An Unlikely Pairing? How Netherlandish Painting Brought Light to Louis XIV’s France

Abstract

A t first glance, the late seventeenth-century French court of Louis XIV, resplendent with visual and performing arts that glorified the Sun King as sovereign not only of France but of the entire universe, seems to have little in common with the Dutch Republic. Governed by prosperous burghers, the Republic excelled at paintings that meticulously recorded the daily lives of its citizens in mundane settings such as canal houses, city streets, taverns and marketplaces. The documentary-like quality of Netherlandish art surely was a far cry from the customary French depictions of King Louis as the mythological god Apollo. In Crowning Glories, Harriet Stone argues that it was precisely this stark difference between Dutch and French art that captured the imagination of the French elite. She notes that between Louis XIV’s birth in  and his death in  Netherlandish paintings by artists like Anthony van Dyck (–) and Rembrandt van Rijn (–) abound in royal and private art collections across France (p. ). Mostly drawing on her own close readings of Dutch painting and French court art, Stone proposes the intriguing view that Netherlandish ‘realism’ offered the French bourgeoisie a vision of reality which, through its seemingly unmediated documentation of daily life in the Republic, unintentionally challenged France’s promotion of Louis XIV as Apollonian centre of the universe. However, Stone’s argument that the fascination of Dutch artists with recording the everyday was part of ‘a scientific, empirical approach’, in contrast to the propagandistic nature of King Louis’s art, and that it even paved the way for the Enlightenment in France (p. ), is open to criticism and could have been supported by more historical evidence. The focus of Crowning Glories on the cultural exchanges between late seventeenth-century France and the Dutch Republic is timely and original. Although transnational research on the early modern history of both nations was pioneered in the late s, scholarship on the topic has only recently begun to blossom and is still mostly concerned with the shared diplomatic and political history of France and the Republic in the second half of the sixteenth century.