Once again the National Gallery visits the Dutch at home. This time not Vermeer and de Hooch's Delft but Aelbert Cuyp's Dordrecht: instead of brick courtyards and side-lit rooms where music is played and good housewifery rules, we have boats, meads, cows, horsemen and horsewomen. The people are not so refined - Cuyp's high finish and urbanity can't disguise the chubbiness of minor figures. Major ones, despite a taste for fancy dress (a touch of the Hungarian here and the Turkish there), show less than perfect elegance. In French 17th-century pictures one has the impression that the protagonists knew something of the solemn steps of Court ballet, in Italian ones that they had been to a fencing school or learned attitudes from stage-players. Cuyp's Dutch herdsman sprawls and sleeps without a thought of how he might look to a passing goddess. His master is not quite easy in his clothes.

LRB 7 March 2002 | PDF Download