The haunting power of 17th-century Dutch art

Laura Cumming writes about art with a painter’s precision. She’s been the chief art critic for the Observer since 1999. Her fourth work of non-fiction, Thunderclap, is a beautifully illustrated memoir that intertwines biography, visual analysis and personal reflection. An eloquent homage to her artist father, James Cumming, and to the artists of the Dutch golden age, it explores the power of pictures in life and in death.

Dutch art is a culture like no other, writes Cumming. ‘Which other nation wanted to portray all of itself in this way, its food and drink and physical conditions, its lovers, its doctors, housewives and drunks?’ Freed from Spanish Catholic rule after 80 years of warfare, the newly independent Dutch Republic emerged in the mid-17th century with a cultural boom: between 1.3 and 1.4 million paintings were produced by up to 700 painters in under two decades. Why then, Cumming asks, is so much of the art ‘seen but overlooked’?

‘That old cliché’ – as she calls it – about Dutch artists only ever replicating what’s in front of their eyes doesn’t help. The relegation of still life to an inferior art form – ‘just depictions of trivial stuff’ – hits hardest at 17th-century Dutch art because there’s so much of it. She’s heard curators disparage Dutch painting as ‘a brown art of cattle, cartwheels and mud, of peasants and platters, too many flowers and wide skies’. Too many perhaps for some, but not for Cumming: ‘I cannot get enough of Dutch art.’

Her passion is inherited from her Scottish father, a painter of semi-figurative art who in the 1960s was given a grant to study Dutch pictures and to visit the Rijksmuseum and Rembrandt’s house. It was the one and only holiday the family took abroad, and everything stands out in Cumming’s memory ‘like a comet’: the gable façades and cheese roundels, the bright bicycles and little bridges.