Sensible Natures: Allart Van Everdingen and the Tradition of Sublime Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting

Abstract

number of reinterpretations and without any pertinent significance for the artist.Additionally, the method used by Clelia Nau is highly problematic.It begins with a very precise reading of the written, literary, philosophical, and rhetorical sources, before trying to find in Poussin's paintings traces of these theories, without ever posing the question of the specifically pictorial and artistic conventions that can also explain many of the painter's iconographical and stylistic choices.Would it be possible to trace the importance of sublime ideas in the works of the painters without being compelled to link these ideas with written sources, literary concepts, and poetical notions?If we want to demonstrate that real and convincing relations exist between the theories of the sublime and the practices of a painter, it is necessary to fulfill some conditions.It is a requirement, for example, to prove that the painter would have known and understood these theories.It is also crucial to identify and analyze visual evidence of this understanding within the works of this painter-this evidence should be iconographical and (if possible) formal and should not be explainable only through explicit artistic conventions.This article, devoted to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters and, especially, to Allart van Everdingen, will take up this challenge and try to understand if, and under which conditions, the antique theories of the sublime described in this volume could hold some importance in the artistic pratice of this artist.Specialized in and admired for the representation of Scandinavian landscapes, van Everdingen seems to have chosen to paint territories which, during the seventeenth century, were assimilated to wild spaces and located on the border of the civilized world.The visual characteristics of these exotic and wild sceneries defy the qualities and the properties of beauty, according to a theme very present in the sublime imaginary, especially in Longinus's treatise: "I would affirm with confidence that there is no tone so lofty as that of genuine passion, in its right place, when it bursts out in a wild gust of mad enthusiasm and as it were fills the speaker's words with frenzy." 4 I will therefore scrutinize van Everdingen's potential knowledge of theories of the sublime, first through the artistic traditions of the European and Dutch landscape, and then viathe written sources of which van Everdingen may have been aware. Van Everdingen and His Possible Access to the Sublime LiteratureAllart van Everdingen was born in Alkmaar in 1621, the second son of Pieter Cornelisz, and died in 1675.5 The education and instruction of the male members of his family seem to have been of a good standard.6 His brother, Caesar van Everdingen, who was born four years earlier, was a famous history painter.7 A former pupil of the genre and history painter Jan van Bronchorst in Utrecht, 8 Caesar was also a member of the Alkmaar guild in 1632, 9 before moving to Haarlem, where he joined the St. George Civic Guard Company (1648) 10 and the guild, serving as an officer between 1653 and 1656.11 In his oeuvre we can see traces of a rich literary culture, even if the chosen subjects are all very conventional.This is the case with his allegorical paintings for the Huis ten Bosch near The Hague: the Allegory of the Birth of Frederick Hendrik, the Four Muses and Pegasus on Mount Parnassus (fig.1), and the Allegory of Marriage, with Venus, Juno, Jupiter and Ganymede and Putti with an Hourglass and the Monogram of Frederick Hendrik and Amalia van Solms are subtle allegorical and mythological propositions, certainly the more complex in Caesar's oeuvre, yet without any originality or complexity.12 Furthermore, we know that Constantijn Huygens, the former secretary of Frederik Hendrik, had conceived the program of the Oranjezaal, and not the painters.13 8 9 7

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