A skilful charmer
The first exhibition on Karel du Jardin reveals a versatile painter with a taste for the good life, writes Jonathan Lopez.
Jonathan Lopez, Thursday, 28th February 2008
For the first monographic exhibition ever devoted to Karel du Jardin, the Rijksmuseum has assembled 23 of the artist’s finest paintings, highlighting his remarkable versatility across three distinct genres. The show presents not only the Italianate landscapes for which Du Jardin is best known, but also his portraits of Amsterdam’s burgher elite and his spectacular large-scale history pieces. The judicious selection and presentation of these works has benefited from the expertise of Jennifer Kilian, whose catalogue raisonné of Du Jardin appeared in 2005. Her essay in the exhibition catalogue is an insightful guide to the career of this multifaceted painter.
Although many details of his biography remain unclear, Du Jardin had a well-documented taste for luxury. During the prime working years of his life, he lived in a mansion on Amsterdam’s fashionable Keizersgracht, filled, according to a surviving inventory, with costly furnishings. Du Jardin’s enjoyment of such comforts was likely to be all the keener because he had not been born to them: he had grown up in the humble working-class milieu of the Kalverstraat, where his father earned a living rendering animal carcasses into tallow. One might assume that Du Jardin’s prodigious artistic abilities paved the path from rags to riches, but other talents may have also have come into play. Writing in 1747, the Dutch Enlightenment polymath Jacob Campo Weyerman noted that Du Jardin ‘was married to an old ugly wife whom he picked up in Lyon, and who had a great deal of money’.
In Weyerman’s estimation, Du Jardin was a skilful charmer, and this assessment rings true, on the level of both image and craft, when one confronts Du Jardin’s splendid half-length self-portrait of 1662 in the first room of the exhibition (Fig. 2). With his thoughtful, sensitive countenance, Du Jardin comes across as a refined yet approachable person – the torsion in his pose suggesting that he has just spun around to greet us, as he decorously holds onto his cloak and displays the most exquisite of linen cuffs. Still, one cannot help but notice the care and calculation that went into producing this sense of casual grace. Indeed, with its limpid palette and sparkling surface, the self-portrait leaves little doubt that Du Jardin, by this point in his career, was past master at the art of seduction.
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