ART REVIEW : Burghers With Everything: The Lure of Dutch Paintings

The County Museum of Art’s latest exhibition is “A Mirror of Nature: Dutch Paintings From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter.” It reminds us that everybody in 17th-Century Holland loved the new painting of the day. It recorded their daily surroundings, the flat horizon broken only by tall ship mast and church tower. Stacked grain in the field glistened under dramatic roiling gray clouds that parted to let golden sun saturate the fecund land.

It was Holland’s century. The little republic was merchant to the world and host for advanced scientists and intellectuals. Tolerant, then as now, the Dutch let the facts persuade them that life was good if led with some restraint. They let painting act as a visual encyclopedia of everything from architecture to fashion, food and flowers.

All those still-lifes of tulips bring to mind the fiasco where the Dutch lost their cool and went broke investing in exotic bulbs. But before the economy unraveled, every burgher had his requisite number of paintings. Demand created lots of artists, so pictures were cheap.

They aren’t any more, but they did become the object of affection for decades of American collectors who, I think, felt in them the roots of their own mercantile Yankee practicality. In California, the most passionate votaries of the genre have long been Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter. He is a civic, cultural and business leader, architect of Carter Hawley Hale Stores Inc. His wife Hannah is a woman who puts one in mind of Katharine Hepburn.

Since the mid-’50s they have carefully built a collection renowned among scholars for both its connoisseurship and its clear exercise of decisive personal taste. The compendium is of particular civic interest since the Carters have promised it to LACMA. When it permanently joins the rest of the museum’s Dutch pictures, “Los Angeles will be able to boast one of the finest and most representative surveys (of the genre) in North America.” That from former museum director Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III. John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum and a noted expert in the field, writes that the paintings “astonish by their quality.”

Yet the Carter collection has not been on public view for a decade. In the meantime it has been fleshed out to 36 intimate pictures by the addition of six more examples of these elusive rarities. The most touching is an earthy still-life by Clara Peeters depicting cheese and dark bread. The most magisterial is “The Great Oak,” which may well become the trademark image of the collection. It is a masterpiece by the brooding proto-romantic landscapist Jacob van Ruisdael with figures by Nicholas Berchem. Such collaboration was common.

What is uncommon about the collection is a particular sensibility that emerges from the ensemble. The Carters purposely limited themselves to land and seascapes, town views, architectural interiors and still-lifes. That choice creates a kind of emotional compression in itself but it yields more. They seem to have looked for artists not at their flashiest but in their mood of most compacted understatement--the sparest and most enigmatic Jan van Goyen , a sweet, modest bowl of wild strawberries by the virtually unknown Adriaen Coorte.

The Carters’ passionate restraint creates an aura of something like innocent rhapsodic ecstasy. Even though its taste is patrician it is a modern taste and something curiously contemporary allows itself to be read into these pictures.

A specialist in church interiors, Pieter Jansz Saenredam is an artist who speaks clearly to this century. Paintings such as his “Interior of the Mariakerk, Utrecht” are often seen as temperamental forerunners of Piet Mondrain. There is more. The artist’s tremulous use of light makes the edges of things go woozy, bringing to mind the Italian metaphysical artist Giorgio Morandi.

Today, Abrosius Bosschaert’s tiny “Bouquet of Flowers on a Ledge” looks like an example of Magic Realism.

At a glance, Adriaen van de Velde’s “The Beach at Scheveningen” seems a straightforward depiction of the subject. Examined, the composition appears like a still from a poetic European film. Distant figures murmur while a horseback rider canters in to begin the action.

Realistic art of the Dutch stamp is sometimes scorned as prosaic, somehow short on style or soul. Frankly, sometimes it looks that way.

It’s the gift of the Carters’ selection to quietly dramatize the range of these realistic works. Aert van der Neer’s “Frozen River With a Footbridge” shows a frame cottage in one corner. Is it being built? Was it burned down? The questions would be impertinent were it not for an ominous aura hanging about the wintry scene.

But, of course, we only pretend all of this is real to begin with. It’s an approximation of optical reality in miniature. Somewhere in all of us there is a kid who responds to the sheer enchanting smallness of these things. And in such detail.

Catch a sober scholar studying Hendrick Avercamp’s “Winter Scene on a Frozen Pond.” He may indeed be thinking about iconography, provenance and all that. You can bet he’s also getting a kick out of the two-inch-tall skating dandy in red satin and a big hat or chuckling at that artist’s naughtiness in slipping in the tiny figure of a man relieving himself under a bridge.

A lot of the surface sobriety of these pictures barely hides the depiction of life full to overflowing. Sometimes the fireworks really get loose as in Jan van Huysum’s baroque “Bouquet of Flowers in an Urn.” Other times it’s less obvious as in Simon de Vlieger’s “View of a Beach.” The sky provides an envelop of calm around the scene but myriad little figures on the strand provide a regular sideshow of genre anecdotes, from an amorous couple to a haggle over the price of fish.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to Jan. 17, closed Mondays. Information: (213) 857-6000.