The National Gallery of Ireland is casting new light on nightscapes in Dutch and Flemish art, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
In Northern Nocturnes: Nightscapes in the Age of Rembrandt, the National Gallery of Ireland's curator of Northern European art, Adriaan Waiboer has had the bright idea of throwing some light onto a little-known aspect of Dutch and Flemish art. While we may be more familiar with their daytime, sunlit landscapes, many of the best-known artists of the time also painted the same landscapes bathed in moonlight, illuminated by fire, or silhouetted by the last rays of the evening sun. But, Waiboer writes, the pictorial nocturne "has seldom been studied as a collective phenomenon." That is what he sets out to do.
He has built the exhibition around one of the acknowledged shining lights of the National Gallery's own collection, Rembrandt's Nocturnal Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt. This small, beautiful painting, long regarded as being exceptional, has the distinction of being Rembrandt's only painted nocturnal landscape. And, despite its biblical subject, it really is a landscape. For a long time the narrative significance of the little figurative grouping was not even appreciated. It was presumed that they augmented the landscape subject rather than vice versa. The picture is striking for the rolling, rhythmic play of light and dark across the surface. Its textures are soft, so that both humans and animals seem to nestle into a gentle, enfolding terrain.
Eventually scholarship linked the composition to Adam Elsheimer's treatment of the subject, The Flight into Egypt, an enormously influential work, its popularity fostered by Hendrick Goudt's engraved version of it. The renowned Elsheimer, born in Frankfurt, was based in Rome for the last decade of his relatively short life. Helpfully, his painting is included in the show. It is a very dramatic little picture, painted on copper, and crisper and much harder in its tonal contrasts than the Rembrandt. In a way what is exceptional about it is its sky, from a dazzling rendition of a full moon to its pinpointed stars and the luminous cloud of the Milky Way - a first in painting. The sharp brilliance of the stars is amazing.
One of Elsheimer's admirers was Rubens, and there is detailed evidence that he tried to acquire The Flight into Egypt for his own substantial collection. Several of his works display its direct influence. An outstanding version of the flight into Egypt by him is included in this show, its sickle moon an explicit tribute to Elsheimer. There are several other stunning pictures by Rubens here, including a mellow evening landscape, and a nightscape which jolts us with the inclusion of a figure swinging languidly on a roadside gallows. Such hanged figures are common presences in Netherlandish art of the time, reflecting the everyday reality of rough justice.
Elsheimer, Rembrandt and Rubens are major protagonists in the story Waiboer tells, and he succeeds in telling a story throughout the course of a modestly scaled, carefully selected exhibition. He manages to chart the advent and development of the nocturne in 17th-century Flemish and Dutch art, from its origins in biblical narrative to secular derivations, including some impressive feats of historical documentation. It was the Dutch who took to the challenges posed by the depiction of night-time lighting effects, and produced two nocturne "specialists," Aert ven der Neer and Egbert van der Pool. Van der Neer's explorations of the fall of moonlight heighten the drama but are brilliant and clearly based on meticulous observation. A spare brush drawing of a moonlit river is especially good.
Van der Pool and his followers made up a kind of painters' fire brigade. His pictorial account of a disastrous fire that destroyed over 800 buildings in a village close to Amsterdam over the course of a week in 1654 is unforgettably vivid and exhaustively detailed. Waiboer suggests that one of his followers, Adam Colonia, may have painted the best pictorial account of the Great Fire of London in 1666, which hangs in the Museum of London. Its authorship has not been established, but Colonia, Waiboer points out, worked in London from 1670 and had the requisite skills to make such an impressive work.
More benignly, painters were also inspired by firework displays and heavenly phenomena. The Great Comet of 1680, was the subject of a very good painting by Lieve Pietersz Verschuier, in which inhabitants of Rotterdam observe the comet against the background of the city's distinctive streetscape. Anthonie Jansz van der Croos's description of a fireworks display in The Hague is an odd painting, but full of incidental felicities like the range of greys used to depict buildings and their reflections in water.
Much of the enjoyment to be derived from Northern Nocturnes comes from careful observation. Most of the works are small and intricately detailed, and many are tonally subtle. In fact, Rembrandt's Small Grey Landscape, a tiny etching that is a virtuoso piece of cross-hatching, is "the smallest work of his entire oeuvre." Several muted, diminutive works on paper are exceptional. Pieter de With's ink and wash drawing of a wooded landscape, with its gold highlights, is gorgeous, as is Anthonie Waterloo's view of trees against moonlight.
There is a very good Ruisdael, A Marsh in a Wood at Dusk. Waiboer notes that the most celebrated Dutch landscape painter of the time did little by way of nocturnes. He did paint two versions of a subject that would have fitted in here well though. One of his views of The Jewish Cemetery is boldly day lit, the other is dark and gloomy, cut by shafts of stormy light, a startling, troubled meditation on transience and loss that had an enormous impact on the Romantic movement. As Waiboer plausibly suggests, the influence of the Dutch and Flemish pioneers of nocturnes was slow-burning but profound.
Northern Nocturnes: Nightscapes in the Age of Rembrandt is in the National Gallery of Ireland Millennium Wing until Dec 11. Admission €7, concessions €4, tel: 01-6615133