Dutch, Flemish masters show exhibits excellence
An exhibit of “Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Golden Age” requires close inspection, but it makes a good case for their “enduring … excellence.”
On loan from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the “Master Strokes” show is at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 415 Couch Drive.
Several works in the exhibit’s 16th-century “Before the Golden Age” section whet our appetites for the rest of the show.
Tiny touches of pink, yellow and gray add interest to an ink drawing of a village fair-wedding feast, done by a “follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.”
It’s a little hard to find the title character in Pieter Coecke van Aeist’s “The Conversion of St. Paul” as men fight below divine figures in the clouds.
Hans Speckaert dynamically depicts “The Entombment” of Christ, and Dirk Barendez makes “Feasting and Making Love” before the last judgment look like fun.
“Religion and Mythology” move to the fore in the Golden Age itself, after the protestant Dutch (15681609) revolt against the Catholic southern Netherlands.
Hendrick Goltzius offers us a titillating ink drawing of “Lot and His Daughters,” and Jacob de Gheyn II supplies a superb study of a seated ancient philosopher having a vision.
Both dramatic and dynamic are the brown ink depictions of “The Fall of Phaeton” by Abraham van Diepenbeeck, and of “Christ Crowned with Thorns” by Anthony van Dyck.
Wonderfully understated and appealing is a “Study of a Seated Woman (The Virgin),” looking a little down and to her right, by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens.
Subjects of other masterful sketches by Rubens include “A Bearded Man, Seen From Behind,” a “Male Figure Descending” and “Arms and a Man’s Face.”
Also catching our eye is Crispijn de Passe the Elder’s engraving of a regally clad Queen Elizabeth I, and Dirck Hals’ animated brown wash of a “Seated Man Drinking from a Glass.”
Among outstanding Golden Age landscapes are one of the moon illuminating a dark wooded shore, attributed to Gerrit Battem, and a chalk “Study of (formidable Alpine) Rocks” by Roelant Savery.
Architecture joins landscape in drawings of a church, houses and castle ruins, while Antoine Waterloo provides a deft, detailed chalk-ink drawing of a “Wooded Landscape with a Wooden Bridge.”
Jan van Huijsum contributes two exquisite flower studies, and Frans Snyders offers us an excellent inkwash of a “Still Life with Dead Game on on a Table (including a boar’s head).”
Highlighting the show’s “After the Golden Age” section is an atmospheric, evocative watercolor, done in about 1872, by Petrus Marius Brouwer, of a “Woman Walking in the Valkhof Park, Nijmegen.”
Spanning 400 years, divided into four sections, and containing work by about 60 artists, the show is highly recommended in its run through Jan. 21.