EMPEROR FOOLED BY DUTCH ILLUSIONIST

The painter and art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627 -1678) is largely forgotten. During his lifetime he was in demand in Holland, at the Emperor’s Court in Vienna and the upper echelons of London society. He was thought of as Rembrandt’s most talented former pupil. But today he exists in the shadow of Rembrandt and his name only really rings a bell with art historians, museum curators and people like myself, who are nerdish about Netherlandish art.

A well traveled museum visitor may recognise van Hoogstraaten’s droll interior The Slippers ( in the Louvre, but not at this exhibition) and his illusionistic masterpiece Old Man in a Window (see below). The National Gallery in London used to have his very clever Perspective Box on permanent display. I hope they bring it back soon. But lovers of Dutch art from the Golden Age await a treat at the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam. The museum has with Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna put together a survey of Samuel Van Hoogstraten’s major works. The exhibition convincingly makes the point that van Hoogstraten deserves to be rediscovered.

Rembrandt (1606 – 1669) had more than 50 apprentices and most of them worked under his guidance in the house in the Jodenbreestraat in Central Amsterdam which for 19 years was both his home and workplace. Many of his pupils became successful artists in their own right: Ferdinand Bol, Willem Drost, Nicolaes Maes, Gerrit Dou and Carel Fabritius are without a doubt ‘top rung’ painters. But Van Hoogstraten was probably the most versatile of all Rembrandt’s apprentices. He was adept at painting portraits, history paintings, architectural and domestic interior scenes.

Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten was born in Dordrecht, Holland’s oldest city, in 1627. His father was a genre and landscape painter and as a 13 year old Samuel was proficient enough to be accepted by Rembrandt as a pupil. Rembrandt’s standards were very high and Samuel spent four years under the master’s tutelage. He was then awarded with the honour of becoming Rembrandt’s assistant for another four years. Clearly the master painter thought highly of him. In 1647 Van Hoogstraten returned to Dordrecht and established himself as an independent master. Then suddenly the ‘Wanderlust’ took over and he turned up in Vienna in 1651, where he was employed by Emperor Ferdinand III, one of Europe’s great art collectors. We find him back in Dordrecht and married in 1654. Dordrecht was not a backwater. It was an important market town with a thriving artist community. In 1662 Van Hoogstraten, for some reason or other, decided to try his luck in London, where he settled with his wife. The diarist Samuel Pepys saw van Hoogstraten’s  clever illusionistic perspective  A View Through a House (1662) in a London house. He wrote in his diary: ¨above all things, I do most admire his piece of perspective especially¨.

We look through a classical archway into a hall with a staircase and beyond that a succession of rooms. Above the archway hangs a birdcage with a parrot. In the foreground a cute spaniel looks at  us curiously, while a startled cat by the doorway is more wary of the viewer. Two men and a woman are seated around a table in the second room,  one of the men is reflected in a mirror on the opposite wall. There’s wit and some clues in the detail: a large broom next to the dog in the foreground, a dropped letter on the stairs, a key hanging on a hook on the pillar nearest to the viewer. The point of this painting is mainly to deceive your eyes. The real world has been extended convincingly in an illusion that in reality is flat.

Even more convincing are Van Hoogstraten’s illusionistic letter boards. Trompe l’Oeil Still Life (1666 -1668, see featured image) shows what appears to be a random assortment of objects: a letter, a quill pen, a pearl necklace, a tortoise shell comb, a cameo pendant and some other stuff tucked behind two leather straps, fixed to a wooden frame that in itself is illusory. It’s the ultimate visual deception. Apparently Van Hoogstraten managed to fool Emperor Ferdinand III with a similar ‘letterboard’ picture. As a reward the ruler gave him a gold medallion containing  his portrait in profile. This medal is featured in this and a few other paintings. In the letter on the board van Hoogstraten is compared to the ancient Greek Zeuxis who was famous for creating painted illusions. Is this optical painting a kind of self-portrait?

Van Hoogstraaten failed to get appointed by the English Court but was in demand as a portraitist of the well-heeled gentry. After 5 years  return to The Netherlands after five years he was bak in Holland and ended up in Dordrecht. He started work on his major treatise Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkunst ( Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, 1678) which gave practical tips about drawing and painting. In this important book Van Hoogstraten demonstrates that he is also  knowledgeable about art history, classical antiquity and (quite surprisingly!) traditions in foreign countries. The Dutch East India Company’s merchant ships ruled the waves and this explains why he could acquire expertise in the art and customs of countries like Japan, China, Persia, India, Florida, Mexico and The Holy Land. In general countries that the Europeans had started to colonise. Somewhere Van Hoogstraten read that the breasts of Aztec women are deliberately stretched so that they can nurse their children while carrying them on their backs. He’s surprised that in East Asia connoisseurs pay more for an exquisite painting of a frog than a history painting. He observes that images from Central America made with colourful feathers have more ‘sheen and splendour’ than an oil Painting. Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkunst, published the year Van Hoogstraten died, became a very important reference work. Nowadays the work is studied closely by Rembrandt scholars, which is due to the fact that much of Van Hoogstraten’s technical advice and many instructions are based on what his master had taught him.

In the 1640s Rembrandt experiments with subtle ways of suggesting movement in his portraits, tronies and history paintings. One way in which he achieves a sense of movement is by having a hand, a fan, a book or his own elbow (in a self-portrait) protrude from the picture plane. The figure appears to move beyond the flat canvas into the space of the viewer. Among Rembrandt’s  ‘window figures’  his Girl in a Picture Frame (1641) comes closest to Van Hoogstraten’s Young Woman at an Open Half-Door, which until the 1990s was thought to be painted by Rembrandt himself (the signature by the master appears to be genuine). But Rembrandt’s technique is superior to Van Hoogstraten’s and that is here mainly down to the fact that he manages to suggest movement in The Girl in a Picture Frame‘s right hand, which she appears to withdraw, or is just about to place on the frame. Her feathery sleeve also seems to be in motion. Van Hoogstraten’s painting doesn’t achieve Rembrandt’s level of sophistication and the girl’s hands are actually the most awkward part of the picture. It is, on the other hand, likely that it was painted under the guidance of the master (hence the signature?). When you put this typical Dutch tronie (a portrayal of  an expression, rather than an actual likeness of a person) next to Van Hoogstraten’s self-portrait from the same year, you can see that the more controlled texture and open strokes, particularly in the rendering of the face, are quite similar.

The highlight of this show is without a doubt the very lifelike, life-size painting Old Man in a Window (1653) which was probably painted to entertain the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. Van Hoogstraten has done his uttermost best to trick our eyes and would probably succeed, if we were made to see the picture in exactly the right environment. The skin of the man is wrinkled, his eyes seem to follow you, his expression is one of curiosity, or maybe there’s even a slight air of suspicion?  Has he put his furry hat on because it’s cold outside? This is another ‘window figure’ , but one that raises many questions.  The weathered stone around the wooden window frame, the crown glass window, the feather and the tiny bottle (what does it contain?) on the window sill, everything is depicted in marvelous detail. And even though there is something unsettling about the way we can only really see the man’s head clearly (and get a vague idea of his clothes through the window), the picture also seems slightly comical. Isn’t it always slightly comical when you just see a head poking out of a hole? This exhibition makes it clear that Samuel van Hoogstraten was a master of the ultimate, or as he put it himself: ¨For a perfect painting is like a mirror of nature; it makes things that are not there appear to exist and deceives in a permissible, pleasurable, and praiseworthy way¨.

THE ILLUSIONIST. SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN   Rembrandthuis Museum, Amsterdam, until 4-05-2025