The Notion of Series
Early Dutch art cannot be understood without taking the social aspects of pictoral production into consideration. Alongside orders for churches (in Catholic Flanders) and great residences, painters produced pictures to meet spontaneous market demand. The work of art was therefore endowed with an aura only equalled by that prevailing during the Italian Renaissance. Family studios (the most famous were those of the Breughels and Franckens) were characterised by high standards of craftsmanship but production of nearly industrial scale.
At the roots of Dutch art, altarpieces were comprised of several pictures with different veins of expression within an overall group. Similarly, the development in the 12th and 13th Centuries of small formats resulted in the appearance of pendants, even cycles. This is so in the Rhenish landscapes of Saftleven, Verdussen's battle scenes and P. van Bloemen's scenes of military life.
Van der Croos, a follower of van Goyen with a prolific output, painted a series of views of The Hague in a style imitating map engraving. His brushwork is light and his tonality deliberately monochromatic. The poetic mood does not exclude documentary precision because all these sites are well-known and easily identifiable. The main scene is an illustration of a Dutch proverb about birds' nesters but is set in the area round The Hague. Smaller pictures must have been grouped edge to edge, frame to frame, in an order that is impossible to recreate.
|
