Making Vermeer look prim

By George Pendle

Black clothes are generally considered both sober and slimming. Yet despite the reams of inky cloth on view in “Class Distinctions”, a superb exhibition of Dutch painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the opulence and corpulence of those depicted are not hidden one jot. Take, for instance, the jowls of burgomaster Jan van Duren that droop pendulously above his white-platter collar in Gerard ter Borch’s portrait. The painting initially seems somewhat austere: the burgomaster – the principal magistrate of a city – is kept company only by a table and a hat. Yet somehow the portrait oozes satisfactory contentment. Pendent eyes stare out impassively from a frizz of cocker spaniel hair. His right arm rests on his belly in a manner somewhere between covetousness and fondness. An ocean of black fabric sweeps and undulates around his body, both obscuring his girth and, at the same time, revealing it. And then, beneath a pair of surprisingly slim legs, just the prettiest pair of black shoes you could imagine. Square-toed and bowed, with tan soles, their welt picked out in white, they complete the burgomaster like the decorative paper frills on the legs of a roast turkey.

Such immodest modesty abounds in this exhibition, which has been simply but effectively split into three sections, each one about a different social class. The titles of some of those portrayed might be unfamiliar, but the hierarchy is immediately recognisable, from stadholders and regents through guildsmen and almoners to, finally, the poor, whose name never seems to change. They date from the Dutch Republic’s Golden Age, when Holland was at the forefront of international trade and urbanising swiftly without the hindrance of an absolute monarch. Artists, too, were spreading their wings, having finally been freed from church patronage by secular wealth. Now, instead of crosses and angels and the paraphernalia of piety, they could paint the accoutrements of success. Satin clothes, black servants, horses, spaniels, nurses: the same signifiers of nobility pop up again and again, although they are often more visible in the portraits of social-climbing merchants than in those of the nobles themselves.