Benjamin Moser, The World Turned Upside Down

Benjamin Moser, The World Turned Upside Down (Allen Lane)

C17th Dutch Painting is one of those periods, like 1960's Detroit in pop music, that brought together a rare collection of talent to make a Golden Age. With Laura Cumming's Thunderclap on the same subject already a highlight of the year, one wants more and Benjamin Moser's investment of twenty years' work is a satisfyingly solid, weighty thing to pick up.

The first news to me is that the latest thinking is that Vermeer didn't use a camera obscura so at least now we know he either didn't or he did. 

Among the many of Benjamin's profound observations comes,

There are many people with artistic talent. But only a handful succeed, and these are not always the most talented. Success requires another talent: the talent to discover opportunities to use that talent.

That is in the context of Gerard Ter Borch, who was no Rembrandt, but whose work succeeded then and is remembered now. A recurrent motif, alongside having very little biographical information about many of these painters, is not being able to see in their pictures that which was obvious to their contemporaries.

Van Meegeren's fame as a faker of obviously sub-standard Vermeers is an aberration, as if tribute bands were of as much interest as the original artists but the inclusion of so many plates of the ensemble portraits of Frans Hals is a mystery to me when such luxury could have been better expended on other artists. However, it does serve to emphasize the disjunction between the prosperity of those he painted and the crippling debts he amassed around him. Even so, while a lot of these artists died young, with Vermeer making it to 43 being relatively long-lived, Frans Hals makes it to 84 and thus there's more of his work than of those whose time ran out too soon.

Benjamin Moser is a paragon example of one of those writers who likes to appear in his own books even though, in this case, he wasn't a C17th Dutch painter. Until two-thirds of the way through, that seemed intrusive and beside the point but then he has a few pages describing his life in Utrecht and makes it sound such an idyllic place that I'd like to go there, too, perhaps on the European Tour of Lubeck and places associated with Bach that I'm never going to do. See. That's how easy it is to sidetrack into talking about oneself. But, after his eulogy to Utrecht, which is apparently like Amsterdam without the seamy downside, I liked Benjamin much more. 

Dutch art is contrasted with Italian for its 'realism' rather than 'idealizing' and that is a good starting point for understanding why Rembrandt is better than Botticelli. Adriaen  Coorte, and his amazing Still Life with Three Medlars and a Butterfly, achieves the quality of symbolism without the least pretension to being symbolic....shutting off the intellect and appealing directly to the senses,

like music can and, in Benjamin's account, like a poem by Bashō.

By the time he finishes leading us through all the paintings there, he's won me over and I like him. I had thought for most of the way I much preferred Laura Cumming but there's no need to choose when you can have both. 

However, in the Afterword he indulges in some further reflections on his life and going back to America, which is good, mostly sad and convincing but whether it belongs as a coda to tis book's proper purpose is less clear. Until I remember that Laura's book was also about her painter father, and her early life with him and so maybe that is how books are written now, openly acknowledging their subjectivity and incorporating their reasons for being written.

It is a glorious area to read about but maybe not as easy to write about as Moser and Cumming make it look. As Benjamin doesn't quite say but certainly implies in his final thoughts, this compact little nation at the height of its commercial and artistic powers is a fine place to escape to when one finds the present failing, unsatisfactory and, like it isn't for me, who is a generation older than him, not as good as we were led to believe it was going to be.