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Friday 9 January 2009

Family business

Painting Family: The De Brays, Master Painters of 17th Century Holland
Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 5 October

Cecil Collins — A Centenary Exhibition
Monnow Valley Arts Centre, Middle Hunt House, Walterstone, Nr Abergavenny, Herefordshire, until 14 September

Dulwich is keen to mount exhibitions of Dutch painters — in the past they’ve done splendid shows of such masters as Pieter de Hooch and Adam Alzheimer — but this time the subject is somewhat more recherché. The de Bray family consisted of four painters: the three brothers Jan, Dirck and Joseph, and their father Salomon. They were something of a dynasty in their own time, a successful workshop of Catholic painters, with Salomon working also as an architect. Dulwich calls Jan de Bray (c.1627–97) ‘the most important painter in Haarlem in the second half of the 17th century’, but that alone is no guarantee of greatness. How do these painters stand up today? There is, after all, fierce competition from all the other Dutch. And just why, if the de Brays are so good, have they been practically forgotten?

The show begins with Salomon, and gives a mixed impression from the start. In the first room there’s an arresting half-nude from the Louvre called ‘A bathing woman combing her hair’ (c.1630). Pale-fleshed and rosy-cheeked, she is arranged around a dynamic profiled form of angled arms. All well and good, and yet nearby hangs an awful little painting of St John on Patmos, sentimental and horribly drawn. Then there’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’, which seems to depict a calm-looking serving wench with ribands in her hair and a decapitated head in her lap. The drama of the subject is so down-played the ornate cloak she wears is given more prominence than her ghastly deed. Very odd.

The second room moves swiftly on to Jan de Bray who is obviously billed as the hero of the piece. In ‘A girl with a dove and a boy’, the neurasthenic girl fixes us with a hopeless stare while showing off her pet dove. The multicoloured feathers in the girl’s hair echo the tints in the bird’s breast, but the whole thing is terribly twee. Jan is supposed to be famed for his painting of children, but his speciality lets him down here. ‘Leda shows her daughter’ is ludicrously out of proportion. More impressive is another ‘Judith and Holofernes’, with the whiskery villain out for the count in drunken slumber, about to receive the coup de grâce. But by and large, the biblical and mythological scenes are stilted and sentimental. The best painting in this section is the double portrait of Jan’s parents, Salomon and Anna: unidealised, dignified and deeply moving.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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