Sundown on the golden age

When Jan de Witt became defacto head of the Dutch republic it ushered in an era of prosperity and liberalism, for the time, that was unheard of. Dutch commerce, trade, and especially the arts developed an identity that has been enduring. As is wont to happen, in a crisis, a moment of panic, a mob killed him and the Golden Era was no more….

de Hooh. Village House. In the background a sevant scours a pan. Cleaning was a constant Dutch preoccupation. Read More: http://www.backtoclassics.com/gallery/pieterdehooch/villagehouse/

But what was this mentality of the past that was particular to the Dutch. It could be termed the “regent mentality” ,  a phrase that indicates an authoritarian paternalism of an egoistic patriciate: a coolness,and haughtiness that became the desired archetype and identity that defined Dutch middle-class identity into the modern era. A deliberate and cultivated snobbery that impairs any cultural growth. This an the affluence of investment income produced a leisure class that was ingrown, constrained and claustrophobic, petty and parochial. The burgher.

“The self-indulgent emulation of French aristocratic manners and habits by the wealthy Dutch regents was thought by many to be the cause of the decline of economic power and international prestige of the Dutch Republic after the Golden Age. Large servant staffs, and valets in particular, were one of these decadent and depraved fashions of the French nobility. Similar to the French elite, the Dutch elite was assumed to have used the servant and especially the valet as a status symbol of wealth and power. Domestic service in the cities of the Dutch Republic would then have been characterised by a polarisation between households organised according to the bourgeois basic structure and households organised according to the hyperbolic aristocratic fashion.” Read More: http://www.iiav.nl/epublications/2004/aproned_maids_liveried_lackeys.pdf

"The museum has some of the equipment to assist with the trial and just punishment including thumb screws, branding irons, execution swords and axes, racks and pillory boards. The most famous prisoner of the prison was Cornelis de Witt , who was convicted of perjury. Later with his brother Johan he was lynched by the mob in front of the Prison. There is a grisly painting of the De Witt brothers’ mutilated corpses strung up at the Rijksmuseum." Read More: http://denhaagdiary.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html image: http://dearkitty.blogsome.com/2006/07/02/botero-exhibition-abu-ghraib-torture-men-women-horse-cat-lynx-and-escher/

A combined French and British invasion saw the Dutch turn from De Witt and the regents to their traditional military leaders, the House of Orange. Blind to the problems of De Witt, the public saw only the regents’ failure to keep out the invaders. Young William III of Orange saw his chance and may have helped feed panic in the crisis. And panic bred violence in The Hague. On June 21, 1672, the day Utrecht fell to the French, four men attempted to assassinate De Witt. De Witt’s brother Cornelius was arrested on dubious charges, tried, tortured and kept in prison. De Witt resigned but refused to flee.


Gerard Ter Borch. 1661. A Lady at her Toilet. The central figure finishes dressing for a party with the help of her maid, who laces her bodice. Her elegant gown recalls the rage for French fashions that prevailed among the well-to-do Dutch read more: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2004/terborch/fullscreen/195-035.htm

On August 20, a mob formed outside a prison whereDe Witt was visiting his brother. The mob broke into the prison and dragged out the brothers; Cornelius was thrown down the stairs, beaten with clubs, and stabbed with pikes. Jan was shot and then finished off by clubs. Within an hour all was over and the madmen, drunk with bloodshed, danced on the bodies which were finally hung up by the feet on a lamp post; horribly mutilated, even cut to pieces by desperadoes who desired a bloody relic. It was an indication of the savagery that Dutch civilization still contained.

Jan Vermeer. The Geographer. The painting may be mistitled. The man's chart shows not land and sea, but stars, while the globe behind him is not terrestrial, but celestial. "Vermeer converted to Catholicism at age 20, probably as a condition for marriage to his Catholic betrothed. But there is no reason to doubt that his conversion was sincere. The scholar Daniel Arasse has suggested that Vermeer's "religion of painting" drew him to, and was reinforced by, the Catholic "dogma of the mysterious union of the visible and the invisible, along with a faith in the power of the image to incorporate a mysterious presence that is both living and indefinable." If Arasse is correct, in the distracted gaze of the Geographer we encounter the Catholic sacramental tradition, in which the sensate world of color and materiality invites us to participate, even as spectators of the painting, in an intuited world of inexpressible Mystery." Read More: http://www.sciencemusings.com/blog/2008/06/geography-of-spirit.html

ADDENDUM:
The image of the regent patriciate as an aristocratic elite heavily engaged in conspicuous consumption, as presented by eighteenth-century moralists, has been persistent. Moral indignation over the patriciate’s betrayal of the burgher values and thus of the nation itself, has been a recurrent theme in the historiography on the Dutch Republic. Dutch historians right up to the 1960s adopted this discourse to analyse and explain the behaviour of the patriciate and the downfall of the Republic after the Golden Age. They also found it difficult to hide their moral indignation over the patriciate’s shameful and degenerate nature. D.J. Roorda was the first historian to move away from moral contempt and analyse the regent patriciate as a social group attempting to tighten their grip on power through aristocratisation.88 In the 1980s, Joop de Jong, Luuc Kooijmans and Maarten Prak wrote three studies on the elite in three cities in Holland in the eighteenth century that analysed the behaviour of the patriciate as a social group. The conclusions to these studies vitiated Roorda’s aristocratisation argument and c


rmed the essentially burgher nature of the patriciate; their lifestyle would only have been modestly sumptuous and always within budgetary limits.Read More: http://www.iiav.nl/epublications/2004/aproned_maids_liveried_lackeys.pdf

http://madeinatlantis.com/amsterdam/evolution_dutch_nation.htm

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