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Updated: June 7, 2025
The Claes who died for the liberties of Ghent, and who might in these days be thought a mere ordinary craftsman if the historian omitted to say that he possessed over forty thousand silver marks, obtained by the manufacture of sail-cloth for the all-powerful Venetian navy, this Claes had a friend in the famous sculptor in wood, Van Huysum of Bruges.
And then these finds served as so many springs which, turned on by a question, played off an essay on Jean Goujon, Michel Columb, Germain Pilon, Boulle, Van Huysum, and Boucher, the great native painter of Le Berry; on Clodion, the carver of wood, on Venetian mirrors, on Brustolone, an Italian tenor who was the Michael-Angelo of boxwood and holm oak; on the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, on the glazes of Bernard de Palissy, the enamels of Petitot, the engravings of Albrecht Durer whom she called Dur; on illuminations on vellum, on Gothic architecture, early decorated, flamboyant and pure enough to turn an old man's brain and fire a young man with enthusiasm.
The most elaborate masters in this art were the brothers De Heem, Willem Kalf, Abraham Mignon, and Jan van Huysum. Exquisite as the pictures by these masters are, Maria van Oosterwyck and Rachel Ruysch disputed honors with them, and many other women excelled in this delightful art.
Flowers by Van Huysum, David, and Heim; butterflies painted by Abraham Mignon; Van Eycks, undoubted Cranachs and Albrecht Durers; the Giorgione, the Sebastian del Piombo; Backhuijzen, Hobbema, Gericault, the rarities of painting none of these things so much as aroused their curiosity; they were waiting for the sun to arise and shine upon these treasures.
I doubt whether poor Paul Potter, as the story runs, was betrayed by the wife whom he blindly loved; and who knows whether Huysum, the great flower-painter, who was consumed by jealousy in the midst of riches and glory for a wife who was neither young nor beautiful, had real grounds for his doubts, or whether he was not induced by the reports of his envious rivals to believe what was untrue?
The glorious carved panellings of Van Huysum and the portrait of the great Claes had been sold. The dining-room was empty: there was nothing in it but two straw chairs and a common deal table, on which Marguerite, terrified, saw two plates, two bowls, two forks and spoons, and the remains of a salt herring which Claes and his servant had evidently just eaten.
He was the first flower painter that ever thought of laying them on light grounds, which requires much greater art than to paint them on dark ones. Van Huysum died at Amsterdam in 1749. He never had any pupil but a young woman named Haverman, and his brother Michael.
Dutch Art showed the world the marvellous flowers of Van Huysum, the last great lover of nature, then folded her weary hands and the flowers fell on his tomb. The present gallery at Rotterdam contains but a small number of paintings, among which there are very few works of the best artists and none of the chefs d'oeuvre of the Dutch School.
Apart from personal friendship there is nothing to connect Berchem with Ruisdael, the popularity of the former being derived from qualities of a totally different nature from those which raise Ruisdael far above any of his contemporaries as a landscape painter. JAN VAN HUYSUM was born at Amsterdam in 1682.
No one before Van Huysum attained so perfect a manner of representing the beauty of flowers and the down and bloom of fruit; for he painted with greater freedom than Velvet Breughel and Mignon, with more tenderness and nature than Mario di Fiori, Andrea Belvedere, Michel de Campidoglio or Daniel Seghers; with more mellowness than de Heem, and with more vigour of colouring than Baptist Monoyer.
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