelis Claesz. Anslo in the double portrait I discuss above (pl. 7).6 Rembrandt finished it a year before The Night Watch. In both cases, there is a rhetorical mismatch in the sense that the gesture to the supposed addressee misfires and is directed elsewhere: Anslo and Cocq aim their words past Anslo’s wife and Cocq’s lieutenant, respectively. In both cases, the misfires serve to make clear that the sitters are more fully engaged in sitting (posing for the observer) than in interacting with other sitters—that the latter is an excuse for the former. But why should the spatial relation between the heads of Cocq and van Ruytenburgh resemble that between Anslo and his wife? For me, the meaning of the resemblance has been dangerously compromised by Schama’s 218

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characterization of the wife: “her head slightly cocked like an obedient pet or a contrite child, . . . a picture of patient and, Rembrandt makes us feel, accustomed compliance.”7 Lieutenant van Ruytenburgh is relegated to the position of Anslo’s wife in the double portrait and, more generally, the position of wives in pendants. The contrast between his colorful outfit, with its intricate detail, and the Captain’s sober black echoes a characteristic pattern of sartorial contrast in portrait pendants. Cocq’s dark form is locked between and recedes behind the brilliance that links the golden girls to the lieutenant and brings them both forward. His dangling glove provides a displaced echo of a familiar pendant motif and thus maps that form of competitive posing onto the officers.8 Yet why does he hold it that way if not “to drop it at his feet”—as David Smith remarks of a similar gesture in Rembrandt’s 1634 pendant of Maerten Soolmans, a gesture Smith interprets as a surrender of authority to his wife?9 Again, why transpose a marital into a martial encounter by mapping the pictorial strategies of pendants onto the representation of masculine power relations?10 One effect is to cast the shadow of the domestic relation over the homosocial bonding that is presumably an escape from it. The heightened uneasiness generated by this allusive transposal also produces other effects. It frames both partners in a metapictorial moment that adds immediacy to their interaction. The lieutenant seems to stare at the captain as if watching him work up his pose. In response, the captain seems all the more strenuously to work it up. Locked in their metapictorial struggle, both partners ignore, with smashing equanimity, the gunshot just behind them. Thus the shadow of domestic competition between husband and wife that is featured in pendants—the shadow thrown by the structure of domestic relations discussed in Chapter 9 above—hovers over the two officers and further complicates a basic project already riddled by the complications embedded in the fiction of the group pose. The power relations between men and women in family life impinge on those between male sitters. Competition in the manly theater of militia group portraiture is turned awry by an allusion to competition between spousal partners in the domestic theater of family life. The lieutenant responds to this threat of feminization by parrying protectively with his partisan, a compensatory response “represented in [such] An Odd Couple

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stunning foreshortening” that it sticks out almost as much as the Captain’s hand.11 Even more protuberant is the braiding on the lieutenant’s coat and partisan. Although spatially behind the head of the partisan, it is so thickly painted that it projects forward as if it were real, three-dimensional fabric. The complex interplay of actual and imaginary depth pulls the viewer in toward the canvas, too close to see the painting as a whole. The contest I have just described is not something one can attribute directly to the sitters. In this explosion of texture, the painter steps forward; the act of the painting hand challenges and upstages the act of competitive posing. Presumably the sitters collaborate with the painter in setting the visual scene, and presumably the painting reflects their efforts to control the final product, including, no doubt, requests for alteration of details that don’t suit sitters. But although the painting itself may represent sitters’ efforts to control it, there are indications that it challenges such efforts. The gendered skew given the contest between the captain and the lieutenant is an indication of this sort. It is the painter’s interpretation of the meaning of their pose, and it serves to reinterpret the clashing crisscross of weapons that enlivens the rest of the picture. Rembrandt’s competition with the sitters brings out theirs with each other.

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Coda: Playing Soldier A funny thing happens in the left foreground of The Night Watch as Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Wilhelm van Ruytenburgh are on the point of leading their company to an unspecified site of assembly or action (fig. 36). Where the now-crepuscular gloom settling over the painting’s surface threatens to deepen, its curtain is lifted by a glimmer of half-light, which bounces off the red musketeer and exposes the fugitive contrapposto of the company’s smallest human sitter, a dwarflike boy in a battered helmet carrying his large powderhorn as if it were a concertina. Just as the captain steps confidently forward with hand outstretched and “gives the order to his Lieutenant . . . to march,” and just after a young musketeer has fired a shot dangerously close to the lieutenant’s beautiful ostrich plume, this boy runs out of the picture while looking back over his shoulder at the main action—though “looking back” assumes more than we know, since, as the RRP notes, the helmet “hides his eyes.”1 Maybe he complies with the captain’s order by hurrying to get out of the way. Or maybe he defies it, refuses to fall in, and dances jauntily off. Commentators come to different conclusions. On the one hand, Westermann sees a boy who “runs off, perhaps because he has been frightened by the commotion behind the Captain.”2 On the other hand, HaverkampBegemann, who includes this “powder monkey” among figures that help “intensify the impression of an actual event,” sees “a thin smile on his face” and suggests that the figure “adds a humorous note to the serious221

figure 36. The Night Watch, detail. Boy with powderhorn.

ness of these earnest citizens.”3 These opposed reactions can be reconciled with the help of the following interpretive fantasy. Let’s imagine that our “caddy,” as Haverkamp-Begemann endearingly calls him, has just supplied someone with powder, and that the special someone has just used it to all but blast the lieutenant’s hat off his head. This contribution to “the commotion behind the Captain” could account 222

Coda

not only for the smile on the face of the caddy. It could also motivate his fear of apprehension and add briskness to the pace of his departure. If, as the RRP observes, the powder boy on one side of the painting and the dog on the other are “both of them movement personified” and are “both kept wholly in the shadow,” the fantasy could help explain why the powder boy takes such precautions.4 This fantasy may be ridiculous. It may add “a humorous note to the seriousness of these earnest citizens,” though hardly in the sense intended by Haverkamp-Begemann. But it is not irrelevant, because it can serve as a caricature of the infernal counterplot, the ghostly scenario, simmering under the surface of the main plot, whose historical irony Carroll has so persuasively explicated. The diminutive powder boy’s oversized helmet and horn join with the little shooter’s unruly discharge and the golden girl’s quizzical gaze and dead chicken to mock militiamen everywhere, who are like overgrown boys in their eagerness to dress up for their painter and play soldier for their fans. If Carroll is right, the major sitters in The Night Watch may themselves be participants in the same game, directed outward toward other portraits and other militias. But slippage is always possible. Strange meanings have been known to mushroom in the mycelium of Rembrandt’s overheated mind or someone else’s. When the ghostly after-image of Anslo’s wife dallies in the neighborhood of our three mischievous Munchkins, the irony programmatically directed outward implodes. It sends up the manly militancy of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburgh, Ensign Jan Cornelisz. Visscher, and the other little boys who are so seriously playing soldier that they ignore their captain’s command, which makes his energetic gesture seem even more orotund and hapless. The challenge to the sitters’ manhood doesn’t stop there. As you get pulled toward the surface of the painting by the brilliant passages of textured paint that describe the lieutenant, another very different brilliance diverts your eye and demands that you move back again (pl. 16). A burst of angelic fire that balances his glowing form materializes in the two chicken girls. Compared with the muscular treatment of his solid and rounded figure, they seem flimsy and insubstantial, painted in a register noticeably lacking in variations of texture; the brushstrokes are neutralized by blending.5 Playing Soldier

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Perhaps this means that the girls are supposed to go up in allegorical smoke. If so, any allegory worth its salt would have to take into account the obvious fact that they are going the wrong way. They lead the opposing army. Just as the form of the dead chicken parodies that of the Captain’s glove, so the girls initiate a strong left-to-right movement that contravenes the will of the officers. The energy of their countermarch surges through the diagonals of the two ill-managed gun barrels, then pushes the pointing sergeant backward, and finally keeps the official drummer from moving all the way into the picture. It beats against the vectors of orderly assembly generated by the repetitive leftward pulses of the drum, the captain’s baton, the banner, and the red musketeer’s gun. The other sitters don’t seem to notice the golden girl any more than they notice the dog. Rembrandt’s composition swirls them round her in a ring of self-absorbed dancers. And as we’ve seen, very few of them seem to notice each other. This may be because each is too busy presenting himself for inspection by the viewers in his future. Several are almost dreamily lost in their own acts of posing—the red musketeer, the ensign, the three men in the half-shadow to his left. Even the drummer, with his hat shading his eyes, poses as if performing his rattatatoo in a trance—or as if, like the others, he hears the music of a different drummer. But only the most dogged commitment to the iconographer’s panacea could blind the viewer to the main chicken girl’s oddly intense and focused look. She is there. She fixes either the young shooter or the captain with a critical and curious gaze, the gaze of someone who finds herself in the wrong parade; the gaze of the pictorial observer or of a contingent viewer who moves past the painting and wonders what is going on.6 She is in Cocq’s company but not of it. She may well, as Binstock discerningly remarks, embody “elements outside or subordinated to the male, civic, businesslike world of the militia,” elements that nevertheless “threaten to subordinate this world in turn.”7 Let’s give these elements a name: woman, say, or wife; Saskia, maybe, dressed to kill as she so often was in life, now poignantly evoked to bless this work, to bestow on it both kinds of wonder, a sense of astonishment and a sense of doubt. And let’s try, finally, to imagine a meaning behind or beneath her pose. Suppose she’s there to remind you of Rembrandt’s secret parody, the one under the historical parody picked out by Carroll? Suppose she’s an 224

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invisible household spirit sent by Rembrandt into an area cordoned off For Men Only; sent to disrupt the homosocial pastoral of manly posing, and to deride its heroics? Suppose she’s been put there to disrupt Rembrandt’s homosocial escape into the pastoral of manly painting? Suppose she’s there as his final pentimento, his act of repentance, to memorialize what he may be on the verge of losing—a friend; a fellow sitter and ironist; his competitor; his lover; their particular home? Suppose any number of things. We dance round in a ring and suppose But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

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Notes introduction: a shot in the dark 1. Citation from Cocq’s album: see J. Bruyn, B. Haak, S. H. Levie, P. J. J. van Thiel, and E. van de Wetering, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, trans. D. Cook-Radmore, 5 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982–), 3:450, 480. Vol. 1 appeared in 1982, 2 in 1986, 3 in 1990. Since this work is the product of the Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project, it will be cited in future references as RRP. 2. Compare plate 12 (fig. 30, below) of the musket sequence in Wapenhandelinghe van roers, musquetten ende spiessen (Weapon-handling with Calivers, Muskets, and Pikes], 1607; modern facsimile reprint accompanied by an early English translation, The Exercise of Armes (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), ed. with commentary by J. B. Kist. The original was prepared by Jacques de Gheyn under the supervision of John II of Nassau, probably in collaboration with his Nassau-Orange cousins, William Louis and Maurice. In future citations the title will be shortened to Wapenhandelinghe. 3. See Chapter 13, below. 4. The gesture seems to echo and either to parody or simply to overgo the gesture designed by Thomas de Keyser for Captain Allaert Cloeck in his 1632 group portrait of Cloeck and members of his company. De Keyser’s composition is prima facie a good example of the conservative lineup format Rembrandt may have been interested in parodying. But as Ann Jensen Adams persuasively demonstrates, de Keyser’s utilization of the conventional lineup is itself far from innocent. See her important account of its self-consciously retardataire character in “Civic Guard Portraits: Private Interests and the Public Sphere,” Nederlands kunsthistorische jaarboek 46 (1995): 168–97. 5. Benjamin Binstock, “Aloïs Riegl in the Presence of The Night Watch,” October 74 (Fall 1995): 41. 227

6. Ibid., 40. 7. See Chapter 11, below. 8. For citations and references, see E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt: The Night Watch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 92–101, and Julius S. Held, “Rembrandt: Truth and Legend,” in Rembrandt’s Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 131, 133. 9. RRP 3:450. 10. Margaret D. Carroll, “Rembrandt’s ‘Nightwatch’ and the Iconological Traditions of Military Company Portraiture in Amsterdam” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1976), 125–26; Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 9–10; Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt, His Life, His Painting (New York: Viking Press, 1985), 214. 11. Several drawings and etchings dated in the years before 1642, supposedly of Saskia, seem to indicate that she was bedridden during this period. 12. Additional clues to the climate of reception have been sought in evidence of stylistic and aesthetic preferences (Did Rembrandt violate “the rules of art,” and if so, did that trouble his patrons?) in the two extant seventeenth-century notices by Samuel van Hoogstraten and Filippo Baldinucci, in the relation of The Night Watch to prior militia portraits, and in the institutional history of the militia guild. The opinions of van Hoogstraten and Baldinucci are discussed in Chapter 12, below. 13. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). Kain’s translation is based on Riegl, “Das holländishe Gruppenporträt,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 23, nos. 3–4 (1902): 71–278. This was subsequently published (with revisions) as a book: Das holländische Gruppenporträt, ed. Karl M. Swoboda, 2 vols. (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1931). Since the trashing of Riegl’s work on Rembrandt (especially The Syndics) by H. van de Waal in the 1950s, there has been much enlightening commentary. See, e.g.: Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44 (1988): 13–14; Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 71–97; Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Benjamin Binstock, “Aloïs Riegl in the Presence of The Night Watch” (see note 5 above); Binstock, “I’ve Got You under My Skin: Rembrandt, Riegl, and the Will of Art History,” in Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: G&B International, 2001), 219–63. See also the enlightening review of the Getty edition by Sheldon Nodelman in Art in America 88 (November 2000): 49–50. Van de Waal’s scornful dismissal

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of Riegl’s deployment of the observer in “The Syndics and their Legend” first appeared in Oud-Holland in 1956 and was subsequently reprinted in van de Waal, Steps towards Rembrandt: Collected Articles 1937–1972, trans. Patricia Wardle and Alan Griffiths (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1974), 247–92, esp. 249, 253–56, 259. 14. Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 15. David R. Smith, “Rhetoric and Prose in Dutch Portraiture,” Dutch Crossing 41 (1990): 74. 16. This departs from normal usage, in which the term sitter refers indifferently to the person who posed and to his or her painted likeness. Obviously, since I’m using these terms in the context of commissioned portraiture, patron denotes someone involved in the commissioning of any portrait containing his or her likeness. 17. As explained in Chapter 3, note 1, below, Genre is capitalized when it designates the particular genre of scenes that appear to represent everyday life.

chapter 1: toward the interpretation of performance anxiety 1. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 7–8. 2. Mariët Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 1585–1718 (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd, 1996), 131. 3. Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips, Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 65. 4. Mariët Westermann, “‘Costly and Curious, Full of pleasure and home contentment’: Making Home in the Dutch Republic,” in Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Westermann (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), 51; Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 131. 5. On this, see Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 261–63. 6. See Chapters 3, 4, and 7–10, below, for examples.

chapter 2: portraiture and the fictions of the pose 1. Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 148–49. 2. Thanks to Peter Erickson for suggesting this possibility. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 13–14. 4. Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18.

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5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 134–35. 6. Patricia Fortini Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 144. Resistance to the tedium of sitting has frequently been expressed. My colleague Deanna Shemek has recently reminded me of this and illustrated it, from her forthcoming translation of the selected letters of Isabella D’Este, with the following example of a sitter’s diffidence: “In reply to Your Ladyship’s letter of the 7th of this month, we thank you for the efforts to persuade Francia to come to Mantua in order better to do our portrait. But Your Ladyship need not press him further, because we do not care for him to come for this purpose, since the last time we had our portrait done, we found it so bothersome to have to sit patiently still and immobile that we would never do that again.” 7. This distinction is indebted to the one between the spectator in the picture and the spectator of the picture formulated by Richard Wollheim and discussed below. See note 15. 8. If real sitters are figures whose referents have been identified as historical persons, what about figures assumed to have been added, like staffage, or fillers? What about figures that—like Rembrandt’s unruly shooter and golden girl—have been identified as merely symbolic? Or figures that fit the category of tronies (on which see the illuminating essay by Charles Ford cited in the next note)? Sitters whose referents are imaginary seem distinguishable as a category from those whose referents are real. 9. Charles Ford, “Works Do Not Make an Oeuvre: Rembrandt’s SelfPortraits as a Category,” in Rethinking Rembrandt, ed. Alan Chong and Michael Zell (Zwolle: Waanders, 2003), 126. 10. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). See Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 181–84. 11. David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 9–11. 12. Ibid., 4–7. Smith is very careful to strip these terms of the psychological baggage they carry in Goffman’s application to the performances and interactions of real people. Eddy de Jongh’s complaint that Smith ignores the difference is unfounded: Portretten van echt en trouw: Huwelijk en gezin in de Nederlandse kunst van de zeveniende eeuw (Zwolle: Waanders, 1986), 59–60, n. 6. Wayne Franits, expanding de Jongh’s criticism in his review of Portretten van echt en trouw, obviously didn’t read Smith’s discussion with any care: see Franits, in Oud Holland 102 (1988): 248–56. 13. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 8. As we’ll see later, this assertion will be qualified: not simply the presence of the viewer to the portrait but also the

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absence (and anticipated presence) of the viewer during the represented act of posing. 14. On this formula, which derives from Jacques Lacan’s use of and elaboration on the phrase donner á voir, see Berger, Fictions of the Pose, chapter 7 and passim. 15. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 102. See, more generally, 101–85 passim. My distinction is less complicated, if more simple-minded, than Wollheim’s. My observer, e.g., doesn’t have a “repertoire” (Painting as an Art, 104–30). See also the spirited discussion of Wollheim’s concepts in Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting, ed. Rob van Gerwen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)—especially the contributions by Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Caroline van Eck, and Robert Hopkins, with Wollheim’s rejoinder on pp. 256–61. 16. Other terms, such as spectator or beholder, may appear citationally, in discussion of the work of others, but from now on, in order to maintain terminological consistency, I’ll try to restrict myself to observer and viewer. 17. Initially I thought of the observer position as blank or null, but this is a misleading way to characterize an address and relation that are intrinsically rhetorical. 18. See Chapters 4 and 5, below. 19. The order implied by “the sitter’s pose and the painter’s imitation of it” is itself a mystification, since the portrait pretends to imitate or copy what in fact it creates. The true order is: the patron’s pose and instructions > the painter’s representation > the sitter’s pose. The portrait disrupts the primary circuit of communication between painter and sitter: it represents the sitter posing not for the painter but for the still-absent viewers.

chapter 3: the posographical imperative: a comparison of genres 1. The term Genre is capitalized here and hereafter when it is used to designate the particular “genre” described and defined below rather than “genre” as a general category. For a recent account of the origin of the term, see Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 1–2. 2. The figure Alberti characterizes as an interlocutor acts as if he were in the presence of imaginary spectators of the depicted event: he “beckons them with his hand to look, or . . . challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or . . . invites you to laugh or weep” (Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson [London: Phaidon Press, 1972], 83). In his 1655 Eavesdropper with Woman Scolding in London, Maes compli-

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cates this motif by painting a frame around the image and a curtain between the frame and the observer. Franits notes that since the curtain covers part of the event the eavesdropper gestures toward—a woman in a distant room shouting at someone—it tempts the viewer “to pull the curtain aside to reveal the unfortunate target of the shrewish mistress’s wrath” (Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 156). As we’ll see, depicting a Genre image as a painting within a painting problematizes the relation between character and viewer. The fictive space no longer extends forward to include the viewer as a participant-observer in the scene. The painted frame transforms the fictive space in front of it into that of any area within which the painting hangs. 3. Mariët Westermann, “Steen’s Comic Fictions,” in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. H. Perry Chapman, Wouter Th. Kloek, and Arthur Wheelock, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 61. 4. See the illuminating remarks about these paintings by Mariët Westermann in The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Zwolle: Waanders, 1997), 234–36. She introduces them to illustrate the theme of seduction as a metaphor for painting. Her comments on “the joint deceits of flesh and paint, . . . story and artifice,” are especially interesting. 5. From the excellent catalogue entry by Wouter Kloek in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 142–45. 6. David R. Smith, “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” The Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 408. 7. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 270; Das holländishe Gruppenporträt, 198. Riegl has much to say about the Genrelike or novellalike aspects of group portraiture. See Chapter 5, below. 8. Eddy de Jongh, Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting, trans. Michael Hoyle (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2000), 85. 9. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon Press, 1972), 83. 10. Chapman, “Jan Steen, Player in His Own Paintings,” in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 17. 11. Thanks to Beth Pittenger for helping me think this through. 12. The distinction between portraiture and history is complicated—and may be interrogated—by the ambiguities of historiation, but the distinction itself remains normative. 13. On the former, see Chapter 5, below; on the latter, Chapter 13. 14. Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, ed. Dennis Weller (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2002), 85. 15. By W. R. Valentiner and Colin Eisler. Cited by Weller, ibid., 86 n. 7. 16. See ibid., plate 24, p.136.

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17. See, e.g., ibid., 85, 130, 136. 18. Leyster herself painted a self-portrait that raises doubts about its genre by raising doubts about the direction of her gaze. Is she looking in the mirror while painting herself paint the fiddler on the easel? Is she being portrayed by another painter? Perhaps she isn’t posing for and gazing at the observer but socializing with the model mirrored in the painting on the easel. Is it a portrait, a self-portrait, or a Genre scene? 19. Chapman, catalogue entry for Self-Portrait as a Lutenist, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 180. Future citations of catalogue entries will refer to this volume. For more sustained comments on Steen’s self-portraits, see H. Perry Chapman’s invaluable “Jan Steen as Family Man: Self-Portrayal as an Experiential Mode of Painting,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 46 (1995): 368–93; here, 372–76. 20. Eddy de Jongh, “Jan Steen, So Near and Yet So Far,” in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 43. Chapman speculates that “Steen’s comic role-playing” may initially have had market value as a signature strategy (“Jan Steen, Player in His Own Paintings,” in ibid., 12). Franits warns against overstating this factor in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 209. 21. Chapman, “Jan Steen as Family Man,” 370–71; Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 92–93. 22. “Jan Steen: From Arnold Houbraken’s De groote schouburgh . . . , 1721,” trans. Michael Hoyle, in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 93 and 93–97 passim. From Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1718–21), 3:12–26. For the influence of Steen’s selfmythologization on Houbraken’s account, see H. Perry Chapman’s stimulating “Persona and Myth in Houbraken’s Life of Jan Steen,” The Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 135–50. 23. “Jan Steen,” trans. Hoyle, in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 93. 24. Ibid, 93, 95, 97. Houbraken’s general attachment to and deployment of the theater metaphor is discussed in Chapman, “Persona and Myth,” 137–38. Chapman goes on to argue that, in spite of this interest, Houbraken wrote as “a conscientious historian,” not a constructor of fictions or myths (ibid., 140–41). 25. Chapman, “Jan Steen, Player in His Own Paintings,” in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 19. See also: Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 231–33, 255–58, and passim; Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 208–9. Earlier in her essay, Chapman states that the participant self-portraits resemble both Alberti’s interpreter figure and artist self-portraits in Renaissance history scenes in that

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they “create a link between artist and observer” (17). This tends to simplify a link that her later comment describes as more indirect and ironic. 26. Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 228, my emphasis. 27. Ibid. 28. Charles Ford, “Works Do Not Make an Oeuvre: Rembrandt’s SelfPortraits as a Category,” in Rethinking Rembrandt, ed. Alan Chong and Michael Zell (Zwolle: Waanders, 2003), 124. 29. Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 124. 30. David R. Smith, “Comedy and Social Vision in Jan Steen,” lecture given at Colloquium 121, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, on February 10, 1994; forthcoming in Oxford Art Journal. Smith emphasizes the Bakhtinian, regenerative, and carnival spirit of Steen’s comedy. For a different opinion, see Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 124–25. She finds Steen’s bodies only “mildly grotesque” and their pleasures “sublimated” by his art “into the private, perhaps nostalgic pleasures of an urban elite.” Smith, however, argues that the inversions borrowed from “old traditions of Netherlandish low-life painting”—the “peasant dances, the weddings, and tavern scenes”—are keyed by Steen to specific festival moments like Twelfth Night and were thus probably experienced as “comic subversion” rather than “moralizing satire.” If I agree with Smith on this point, it is largely because of Westermann’s emphasis on the effect of Steen’s conspicuous virtuosity. Elsewhere, Smith makes imaginative use of Bakhtin in a discussion of open form with unspecified novelistic possibilities in the work of de Hooch: see “Privacy, Realism, and the Novelistic in 17th-Century Dutch Painting,” in L’Art et les Révolutions: Actes du XXVIIe congrès international d’histoire de l’art, vol. 3: L’Art et les transformations sociales revolutionaries (Strasbourg: Société alsacienne pour le développement de histoire de l’art, 1992), 35–52. 31. Or, to restate it from the posing sitter’s standpoint, the act of posing will have occurred before the completed work becomes available. 32. I distinguish the sitter in a portrait from the sitter for his or her portrait: the former is the painted figure or likeness, the latter the original or referent. Obviously, the latter may have contact with anyone present during the original act of posing. 33. Chapman, “Jan Steen, Player in His Own Paintings,” in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 19. See the related and interesting discussion of the “conflation of genres” in Westermann’s The Amusements of Jan Steen, 263 and 255–75 passim, also the three chapters on Steen in Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 43–74. 34. See, e.g., the references to this theme by Chapman and Kloek in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 166, 173, 174, 197. Kloek finds “the complete absence of a father figure . . . remarkable”

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in The Feast of St. Nicholas (197), but equally remarkable is the strong resemblance of the crying brother to Steen. 35. Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 227. 36. Salomon, Shifting Priorities, 44. Westermann has objected to Salomon’s argument that the earlier conventions parodied by Steen had lost their relevance in his time (The Amusements of Jan Steen, 244 n. 20). For Salomon’s spirited if somewhat aggrieved response, see Shifting Priorities, 6–7. 37. Ibid., 61. See also Salomon’s discussion of the theme on pp. 93–105. 38. Chapman, “Jan Steen as Family Man,” 386, my emphasis. 39. There are large groups of people in many Steen Genre paintings. It’s therefore helpful to be reminded by Chapman that in seventeenth-century Holland “it was rare to have relatives beyond the nuclear family living at home. Steen’s extended family, with children, grandparents, aunts, and uncles feasting in a kind of eternal holiday celebration, must have represented, and subverted, an ideal” (ibid., 369). 40. Ibid., 371. 41. Ibid., 379. 42. Ibid., 390. 43. Chapman, in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, catalogue entries 23 (173) and 45 (247). 44. Ibid., 254. 45. See, e.g., ibid., 148–49, 173–74, and 254. 46. See Mariët Westermann, “Jan Steen, Frans Hals, and the Edges of Portraiture,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 46 (1995): 298–331. Revised as chapter 6 of The Amusements of Jan Steen. 47. Chapman, in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 166. 48. In addition to the hint of exotropy we find in so many portraits and portrayals, the contrasting definition of her two eyes, one bright and the other dim, produces the unsettling effect of an ocular prosthesis. This is perhaps a hyperbolic reaction to a model who seems less to be looking than to be concentrating on the act of giving herself to be seen. 49. Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 12. 50. Chapman, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 205. 51. According to Franits, for example, “Steen functions in his paintings in a manner akin to fools in sixteenth-century art and even to actors on stage who address the audience and enlighten them” (Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 208). In scripted plays, however, audiences are addressed not by the actor per se but by the character the actor performs (the character of Fool, Vice, villain, hero, or even “actor”), and they are often addressed by characters who pretend to enlighten them but whose motives are suspect. Franits’s analogy

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ignores the basic relation of self-portraiture. It would work better if, e.g., we imagined that Shakespeare as actor performed the roles he wrote for Iago, Falstaff, and Richard III. 52. Which might be the better of the two alternatives, if Seymour Slive is to be believed: “The very act of listening to a rommel-pot is itself a folly best endured by the young, who apparently have a higher tolerance than adults for the ghastly sound produced by the home-made instrument, which consists of a pig’s bladder stretched across an earthenware jug half-filled with water. When a long, wet reed is stuck through the middle of the bladder and moved between the thumb and fingers or slipped up and down, the instrument produces sounds not unlike those emitted by a stuck pig” (Seymour Slive, ed., Frans Hals [Munich: Prestel, 1989], 151). Comparison of Steen’s figure to the livelier and more sympathetic semblance by Hals that Slive discusses accentuates the frozen quality of the former. 53. On this score, the catalogue entry is confusing. Its author, Arthur Wheelock, refers to a previous entry that explains the Twelfth Night tradition of assigning roles by lottery. This reference informs the next sentence, in which he tells us that Steen’s “figures all play their parts—fool, musician, drunken wench, or king, as the case may be” ( Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 206). “Drunken wench” seems an odd member of a series of roles selected by lot. Nevertheless, her inclusion ironically reinforces the idea that what we are shown are models posing as characters. In the earlier entry, we learned that Steen “depicts the chosen lots, identifying the role participants would assume during the evening, pinned to their hats and clothes” (ibid., 157). Thus, in another ironic move, Steen overlays roles assigned by lottery on the set of roles assigned by the painter to his models.

chapter 4: group portraiture: coming together and coming apart 1. See the discussion of group portraits in chapter 13 of Berger, Fictions of the Pose. 2. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 67. His account of the painting occupies pp. 68–84. The two clusters contain twelve and five figures, respectively, and Riegl identifies the latter as members of the former group. 3. Ibid., 79. 4. Ibid., 73; Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 12. 5. For illuminating comments on the extant compositional sketches by Haarlem painters, see Ann Jensen Adams, “Civic Guard Portraits,” 174–77 and n. 23. 6. Scott Newstok has directed my attention to the amusing parody of this procedure in The Headless Horseman, Pierre Lombart’s late-seventeenth-

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century engraving after van Dyck’s equestrian portrait of Charles I. Charles I’s head sits atop one version of the sitter, Oliver Cromwell’s atop another, Louis XIV’s atop a third. 7. “The men posed separately,” Pierre Descargues speculates, “but they accepted the role assigned them in the little play staged by the artist” (Pierre Descargues, Frans Hals, trans. James Emmons [Geneva: Skira, 1968], 89). 8. Frans Hals, ed. Seymour Slive (Munich: Prestel, 1989), 390–91. See the specific documented speculations about Hals’s method by Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks, “Frans Hals: A Technical Examination,” pp. 109–23 in the same volume, esp. 118–19. See also the comments, based on the Hals documents, by Neeltje Köhler and Koos Levy–van Halm in Frans Hals: Militia Pieces (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1990), 10. 9. Seymour Slive, Dutch Painting 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 43. For references to nineteenth-century proponents of the idea that the militiamen were greedy gluttons, see Köhler and Levy–van Halm, Frans Hals: Militia Pieces, 12–13 and 46 (bibliography). 10. G. Hellinga, “Uit de Geschiedenis der Amsterdamsche Gasthuizen: De Sleutel-Paasch-en Gedachtenis Maaltijden,” Maandblad Amstelodamum 35 (1948): 111. Cited in Sheila D. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic: Pictures of Rich and Poor for Charitable Institutions (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985), 233 n.36. 11. See: Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 10–11 and passim; Paul Claudel, The Eye Listens, trans. Elsie Pell (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 48; Claudel, L’oeil écoute (1935), Oeuvres complètes, vol. 17 (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 46. 12. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 233n.40. 13. See Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); 106. 14. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 159. 15. Formally, the ensign and officer are reversed parentheses: they curve in the wrong direction. Having hit on this figure, I’ll continue to use it. 16. He is, famously, Van Gogh’s favorite (“divinely beautiful” and “pearl grey” from head to toe). 17. On the meaning I give to the terms graphic, optical, and textural, see chapter 1 of Berger, Fictions of the Pose. 18. Frans Hals, ed. Slive, 253. For a discussion of this portrait that at times differs from Slive, see Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, trans. Jürgen Riehle (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 71–84. Martin Bijl gives a different view of Hals’s working method and its results in “The Meager Company and Frans Hals’s Working Method,” in Frans Hals, ed., Slive, 103–8. 19. Opinions differ as to how far Hals had advanced toward the completion

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of the figures in this part of the painting. He is credited with having done considerable work on the faces of Sitters 9–12 and perhaps some of the others. For an improbably detailed list of speculations, see Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, 82–83. 20. They may be pikemen: it isn’t clear which of the three obvious candidates is holding one of the two crossed pikes in the right center of the picture. 21. On Hals and half-heartedness in representation, see David Smith’s excellent comments cited later in this chapter. 22. On the Renaissance elbow, see Joaneath Spicer, “The Renaissance Elbow,” in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 84–128. See also Marjorie Garber, “Out of Joint,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23–51. 23. My phrases, but adapted from the description in Köhler and Levy–van Halm, Frans Hals: Militia Pieces, 20. 24. Descargues, Hals, 90. 25. Ibid., 47. 26. Ibid., 85. 27. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 11. 28. In Thomas de Keyser’s 1633 portrait of twenty-one shooters in the Amsterdam Historical Museum, e.g., figures overlap and squeeze against each other in such a way as to indicate that there wasn’t enough room to accommodate all of them comfortably. The hiatus created right of center by the pikeman in front of the doorway only accentuates the problem; his expansive, oversized figure demands so much space that the tight little duo huddling in front of him seems crushed together. 29. On this, see Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, chapter 1 and passim. 30. Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 264. 31. Gary Schwartz, The Dutch World of Painting, catalogue for the exhibition organized by the Netherlands Office for Fine Arts and the Vancouver Art Gallery, April 6–June 29, 1986 (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1986), 66. Schwartz relies heavily on, and expresses his indebtedness to, Muller’s Charity in the Dutch Republic. 32. J. L. Price, Dutch Society, 1588–1713 (New York: Longman, 2000), 152. 33. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 3–4. 34. Schwartz, The Dutch World of Painting, 65. 35. Anne E. C. McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 76, 28. One of the many strong points of this study is its account of the complementary relations between the form and development of the charitable institution and

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the development of the nuclear or “newly privatized family,” on which the orphanage was modeled and which it was designed to support. See pp. 30–37, 148, and 201. 36. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 8. 37. Ibid., 229 n.14, 8. 38. Ibid., 51. 39. Schwartz, The Dutch World of Painting, 70. 40. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 51, 82. 41. Schwartz, The Dutch World of Painting, 67. 42. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 13–16 and passim. 43. Riegl, Dutch Group Portraiture, 223. See Chapter 5 for a more extended account of the participant-viewer and Genre functions. 44. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 3. 45. Chapman, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 121. 46. Ibid., 119. 47. Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 264. 48. Chapman, Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, 121. 49. Schwartz, The Dutch World of Painting, 65. 50. McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age, 106–7. 51. Ibid., 106. For a much richer speculation about the motives of regents, see Muller’s remarkable close reading of Werner van den Valckert’s 1624 portraits of the regents and regentesses of the Amsterdam Leprozenhuis in Charity in the Dutch Republic, 14–20. The “image of virtue” portrayed in these works “was meant to be seen as an exemplar of charity and not as a factual description of administrative activity within the Leprozenhuis. . . . To the sitters . . . this image of virtue was perhaps a way of justifying for themselves the advantages they enjoyed over their fellow men: their regency was a position of privilege but it was only from that position that they were offered the opportunity to practice charity in a manner approaching the biblical ideal” (19). 52. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967), 63. 53. Ibid., 199. 54. On this, see Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 356. 55. To diagram this relation, the human figure stands at the center; above is the power, the source of the figure’s gift and favor; around the figure is the audience that recognizes this power and confers the status of charismatic embodiment. Charismatic stability depends, first, on the relative strength or weakness of collective belief in the authorizing power; and, second, on the extent to which both the central figure and the audience can repress or ignore

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the disabling suspicion that charisma lies in the eye of the observer (or simply that charisma lies). 56. Riegl, Dutch Group Portraiture, 346. 57. From the catalogue entry by Seymour Slive in Frans Hals, ed. Slive, 284. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 340–42. 60. Ibid., 342. 61. Ibid., 288. 62. Descargues, Frans Hals, 99. 63. Slive, Dutch Painting 1600–1800, 54. 64. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 348. 65. On the deterioration of the portraits, see Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks, “Frans Hals: A Technical Examination,” in Frans Hals, ed. Slive, 120–21. 66. P. J. Vinken and E. de Jongh, “De boosardigheid van Hals’s regenten en regentessen,” Oud Holland 80 (1963): 1–24. 67. See E. de Jongh, “Oude portretten, hun zwijgzaamheid en mededeelzaamheid,” Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Weterschappen, “Verslag van de Verenigde Vergadering van de beide Afdelingen der Akademie op maandag 8 april 1991”: 15–44; and Portretten van echt en trouw: Huwelijk en gezin in de Nederlandse kunst van de zeveniende eeuw (Zwolle: Waanders, 1986), 33. 68. Christopher Wright, Frans Hals (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1977): 6. 69. Descargues, Frans Hals, 127; Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 46. 70. Conspicuous exclusion expressed as a statement might be, “We want you to think of other institutional group portraits when you look at us so that you’ll see we aren’t doing and wouldn’t do the sorts of things they’re doing— for whatever particular reasons (emulation, parody, or critique, which might reflect aesthetic social, political, or moral motives).” See, e.g., my two essays on conspicuous exclusion in Vermeer, reprinted in Harry Berger, Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. and introd. John P. Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 441–509. 71. Wright, Frans Hals, 13. 72. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 44. As we’ll see in the next chapter, these are the types of portraits that Riegl converts to hybrids dominated by Genre-type interactions involving participant-observers. 73. Ibid., 44–45. 74. Ibid., 45. 75. See the catalogue entry in Frans Hals, ed. Slive, 362. 76. Ibid. 77. Descargues, Frans Hals, 127. 78. Muller’s reading of the placement differs from that of Descargues: she

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claims that the treasurer’s position is occupied by Regentess 2, who “has her hands spread far apart to show that there are no coins on the bare table” (Charity in the Dutch Republic, 45). 79. Ibid. The different styles and positions of their collars reinforce their different gestures. The longer collar and tabs of Regentess 2, e.g., accentuate her reliance on the table for support. A similar collar on the matron subtly accentuates the deferential forward tilt of her upper body. Regentess 1’s shorter and more protuberant collar seems to facilitate as well as to emphasize the rhetorical placement of her arms. In the triangulated drama of Regentess 3’s self-display, the eye attracted to the distanced gauziness of her collar is led downward and forward from the smaller to the larger of the butterfly-shaped ties to the climactic stage business with fan and gloves. Finally, the single tie that adorns Regentess 4’s collar (noticeably more reserved than her neighbor’s display) is closely enough related in form to the tie that fastens her book to reiterate its insistence on the priority of posing and portraiture over business and Genre. 80. Such qualities prompted Grimm to reassign the portrait from Hals to his “Workshop” (Frans Hals, 158, 242–43). 81. Ibid., 45. 82. Descargues, Frans Hals, 127. But notice that he calls them “old ladies,” whereas no such epithet is applied to the regents. Are regentesses supposedly older and more motherly than their more vigorous manly counterparts? 83. The dominant authority of the regentess with the book beside her is reinforced by the inclusion of the matron in her pyramid. 84. His “friendly and guileless expression” endears him to Riegl, who judges him to be the most congenial figure in the painting (Group Portraiture, 350). 85. Descargues, Frans Hals, 123, my translation: “un vieillard qui ne croit plus à ce qui rassemble ses modèles” (Hals: Étude biographique et critique [Geneva: Skira, 1968], 123). 86. See the discussion on pp. 49–50, above. 87. David R. Smith, “Rhetoric and Prose in Dutch Portraiture,” 72. Smith brilliantly observes that Riegl’s distinction between “inner” and “outer” unity is actually a distinction “between rhetoric and prose.” 88. Ibid., 85–86. In describing the normal practice in which sitters indicate their good works, Smith, like Schwartz (see note 31), acknowledges the insights of Muller. 89. Ibid., 86. 90. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 46–47. 91. Smith, “Rhetoric and Prose,” 85–86. The presentation is noted by Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 47. 92. In Frans Hals: Life Work Restoration (Amsterdam: Uniepers, 1989),

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Norbert Middelkoop and Anne van Gravenstein speculate that “the dullness of his look” signifies a disease of the eye (34). They may be referring to the evidence of paresis discussed by Vinken and de Jongh in “De boosardigheid van Hals’s regenten en regentessen,” 4. 93. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 350. 94. See Vinken and de Jongh in “De boosardigheid van Hals’s regenten en regentessen,” 4. For a skeptical opinion about Regent 4’s condition and a comment on other portraits by Hals that feature cocked hats, see Frans Hals, ed. Slive, 367. See also Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 299–301. 95. Regent 1 looks “in the approximate direction of the speaker, while not looking directly at him. A corresponding movement of his right index finger supports this interpretation of his orientation” (Riegl, Group Portraiture, 348–50). 96. In Wybrand Hendricks’s watercolor copy, the roles are reversed: Regent 2 appears to be addressing Regent 1, whose manual gesture is thereby rendered irrational. 97. Wright, Frans Hals, 6. 98. Ibid. 99. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 6 and 228 n.4. 100. Ibid., 45–46. On attempts to identify the landscape, see Frans Hals, ed. Slive, 362. 101. Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, 46. 102. Ibid., 48. This contradicts her emphasis on the way the contorted pose of Regent 3 influences the viewer’s “feeling for the portrait as a whole” (47). 103. Ibid., 48. 104. Genre actions with possible participant-observers appear earlier in militia portraits. See the discussion of Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem and Hals in Chapter 5, below.

chapter 5: alois riegl and the posographical imperative 1. More than a century after the first publication of Riegl’s study, this scheme appears to be its most dated and least important aspect. 2. The phrase is Margaret Iversen’s, from Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 94. See in general, 94–96, also 108–10. In this discussion, I don’t take up or assess the role of this triad in Riegl’s narrative because he deploys the first two terms, will and feeling, more casually and superficially than the third. 3. Review of the Getty translation, Art in America 88 (November 2000): 49–50. 4. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, 155–69, esp. 164–66; Iverson, Alois Riegl, 96. 5. Merken means “to notice, to be observant (to mark).” Aufmerken means 242

Notes to Pages 78–86

“to pay attention” but also, more forcefully, “to sit up and take notice.” Aufmerksam means “attentive, observant, sharp-eyed.” 6. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, 163. See also Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 83, and Berger, Fictions of the Pose, chapter 13. 7. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 62. Iversen’s paraphrase, “a family is unavoidably hierarchical in structure,” may be implicit in Riegl’s statement, but he doesn’t say that, and since militias are also hierarchical the paraphrase is a distraction (Iversen, Alois Riegl, 100). 8. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 148. 9. Ibid., 223. 10. See, e.g., ibid., 270, 282–85, 321–34, 344–45, 348, 356, 360–63. 11. Ibid., 326, 322. 12. Ibid., 232. 13. Iversen, Alois Riegl, 111. 14. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 271. 15. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, 166; see Riegl, Group Portraiture, 355–57. Olin identifies four rather than three phases, dividing the third phase into “dramatic” and “narrative” (224 n.13). 16. This may be because it carries dated epistemological baggage, whose rhetorical status is uncertain. It isn’t always clear whether Riegl’s assertions about psychology and subjectivity are metaphorically or literally intended. 17. Kemp, Group Portraiture, 49–50. 18. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 322–23. 19. Ibid., 211. 20. Ibid., 207–8. 21. Ibid., 202, 204. 22. Ibid., 207. 23. Riegl’s detailed reading of this work and its 1599 successor occupy pp. 202–15 of ibid. 24. Hals’s gorgeous ensign (Boudewijn van Offenburg) standing at the far right in his 1616 portrait of the Saint George Militia evokes this figure not so much to pay homage to it as to demonstrate the chutzpah Cornelis’s sitter clearly desired and sadly failed to achieve. 25. Ibid., 213; “das Glas zierlich mit der Rechten vor sich hinhält und ins Blaue schaut” (Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 147). 26. Riegl, Group Portraiture, vol. 1, 214. 27. Ibid., 214–15. 28. Ibid, 213–14. 29. Ibid., 214. 30. Ibid., 212. 31. Ibid..

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32. Ibid., 321. 33. Ibid., 323. See p.322: “Cornelisz. depicted his men swearing oaths of allegiance and brotherhood, acts that are relatively serious and have historical significance. Hals, on the other hand, chose the kind of insignificant, everyday exchanges that can happen at any dinner table, capturing the casual chatter of carousing guardsmen.” 34. Grimm, Frans Hals, 137. 35. In Das holländische Gruppenporträt, this painting is attributed to Jacob van Loo, and dated 1658, although James Schmidt’s attribution to de Bray, in an essay published in 1922, is acknowledged in a footnote (272). 36. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 363, 361. 37. Ibid., 363. 38. Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 1:277. 39. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 360. “Unseen party” is an interpretive rendering of die Partei (Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 1:277). 40. “In the case of van der Voort’s painting . . . we are immediately tempted to ascribe to it the unity of a genre painting” and to imagine “one or more figures who are not visible in the picture but presumably standing in front of it. And because we know that the men in the portrait were the regents of an almshouse for old men, we can imagine the unseen party in the viewer’s space as a needy elderly person (or several of them) who is seeking some form of assistance” (Riegl, Group Portraiture, 223).

chapter 6: performance anxiety and the belated viewer 1. Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 271. Noting that “the responses of sitters to the genre-bending portraits of Steen and Hals are unknown,” she speculates that they may have “appealed to viewers in the know about the pictorial genres practiced in the Dutch Republic,” but goes on to acknowledge that “Not all customers would have liked to see their faces enlivened by Hals’s faceting brushwork, as the voluminous production of more conventional portraits in Haarlem suggests” (ibid.). 2. Alison McNeil Kettering, “Gerard Ter Borch’s Military Men: Masculinity Transformed,” in The Public and the Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Arthur Wheelock, Jr., and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 119. 3. Ibid., 115 and passim. See Kettering’s brilliant and detailed analysis of androgynous qualities in Ter Borch’s portraits of soldiers. 4. Paul Knevel, “Armed Citizens: The Representation of the Civic Militias in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Public and the Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Wheelock and Seeff, 97. 5. Ibid., 89, 92–93. Knevel’s essay is essentially a distillation of the argument

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he painstakingly develops and documents in Burgers in het geweer: De schutterijen in Holland, 1550–1700 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994). His balanced assessment leads him to question the often-stated view (held especially by American scholars) that from the end of the sixteenth century on the militias declined into the equivalent of sport clubs and social groups. But he also dissents from the opinion that increasing attention to weapons in militia portraits after 1580 is evidence for the increased military function of the civic guard companies. If there wasn’t a decline, he argues, it was because such signs of decay as negligence in military conduct and excessive sociability were present throughout the seventeenth century. Knevel’s reference to Goffman is ill-advised. Goffman’s discussion is part of a fundamentally moralistic and at times bitterly satirical commentary on the performative culture and behaviors it represents, and Knevel clearly doesn’t intend to scapegoat “the painted burghers” by casting the shadow of Goffmanesque irony over them. More to the point, Goffman’s early work is dated by its gender-neutral approach to motives of self-presentation. For a critique of Goffman, see Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 543–44.

chapter 7: male bondage and the military imperative 1. J. L. Price, “A State Dedicated to War? The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Military Revolution: State, Society, and Military Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Ayton and J. L. Price (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1998), 183. 2. Gary Schwartz, “Virtually Soldiers: Civilians as Warriors in Dutch Art,” unpublished lecture delivered on March 21, 1998, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; cited with the author’s permission. 3. Ibid. 4. Schwartz, “City Fathers as Civic Warriors,” in 1648: Paix de Westphalie —L’art entre la guerre et la paix/Westfälischer Friedez: Die Kunst zwischen Krieg und Frieden, ed. Hermann Arhold and Matthias Waschek, Actes du colloque organisé par le Westfälisches Landesmuseum le 19 novembre 1998 à Münster et à Osnabrück et le Service culturel du musée du Louvre les 20 et 21 novembre 1998 à Paris (Paris: Louvre and Klincksieck and Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum, 2000), 203. Although it develops the same theme, this is a substantially different essay from the one cited in n. 2, above. 5. J. C. Grayson, “The Civic Militia in the County of Holland, 1560–81: Politics and Public Order in the Dutch Revolt,” Bijadragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 95 (1980): 38. For a differently inflected opinion, see Knevel, Burgers in het geweer, 66–82. Knevel claims that the militias in several cities disobeyed the injunctions to use force because the beeldenstormers included friends or family members.

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6. Grayson, “The Civic Militia,” 62. 7. See Knevel, Burgers in het geweer, 82–91. 8. M. Carasso-Kok and J. Levy–van Halm, eds., Schutters in Holland: kracht en zenuwen van de stad (Haarlem: Frans Halsmuseum, 1988), 397; from the summary by A. F. W. Erftemeijer and P. Knevel, trans. Paul Gabriner. It is misleading to characterize the urban “political elite” or “ruling elite” as the aristocracy. 9. Seymour Slive, Frans Hals, 3 vols. (London: Phaidon Press, 1970), 1:42. See also Spicer, “The Renaissance Elbow,” 102. A view similar to Slive’s was expressed by Simon Schama in The Embarrassment of Riches, but qualified in Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). In the former he argues that, far from being considered military units, they served a countermilitary function in the symbolic economy of Dutch culture (Embarrassment of Riches, 181–82 and 244–45). In Rembrandt’s Eyes, however, he insists that the presence and ceremonial activity of the militias were “not all show. Though the panEuropean war meant, overwhelmingly, the mutual slaughter of mercenaries and professional men-at-arms, there were still some occasions when companies of . . . [Amsterdam] schutters did actually go off to fight in war against Spain (and the troops of the Catholic Netherlands),” and also to fight against “Counter-Remonstrant disorders . . . fomented . . . from the more militantly Calvinist cities of Leiden and Haarlem.” He cites three such occasions, in 1622, 1629, and 1632 (482). Schama’s later view resembles that of the Dutch historians registered in my next paragraph. 10. Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 244. This is part of Schama’s earlier emphasis on “the marked unwillingness of the Dutch to allow the martial ethos status or dignity in its culture” (ibid., 254). He notes, however, that “their own conduct periodically belied” their “an aversion for military force” (238). Schama’s earlier view, and others like it, have been forcefully challenged by Schwartz in “City Fathers as Civic Warriors” and “Virtually Soldiers.” Schwartz insists that “during the Eighty Years War the preferred collective self-image of the Dutch burgher was a military one,” and this self-image is most conspicuously displayed in the schuttersstukken, which bring together “the burgher as a man of arms, an artistic genre related to warfare, portraiture of military figures, the display of well-wrought weapons and other attributes of war, patronage of the arts by a military body” (“Virtually Soldiers,” see n. 2 above). 11. Carasso-Kok and Levy–van Halm, eds., Schutters in Holland, 397. For details, see J. B. Kist and J. P. Puype, “Wapens op de schutterstukken,” ibid., 167–70. See also Koos Levy–van Halm and Liesbeth Abraham, “Frans Hals, Militiaman and Painter: The Civic Guard Portrait as an Historical Document,” in Frans Hals, ed. Slive, 87–102. Margaret D. Carroll argues that the military activity of the companies increased after the Twelve Years’ Truce (“Rembrandt’s

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‘Nightwatch’ and the Iconological Tradition of Militia Company Portraiture in Amsterdam,” 38–58). 12. Knevel, “Armed Citizens,” in The Public and the Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Wheelock and Seeff, 92. 13. Ibid. On Wapenhandelinghe, see Introduction, n. 2, above. For Rembrandt’s imitations see figs. 29–34 and the discussion in Chapter 16, below. 14. In this maneuver, each rank, after firing, marches to the rear of a formation about five ranks deep and reloads. Based on Roman models of battlefield tactics modified to accommodate the advantages and limits of contemporary firearm technology, this was among the reforms that were put into effect against the Spanish invaders by Maurice and that produced what’s often been called the first modern army. 15. Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 42. 16. Ibid., 42–45; see, more generally, chapter 10, pp. 271–90. 17. Ibid., 42, 45, 37. Anglo notes the impatience of the English fencing master George Silver, who “has no time for the fancy posturing of the Italian masters with their unrealistic rules and regulations and their concentration upon Terpsichorean grace. Real fighting is an all-in affair” (37). 18. Kettering, “Gerard Ter Borch’s Military Men,” 100, 109–10. 19. Wolfgang Kemp, Introduction, trans. David Britt, to Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 27. 20. Ibid. 21. See Grayson, “The Civic Militia,” for changes in Leiden, Haarlem, Delft, and Amsterdam. 22. Kemp, Introduction to Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 27. 23. Ibid., 27–28. 24. J. L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics of Particularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 90, 99, 91, 90. 25. Ibid., 91–93. 26. The opinions, respectively, of Slive and Schama, cited in nn. 9 and 10, above. 27. Schwartz, “City Fathers as Civic Warriors,” 213. 28. Ibid., 205. 29. Ibid., 207. Since Schwartz is writing about works by de Hooch dated in the late 1650s, he must be referring to memories and aftereffects of the war. But see the comments by Richard Helgerson discussed immediately below. 30. Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 84–85.

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31. I say “more or less” because one doesn’t want to overstate the executive power of the Stadholder in extra-military affairs. 32. Ibid., 83–84. 33. Ibid., 89. 34. Kettering, “Gerard ter Borch’s Military Men,” 110, 114. 35. Schwartz, “City Fathers as Civic Warriors,” 207. 36. Salomon, Shifting Priorities, 86–87, 61, 98. 37. Salomon continues the war of the sexes with her critique of the misogynist spin of “E. de Jonghism” in iconography: de Jongh “concludes that the majority of genre images are about naughty, sexy girls who seduce innocent men into immoral behavior. He has worked the endlessly reiterated scenario of victim Adam and seducer Eve into a standard of Dutch art-historical methodology” (ibid., 64).

chapter 8: social sources of performance anxiety 1. David McKnight, “Men, Women, and Other Animals: Taboo and Purification among the Wik-mungkan,” in The Interpretation of Symbolism, ed. Roy Willis (New York: Wiley, 1975), 94. 2. This paragraph has been lifted from my Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 282. 3. David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 339. 4. See David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 82. 5. After a daughter married, e.g., her children would leave her father’s lineage and their allegiance would pass to her husband’s line. 6. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 231–36. 7. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 163. 8. Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 19. 9. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), xiii–xiv. This is not only a book about early modern domestic ideology but also a book that expressly intervenes in a current debate: Belsey’s “essay in cultural history . . . is put forward as a reservation about the call for the restoration of family values in our own society” (176). 10. Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in PostReformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 3. But as 248

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Orlin clearly notes and discusses at length, such a shift of responsibility produced faultlines in all domestic roles and relations, whether “dichotomized as husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister, and master and servant, or whether they are the more vexed and ambiguous ones of host and guest, mother and son, and mistress and servant” (ibid.). 11. David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 35. Smith cites Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 458–65. 12. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 144–45. See also Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 6, 134–35, 146– 49, 158. In Private Matters and Public Culture, Orlin explores what happens at the interface of the domestic and political orders when the taxonomies and dichotomies of ideological prescription are skewed by their embeddedness in household “stuff,” which includes not only goods and possessions but also architecture and domestic spaces. Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, complements Orlin’s account by attending to what happens when similar prescriptive structures are skewed by their embeddedness in visual and verbal texts. It also complements Richard Helgerson’s study, in Adulterous Alliances, of the ways in which conflicts between the literary genres of domestic drama and history (or tragedy) represent and interact with conflicts between the institutions of the household and the state. For Helgerson’s responses to the work of Orlin and Belsey, inter alia, see “Murder in Faversham: Holinshed’s Impertinent History,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 133–58. 13. On the average marriage ages and the significant increase in the number of marriages in Amsterdam between 1585 and 1630, see E. K. Grootes, “Het jeugdige publiek van de ‘nieuwe liedboeken’ in het eerste kwart van de zeventiende eeuw,” in Het woord aan de lezer; Zeven literatuurhistorische verkenningen, ed. W. van den Berg and J. Stouten (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1987), 72–88, esp. 77–78, 80–81. 14. On the romanticization of marriage and married love, see H. Rodney Nevitt, Jr., Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15. Belsey, Desire, 108, 99, 117, 115. 16. Ibid., 107. 17. Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, 192. 18. Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, 81. 19. Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, 192–93.

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20. Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, 23; Subject of Tragedy, 192. “Dangerous familiars” is the title of an important study cited by Belsey during this discussion: Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Dolan’s account of “stories of women who plot against their husbands” centers on the ways in which these stories “articulate and shape fears of the danger lurking within the home” and connect these fears to “the instability of masculine privilege and power” (58). 21. Diane Owen Hughes, “Representing the Family: Portraits and Purposes in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1986): 7. 22. Ibid., 25, 32. 23. Barbara Correll, “Malleable Material, Models of Power: Woman in Erasmus’s ‘Marriage Group’ and Civility in Boys,” English Literary History 57 (1990): 242. See the fuller development of this argument in Correll’s remarkable The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 24. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Viking, 2003), 595. 25. Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 125. 26. Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 400. De Vries and van der Woude similarly comment on the “explicitly central” role of women in “the domestic sphere,” the increasing emphasis on the distinction between adult and child, and the selectivity of representation, in which the “male head of the household appears seldom in his primary role of provider. . . . This stands to reason, in a culture increasingly inclined to see the home as an enclosed, feminine sphere” (The First Modern Economy, 58–59). J. L. Price notes that there is “a deal of anecdotal evidence regarding the dominant role of women within the Dutch household but not much other evidence.” He goes on to identify “one semi-political area of Dutch social life where women did have a significant part to play, and this was in demonstrations, riot, and disorder. . . . women were prominent in all aspects and phases of public disturbances in the towns of Holland in the seventeenth century, including the more violent episodes. This was the reverse side of the denigratory image held about them by society in general” (Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century, 106–8). 27. Andrew Pettegree, “Religion and the Revolt,” in The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt, ed. Graham Darby (London: Routledge, 2001), 69. 28. Ibid., 69–70. 29. Ibid., 75. See also Guido Marnef, “The Towns and the Revolt,” in The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt, ed. Darby, 84–106, esp. 87–88.

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30. Pettegree, “Religion and the Revolt,” in The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt, ed. Darby, 81. 31. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution, 158, 55, 51. 32. Ibid., 58. 33. Ibid., 67. 34. Steven Ozment, Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 35. 35. Ibid., 37–38. 36. Ibid., 39–40. 37. Bryan Jay Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 49. 38. A. Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland, trans. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 83. 39. Sherrin Marshall, “Moderation and Mutuality: The Dutch Family in Life and Art, 1500–1700,”in Double Vision: Perspectives on Gender and the Visual Arts, ed. Natalie Harris Bluestone (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 113. See Marshall’s more general study of reciprocity in The Dutch Gentry, 1500–1650: Family, Faith, and Fortune (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). For examples of European opinions of Dutch women, see ibid., xix–xx. 40. “The injunction that women of all ages should be silent is so frequent as to suggest that in ‘real life’ the opposite was more often the case. The men who commissioned and painted these portraits of women [in pendants] may have had good reason to value the lasting likeness of a silent spouse” (Stephanie S. Dickey, “The Unspeaking Likeness: Silence and Interiority in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Portraiture,” paper presented at a College Art Association session in New York, February 21, 2003). 41. William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of The Netherlands, ed. George Clark (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972), 105–6. See also Fynes Moryson’s comments in Shakespeare’s Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the end of the 16th century, 2d ed., ed. Charles Hughes (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 382–83. For a recent view questioning the credibility of such reports, see D. Christopher Gabbard, “Gender Stereotyping in Early Modern Travel Writing on Holland,” Studies in English Literature 43 (Winter 2003): 83–100. Gabbard argues that so-called eyewitness reports like those of Fynes Moryson and Owen Felltham can’t tell us “much about what really was happening in Holland. If anything, these writings tell us more about England than they do about Holland” (96). They tell us, for example, about the effects on these reports of humanist pedagogy. Gabbard suggests that Moryson’s opinions about strong women may derive from texts in Vives and Tacitus—for example, Tacitus’s

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description of “androgyny” among the Batavians (87; what Gabbard describes isn’t actually androgyny, since tomboys aren’t androgynes). But Gabbard’s essay loses its point by failing to say anything “about what really was happening in Holland.” Moryson may well have gotten his ideas about what to look for from Vives and Tacitus. But he may also have been correct about what he saw. Gabbard doesn’t supply enough evidence to allow his readers to judge the eyewitness’s credibility. 42. Eddy de Jongh, “The Model Woman and Women of Flesh and Blood,” in Rembrandt’s Women, ed. Julia Lloyd Williams (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 31–32, 29–35. 43. Elizabeth Honig, “Desire and Domestic Economy,” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 2 (June 2001): 311. 44. H. Perry Chapman, “Home and the Display of Privacy,” in Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Mariët Westermann (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), 145. 45. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 26. 46. A. Agnes Sneller, “Reading Jacob Cats,” in Women of the Golden Age: An International Debate on Women in Seventeenth-Century Holland, England, and Italy, ed. Els Kloek, Nicole Teeuwen, and Marijke Huisman (Hilversum: Verlorn, 1994), 23. 47. Ibid., 26. 48. Thanks to Peter Erickson for reminding me of Rosalind. 49. Ibid., 31. Similarly, A. Th. van Deursen has remarked on the way an ideology of blame based on male anxiety was characterized by proverbs that “made the girl the butt of ridicule” and thus revealed the extent to which “the norms and standards of good moral behavior were defined by men.” “The man could not help it if woman drove him crazy; she would have to learn to control herself.” See van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age, 89. 50. Ibid., 30–31. In Cats’s work, Sneller remarks, “one example follows the other, all telling the same story of the holiness of marriage and the sanctity of the family” (ibid.). Such redundancy is itself a symptom of anxiety. 51. Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing, 15. 52. Ibid., 51. 53. John Loughman and John Michael Montias, Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), 104, 31. 54. Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing, 51. 55. Elizabeth Honig, “The Space of Gender in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” in Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, ed. Wayne E. Franits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195–97. The feminization of “bourgeois domestic space” is emphasized throughout

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Salomon’s Shifting Priorities, where it is suggestively associated with the motif of the absent father. 56. Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13–14. 57. Ibid., 14. 58. Ibid., 61–62. 59. “Dutch artists often used pictures within pictures to allude to hidden meanings. Sometimes these meanings are positive and exemplary,” but when the inner pictures are erotic they “are almost invariably negative” (David Smith, “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” The Art Bulletin, 69 [1987]: 411). 60. Muizelaar and Phillips, Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age, 54. 61. In addition to Muizelaar and Phillips, ibid., 54–60, see Westermann, “Costly and Curious,” 46–47, and C. Willemijn Fock, “The Domestic Interior in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting,” in Art and Home, ed. Westermann, 83–101. 62. Westermann, “Costly and Curious.” See the interesting exchange on this topic between Westermann and Schwartz in Schwartz’s newsletter, Form Follows Dysfunction, for December 8, 2001.

chapter 9: the preacher’s wife 1. Muizelaar and Phillips, Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age, 71–72. 2. See esp. Smith’s excellent comments on the interrupted-husband motif, exemplified by Rembrandt’s 1633 Shipbuilder and His Wife and Jan de Bray’s 1663 Abraham Casteleyn and Margarieta van Bancken (“Rhetoric and Prose in Dutch Portraiture,” 78–79). 3. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 135. 4. Slive, Dutch Painting 1600–1800, 74. 5. Mariët Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585–1718 (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 142. 6. Cited in translation by Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt, His Life, His Painting (New York: Viking Press, 1985), 219. 7. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 480. The signifiers of tension Schama picks out are accentuated by the wrinkles on the sleeve above the left hand and on the gown below it. 8. Stephanie S. Dickey, Rembrandt: Portraits in Print (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), 48. This account expands observations previously made in Dickey, “What Rembrandt Saw,” The Christian Century, June 21–28,

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2000, 685–88, and in “The Unspeaking Likeness” (see Chapter 8, n. 40, above). 9. Dickey, Rembrandt: Portraits in Print, 50–51. 10. Dickey, “The Unspeaking Likeness.” 11. Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 142. Does Westermann mean the audience is imaginary to the speaker in the portrait or only to the viewer, who can’t see it? 12. Personal communication. 13. Is the candle actually lit? If so, it doesn’t give off much light; any light it does give is lost in the brighter light on the books and on (rather than from) the candle. The candle may well be a symbol of light, but in this picture it isn’t doing its job as a bearer or shedder of light. See Dickey’s excellent comments on the representation and iconography of light and candles, Rembrandt: Portraits in Print, 51–52. 14. That effect may partly be accounted for by the fact that, as Dickey reminds us, a comparison with eighteenth-century copies shows the painting to have been “cut down at the right; the space allotted to her [Aaltje] was originally larger” (ibid., 178 n. 107).

chapter 10: women with elbows 1. Spicer, “The Renaissance Elbow,” 86. 2. Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing, 49. 3. Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 133. For an extended and illuminating account of pendants, see Smith, Masks of Wedlock. 4. Ibid., 132–33. See also Westermann’s brief but illuminating comments in “Costly and Curious,” 49–52. 5. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 37, 41. Most of Smith’s book is devoted to lucid, informative, perceptive, original—and persuasive—discussions of pendants and double portraits. I consider it by far the best study of the subject, and my debt to it runs very deep. 6. Spicer, “The Renaissance Elbow,” 86. 7. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 44. 8. Ibid. 9. Thanks to H. Perry Chapman for help on the question of women and hats in pendants. 10. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 473–74. 11. Ibid., 474. 12. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 85. 13. On this, see Mariët Westermann, Rembrandt (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 157. 14. Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 132–33.

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15. Westermann, “Costly and Curious,” in Art and Home, 51. 16. Ibid. 17. Chapman, “Home and the Display of Privacy,” 144. 18. Slive, Dutch Painting 1600–1800, 51. 19. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 114. 20. Slive remarks the perverseness of vanitarians, who have “proposed that her rose should be read as a vanitas symbol, and as warning of earthly love’s fickleness and the dangers of voluptuousness” (Slive, Dutch Painting 1600– 1800, 51). 21. Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 133. 22. Many thanks to Erika Naginski, who suggested this idea to me.

chapter 11: families making music 1. De Jongh, Portretten van echt en trouw, 284. 2. I say “rare” rather than “unique” because I haven’t canvassed the extant totality of family portraits. 3. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 29. 4. Chapman, “Jan Steen as Family Man, “ 382. 5. Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 227. 6. The first by Westermann in The Art of Dutch Republic, 12; the second by Smith in Masks of Wedlock, 29; and the third by Dennis Weller in Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2002), 2. The Frans Hals Museum has it both ways: the English title is Family Making Music, but the Dutch title is Zelfportret met zijn familieleden. Westermann brings it into contrastive contact with the disorderly genre model illustrated by Steen’s In Luxury, Beware; see n. 13, below. Smith’s focus is a polemical discussion about the legitimacy of decorum as a means of connecting images of marriage and family “to the larger purposes of society” (35). Weller’s concern is to document the claim that, since the major figure is a selfportrait of the artist, this is a Molenaer family portrait. 7. Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer, 3. 8. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 30, paraphrasing the argument of Berthold Hinz’s essay “Das Familienbildnis des J. M. Molenaer in Haarlem: Aspekte zur Ambivalenz der Porträtfunktion,” Städel Jahrbuch n.s., vol. 4 (1973): 207–10. 9. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 34–35. 10. Yvor Winters’s example of this fallacy: “To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry” (Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason [Chicago: Swallow Press, 1947], 41). 11. Probably, according to the author of the Frans Hals Museum Website

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entry about this painting, “a miniature of his late wife” (http://www.franshalsmuseum.collectionconnection.nl). 12. Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer, 2. 13. Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 15. 14. This is complicated by a variable series of secondary triangles, with the pendant father at the receding apex of one and the pendant mother at the more pronounced apex of another. 15. Although the instrument this figure plays is the specific kind of lute called theorbo, I find it easier to use the word lutenist than the word theorbist, and will proceed accordingly. 16. Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer, 2. 17. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 31, 35; Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic, 15. 18. Catalogue entry, The Frans Hals Museum, Ludion Guides (Amsterdam: Ludion, 2003), 102. 19. Quoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3. See Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Lydia Sargent, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 14. 20. Sedgwick, Between Men, 5, 25. The relation of sexuality to the traffic in women can be expressed as a relation of the penis to the phallus. The power of the penis is a power of penetration for pleasure, for dominance, and for insemination (which may be a contingent and unwanted byproduct of the desire for pleasure and dominance). The power of the phallus is a power over penetration exerted in the collaborative strategies of gift exchange by which men in groups organize and shape the traffic in women. These collaborative strategies illustrate the meaning of homosocial. Homosocial economy comes into being when the power of the penis is symbolically transformed into the power of the phallus and extended from individual male actors to the corporate group. Where homosexuality is sanctioned, it serves to defend the homosocial interests of male corporate groups against the disruptive effects of women’s sexual, reproductive, and nurturant power. Whether sanctioned or prohibited, therefore, homosexuality is a factor, a “player,” in a homosocial game one objective of which is to control what men do with their penises. For more on the topic, see my “Gynephobia and Culture Change: An Irigarayan Just-So Story,” in Towards Irigaray: Reading Premodern Writing, ed. Theresa Krier and Elizabeth Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2004), 138–45. It is with this basic understanding of homosociality that I venture to characterize what I see going on in The Night Watch as a kind of homosocial

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pastoral—that is, a homosocial version of escape from the potential bondage of wedlock. 21. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 72, 74; Kettering, “Gerard Ter Borch’s Military Men,” 119. 22. Kettering, “Gerard Ter Borch’s Military Men,” 108. 23. Binstock, “Aloïs Riegl in the Presence of The Night Watch,” 41. 24. Ibid., my emphasis. 25. Kettering, “Gerard Ter Borch’s Military Men,” 115. As I formulate it above, the instability Kettering picks out only contributes to—it doesn’t constitute—the instability lodged at the core of constructions of all-male group portraits. 26. Paul Claudel, The Eye Listens, trans. Elsie Pell (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 48. Translation altered: “disaggregation” replaces the translator’s “disintegration.” The original: “un arrangement qui est en train de se désagréger . . . est . . . toute l’explication de La Ronde de nuit. Toute la composition d’avant en arrière est faite sur le principe d’un mouvement de plus en plus accéléré, comme d’un talus de sable qui s’écroule” (Paul Claudel, L’oeil écoute [1935], Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 17 [Paris: Gallimard, 1960], 46).

chapter 12: ‘the night watch’: how the sandbank crumbles 1. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 11, 113. 2. Gary Schwartz, The Night Watch, Rijksmuseum Dossiers (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002), 36. 3. Seymour Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics 1630–1730 (1953; rpt New York: Hacker Art Books, 1988), 97–98. See also Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 246–47. A different version of this criticism was expressed by Filippo Baldinucci in the commentary based on information apparently given him by Bernhardt Keil: inattention to the individual sitters is not the result of The Night Watch’s overall unity but the cause of its overall confusion. See Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, 108–9. 4. Filippo Baldinucci, Cominciamento, e progresso dell’arte dell’intagliare in rame . . . (Florence, 1686), 78. 5. Westermann, Rembrandt, 167. See Slive, Rembrandt and his Critics, 108–9. 6. The most nervous version I’ve encountered was part of a small brochure distributed at the Rijksmuseum a few years ago: “Were the guardsmen disappointed? There is no evidence whatsoever and not a single document to suggest anything of the kind. Some of them are certainly in the background, which might have led to dissatisfaction, but they are all clearly recognizable.” 7. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 35. See also Westermann, whose Notes to Pages 172–178

257

comment compactly summarizes the position more discursively presented by Haverkamp-Begemann: “To Banning Cocq’s company and to those who visited the Kloveniersdoelen, The Nightwatch must have been an innovative collective portrait of the militia’s role, history and ambitions” (Rembrandt, 168). 8. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 487. 9. Ibid., 489. 10. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 71. 11. Schwartz, The Night Watch, 31. Schwartz responds that “The favored opinion at the moment is that the Night Watch is a ‘role’ portrait in which the sitters are depicted less as individuals than as actors in a dramatized civic function.”

chapter 13: evasive action: three ways to shore up the sandbank 1. Riegl considers it to be “a genre episode rather than a historical event, because it no doubt occurred again and again” (Group Portraiture, 265). He mentions “the idea of men setting out on a march” while discussing not The Night Watch but Hendrick Gerritsz Pot’s Officers of the Civic Guard of St Hadrian (ibid., 352). The best argument for the opinion that the painting commemorates a historical event and that the occasion in question was the visit of Maria de Medici in 1638 has been supplied by Schwartz in Rembrandt, His Life, His Painting, 210–12. 2. This is part of the statement printed in the brochure cited in Chapter 12, n. 6 above. For examples of this approach, see the references to the views of A. Riegl, H. Riegel, F. Schmidt-Degener, W. Martin, and others in HaverkampBegemann, Rembrandt, 5–8 and 105–10; for the latter’s criticism. See 107–110. See also RRP 3:453–54. 3. Considering the confusion amplified by the presence of so many “extraneous figures,” Westermann perceptively deduces from the subsequent addition of the eighteen names on the heraldic shield that “the militia company may have been troubled by the relative obscurity of some portraits” (Rembrandt, 168–69). And from the documented testimony of the two sitters who reported the correlation of differential payment and placement in the picture, she speculates “that the sitters knew how they were to be placed in the painting before Rembrandt completed it” (ibid., 165). The total of thirty-four figures includes three depicted in the section that was removed ca. 1715 but exists in the copy made by Gerrit Lundens in ca. 1649. The figures were numbered and identified or distinguished by HaverkampBegemann on Lambertus Claessens’s 1797 etching of the complete painting:

258

Notes to Pages 179–182

Rembrandt, figure 2. Haverkamp-Begemann’s chart was borrowed by Schwartz, who added information about the known figures and revised the descriptions of the two musketeers flanking the Captain and Lieutenant. See Schwartz, The Night Watch, 48 and figure 66. 4. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 105. 5. Ibid., 105, 95, 88. 6. Ibid., 110. 7. Ibid., 111–12, 50. This is essentially the interpretation Schama adopts (Rembrandt’s Eyes, 496–500), though nothing in Haverkamp-Begemann’s account matches Schama’s superb if brief comments on the unifying effect of the painting’s formal “armature” (496). 8. RRP 3:456–57, 462–63. 9. Ibid., 3:467. 10. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 94. 11. See ibid., 95–96, and RRP 3:455–56. 12. Eddy de Jongh, “A Bird’s-Eye View of Erotica: Double Entendre in a Series of Seventeenth-century Genre Scenes,” in his Questions of Meaning, 21–58. See also Eric Jan Sluijter’s ingenious double critique of the realism versus allegory debate between Peter Hecht and de Jongh in Sluijter, Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age, trans. Katy Kist and Jennifer Kilian (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), 265–95, esp. 278–81 on birds and “birding.”

chapter 14: captain cocq and the unruly musketeer 1. Schwartz’s observation that “none of the prints in the book corresponds exactly with a detail in the Night Watch” (The Night Watch, 22) increases in significance when we take into account the possible effect and meaning of Rembrandt’s departures. 2. See esp. Werner van den Valckert’s group portrait of thirteen guardsmen (1625) in the Amsterdam Historical Museum, and Bartholomeus van der Helst’s portrait of the company of Captain Roelof Bicker (in the Rijksmuseum), which features a shooter dressed like Buffalo Bill (see fig. 35). There is disagreement about the latter’s date of completion. It is signed and dated 163(9) but is supposed by some scholars not to have been completed until 1643. Riegl prefers the later date, as Binstock notes, and he takes van der Helst’s performance to be a critique of The Night Watch (Binstock, “Aloïs Riegl in the Presence of The Night Watch,” 38). But the reason Riegl gives and Binstock laboriously defends is arbitrary, a spinoff from the shaky rationale associated with Riegl’s commitment to the Kunstwollen. My preference for the earlier date is no less (and no more) arbitrary than theirs, but has the advantage of making it possible to assume Rembrandt had seen van der Helst’s painting with its faux-aggressive and self-conscious pose. In this construction, Rembrandt’s shooter figure, even

Notes to Pages 182–185

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though partly hidden, not only evokes van der Helst’s shooter but, by being depicted in real action, makes fun of Buffalo Bill’s eye-soliciting staginess. There is gunfire in van der Helst’s painting, but it is dissociated from the sitters: four firing guns are visible at the upper left of the painting. 3. In a note, Haverkamp-Begemann briefly questions the extent of Rembrandt’s reliance on de Gheyn’s prints, observing only that differences have been pointed out “between Rembrandt’s and De Gheyn’s corresponding figures” (Rembrandt, 86). This is hardly an adequate criterion for rejecting the presence of allusiveness. For a difference with major allusive significance, see the comments of Margaret Carroll on the fuse-blowing musketeer, in Chapter 16, below. 4. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 92–93. 5. Ibid., 87–88. 6. Schwartz, The Night Watch, 48, 28. 7. “Trying to divert” connotes a more labor-intensive and conflicted act than “supporting.” The RRP (3:430) opts for deflection. 8. RRP 3:460. 9. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 487, 499. 10. Westermann, Rembrandt, 170. This is an example of vestigial or tempered iconography: “emphasize” is more moderate than “symbolize.” Still, it tends to downplay the unruliness of the act. 11. Schwartz, The Night Watch, 25, 30. So also Haverkamp-Begemann: “some are placed so prominently that they seem to compete with the sitters” (Rembrandt, 81). Unlike the other three, the drummer has been tentatively identified: see ibid., 32. But he qualifies as an “extra” if Haverkamp-Begemann is correct in stating that he was “not a member of the company and therefore not one of the men who paid to be portrayed” (ibid.). 12. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 27, see also 109. 13. Ibid., 10. 14. Kenneth Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 87. 15. Kenneth Clark, An Introduction to Rembrandt (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 79. Clark doesn’t identify the source of this opinion.

chapter 15: disaggregation as class conflict 1. Schwartz, The Night Watch, 14. 2. Norbert Schneider, The Art of the Portrait: Masterpieces of European Portrait-Painting, 1420–1670, trans. Iain Galbraith (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1994),153. 3. Ibid., 154. 4. Ibid., 154–57.

260

Notes to Pages 185–192

5. Ibid., 157. 6. Ibid., 154. 7. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 73.

chapter 16: manual mischief: the loneliness of the red musketeer 1. Margaret D. Carroll, “Accidents Will Happen: The Case of The Nightwatch,” in Rethinking Rembrandt, ed. Alan Chong and Michael Zell (Zwolle: Waanders, 2003), 91–105; 94. 2. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 111–12, 50. 3. Ibid., 94–95. 4. Ibid., 96. However trifling this discrepancy may seem, Carroll isn’t the only viewer to have noticed it. Wouter Kloek registers a similar impression in his catalogue entry on The Night Watch in Jan Piet Filedt Kok, Reinier Baarsen, Kloek, et al., Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum, 1600–1700, trans. Michael Hoyle (Zwolle: Waanders, 2001): this “dwarfish figure . . . is loading his musket at what is quite clearly not an appropriate moment” (130). At least he poses as if preparing to reload—as if, therefore, he had recently fired. 5. Carroll, “Accidents Will Happen,” 96. 6. Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance, 172. 7. Otto Benesch, Rembrandt, trans. James Emmons (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1957), 65. In the same passage, Benesch states that Rembrandt’s “compositional rhythms always have something asymmetrical or syncopated about them.” 8. Similar, for example, to Masaccio’s vault in The Trinity in Santa Maria Novella. 9. In the uncut copy, the ground plane bounded on the left by the railing and the first step is roughly pyramidal in shape. The step is parallel neither to the picture plane nor to the archway; it slants upward toward the left, accentuating the tilt in a manner that affects the observer’s sense primarily of the red musketeer and the golden girl. 10. Copies and reconstructions have established the basic architecture, with its three steps. The golden girl hurries along on the first step, the powder monkey’s back foot is about to leave that step, and the red musketeer’s raised right heel is either close to or up against the riser. The stairway extends only to the pillar above and behind the lieutenant. Two sergeants bearing halberds flank the group, one in a fancy helmet seated on a parapet at the left, the other standing at the right and pointing toward the center. The sergeant on the right is obviously tall, but his height may also be an indicator of his distance from the picture plane, signifying how much farther back he stands on the tipped-up ground plane than the foreground figures.

Notes to Pages 192–198

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11. Is his right foot raised or is it flat on the tipped-up ground plane? It appears raised in the original but flat in the Lundens copy. But is the right knee bent or not? It doesn’t appear to be bent in the Lundens, but in the original the uncertain foreshortening of the leg obscures the physics of the maneuver and leaves it an open question. 12. If we let the ground plane determine the observer position, we are roughly at shoulder level, looking down toward the musketeer’s feet. But if we give priority to the archway system, we look up at his shoulders from below. 13. See esp. the peninsular shadow under the musketeer’s foreshortened arm. I call the effect “eerie” because it has nothing to do with the fall of light. The rhythmic relation among sitters is beautifully worked out on the plane of pedal choreography. The captain and lieutenant marching or dancing in step are counterbalanced by the red musketeer: their feet move together in one direction, his in the other; their bodies are canted toward the right, his toward the left. 14. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 496. 15. Comparison with the same figure in the copy attributed to Lundens makes this immediately evident: his red musketeer torques around the gun’s axis more energetically, the angle at which it declines is more acute, the distance from the musketeer’s left shoulder to his elbow is greater, the shoulder is collapsed, the feet are more stubbornly set against the more obvious tilt of the ground plane, and the whole body is more energetic and tense. The construction of the figure in the drawing of The Night Watch in Cocq’s album is more like that in the Lundens copy. 16. Schwartz, The Night Watch, 22. This contradicts the opinion of Haverkamp-Begemann that this step in the handling of the musket as laid out by de Gheyn is “accurately rendered” (Rembrandt, 86). Schwartz gives the following explanation for the error: the red musketeer “resembles a figure not from the book [Wapenhandelinghe] but from a lost civic guard portrait by Jan Tengnagel. The pose was misunderstood by Tengnagel, and Rembrandt copied his mistake: the stock of the musket should be held not from above but from below” (The Night Watch, 23). 17. Kloek, Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum, 130.

chapter 17: between ‘stad’ and stadholder: captain cocq’s dilemma 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

262

Kloek, Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum, 130. Carroll, “Accidents Will Happen,” 96, 104. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 100–102. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 482.

Notes to Pages 200–204

6. Israel, The Dutch Republic, 531. For Israel’s full account of this period, see 523–46. 7. Schwartz, Rembrandt, His Life, His Painting, 203–4. 8. Ibid. 9. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 483; see also Carroll, “Accidents Will Happen,” 102–3. 10. Carroll, “Accidents Will Happen,” 104. 11. Ibid., 103, 226. 12. Ibid., 103. 13. Ibid. On the relation of The Night Watch to Helst’s Company of Captain Roelof Bicker, see Chapter 14, n. 2, above. 14. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 50.

chapter 18: posographical misfires 1. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 495. 2. Ibid., 500. See also the RRP’s usefully detailed account of the paint techniques discernible in this area and of its paint condition (RRP 3:436–37). 3. The sitter in the stovepipe hat is usually called a pikeman, but as B. Kist has pointed out, his weapon is a cavalry lance. See RRP 3:457. 4. Either that gesture or the lack of space seems to have an unsettling effect on the sitter behind him, who appears in danger of toppling over backward. 5. Gary Schwartz, who picks out three variations of the Wapenhandelinghe pike sequence in The Night Watch, identifies only de Gheyn’s figure 13 (“the second motion of porting the pike”) with this pikeman (Schwartz, The Night Watch, 23; actually, he prints Robert de Baudou’s copy of de Gheyn’s figure). But it equally resembles the first motion of ordering the pike (de Gheyn’s figure 15). 6. The RRP judges that this expression may in part be the effect of poor paint condition but also notes a consistent difference between the convincingly rounded shapes of the helmets that catch the light and faces that “in a number of cases include a simply-executed eye area” and are “painted thinly in the shadows” (RRP 3:437). On the identification of this figure, see RRP 3:432 7. In Rembrandt’s physiognomic soft focus, their faces are as inexpressive as the means by which they are produced. Could they be tronies? Space fillers? 8. Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 183. 9. Kloek, Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum, 130. Kloek’s opinion differs from that of Gary Schwartz, who claims that “ten additional pikes lean against the wall” (The Night Watch, 28). This need not change Kloek’s reading. It would only render the blocking gesture more purely symbolic. The obstructive function is emphasized by the gradual brightening of the pike. It emerges out of an area of misty shadow relieved only by streaks of

Notes to Pages 204–211

263

white pigment on the pikeman’s helmet, and it reaches a climax in a small ribbon of red paint poised directly over the head of the pointing sergeant. Perhaps this signifies that the sergeant is one of the fortunate few chosen to join the magic circle of portrait sitters. 10. The double-edged sword crossing his pole adds to the effect of crowdedness. Its awkward relation to its probable holder—the guardsman between the captain and the lieutenant—testifies to the constraints of density in the center of the group. 11. In an effort to deflect the gun or to support it? 12. Schwartz, The Night Watch, 23. 13. What I call “flaccidity” can be grasped by examining the RRP’s comparison of this gesture with the one Rembrandt depicted in a similar passage in The Concord of the State (RRP 3:457–58). In The Night Watch, the sergeant’s hand is rotated so that the indexical function gets blunted. 14. RRP 3:462. 15. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 7, 1666 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 74–75. 16. On Buffalo Bill and the problem of dating these two group portraits, see Chapter 14, n. 2, above. 17. Assuming, of course, that van der Helst’s portrait preceded Rembrandt’s. 18. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 105. 19. Carroll, “Accidents Will Happen,” 105.

chapter 19: an odd couple: the ghost of anslo’s wife 1. Riegl, Group Portraiture, 265. 2. Ibid., 267. 3. Ibid. 4. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 76. 5. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 491. 6. See Schwartz, The Night Watch, 17, and Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 478–79. See also van de Waal, Steps Toward Rembrandt, 266–67. 7. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 480. 8. Thanks to Richard Gabri for suggesting the association between the glove and the pendant pose, and for reminding me of the valuable discussion by David Smith cited in the next footnote. Possible interpretations of the glove are canvassed by Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 74–75. 9. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 79–80. 10. Thanks once again to the excellent comments of Erika Naginski, who urged me to be more explicit about this line of inquiry. 11. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 76.

264

Notes to Pages 211–220

coda: playing soldier 1. RRP 3:432. 2. Westermann, Rembrandt, 170. 3. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt, 82. 4. RRP 3:473. 5. For details, see RRP 3:437–38. 6. In the best interpretation of this figure I know, Binstock finds her “cryptic” and “unsettling”: “the only figure who looks directly at the captain and lieutenant,” she serves “as a personification of the beholder within the picture” (Binstock, “Aloïs Riegl in the Presence of The Night Watch,” 43). 7. Ibid., 43. “Subordinate” is one of Riegl’s key terms, and although Binstock uses it here in its normal sense, the context gives his usage added color.

Notes to Pages 221–224

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Index Adams, Ann Jensen, 227n4, 236n5 Alberti, Leon Battista, 25, 29–30, 231n2, 233n25 Alpers, Svetlana, 231n15 Anglo, Sydney, 115–16, 247n17 Anslo, Cornelis Claesz, 141–45, 217–19, 223 Anthonisz., Cornelis, 59 Ariès, Philippe, 129 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 234n30 Baldinucci, Filippo, 178, 228n12, 257n3 Bambeeck, Nicolaes van, 154 Barendsz., Dirck, 59–60 Barthes, Roland, 17 Bas, Agatha, 154–55 Baudou, Robert de, 263n5 Baxandall, Michael, 231n15 Belsey, Catherine, 127–29, 248n9, 249n12, 250n20 Benesch, Otto, 198, 261n7 Berck, Dorothea, 156–57 Berckheyde, Gerrit Adriaensz., 66 Berger, Harry, Jr., xvii, 211, 229n5, 230n10, 231n14, 236n1, 237n17, 240n70, 242n94, 243n6, 245n5, 256n20

Bicker, Captain Roelof, 213, 259n2, 263n13 Bijl, Martin, 237n18 Binstock, Benjamin, 3, 172–73, 224, 228n13, 259n2, 265nn6, 7 Bol, Hans, 73 Bray, Jan de, 73, 92, 253n2 Regents of Children’s Charity Home, 100–2, 244n35 Brilliant, Richard, 11–12 Brown, Patricia Fortini, 18 Buffalo Bill, 213, 259n2, 264n16 Carasso-Kok, Marijke, 28–29, 115 Carroll, Margaret D., 4, 194–95, 203–7, 212, 215, 223, 246n11, 260n3, 261n4, 263n9 Cats, Jacob, 133, 135, 252n50 Chapman, H. Perry, 30, 35, 39–41, 65, 134, 233nn19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 235n39, 254n9 Charles I (king of England), 237n6 Claessens, Lambertus, 187, 258n3 Clark, Kenneth, 190, 197 Claudel, Paul, 51, 173, 209, 237n11, 257n26 Cloeck, Captain Allaert, 227n4 Cocq, Captain Frans Banning, xvi, 267

1–6, 89, 172, 177–225, 258n7, 262n15 Codde, Pieter, 76 The Meager Company (with Frans Hals), 54–57 Conrad, Joseph, 65 Coppit, Oopjen, 142 Cornelisz. van Haarlem, Cornelis, 59, 242n104, 244n33 Civic Guard Banquet, 92–94 Civic Guard Group Portrait, 94–97 Correll, Barbara, 129, 250n23 Coymans, Isabella, 156, 159 Coymans, Joseph, 156–59 Cromwell, Oliver, 237n6 Damian, Peter, 126 Delff, Jacob Willemsz.: Arquebusiers of the Fourth Squad, 52 Descargues, Pierre, 58, 70, 72, 76, 80, 237n7, 240n78, 241n85 Deursen, A. Th. van, 133, 252n49 Dickey, Stephanie S., 143–45, 251n40, 253n8, 254nn13, 14 Diderot, Denis, 19 Dolan, Frances E., 250n20 Dyck, Anthony Van, 129, 237n6 Eck, Caroline van, 231n15 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 129, 136–37 Erasmus, Desiderius, 129 Erickson, Peter, 229n2, 252n48 Este, Isabella D’, 230n6 Eyck, Jan Van, 198 Felltham, Owen, 251n41 Fock, C. Willemijn, 253n61 Ford, Charles, 19, 35, 230n8 Francesca, Piero della, 45

268

Index

Franits, Wayne, 230n12, 231n1, 232n2, 233nn20, 25, 235n51 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 172–73 Fried, Michael, 19–20 Fromentin, Eugène, 178 Gabbard, D. Christopher, 251n41 Gabri, Richard, 264n8 Garber, Marjorie, 238n22 Geertgen tot Sint Jans, 48 Geraerdts, Stephanus, 18–22 Gheyn, Jacques de: Wapenhandelinghe, 115–17, 185, 189, 195, 202, 205, 211, 227n2, 260n3, 262n16, 263n5 Giddens, Anthony, 179 Goffman, Erving, 20, 108, 230n12, 245n5 Gogh, Vincent Van, 237n16 Gorski, Philip S., 131–32 Graeff, Andries de, 205 Graeff, Cornelis de, 205 Grevenstein, Anne van, 242n92 Grayson, J. C., 114, 118, 247n21 Grebber, Frans Pietersz., 59, 61, 211 Greenaway, Peter, xv–xviii Grimm, Claus, 98, 237n18, 238n19, 241n80 Groen, Karin, 237n8, 240n65 Grootes, E. K., 249n13 Hals, Frans, 31, 49–50, 59, 61, 89, 91–95 The Meager Company (with Pieter Codde), 54–57, 236n52 Officers of the Saint George Civic Guard, 97–99, 243n24, 244n33 Officers of the Saint Hadrian Civic Guard, 57–58, 237nn8, 18, 19, 238n21 Portraits of Joseph Coymans and Dorothea Berck, 156–62

Portraits of Stephanus Geraerdts and Isabella Coymans, 156–62 Regents and Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House, 71–83, 241nn78, 79, 80, 242nn94, 95 Regents of Saint Elizabeth Hospital, 68–71 Hartmann, Heidi, 171, 256n19 Haverkamp-Begemann, Egbert, 4, 178, 182–89, 193, 218, 221–23, 228n8, 258n7, 259nn3, 7, 260nn3, 11, 262n16, 264n8 Hayls, John, 213 Hecht, Peter, 259n12 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 85 Held, Julius S., 228n8 Helgerson, Richard, 121, 247n30, 249n12 Hellinga, G., 50 Helst, Bartholomeus Van der: Company of Captain Roelof Bicker, 213–14, 259n2, 263n13, 264n17 Hendricks, Wybrand, 242n96 Hendrik, Frederik, 185, 204–6 Hendriks, Ella, 237n8, 240n65 Herlihy, David, 126, 248n4 Hill, Christopher, 249n11 Hinz, Berthold, 164, 171, 255n8 Honig, Elizabeth, 134, 136–37 Hooch, Pieter de, 66, 120, 123, 234n30, 247n29 Hoogstraten, Samuel van, 178, 203, 228n12 Hopkins, Robert, 231n15 Houbraken, Arnold, 34–35, 233nn22, 24 Hughes, Diane Owens, 129 Israel, Jonathan I., 198, 239n54, 263n4

Iversen, Margaret, 96, 228n13, 237n13, 242n2, 243n7 Jacobsz., Dirk: Civic Guard Group Portrait, 52 John II of Nassau, 227n2 Jongh, Eddy De, 29, 72, 76–78, 80–81, 84, 133, 184, 230n12, 240n67, 242nn92, 94, 248n37, 259n12 Keats, John, 15, 24 Keil, Bernhardt, 178, 257n3 Kemp, Wolfgang, 90, 117–18 Kettering, Alison McNeil, 60–63, 117, 122, 172, 244n3, 257n25 Keyser, Thomas de, 227n4, 238n28 Kist, B., 263n3 Kist, J. B., 113, 187, 246n11 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, 126 Kleimachos, 16 Kloek, Wouter, 202–3, 211, 232n5, 234n34, 261n4, 263n9 Knevel, Paul, 108–9, 115, 193, 244n5, 245n5, 246n7 Köhler, Neeltje, 114, 237nn8, 9, 238n23 Lacan, Jacques, 231n14 Lastman, Claes: Group Portrait of Nine Guardsmen (with Adriaen van Nieulandt), 205 Leonardo da Vinci, 50 Levy-van Helm, J., 114 Levy-van Helm, Koos, 237nn8, 9, 238n23, 246n11 Leyster, Judith, 31–32, 233n18 Lombart, Pierre, 236n6 Loo, Jacob van, 244n35 Loughman, John, 135–36 Louis XIV, 237n6

Index

269

Lundens, Gerrit, 197–98, 258n3, 262nn11, 15 McCants, Anne E. C., 63, 67–68, 238n35 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 130 McKnight, David, 125 Maes, Nicolaes: Eavesdropper, 25, 27, 36, 231n2 Mander, Karel van, 93 Marnef, Guido, 250n29 Marshall, Sherrin, 133, 251n39 Marx, Groucho, 49 Maurice, Prince of Nassau, 115, 227n2, 247n14 Mauss, Marcel, 68 Medici, Maria de, 258n1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 18 Middelkoop, Norbert, 242n92 Molenaer, Jan Miense: Family Making Music, 163–71, 255n6 The Duet, 31–34 Montias, John Michael, 135–36 Moryson, Fynes, 251n41 Moxey, Keith, 130 Muizelaar, Klaske, 12, 137, 141, 253n61 Muller, Sheila D., 51, 59, 61, 64– 65, 72–75, 77–78, 81–82, 238n29, 239n51, 240n78, 241nn88, 91 Nevitt, H. Rodney Jr., 249n14 Newstok, Scott, 236n6 Nieulandt, Adriaen van: Group Portrait of Nine Guardsmen (with Claes Lastman), 205 Nodelman, Sheldon, 86, 228n13 Offenburg, Boudewijn van, 98, 243n24

270

Index

Olin, Margaret, 86, 89, 228n13, 243n15 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 127, 248n10, 249n12 Ozment, Steven, 132 Pepys, Samuel, 213 Pettegree, Andrew, 131 Phillips, Derek, 12, 137, 141, 253n61 Pittenger, Beth, 232n11 Podro, Michael, 228n13, 243n6 Pot, Hendrick Gerritsz., 258n1 Price, J. L., 61, 113, 118, 250n26 Rembrandt, xx, 17, 51, 74, 106, 119, 152–53, 228n13, 230n8 The Night Watch, xv–xviii, 1–6, 31, 48–49, 89, 105, 115, 171–73, 177–225 passim, 227n4, 228n12, 257–65 passim The Mennonite Preacher Anslo and His Wife, 141–45 Portraits of Nicolaes Bambeeck and Agatha Bas, 154–56 Rembrandt, Saskia (Van Uylenburgh), 3–4, 224, 228n11 Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), 4, 182–83, 188, 193, 212, 221, 223, 227n1, 258n2, 260n7, 263nn2, 3, 6, 264n13, 265n5 Riegl, Alois, 5, 21, 28, 34, 48, 53, 56, 60, 65–72, 78, 81, 84–103, 172, 217–18, 228n13, 232n7, 236n2, 240n72, 241nn84, 87, 242nn95, 1, 2, 243nn7, 15, 16, 23, 244nn39, 40, 258n1, 259n2, 265nn6, 7 Rubens, Peter Paul, 154 Ruytenburgh, Lieutenant Wilhelm van, xvi, 1–6, 177–78, 204, 206, 215, 218–23 Rybczynski, Witold, 172

Salomon, Nanette, 38, 122–23, 234n33, 235nn36, 37, 248n37, 253n55 Sandrart, Joachim van, 178 Schama, Simon, 51, 115, 142–45, 154–55, 178–79, 188, 204–5, 209–10, 218–19, 237n11, 246nn9, 10, 253n7, 259n7 Schmidt, James, 244n35 Schneider, Norbert, 191–93 Schouten, Aaltje Gerritsdr, 141–42, 145 Schwartz, Gary, 4, 113, 119–22, 178, 187–89, 202, 204–5, 238n31, 241n88, 246n10, 247n29, 253n62, 258nn11, 1, 259nn3, 1, 262n16, 263nn5, 9, 264n6 Sedgwick, Eve, 171–72 Shakespeare, William, xx, 135, 152, 236n51 Shemek, Deanna, 230n6 Silver, George, 247n17 Slive, Seymour, 50, 69–71, 159–60, 236n52, 237n18, 246n9, 255n20, 257nn3, 5 Sluijter, Eric Jan, 259n12 Smith, David R., 6, 20, 27–28, 35, 76–77, 79, 82, 134, 141, 152, 154–55, 159–60, 164–65, 169, 219, 230n12, 234n30, 238n21, 241nn87, 88, 249n11, 253n2, 254nn3, 5, 255n6, 264n8 Sneller, A. Agnes, 134–35, 252n50 Soolmans, Maerten, 142, 219 Spicer, Joaneath, 152, 238n22, 246n9 Steen, Jan, 6, 29–30, 34–35, 91, 163, 233nn19, 20, 22, 234nn30, 33, 235nn34, 36, 39, 51, 244n1 The Burgher of Delft and His Daughter, 65–67 The Cardplayers, 25–28, 36

The Cat Family, 39 Merry Company on a Terrace, 41, 45 In Luxury Beware, 38–39, 42–43, 45–46, 166, 255n6 As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young, 39 Twelfth Night, 44–45, 236nn52, 53 The Dancing Couple, 45 Steinberg, Leo, 228n13 Stoichita, Victor, 17 Svenbro, Jesper, 16 Tacitus, 251n41 Temple, Sir William, 133 Tengnagel, Jan, 262n16 Ter Borch, Gerard, 106–7, 122 Teunissen, Cornelis, 92 Valckert, Werner van den, 62, 69, 73, 82, 205, 239n51, 259n2 Valentiner, W. R., 232n15 Voort, Cornelis van der, 63–67, 82, 90 Regents of the Old Men’s and Women’s Home, 64–65, 68–69, 88–89, 244n40 Vermeer, Johannes, 66, 240n70 Verspronck, Johannes, 73–74 Portraits of a Man and a Woman, 147–54 Vinken, P. J., 72, 76–81, 84, 242n92 Visscher, Ensign Jan Cornelisz., 223 Vives, Juan, 251n41 Vries, Jan de, 126, 250n26 Waal, H. van de, 228n13, 264n6 Wall, Wendy, 136–38 Weber, Max, 68 Weller, Dennis, 31–32, 163–65, 167–68, 255n6

Index

271

Westermann, Mariët, 25, 35, 41–43, 45, 66, 106, 137, 144, 151, 156–57, 161, 166–67, 169, 188, 221, 232n4, 233n25, 234nn30, 33, 235nn36, 46, 244n1, 253nn61, 62, 254nn11, 4, 13, 255n6, 257n7 Wheelock, Arthur, 236n53 William of Orange, 114

272

Index

William Louis of Nassau, 227n2 Winters, Yvor, 165, 255n10 Wolf, Bryan Jay, 135–36, 254n2 Wollheim, Richard, 21–22, 230n7, 231n15 Woude, Ad van der, 126, 250n26 Wright, Christopher, 72–73, 80 Wtenbogaert, Joannes, 205