[Essay] Music & Dance in Painting of the Dutch Golden Age

In June 2017, the Museum re-launched as the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College with a spectacular exhibition entitled Rembrandt’s Academy. That hugely popular show was developed exclusively for the Museum in collaboration with the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation in the Netherlands and featured 16 privately-owned masterworks by the students of Rembrandt.

Two and a half years later, we have upped the ante with the 27 Old Master paintings that make up Music & Dance in Painting of the Dutch Golden Age. Our second collaboration with the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation, located in The Hague, Music and Dance rivals any exhibition the Polk Museum has previously hosted. The show will fill our two main galleries and features masterworks from private European collections, many rarely seen by the public before. Framed around the interdisciplinary themes of music and dance, the exhibition has been designed purposefully to engage audiences of diverse interests and to allow for programming that integrates the fine and performing arts. From the earliest stages of planning the exhibition and selecting the works for the show, the idea of activating our gallery spaces with actual music and dance performances from our community was integral to our preparation. The exhibition will also introduce visitors to the wondrous world of Golden Age instruments and dance styles, from the viola de gamba and the cittern to the “egg dance” (which promises to be the newest Central Florida sensation).

Above all else, though, the rare opportunity to bring more than two dozen exquisite, otherwise-unviewable privately-held European paintings from three centuries ago to Polk County goes to the heart of our mission as an educational institution. We strive to create world-class art historical experiences for our community and beyond — and Music & Dance promises to astound.

The exhibition delves deeply into the art, history, and culture of the Netherlands in the 17th century, a period of great wealth and cultural achievement for the Dutch people. In what was then already called a Golden Age, the Netherlands was a world power whose military fleet was growing and where trade, science, and the arts flourished as never before. Of particular note, the pleasures of music and dancing were a fundamental part of life in both the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands, as reflected in the strikingly high number of Dutch and Flemish paintings that include dancing figures, groups of musicians, and compositions of musical instruments. Visitors will thus have the opportunity to see for themselves how brilliantly the Old Masters were able to capture the spirit of the Golden Age in their paintings, revealing in vivid color the insatiable Dutch appetite for singing songs, forming ensembles, and moving to melodies.

The show will be divided into five thematic “chapters,” tracing the resounding influence and presence of music and dance in all aspects and social strata of Dutch society in the 17th century. While one chapter will explore how masters like Pieter Codde and Willem van Herp depicted the elite inner worlds of wealthy merchants and so-called “ladies of leisure,” the next will transport visitors into laughter-filled scenes of peasants and vagabonds, who find jovial pleasure in music and dancing.

Just as today, music and dance in the Dutch Golden Age brought people together, often in times of celebration (as in the people-packed hall of Peasant Wedding by Jan Miense Molenaer) but also in the passing moments of everyday life. In paintings like Peter de Grebber’s Violinist, we see in a simple, masterful composition the eponymous portrait subject, a young man who becomes the sole focus of the painting, underscoring both the pure bliss he takes in his own music-making and likely in the knowledge of the delight his music brings to his unseen audience. That de Grebber gives the viewer no visual access to anything more of the scene beyond an unembellished wall behind the sitter cleverly allows each of us to envision the context of this painting as we care to imagine it. Is the violinist performing for a wealthy crowd of music aficionados?  Is he wooing the woman he loves? Or can we even really know if he is playing for anyone other than himself? We become doubly engrossed in this painting because, more than simply the beauty of the work itself, we are pushed to speculate about what we cannot see in it.

Instruments form the contemplative centerpieces for several still-lifes in the show; these so-called vanitas paintings are symbolic works popularized in the Netherlands in the early 17th century and use everyday objects arranged on a table to remind viewers of the transience of life, the impermanence of mortal pleasures, and the passage of time. Artists painted such vanitas still-lifes with great intentionality, selecting symbolic items that may, on one hand, convey how a patron’s intellectual accomplishments can endure beyond death — but point simultaneously to the fundamental vanity of man’s pursuit of such pleasures of the mind when faced with the larger conceit of death. As in the exhibition’s Vanitas Still Life with Twisted Silver Candlestick by Reiner Meganck, a brilliant essay in academic study of objects, most vanitas paintings feature a skull — a physical memento mori (Latin for “remember you must die”) — along with other open-endedly metaphorical belongings, like the work’s titular twisted candlestick, compass, sheet music and violin, and nearly expired hourglass flipped on its side. Meganck intends for us to search for deeper meaning in these items, some more subtle than others.

Filled with such symbolism, Dutch paintings of the 17th century are known for their beauty and exquisite compositions, but more than anything else it is their themes of everyday life that have made them so beloved for centuries; this spring, Music & Dance adds a musical twist to the genre, bringing the past to the present in the most entertaining of ways.

H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D.
Executive Director and Chief Curator

Music & Dance: in Painting of the Dutch Golden Age will be on view February 8 to May 21, 2020 in the Dorothy Jenkins Gallery and Gallery II.