Advanced Listening Practice

The painting I want to talk about tonight is not one you would cross a city to see. It measures roughly forty centimetres by thirty, it hangs in a room that most visitors pass through on their way to something more celebrated, and it was painted by a man whose name, even in the seventeenth century, was not widely known. It is a Dutch landscape from 1643, attributed to a painter called Hendrick van der Straeten, about whom we know almost nothing beyond a handful of guild records and the fact that he lived and worked in Haarlem during a period when Haarlem was producing painters the way certain towns produce cheese, abundantly and without excessive deliberation about quality.

The painting depicts a flat expanse of land under a wide sky. There are two trees in the middle distance, a canal running diagonally from the lower left towards the horizon, and a single figure, barely distinguishable, walking along a path that seems to lead nowhere in particular. The sky occupies roughly two thirds of the composition, which is characteristic of Dutch landscape painting of the period and which, to a modern viewer, can feel either liberating or simply empty, depending on how much sky one feels one needs in a painting.

It is, by any conventional measure, a minor work. And that is precisely why I find it so interesting.

Let me tell you how it ended up in our collection. In 1887, a private collector in Edinburgh named James Dalrymple died, and his estate was auctioned at his solicitor's instruction. Dalrymple had accumulated, over a period of about forty years, a collection of roughly three hundred paintings, most of them minor Dutch and Flemish works that he'd acquired cheaply during trips to the continent. He was not a connoisseur in the elevated sense of the word. He was a solicitor who liked paintings and who had sufficient disposable income to buy the ones that nobody else particularly wanted. His taste, such as it was, ran to the quiet and the domestic. He liked landscapes. He liked interiors. He liked paintings of people doing unremarkable things in unremarkable rooms. When the collection was auctioned after his death, the more notable pieces, a competent but unremarkable Teniers, a school-of-Ruisdael landscape that probably wasn't by Ruisdael at all, went to dealers for modest sums. The smaller works were grouped and sold in lots of five and ten for a few shillings each.

Our painting was in one of those lots. It was purchased by a man named Hector Gordon, who was the cousin of one of the gallery's early benefactors, and who donated it in 1892 along with seven other works, most of which are now in storage. A fire in 1911 damaged the frame and scorched the lower right corner of the canvas, which was restored, competently but visibly, sometime in the 1920s. For most of the twentieth century, the painting hung in a corridor near the lavatories, which tells you approximately how much the institution valued it.

I moved it to its current position in 2008. Not because I believed it was a neglected masterpiece, though I've been accused of that romanticism. I moved it because I think it asks a question that the more celebrated works in the adjacent rooms do not ask, at least not as plainly. And the question is this: what decides whether a work of art survives?

Not survives physically, though that's part of the story. I mean survives in the sense of continuing to be seen. To be displayed. To be accorded the minimal dignity of a frame and a wall and a label with the artist's name and a date. The vast majority of paintings produced during the Dutch Golden Age no longer exist. They were painted over. They were burned for fuel during cold winters. They were cut up so the canvas could be reused. They were left in attics and cellars until damp and mould and insects did what time alone could not. The ones that survived did so not necessarily because they were the finest examples of the art form, though some were, but because they happened to be owned by someone who valued them enough to preserve them, or stored somewhere sufficiently dry, or included in a lot that a buyer purchased for the sake of one desirable piece, taking the rest as makeweight without particular thought.

Van der Straeten's landscape survived because James Dalrymple happened to be in Leiden in 1859 and happened to walk into a particular shop on a particular street and happened to find the painting attractive enough to pay what was, even at the time, a trivial amount. Had Dalrymple turned down a different street that afternoon, or arrived a day later, or been in a less acquisitive mood, the painting might have remained with the dealer, and from there, who knows. A house clearance. A skip. A bonfire. The history of art is not only a history of what was made. It is a history of what happened not to be destroyed.

Van der Straeten painted competent, quiet, unspectacular landscapes during a period when the market was saturated with competent, quiet, unspectacular landscapes by hundreds of other painters doing essentially the same thing. He had no wealthy patron to ensure his work was preserved and promoted. He produced no single painting dramatic or distinctive enough to attract the retrospective attention of scholars and collectors in later centuries. He was, in the language of art history, a minor master, a phrase I have always found faintly cruel in its precision, as though mastery could be meaningfully modified by its own inadequacy.

But stand in front of his painting for five minutes, which I have done more times than I can reasonably justify to anyone, and something happens that is worth attending to. The sky is not merely empty. It is rendered with a subtlety of tonal gradation that repays sustained looking, the grey shading into a faint warmth near the horizon that suggests either the first light of dawn or the last hour before dusk, and the ambiguity feels deliberate. The figure on the path is not merely small. It is small in exact proportion to the vastness of the landscape surrounding it, and the relationship between the two, the lone walker and the wide flat land, says something, whether intended or not, about the human situation that I find quietly devastating every time I stand before it. The canal catches light differently depending on the angle at which you approach the painting.

None of this makes it a great painting. I want to be absolutely clear about that. It is not a Vermeer. It is not a Rembrandt. It does not command a room or alter your understanding of what painting can achieve. But it is a good painting. A thoughtful, carefully observed, sensitively executed record of a landscape that no longer exists, made by a man who brought skill and attention to his work and whose reward has been three and a half centuries of near-total obscurity. And the gap between "good" and "great," which seems so self-evident when stated, is far murkier in practice than art history typically acknowledges. Greatness is partly a function of quality. But it is also a function of visibility, of accident, of who owned a work and where it hung and whether the right critic happened to see it at the right historical moment. Quality is necessary for greatness, but it is not sufficient. And insufficiency, in the art world, is usually fatal.

John Berger wrote that the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. I have always taken that to mean, among other things, that looking is not a passive act. What you see in a painting depends on what you bring to it, what you have been taught to value, what you are prepared to notice. A visitor who walks through our gallery and pauses reverently at the Rembrandt and passes the Van der Straeten without a glance has not made an error of judgement. They have made a perfectly reasonable allocation of their finite attention in a world that offers far more to look at than any human being can absorb. But they have also, without knowing it, participated in the process by which certain works endure and others fade from view. Every glance is a vote. Every pause is a small verdict. And the works that receive neither, the ones that hang in rooms people walk through on their way to somewhere else, survive only on the charity of institutions and the stubbornness of curators who happen to believe that being minor is not the same thing as being insignificant.

I am that curator, obviously. And the painting, for what it is worth, is still there. Room 14. On the left as you enter. Most people turn right.

Thank you.