Interview with Ian Dejardin

Associate Curator Jennifer Klos speaks with Ian Dejardin, director of Dulwich Picture Gallery and curator of The Dutch Italianates: 17th-century Masterpieces from Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, about the exhibition.

Jennifer Klos: How did you originate the idea for this exhibition to travel to the United States?

Ian Dejardin: It was always a project that my predecessor, Desmond Shaw-Taylor, had wanted to do, and we couldn’t find the right timing. Then, there were a couple of projects that we wanted to put on in the gallery that required extra space. We needed to clear a gallery, in fact. And so I was faced with a rather horrible choice of putting a whole room full of great paintings into store. And I didn’t want to do that because they were our Dutch Italianates. At which point, I remembered my conversation with International Arts & Artists. I approached them again and said, look, I know it’s very short notice, but rather than put these paintings into store, I would rather tour them, if at all possible, so that people can see them. And that was how it started.

JK: Have these paintings ever travelled outside your gallery before this tour?

ID: Never in a group.  As individual paintings, or even one or two of them have travelled to the United States before, but we have never toured our entire selection like this. There are several paintings that are the best of their kind.

JK: What is most interesting about Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection of Dutch Italianate paintings that visitors may not know?

ID: Dulwich Picture Gallery was founded in 1811 and is the first public art gallery in England, which means that these paintings have been on public view for nearly 200 years. In that time, of course, tastes change. At the time these paintings were acquired, these were very, very famous names indeed and far better known and far more collected in this country than the great classic Dutch landscapists.

Nicolaes Berchem was one of the great gods of art, and nowadays people haven’t heard of him. That always fascinates me. I think it’s one of the most interesting things, the history of taste, because things go in and out of fashion. They are seen as million-pound paintings one minute, and nobody wants them the next.  And because we have been here so long, we actually have several areas of painting on display in our gallery of the highest possible quality that have gone completely out of fashion for a period and then are on their way back. It’s charting the course…the paintings themselves don’t change but our appreciation of them does.  It’s like rediscovering a whole new phase of art history.

JK: What particular features characterize these paintings as Dutch Italianate?

ID: The Dutch Italianates were right there at the creation of the classical landscape in Italy. They play an important role in it. With the exception of one or two, Dutch Italianates have a very particular feel to them that sets them apart.  The Dutch are famously frank. They are not interested in the nonsense that they would have perceived in the Italian character.

The Dutch Italianates were electrified by the landscape. But you will find, even in the most classical of their paintings, there are also Dutch elements, as with Cornelis van Poelenburch’s Valley with Ruins and Figures. As your eye moves into the center of the painting, you see that someone has put out their washing to dry. There is the old Roman ruin in the center and what the Dutch artist does is put the washing out to dry.

That’s what I love about them. They like the little touches of real life. In all the landscapes, you will find this very particular view of the inhabitants, the very colorful peasant population, shepherdesses, muleteers.

JK: Did the contemporary Italian artists of the seventeenth century respect these Dutch artists?

ID: Very rarely. One of the most interesting things about this is that these painters have acquired this label, “the Dutch Italianates.” Of course, they were not known as that in their own day. They were just seen as Dutch artists.  The reason that “Dutch Italianates” is such an unfortunate “dog-eared” label is because it gives the impression that they lived in Italy. They didn’t. They visited Italy, some of them for a comparatively short time, some of them for quite a long time. A lot of them would spend a year, 18 months, to two years. And when you consider the difficulties of the journey, that is quite a commitment. 

JK: For the artists who did not have the chance to travel to Italy, who influenced them the most?

ID: The most influential artists would be Jan Both and Cornelis van Poelenburch. For instance, [Aelbert] Cuyp was electrified by Jan Both. There are two Cuyp paintings in the exhibition, Landscape with Cattle and Figures and Herdsmen with Cows, which are effectively identical in subject matter. And what has happened is that in between those two compositions, Cuyp has seen the works of Jan Both. So it’s Jan Both who teaches Cuyp how to capture a different light from what the classic Dutch artists were producing. I also think Poelenburch was hugely influential in [the work of] Utrecht.  He was larger than life, influencing whole generations of artists.

Of course, what fascinates me about Holland is how close everybody was to each other. You think of artists in Haarlem and artists in Amsterdam without realizing that Haarlem is precisely 12 miles away from Amsterdam. It was never very hard to be influenced by other artists in Holland. You just jumped on a horse and rode down the road a bit.

JK: Considering the wealth of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, what was the art market like in Holland?

ID: Holland, unlike almost anywhere in Europe at that point, was producing for a very large and not necessarily aristocratic market. By the end of the century, the school of landscape painting that emerges in Holland was being produced for quite ordinary families. There was a lot of wealth, there was a lot of religion, but there was also a respect for artists and a thriving market.

It’s a very modern phenomenon, I think, in many ways, because you get artists who specialize. This is what the Dutch Italianates are doing. They painted in the manner not because they were inspired by the muse of Dutch Italianates of Italy; they were inspired by the market. There was a thriving mercantile population who were at this period conquering the world. I mean, the Dutch were all over the globe at this point trading. And that mercantile population were the people who were tapping into the Dutch Italianates because they provided a vision of a more exotic reality than just the dunes of Holland.

Consequently, the Dutch Italianates developed not only the beautiful landscapes of Italy, which would have been recognized as such, but also fantasy scenes of harbors and marketplaces. They did it because it emphasized the cosmopolitan nature of their society at that moment.

JK: How did the founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois and Noel Desenfans, acquire the Dutch Italianate paintings?

ID: The story of our foundation is a natural-born Hollywood film. Our founders were kind of larger-than-life people. They were very interesting. They were foreigners within London. Desenfens was French. Bourgeois was Swiss, although his mother was English. They were always trying to break into the art establishment and always being resisted.

Our gallery’s origins are twofold, one in Jacobian England and the other in Poland in 1790. The King of Poland [Stanislas II August] gave the commission to our founders to put together a national museum for Warsaw to be a royal collection that was to educate the people of Poland but history intervened.  Basically, Poland ceased to exist. Stanislas never paid up any money. And consequently, his influence has never really been traced on our collection, but it’s there, and it’s very interesting.

The King of Poland, in giving this commission to our founders, clearly corresponded at length with them and had strong opinions on art. And so I think the shape of our collection, as it was eventually given to Dulwich College in 1811, owes quite a lot to his vision of what a collection for Poland would be like–It was to tell the history of art.

JK: Lastly, what is your favorite painting or artist in the Dutch Italianates exhibition?

ID: It’s really hard because I love them all. But, my favorite happens to be my namesake, Karel du Jardin.  Everyone loves Smith Shoeing an Ox, and I do, too, but actually it’s Peasants and a White Horse. The painting had never been on view, and now it’s always on display. I can’t tell you how beautiful it is. The sky is poetic. And I just love that horse. He makes me want to cry. He’s so rackety. He’s so old. He’s worked so hard. And he seems to be laughing. I just find it very touching. The main thing that you cannot possibly judge from this reproduction is the unbelievable beauty of the landscape. It’s a very particular time of day, with these long shadows. And the little house or villa in the background is sunk in shadow, and you have these beautiful lilac hills on the horizon. It is really an extraordinary painting, and I have a completely irrational love of it.