Dutch Landscapes [antikvár]

w T ˇ hether the artist picks as his subject the face of his beloved, his boots, or a piece of antiquity, it is all the same as far as art is concerned. That is what Goethe declared, he, true child of his time; his artistic taste and his activity as an art collector bear out this statement. Apart from the plaster-casts made after antique statues he bought drawings and engravings of iyth-century Dutch masters who used to draw every feature of their family members, their beloved, their customers, and even pieces of their garment and furniture with the same minute care as-if by any chance- they copied the Italian ruins of the antique. The admiration for classical antiquity and the collection of iyth-century Dutch art was a characteristic duality of Goethe's age. Beside the huge head of Juno in his collection we find an etching by Jacob van Ruisdael whom he called a philosopher and poet, and we know that he was a true admirer of Rembrandt's art. Whenever Goethe was drawing-and that he often did with great pleasure-he never copied antique statues, but drew landscapes almost exclusively, several of which reminds one of Hercules Seghers' coloured etchings akin to Rembrandt's style. As is known, Goethe encouraged his painter friends to paint and draw landscapes, although in his works on art-as most aestheticians of the i8th and i$)th centuries-he referred to landscape painting as an "inferior genre." Goethe's contemporary, Prince Miklós Esterházy, the famous art collector, adapting himself to the dual taste of his age, bought for his picture gallery not only masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and iyth-century Spanish masters, but alsó iyth-century Dutch paintings, in great numbers. The best part of the rich Dutch material in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts consists of these paintings bought by Miklós Esterházy, many landscapes among them. Later-even during the past decades- the museum acquired quite a number of Dutch paintings, which prevailed alsó in the priváté collections in Hungary. In this volume we present thirty-eight pieces of one particular genre of this collection: the landscapes. Since many of the greatest and most characteristic Dutch landscape painters happen to be represented in it, we consider it proper to give, as a preliminary, a survey of Dutch landscape painting as a whole. 5