All language subtitles for The High Art of the Low Countries 2of3 Boom and Bust HDTV_Subtitles01.ENG

The Netherlands.

Has any small nation ever achieved
so much in so short a space of time?

For barely 100 years - a time now
known as the Golden Age -

this tiny country boasted the most
powerful empire on earth.

It was a new kind of society,
ruled not by kings but by citizens,

driven not by privilege
but by naked market forces,

and it gave birth to the first
truly-free art market.

Portraits, landscapes,
still lives, sea paintings,

drunken comedies, domestic idylls -
what the people wanted, the people
got.

And all from geniuses like
Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Vermeer.

But how did it happen?

And how do you begin to grasp such
a revolution in culture?

Well, I think the best place to
start is with a curious tale of
horticulture.

In the early 1600s the tulip was
an exotic import from Asia.

Then Dutch entrepreneurs learned how
to cultivate ever more vivid

shades and shapes, and Dutch
consumers went mad for them.

They called it tulip mania.

The spiralling market in tulip bulbs
drew in people from all

walks of life. Holland was full of
deluded paper millionaires -

simple ship's carpenters,
ordinary tailors having themselves

shown around country estates
with a view to buy.

By 1637, it's said that the
price of a single Semper Augustus

tulip bulb was 10,000 guilders -

enough money to feed and clothe an
entire family for their whole
lifetime.

And then the bubble burst.

Someone suggested the bulbs were
actually worthless.

Everyone tried to sell.
Thousands were ruined.

But as always in Holland, there was
an artist watching as the

wheel of fortune turned, ready to
cash in with a topical satire.

Jan Brueghel the Younger
painted this picture.

Basically, he's saying
the Dutch have made

monkeys of themselves in this
affair of the tulips.

Monkey celebrates,
tulip bulb in the one hand,

money bag in the other.

Move over here
and we see those who've

lost in the game of speculation.

And here in the corner,
we see a monkey having a slash
on a patch of tulips.

I think it reminds us that the

Dutch had indeed invented a brave
new world of venture capitalism,

but it was also inherently
a deeply unstable world.

And this cycle of boom and bust
would be repeated throughout

Holland during the Golden Age,
both at the grandest scale,

and also in the very lives of some
of Holland's greatest artists.

Modern Holland is such a visibly
prosperous, easy-going place,

that it's hard to imagine
the bitterness

and violence that first gave
birth to this nation.

500 years ago, the King of Spain
inherited the Low Country region.

The Dutch weren't keen on being
a mere province of the global

Spanish Empire.

But what they REALLY
objected to was tyranny

and vicious repression at the hands
of the Catholic Inquisition.

There are churches
in the Netherlands today that still

bear the scars of a furious
anti-Spanish backlash that

began in the late 1560s.

I think the natural instinct
when you come into the cathedral
church in Utrecht is to think

what a beautiful space,
what wonderful architecture,

but it's important to remember that
this place is actually a
battlefield.

And once you get your eye in, you
can see how much has been lost,

how much has been destroyed.

If you'd come
here before the Reformation,

the whole cathedral would have been
ablaze with colour and imagery.

Now what do we see?

White space, blank glass,
empty plinths.

Over here in this chapel,
look at these little plinths that

once would have supported statues
that are no longer there.

On the other side, you've got a
little bit of fragmented sculpture.

It's actually Golgotha,
the place of the skull,

upon which Christ was crucified.

But the image of Christ
himself has gone,

ripped out by Protestant reformers.

This was how Dutch Calvinists lashed
out at their Spanish oppressors -

by assaulting the fabric
of their own churches in waves

of violent protest known as the
Iconoclastic Fury.

They saw it as purification -
statues,

paintings and altarpieces were all
symbols of Catholic corruption.

But if you want to see the most,
almost chilling reminder of the

sheer rage of iconoclasm that swept
through this city,

swept through Holland, you have
to come into this chapel, because

this is an example of what I call
Reminder Iconoclasm, because what

the men with hammers and chisels
have done in this case is leave the
altarpiece in place,

but defaced - and I mean
literally de-faced.

Look at it, you've got
the image of God the father above,

Mary with the Christ child
surrounded by the saints.

They're all there, and they've still
got most of their original colour.

But what's missing? The faces.
They've literally been sliced off.

It's as if the men who came in here
and did this, they wanted people

to remember forever that they had
once made images, they had once,

in Protestant terms, worshipped
images, and it was never to happen
again.

In 1576, the Low Countries
effectively split in two.

Seven northern provinces broke away
and declared themselves

an independent Dutch republic,
purged of monarchy and tyranny.

Though war with Spain would
drag on for decades,

it launched the meteoric
rise of a new kind of state,

free of the religious and political
paraphernalia of the past.

But how to build a new
state from nothing?

How to fill that void?

Well, you could begin by painting
the void itself.

Pieter Saenredam,
working in the 1600s,

celebrated the unadorned
architecture of the Dutch

Reformed Church with a purity that
foreshadows Modernism by 300 years.

He takes us to the
spiritual heart of the new republic.

The old order is gone,
and what remains is man, standing

in the naked truth of God's word,
ready to go forth...

and do business!

Why didn't the Dutch Republic
turn into an extremist,

Taliban-style state
like Puritan England under Cromwell?

The answer is - market forces.

Tiny Holland didn't have the
resources to survive without

trade, so its Calvinist leaders
pursued a policy of half-reluctant

tolerance towards those of other
faiths, as long as they worked hard.

This new society was forged
first of all in the crucible

of bustling Haarlem,
in the heart of Holland.

By the start of the 17th century,
Haarlem was on its way to

becoming one of the great
melting pots of Europe.

It was a city known for trade
and commerce,

and for religious tolerance, the
so called Satisfaction of Haarlem

was a statute passed that guaranteed
anyone, whether they be Protestant

or Catholic, could come here and
they could practice their trade in
peace.

Now this new type of city,
filled with merchants,

a new kind of middle class, brought
into being a new kind of art,

untethered from the religious
traditions of old.

An art dedicated to the
depiction of daily life - portraits,

genre scenes,
paintings of people drinking,

paintings of peasants,
paintings of the countryside,

and its first great star was
an artist called Frans Hals.

Like nearly a quarter of Haarlem's
residents, Frans Hals and his

family came as refugees from the
Spanish-occupied southern states.

By his twenties, Hals had already
made his name capturing

the city's bourgeoisie in paint.

Hals' most famous portrait, the
so-called Laughing Cavalier, takes

us straight to the beating heart
of Haarlem.

We don't know who the sitter was,
but we can work out why he wanted to
be painted.

The picture was a Valentine's card,
this man's gift to the woman

he wanted to marry.

Hence his amorous look, and he's

literally wearing his heart - lots
of them, in fact - on his sleeve.

"Have me," it says. "Buy into me
and I'll make it worth your while."

Hals could make anyone look
a million guilders,

and he was just as impressive
when working on a grander scale.

At his peak he cornered
the market in a particularly

lucrative form of group painting -
the civic guard portrait.

Prosperous burghers generally
depicted round a lavish banqueting
table,

itself slightly eccentrically
recreated here at the Frans Hals
Museum.

I think of Frans Hals
as the first great painter

of the 17th century Dutch
male face - slightly florid,

slightly jowly,
extremely substantial,

almost formidably self-satisfied.

But I think he's also the first
great painter of the Dutch

sense of civic
and political identity.

These men are members
of the Company of St George.

They see themselves as the guardians
of Haarlem's new-found wealth

and prosperity.

They're seated at their annual
banquet

and I think that table
stands for Haarlem

and how well it's doing, positively
laden with meat, cheese, bread.

They have all they want.

But Hals has done a rather
remarkable

and revolutionary
thing in painting this picture,

because what he's done is he's
taken the international

language of court portraiture,
the notion of aristocratic swagger -

look at this gentleman on
the right - his elbow is outthrust.

And if you read the deportment
books of the 17th century you'll

know that the outthrust elbow is the
mark of the gentleman. It symbolises

his right to elbow his way through
the crowd of ordinary people.

So he's taken this very grand
language, a language that was meant,

that had been invented
to be applied to kings, queens

and courtiers, and yet these people
are not kings,

princes, aristocrats -

they're merchants. They've
made their money through trade.

What this picture proclaims is
that we don't need the old regime,

the old apparatus of absolutist
monarchy

to function as a society -
we don't need it.

We're doing perfectly well without
it, thank you very much.

But Hals mania, like tulip mania,
didn't last.

The new money that made Hals rich
came with new temptations.

He had a weakness for drink.

You can see it in the bags under
his eyes and the disenchanted gaze.

Business slipped away, and his
painting became less fluent, but
more profound.

Near the end, he produced this -

the Regentesses
of the Old Men's Almshouse.

These women, the board of Hals'
local poorhouse, are painted

in a much more sombre mood,
mirroring his own change of fortune.

Commissioning the picture from
Frans Hals may itself have been

an act of charity, because his later
years were much more troubled.

He fell out of fashion,
his fortunes fell.

Now 1664, he was granted poor relief

and three cartloads of peat to keep
himself warm.

And it's hard not to think that as
he looked into the compassionate,
serious faces

of these women, he was moved to
reflect himself on the transience of
life,

the fragility of life, perhaps
the fragility of his own life.

Darkness encroaches from all sides.
The picture's 90% shadow,

with just these beautifully
poignant faces,

almost the faces of ghosts
staring out at us.

I think the picture is very clever,
I think it puts you

in the place of someone appealing to
these women for charity.

They look at you, they consider
your petition. Will they help you?

Won't they help you?

Will you be greeted by the hand
that gives,

or will you be refused by the hand
that withholds?

I think it's Hals's
way of reflecting on

the wheel of fortune that he himself
had experienced in his own life,

that no matter how high you rise,
in the end,

you do always have to
head for the exit.

Just two years after painting
this picture, Hals died

virtually penniless.

Boom and bust -
it was the Dutch way.

You could even say it was
a Dutch invention.

In 1609, Amsterdam's new Wisselbank
introduced the world to stocks
and shares.

Suddenly, everything was
a commodity, especially art.

In 1640, English writer Peter Mundy
observed with amazement that

butchers, bakers, even cobblers,
eagerly bought paintings to

cover their walls, hoping to
sell them again for a profit.

It fuelled a huge
boom in secular painting,

every artist specialising
in a particular subject.

But all reflected what the Dutch
wanted to see - their own world.

Whether it was life in the kitchen,

the sick room,

or the classroom, the national
obsession with painting injected

a whole new range of subject matter
into the bloodstream of Western art.

But why were images
so important to the Dutch?

Because they were attempting to
build a new kind of society,

built on the Calvinist work ethic,
communal effort.

A society every
bit as new as Soviet Russia

was in the early 20th century.

The Dutch needed art to prove
that their experiment was working.

And it was the artist's
task to fill his blank canvas with

the values of the Republic.

That's why Dutch art was so often
just a step away from propaganda.

Even when approaching the most
apparently innocent subject
matter of all.

The Dutch landscape was itself a
work of art, a man-made creation of

immense ingenuity with its polders
as they're called, vast expanses

of meadow, fertile meadow irrigated
by complex networks of canals.

This is the Beemster Polder,
and believe it or not this whole

area was nothing but one vast lake
until the 17th century.

In fact, as I cycle through this
landscape, I feel very much as if

I'm cycling through a Dutch
painting, and there's a good reason
for that.

Landscape was one of the great
subjects of Dutch art.

When a Dutch painter saw his land,
he didn't just see trees,

fields, cloud-filled skies.

He saw symbols of his country's
achievements,

and the dangers it faced.

Yes, Hobbema's tonal landscapes
are hymns to natural beauty,

but they're also celebrations
of fertility and symmetry,

a painter's reminder to his fellow
citizens

always to remain on the straight
and narrow.

Ruisdael's towering windmills
forever draining, irrigating,

stand for the sheer hard
work needed to keep Holland

above water, and to safeguard
the future of the nation's children.

And Avercamp's skating scenes -
what do they say?

Well, you might as well enjoy life,
but never forget,

you're always on thin ice.

It's as if the Dutch couldn't help
prodding away at their world,

searching everywhere for meaning.

Paulus Potter's The Bull.

It's one of the great
wonders of Dutch art.

If you want to understand Dutch
pride in their land,

this is the picture that
absolutely encapsulates it.

It's painted on the scale
of an altarpiece.

We're meant, in a sense, to worship
at the image of Dutch prosperity,

Dutch genius. It shows us livestock.

A sheep with her udder pushed into
the ground, baby lamb by her side.

Meek cow, flies buzzing - bzzz! -
in the air.

You can almost feel
the heat of this summer's day.

On the ground - ribbit! - a frog.

But at the centre of it all,
this huge, virile bull.

There he stands with his testicles
the size of church bells,

his prominent cock standing astride
a wonderfully luxuriant patch of
vegetation -

this picture's all about fertility.

He's blessed the soil with a
humungous turd. Look at that cowpat!

Have you ever seen a more
vividly rendered cowpat than that?

In fact, have you ever seen
a cowpat in art?

What's most extraordinary about the
picture is just the sheer scale of
it.

And what that scale
expresses, I think, is the magnitude

of Dutch pride in the achievement of
having created this land of theirs.

As Descartes said, God made the
earth, but the Dutch made Holland.

And boy, did they know it!

The fatted calf -
the lamb for slaughter.

Dutch passion for the symbols
of plenty was not abstract,

but entirely practical.

The fruits of the earth were not
just for looking at,

but for eating too.

The pleasures of food are everywhere
in Dutch art,

and you can actually
chart the rise of Republican

self-confidence through changing
tastes in still-life painting.

Dutch painters rendered
the textures of food

and drink with astonishing
vividness.

The sparkle of light through water.

The citric glint of lemon peel.

But to begin with at least,
it was simple bread and shellfish on

plain white cloth an arrangement
of relative modesty and restraint.

By the end of the 1640s,
the Republic's 80-year war with

Spain was finally over, and Dutch
prosperity was at its height.

Now there's a definite loosening
of the belt -

more luxurious food and more
of it, exotic props.

The earlier sense of propriety has
given way to naked aspiration.

It opened a kind of fault-line in
the Dutch sense of civic
responsibility.

How rich was it reasonable for a
God-fearing merchant to become?

From the start there was a tension
between the egalitarian ideals of

the young Republic, and the way this
free-market economy actually worked.

Inevitably some people did much
better than others.

Living in fine canalside homes,
owning fabulous art,

and monopolising
the mechanisms of civic power.

'You can still touch that reality
in modern Amsterdam

'in a splendid mansion that dates
back to the Golden Age.

'What was once new money
is now very old.'

So when did your family first
come to Amsterdam?

In 1583.

'Owner Baron Jan Six van
Hillegom X is the scion

'of one of Amsterdam's
longest-established families.'

This is spectacular.

I feel like I've stepped straight
into the Golden Age.

'This 46-room house contains
one of the most impressive private

'art collections in the world.'

Is this a Saenredam? Yes.

A real genuine Saenredam!
Yes, it is.

That's beautiful!

And serenity and the icy colours,
they will stick to your eyes.

I like that!

So where do we go next?

Well, whatever you find interesting.

It's sensational.

'Many of the greatest
artists of the Dutch Golden Age

'are represented here.'

Wow! What a picture!

The room was created
for the painting.

So this is Paul Potter who painted
the famous picture of The Bull?

Exactly.

It goes on and on, this house.
It's an art gallery.

Ruisdael. This is a Frans Hals.

That's wonderful.

But what does it mean to you,
though, emotionally, this
collection?

Because you've worked very
hard to keep this house together,

to keep it as a kind
of microcosm of the Golden Age.

I am Jan Six number ten. So Jan Six
number one collected a part...

Jan Six number two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine,

and myself, and I used to say,

"You can't be anxious
enough in choosing your parents."

I was born and this was gifted,
and a lot of pleasure,

but also a lot of taking care of.

'The undisputed
jewel in the collection is

'a portrait of the very first Jan
Six, painted by his good friend

'one of the greatest of all
Golden Age painters - Rembrandt.'

There he is. My goodness.

And there, you see - the painting.

Wow! That is just...it's almost
impossible to believe that

a painting can conjure up a human
being to such an extent that

you feel that they're THERE.

It's the man almost alive.

What do you think
the story of the painting is?
What do you think's happening?

I think that he went to Rembrandt's
place, they had food, drink -
whatever,

and then he leaves.

And then he thinks to himself, "Oh,
didn't I forget to say something to
Rembrandt?"

And probably that's the moment
that Rembrandt was,

"That's the thing, the situation I
like to fix on canvas."

It looks like it's painted
wet-in-wet, when you paint on...

Sprezzatura.

Sprezzatura.
You find it here, and here.

But if you see, the brush thickness
here, then Rembrandt took his thumb

and put his thumb here.

Those are actually thumb prints?
To make it completed...yes.

There! Yeah, you can see it.

And that coat... He's turned it into
almost like an abstract painting.

It's perfect, isn't it?
You can see the paint.

But that is so bold and daring.

Absolutely. And yet it isn't
abstract, because I think what it
conveys, as you say,

it's a man on the move,
a man who's about to leave,

a man who's been in thought for a
second. In thought, in thought...

He's thinking. Yeah, yeah.
That makes it also a little mystic.

Yes, it's got that enigma quality.
But it's very good. It draws you in,
it's a bit like the Mona Lisa.

Nobody knows what the Mona Lisa's
thinking, nobody knows what that
smile is, and he's not smiling.

And it has an extra...an extra part.

Yeah. I mean, do you think there's
a greater Dutch portrait than this?

Do you think there is one?
I don't know, but I advise you one
thing, take a chair,

sit down and have a good
clear look to it!

No Dutch painter pushed
his originality as far as this,

blurring the line between finished
work and improvised sketch.

"Avant garde" is a later phrase,
but a good one for Rembrandt.

Rembrandt had been an original
right from the start,

when he arrived in Amsterdam to
make his fortune in 1632.

He understood how the art market
worked in this thriving city.

He saw that the key to being
successful was to be different -

to innovate.

At just 26, he painted this
arrestingly visceral depiction of

Doctor Tulp, Holland's first great
anatomist. Blood, guts and all.

A brilliantly gory advertisement for
Dutch science - Tulp was delighted.

And an even more effective
advertisement for Rembrandt.

Yet sometimes his art would cut
so deep into the tissues of Dutch

society, that he'd risk alienating
the very market that sustained him.

And rarely did he walk a finer line
than when painting his best-known
work.

So here it is, Holland's most famous
painting, The Night Watch.

Although like many famous paintings,
it's actually deeply ambiguous

and endlessly fascinating.

Even its title turns out to
be a fiction.

It should actually be
called the Day Watch,

because Rembrandt has set
the scene during daytime,

in a rather dark corner
of Amsterdam, with sunlight

streaming in and catching these
figures in its beams.

It represents a militia company,

one of many such organisations that
had sprung up during the wars

of independence to defend, city
by city, against foreign invaders.

Now, what Rembrandt has done with
the convention of the militiamen
group portrait

is he's suddenly invested it with a
new kind of drama, a new kind of
energy.

He's turned it into a history
painting, almost. It tells a story.

This is the moment when the militia
company is about to advance,

and prepares to do battle.

But as is so often the case with
Rembrandt, all is not quite

as it seems, because by the time
he painted this picture, militia

companies such as these had in
effect become a kind of gentleman's

drinking club, more noted for their
carousing than their fighting.

And I think Rembrandt has quite
a bit of fun with his own

knowledge that they're not actually
fighters at all.

Look at their finery.

And there's also this sense running
through the whole painting

like a rather subversive
current of electricity that they're

not quite sure of what they're
doing - look at this musketeer.

He's pouring that
gunpowder into his musket

as if he's a bit worried that he
might blow his own hand off.

And this chap with his rather
unconvincing helmet

gazing at the flintlock
mechanism of his gun as

if he can't quite remember
how it all works.

And right at the centre of the
picture, look how disaster nearly
strikes.

A little boy's got his musket out -
he's actually fired the thing.

And he's fired it so close to the
captain's hat that it looks

almost as if the plumes are about to
burst into flames.

Look at the chap behind saying,
"Cor, crikey, that was close!"

So yes, this is the great company
of Amsterdam's militiamen but at the

same time, Rembrandt's just slightly
verging on taking the mickey out

of them. Is he perhaps suggesting
that they're a bit of a dad's army?

The militiamen adored the picture,
paid Rembrandt a fortune for it,

oblivious to the cutting
edge of his wit.

He'd got away with it.

For now,
he was Holland's number one painter.

In 1639, he mortgaged
himself to the hilt to buy this

house in central Amsterdam
now restored as a museum.

Rembrandt knew he'd made it -
a five-storey family home

replete with servants and a
spacious, well-lit painting studio.

But fortune's wheel turned,
and Rembrandt's patrons

began to see that his work wasn't in
tune with the great Dutch project.

Especially when he was asked to
paint a hero from the nation's
ancient past.

In 69AD, Claudius Civilis handled
a rebellion against occupying
Roman forces.

In Dutch eyes,
he was the very first militiaman.

This painting was intended for
Amsterdam's elegant new Town Hall,

but the governors couldn't stomach
this all-too-human depiction of a
half-blind, coarse Barbarian chief.

The picture was turned down -
Rembrandt's originality rejected.

It marked a terminal
downturn in business

and lifestyle for Rembrandt.

Yet he continued to search
the souls of the people he painted

and to ask awkward questions.

In this revolutionary new republic,

the freest society
in the world, what did freedom mean?

If you can choose who you
want to be,

how do you know which is
the real you?

Rembrandt studied humanity.
But most of all, he studied himself.

He painted more self-portraits than
any previous artist.

He portrayed himself in different
costumes,

different moods,

with different expressions.

These pictures form
a chronicle of the many faces

and ages of a single life.

And the later pictures reflect,
unmistakeably,

the fact that Rembrandt's luck
was running out.

By the 1660s, Rembrandt's life
was very much on the slide.

He'd been a millionaire,

he lived in a grand house on
Amsterdam's main canal.

He'd had a wonderful studio,
possessions, riches,

a beautiful wife.

By now, he'd lost nearly everything.

This is one of the great pictures of
the Golden Age but there's nothing
very golden about it.

It's painted in the colours of
flesh, of earth, of penitence.

He's depicted himself in a turban
holding a holy book

as the apostle St Paul.

Very much a prophet
in the wilderness.

Perhaps Rembrandt himself felt at
this time like a prophet
in the wilderness.

Certainly, his art for me
runs shockingly counter

to most other art
of the Dutch Golden Age.

When I think of portraits of the
period,

I think that in almost every case,

their function was somehow
to create and cement

for the enterprising,
yet also rather nervous Dutch,

a sense of their own identity.

But in these late self-portraits,

Rembrandt seems to be questioning
the very notion of identity itself.

He's not just
reflecting on the slings

and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I think he's reflecting
on the fiction of selfhood.

"What is a man?" he asks himself.
"Who am I?"

And he has the guts to admit that he
really doesn't know.

These pictures are great

because they dare to suggest that
a man can be many things.

When I look at them, I'm reminded of
the words of the great French
philosopher,

Rembrandt's contemporary, Montaigne.

"Every sort of contradiction can be
found in me, depending upon some
twist.

"Timid, insolent, chaste, lecherous,
talkative, taciturn, tough, sickly,

"clever, dull, brooding, affable,
lying, truthful, learned, ignorant.

"I can see something of all that in
myself, depending on how I gyrate".

Boom and bust again.

Like Hals the drinker, Rembrandt
the great innovator died a pauper

aged 63, and was
buried in an unmarked grave.

Holland hardly blinked.
And why should it?

By the mid 17th century,
the Dutch Republic was quite simply

the most powerful nation on earth.

The intrepid agents
of the Dutch East India Company

established trading
posts at the southern tip of Africa,

round the coast of India and Ceylon,
and in the Moluccan Spice Islands.

Meanwhile, merchants of the
West India Company had crossed

the Atlantic to colonise
parts of the Caribbean

and the coasts of South
and North America

including Manhattan Island which
they christened New Amsterdam.

The extremes of the Dutch
maritime adventure were

mirrored in Dutch maritime art.

More propaganda - Dutch men-of-war
vanquishing their foreign foe

in a fusillade of cannon fire.

But there were other,
more uneasy pictures too.

Scenes of impending disaster -
stormy skies, treacherous rocks.

How hard it was to steer
the correct course.

Where Dutch traders went,
Dutch artists followed, giving us a

fascinating window into worlds seen
by Western eyes for the first time.

Some of the most intriguing colonial
paintings were made at Pernambuco,

in the northeast of modern-day
Brazil.

Artist Frans Post recorded
the tropical landscape

and its exotic plants.

Albert Eckhout painted studies
of the local tribespeople, the Tupi.

His portraits are naturalistic,
even tinged with sympathy, when so

many other European artists
demonised the "foreign savage".

Back home, the Dutch reaped
the dividends of Empire.

For a time they were Europe's chief
importers of exotic luxury goods -

tobacco, spices, coffee,
fine Chinese porcelain.

They also capitalised by making
their own cheaper versions

of some of those goods such as the
famous Delftware tiles and pottery.

The standard of living in Holland
was now higher than in any other

country in the world - they really
had never had it so good.

The Dutch embraced the good life -
just rewards for hard work.

But still the old Calvinist
conscience nagged away at them.

If you have TOO much fun, it might
all be snatched away from you.

Even as the party went on,
they feared it might be their last.

Let's wait and see.

It's a tension crystallised
in the work of a publican turned

painter called Jan Steen.

As an innkeeper,

Steen was no stranger to the sight
of people indulging in pleasure.

No surprise, then, that he's
famous for painting witty

scenes of domestic chaos.

So much so that even today the Dutch
talk disparagingly of a

"Jan Steen household" meaning
a particularly anarchic home.

But is there more to Steen's
anarchy than meets the eye?

HE CHORTLES

Meet the Dutch neighbours from hell.

Het vrolijke huisgezin -
the merry household -

is the name of perhaps Jan Steen's
most famous picture,

certainly one of the rowdiest
pictures of the Dutch Golden Age.

What I love about it is it's a kind
of assembly of human gargoyles.

Look at this gurning
head of the family,

grinning his boozy delight
at the pleasures of the bottle.

Look at the wizened crone
singing a tune.

And there, at the centre of the
picture, a kind of profane Madonna,

the mother of the household with her
distinctly un-Christlike child.

She's certainly got the cleavage
to end all cleavages.

And if you know how to look at these
pictures, they're full of warnings

about the moral danger of excess.

The broken egg -
symbol of fractured virtue,

the smoke that curls up from the
pipe being smoked by the little boy.

That symbolises
the transience of pleasure.

And to underscore that moral,
there's a piece of paper

pinned above the fireplace which
tells us that as the old sing,

so they young will chirrup.
In other words,

set a bad example to your children
and they will surely follow it.

And yet there's something about the
picture that makes you wonder

whether the moral isn't actually
just an alibi for having
a good old laugh.

Jan Steen was himself,
after all, a publican.

He was hardly the enemy of those who
sought to overindulge.

And I'm not sure if ultimately
he wasn't actually on the same

side as the merry family,
laughing along with them

rather than poking fun AT them.

There's a polar opposite to
Jan Steen's scenes of mayhem -

Pieter de Hooch's serene, zen-like
depictions of Dutch domesticity.

And there's no
ambiguity in this art.

Clean house,
clean soul is the message.

Everything spotless,
nothing out of place.

If you're troubled by the pitfalls
of consumer society,

this is somewhere you can control,
can keep pure.

Home sweet home.

De Hooch's gentle celebration
of an ideal Dutch home is

the microcosm of an entire world.

There was a huge popular vogue at
the time for household manuals

such as this. It's a book called The
Skilled And Responsible Housekeeper,

And it's a kind of secular
book of hours telling the person

exactly what and when to clean.

On Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays
and Fridays for example, we learn
that you have to clean the reception

area. On Wednesdays it's the path
leading up to the front door.

And at the centre of it all lay
one great tenet.

It's written here, "Zindelijkheid
is een groot Cieraadt" -

cleanliness is the great gem.

The obsession with cleanliness is
a lasting national characteristic.

In Holland you're still
expected to keep

the pavement in front of your house
spick and span.

And a common aversion to curtains
shows you've got nothing to hide.

In the Dutch Golden Age,
the house was a symbol not

only of your own moral fibre, but
the state of the Republic itself.

After all, what was the Republic
but an edifice -

a house where each brick,

each fine, upstanding citizen helped
ensure the whole would not collapse.

And it would produce one last, truly
great artist who would try to

grasp that dream.

If de Hooch was the great
painter of Dutch bricks and mortar,

I think it was Johannes Vermeer who
most memorably, most

hauntingly depicted the interior
spaces of the Dutch household.

He paints a serving girl pouring
milk into a bowl in a humble
kitchen.

And yet the whole space is suffused
with light that falls on her

almost like a form of benediction.

Your eye is caught by the bread
on the table, which inevitably

brings to mind the bread
on the altar at the moment of Mass.

She's the high
priestess of the home.

Then he paints a woman in blue
receiving a letter,

reading it for the first time.

There's a look of anticipation
on her face.

The map behind her suggests
distance.

Is she receiving news from her
beloved, her husband?

Her swollen belly suggests that
she's pregnant,

the whole scene has
the aura of a secular Annunciation.

She is the Madonna of the house.

And then perhaps most
memorably of all,

he paints The Girl With
A Pearl Earring.

It's the look of love caught
forever on a human face.

You can see the moistness
in the corner of her lip,

the wetness in her eye.

It's an utterly beguiling picture.

I think for Vermeer she represents
almost the sanctity of love.

She's a person,
but she's also a kind of saint.

You'd hardly guess from the hallowed
serenity of his art that

Vermeer struggled to make ends meet
and lived in a somewhat

troubled home, often
plagued by obnoxious relatives.

Perhaps his paintings reflect
a longing, not a reality -

a peace he wished he had.

Vermeer was the last truly great
artist of the Dutch Golden Age.

Its downfall was his downfall.

1672, when Vermeer turned 40,

was the Republic's great
Year of Disaster.

English, French and German forces
tried to invade simultaneously

from different directions.

The Dutch had to break the dykes and
flood the land to repel invaders.

It broke Dutch global supremacy.

They survived, but their power would
never be the same again.

And it broke Johannes Vermeer.

He lost everything in the economic
crisis that followed,

and died, aged 43, a destroyed man.

For me, it's one of his paintings
that stands for ever as an elegy

to the extraordinary time and place
that was Holland in the Golden Age.

This is Vermeer's View Of Delft.

Marcel Proust, the French writer,
said it was the most beautiful

painting in the world,
and I wouldn't contradict him.

What a picture it is -
it's beguiling, entrancing.

It's Vermeer's hometown painted
from a vantage point that never was.

And idealised to a great
extent, I think.

Look at the way he's tidied
everything up.

He's given a kind of geometrical
order to the outline

of these buildings
in the centre of Delft.

I think it's a picture that
encapsulates the great dream

of Holland in the 17th century,
the dream of a perfect world,

a place where all is for the best,
in the best of all possible worlds.

The sun is shining, people are going
about their business, peace,

tranquillity, prosperity, order.

And yet, if you look more closely
at the picture, I think Vermeer's

also absolutely encapsulated that
sense that the Dutch always

had throughout their greatest hour,
throughout the 17th century,

that whatever they gain, whatever
they made, whatever they profited,

it was always profoundly
at risk, it was always vulnerable.

And Vermeer's painted that sense
of vulnerability into his idyll

by placing a huge amount of emphasis
on transience, on change.

Look at the weather, the sky,
that...you can almost feel it moving
above you.

And look at the way he's depicted
that wonderfully subtle
expanse of water.

These lines of white that
run across it.

They are they are waves
created in the water by the whipping
of the wind.

You can feel that wind moving
towards you.

There's a wonderful little detail
over here on the left where

Vermeer's had the paint
ground in a slightly crystalline,

granular way, so that those roofs
sparkle. Why do they sparkle?

To show us that it has been raining.

That cloud has
dumped its load on those roofs.

But that rain has passed.

This is a moment of perfection,
a moment of sunshine.

The storm's passed, but another
storm might be on the way.

Vermeer's painted a golden moment

and I think he's, in a sense,
painted the Dutch Golden Age itself,

something beautiful, something full
of wonder, something extraordinary

but something also destined
inevitably to pass and to fade.

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