Introduction

Gerard de Lairesse has been highly praised as well as intensely reviled. Since the middle of the twentieth century, however, he has been slowly regaining his place within the canon of Dutch art. In his own time he was a highly celebrated master.¹ After his arrival in Amsterdam in 1665, Lairesse had quickly become the most admired history painter of the Northern Netherlands, working for the open market as well as receiving many prestigious commissions from the highest circles in both Amsterdam and The Hague. In the Latin version of the Teutsche Academie (1683), Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688) recorded that “he was highly esteemed by all because of the exceptional excellence of his art and the honesty of his moral.”² Arnold Houbraken praised him in his Groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen of 1714–1718 as “a flower of art so beautiful the likes of which will not easily be seen for another century.”³ In 1760 Jean Baptiste Descamps writes that he was given the honorary title of the “Dutch Poussin,” and Jean-Baptiste Pierre Lebrun even described him in 1792 as “without doubt the greatest genius in the art of painting ever.”⁴ However, his popularity waned rapidly in the nineteenth century. Gerard de Lairesse came to symbolize, and was even held personally responsible for, the decline of Dutch art at the end of the seventeenth century. With the characterization in 1919 by Frederik Schmidt Degener, successively director of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Rijksmuseum, Lairesse’s reputation hit an all-time low; Schmidt Degener called him a foreigner “having the petty style of the international decorator, and with the aplomb and the loquaciousness of the dogmatic.”⁵ Driven by pure hatred, Schmidt Degener even saw in Rembrandt’s—in our eyes moving—portrait of Lairesse “the most revolting, most hideous mug that was ever painted. Pathetic, certainly, but with his greedy mouth, his perfidious thoughts, he is hateful at the same time. His apelike shape houses the soul of a miscreant.”⁶ In the most exhaustive survey of Dutch art in the Golden Age written in the twentieth century, Wilhelm Martin’s two monumental volumes from 1935, Lairesse was still accused of causing the decline in Dutch art by introducing French taste into the Netherlands.⁷

The first serious study of Lairesse’s artistic work was published in 1947 by Jan J. M. Timmers, who had the intention to regain interest in and recognition of the artist’s achievements.⁸ Apart from a biography and still-valuable introduction to his art theory, Timmers focused on Lairesse’s prints, of which he also added a catalogue. It took more than twenty years before this pioneering study was followed by Derk Snoep’s important essay on Lairesse’s decorative paintings (1970).⁹ In 1992 (with a supplement in 2004) Alain Roy published his timely monograph on Lairesse’s paintings, drawings, and prints, of which the catalogue raisonné is of crucial importance for any research on Lairesse’s work.¹⁰ Between 1989 and 2000, Janno van Tatenhoven published a series of small but insightful articles on Lairesse’s drawings.¹¹ Arguably the most encompassing study is Melinda Vander Ploeg Fallon’s little-known, unpublished dissertation (2000), in which she discusses Lairesse’s responses to his artistic environment, his career, and the buying public.¹² This renewed interest in Lairesse had been much stimulated by the first groundbreaking exhibition on Dutch history painting, God, Saints and Heroes (1980, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Detroit Institute of Art; Rijksmuseum Amsterdam).¹³ Lairesse’s paintings also featured prominently in the exhibition Dutch Classicism (1999, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Städelsches Kunstistitut) and he was even given the lead role in the exhibition De Kroon op het werk. Hollandse Schilderkunst 1670–1750, held at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, the Dordrechts Museum and the Gemäldegalerie in Kassel in 2006–7, that called attention to late seventeenth-century painting.¹⁴ Over the same period, a number of excellent studies appeared that focused on Lairesse’s art-theoretical writings (Het Groot Schilderboek of 1707, and to a lesser degree his Grondlegginge ter teekenkonst of 1701), such as the searching article by Arno Dolders of 1985, followed by the study of Claus Kemmer in 1998, and the highly valuable publication of Tijana Zakula (2015), based on her dissertation.¹⁵ Lyckle de Vries took Lairesse’s ideas about art and art making as a starting point for examining his works in two books (published in 1998 and 2011) that contributed greatly to our insights in Lairesse’s theory and art; he approached the Groot Schilderboek as a practical manual on art making, closely examining the interrelation with his paintings.¹⁶

Calling public attention to Lairesse’s artistic oeuvre as a whole for the first time, the exhibition Eindelijk! De Lairesse (2017–2018; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede) successfully countered the generally negative reception that had befallen Lairesse for such a long time. The exhibition was conceived by the late Bob van den Boogert, who was convinced of the necessity to confront the Dutch museum-going public with a reappraisal of the classicistic idealism exemplified by Lairesse’s art. After van den Boogert’s sudden death, the exhibition was curated by Jasper Hillegers and Eddy Schavemaker in collaboration with Paul Knolle and the staff of the museum; it demonstrated the varied and consistently high quality of Lairesse’s oeuvre with fifty paintings (ranging from small, jewellike works to the five-and-a-half-meters-high organ shutters), twenty-eight drawings, and ten prints, thus fully justifying the high praise of his contemporaries. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication featuring short but informative essays by seventeen experts on a variety of topics pertaining to Lairesse’s life, ideas, art, and reception history.¹⁷ With the aim of reassessing Lairesse’s artistic oeuvre, a two-day symposium was held at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede and the RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, at the closing of the exhibition. This inspiring conference was the starting point of this thematic issue of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art.

Presenting new insights into Gerard Lairesse’s artistic development, subject matter, workshop practice, and technique, this issue consists of four thematic essays and three case studies, each focusing on Lairesse’s work rather than on his art theory or his reception history, although these topics are brought into play where necessary. Eric Jan Sluijter argues that Lairesse’s artistic development was informed by the Romanist classicist tradition in Liège, his hometown, and by Italian artistic sources from Raphael to Poussin, while contemporary art and theory in France appear to be of no significance. After settling in Amsterdam, Lairesse also assimilated elements from the styles prevalent in that city. Paul Taylor discusses Gerard de Lairesse’s response to works by artists in the “grand manner” such as Raphael, Poussin, Annibale Carracci, and Domenichino, painters Lairesse presents in his Groot Schilderboek as examples to follow. Taylor examines in particular Lairesse’s numerous mentions of Raphael and Poussin—whose paintings Lairesse had never seen in reality and only knew through reproductive prints—especially with respect to his theory and practice of color. Weixuan Li analyzes trends and patterns in Lairesse’s painting production. By dividing his paintings into three categories and taking the relative dates into account, she correlates his output with the quantity and quality of the pupils in his workshop, thereby revealing the pupils’ participation and the consequences for his workflow. Starting from a critical review of the literature on Lairesse’s drawings, and signaling the field’s considerable lacunae, Jasper Hillegers presents a much-needed, expansive reassessment of the artist’s production of drawings, considering their function in light of what little we know about Lairesse’s studio practice.

Of the three case studies, two focus on groups of paintings and one on an individual work. Exploring the early series The Infancy of Jesus, Robert Schillemans discusses the iconography and function of this cycle of religious paintings, which must have been a Roman Catholic commission, although Lairesse himself had converted to Calvinism. He demonstrates how Lairesse ingeniously made use of older print sources for these traditional subjects, adopting and transforming them into his own style. Vera Blok studies Lairesse’s painting technique in four paintings for the large decorative cycle in Soestdijk Palace, concluding that the artist appears to practice what he later would preach in his Groot Schilderboek. Finally, Robert Wenley traces the provenance and identifies the sitters in an enigmatic, allegorical group portrait of children. He gives a new interpretation to this complex painting, demonstrating that the artist’s invention goes beyond the traditional iconography of the Five Senses, simultaneously showing Lairesse’s great capacities as an inventor and a portraitist.