High Art from the Low Countries

By ROBERT HUGHES

Among 17th century masters Rembrandt is matchless

The acquisitive urge, the desire to complete and catalogue a series, shows early in some collectors--and in none earlier than Frits Lugt, the century's greatest scholar and collector of Dutch drawings. In 1892, when Lugt was eight and the other little boys in his native Amsterdam were swapping beetles and cigarette cards, he transformed a room into the "Museum Lugtius" with a sign on the door reading "Open when the Director is at home." By twelve, he started a fully annotated catalogue of Netherlandish drawings and, even more surprisingly, kept at it for three years. At 15, he wrote a life of Rembrandt. The chief works of Lugt's maturity, especially the great catalogues of Rembrandt and early Netherlandish drawings he compiled for the Louvre, are as basic to the study of Dutch art as Bernard Berenson's lists are to that of Italian.

For six decades before he died in 1970, Lugt knew more about his chosen subject than anyone else alive. His collection of Dutch and Flemish 17th century drawings--there are now 2,500 of them housed in the Institut Neerlandais in Paris, which he endowed--is definitive. The present show at New York's Morgan Library, entitled "Rembrandt and His Century: Dutch Drawings of the 17th Century" and comprising only 132 items culled from the 2,500, conveys at least an idea of the collection's extraordinary range and quality. Lugt's taste was not for the quick scribble, but for clear, developed, informative drawings. The major names of 17th century Dutch painting are there: Hendrick Goltzius, Aelbert Cuyp, Jacques de Gheyn, Pieter Saenredam, Hendrick Avercamp, Ferdinand Bol. So are scores of lesser figures, known mainly to the specialist, but always represented by drawings of considerable grip and finesse.

Towering above them is Rembrandt van Rijn, the greatest Dutch artist of the 17th century and one of half a dozen supreme draftsmen in the history of the West. The show contains ten Rem brandt drawings, and to see them in the context of work by his more gifted students is to be reminded of the difficulties of attribution. They imitated just what, one would think, was inimitable in his style: Ferdinand Bol, for instance, got Rembrandt's quick hooking line down so pat that he reproduced it unconsciously. They could not, however, approach the beautiful, sure clarity with which Rem brandt set down, in a few streaks and slashes of bistre, a windmill facing the estuary from an old bulwark of Amsterdam. Nor could they rival the depth of Rembrandt's grasp of gesture, expression and character. A drawing like Saskia 's Lying-in Room evokes, in the space between the shadowed head of Rembrandt's pregnant wife and the sewing hands of her nurse, a domestic silence so intense that one can almost hear the tick of cooling embers in the grate. Once again the Morgan Library, eschewing the theatrics with which other museums are apt to present their loan shows, has come up with an exhibition of instructively high quality.

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