Emotion in seventeenth-century Dutch painting Haarlem by XANDER VAN ECK EMOTION IN ART is an attractive subject for an exhibition; the relevance of the exhibits hardly needs explaining because every visitor has his or her own experience and emotions to bring to the equation. The tone of Emo- tions: Pain and pleasure in Dutch painting of the Golden Age at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (to 15th February), is playful and open. 1 The public clearly enjoys what is on offer, and for specialists there is food for thought. Many of the juxtapositions enhance the viewing experience, that of Arent de Gelder’s Lot and one of his daughters (cat. no.34; Fig.68) with Cornelis van Haarlem’s A monk with a beguine (no.35) showing what enormous progress had been made over the course of the seventeenth century in the depiction of emotions, in this case awkward relationships. In one of his best paintings, De Gelder’s portrayal of Lot’s gesture is both believable and suggestive, whereas Cornelis van Haar- lem’s monk seems to touch the beguine’s breast only for lack of a better idea. And seeing Judith Leyster’s Pekelharing (no.69) next to Frans Hals’s Mulatto (no.68), one realised that to paint a person laughing with an open mouth is something that only the greatest artists can pull off. As the show was curated by Gary Schwartz, one might have expected more works by Rembrandt, but there was only his early Allegory of the sense of Touch (1623; no.24), which is hardly representative of the enormous emotional power that the master could wield later in his career (there were some Rembrandt etchings, but they, too, focused on the early Rembrandt). Budgetary constraints may have contributed to the decision to mount a conceptual exhibition about the problems that face an artist when depicting emotions, rather than show the best that Dutch seventeenth-century art has to offer in this respect. Painters such as Adriaen Brouwer, Adriaen van Ostade and Gabriel Metsu were sorely missed, whereas Maerten van Heemskerck, Cornelis van Haarlem, Hendrick Goltzius and Karel van Mander, none of them particularly convincing in their depiction of emotions, were rather over-represented, presumably because their work is available in abundance in the Mus- eum’s permanent collection. The thematic division into sections gave the visitor something to hold on to – ‘Suffering and despair’, ‘Mourning’, ‘Desire’, ‘Fear, fright and amazement’, ‘Rage and revenge’, ‘Regret and disappointment’ and ‘Rapture, love, joy and delight’ – but it also betrayed the difficulty of defining what an emotion actually is. Suffering and revenge can hardly be called emotions, for instance, and that is leaving aside the question of whether what we define as emotions today was already a category in the seventeenth century. In his introductory essay, Schwartz tackles this problem by giving an overview of defi- nitions from the classics until the present day, concluding that even in the seventeenth century there was no generally accepted theory about where feelings come from or what they are. He also invokes the scepti- cism of modern psychologists about the possibility of conveying an emotion by facial expression alone – they argue that it is necessary to know the narrative context in order to interpret the expression. That line of thought is fleshed out in a separate essay about the expression of emotions as a subject of art and science by Machiel Keestra, a philosopher at the Institute for Interdiscipli- nary Studies at Amsterdam University. The section on ‘Desire’ provides another example of conceptual flexibility. It focused not only on the feelings experienced by the protagonists in the paintings, but also on how lust is awakened in the spectator when looking at paintings of nudes. Appealing as the works in this section were – Gerard de Lairesse’s Sleeping bacchante (no.38), for instance, and Werner van den Valckert’s Venus and Cupid (no.39; Fig.69), in which Cupid points his arrow directly at the spec- tator – this detour raised questions that would justify a separate exhibition about the ability of art to provoke emotions in the viewer. But then again, in the associative approach of this exhibition, it provided yet another instance of surprise and intellectual stimulation. Apart from psychology, philosophy and art history, the history of civilisation (as per Norbert Elias) was invoked to explain the difference between paintings of the first half of the seventeenth century, with the raw emotions we see expressed in the works of Jan Miense Molenaer and others, and those of the second half of the century, in which a sense of decorum makes its rather sudden appearance in Dutch art. One would have expected this to have been illustrated by a few examples from the great generation of genre painters from the 1650s and 1660s such as Ter Borch, Van Mieris and Vermeer, but they were not represented. Be that as it may, the observation that Europeans in general started to eat with knives and forks is not a good enough explanation for the spectacular development of Dutch painting around 1650, which must have something to do with the rise of a self-conscious upper EXHIBITIONS the burlington magazine • clvii • february 2015 119 68. Lot and one of his daughters, by Arent de Gelder. c.1681. Canvas, 90 by 90 cm. (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; exh. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem). 69. Venus and Cupid, by Werner van den Valckert. c.1612. Panel, 101.4 by 75.6 cm. (Collection of David P. Southwell; exh. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem).