It was Christmas in July at the Morgan Library. No sooner did the small lobby gallery open with the Eveillard gift of drawings from several restless centuries than Santa was back in town. Eighty drawings from the Clement C. Moore collection are a promised gift—but more on him and Santa in a moment.
Through September 22, it offers a chance to assess just what the great age of Dutch art meant for the Dutch. It may not be a compendium of stellar names and stellar prints, but that seems only right for an emerging nation. It suggests a collective enterprise tied up in the Dutch republic while reaching across Europe with its influence.
Moore, I can only presume, descends from Clement Clarke Moore, although the Morgan does not say so. It must wish him to stand on his own as a scholar and now donor. The older Moore, of course, wrote “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” about “the night before Christmas,” and that seems right, too. No one did more to convert a religious holiday to a secular one—and a gift to all mankind to a bag of toys for children. (Trust me, a Jew who benefited.) And no nation did more to assert a secular purpose for art.
It stays all the truer to that purpose in drawings. In The Hundred Guilder Print (nicknamed for its one-timer cost and extravagance), Rembrandt shows Jesus preaching, healing the sick, and reaching out to all. A quick sketch isolates a sick woman and a still more haunting face. The poor really will always be with us. A boy from Adriaen van de Velde, who could easily be their companion, catches what rest he can leaning on the jug that must have helped put him to sleep and given him what small pleasures he could claim. The angel of the Annunciation for Samuel van Hoogstraten seems to have dropped by just to say hello.
The show opens with Mannerism in the late 1500s, to show the emergence of a new art and a new century, although dates jump wildly back and forth. It has an alcove for what a past show at the Morgan (also with work from Moore) called “Rembrandt’s World,” but with more of his school than the man itself. It cares more for results than for chronology or artist, in an arrangement largely by subject. That includes France and Italy, where Cornelis van Poelenburch found inspiration for Dutch landscape in towering, glistening rocks. It includes close observation of butterflies and tulips, with none of the moralizing in still life as fresh but dying for Flemish artists of the time. It includes the Flemish themselves, like Jacob Jordaens, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck.
Mostly, though, it describes a land and people. It unfolds during their long war of independence from Spain, but without a battle in sight. The royal fleet puts on a show in panorama, but not half so memorably as fishermen for Hendrick Avercamp, a lone man crossing a bridge for Guercino (an Italian), or the banks of a stream for Jacob van Ruisdael. A Roman general comes home to a public welcome, but it could be just another village festival. And gatherings are everywhere, only not so easy to tell from chance encounters and private outings. 
Hendrick Goltzius fills a sheet with nudes, as prelude to painted myth. They might have gathered for an afternoon in the sun.
Individuals come off as smart, casual, and vulnerable, with not a touch of Flemish bravura. A man from Peter Levy, quite possibly himself, might be dreaming or showing off. He also shares his dignity with herdsmen for Paulus Potter and Jan Lievens, who also supply the herd. The nation was built on their collective labor. It was built, too, on wind power, but windmills are just one landmark in a layered landscape. Aelbert Cuyp uses lighter strokes in chalk to deepen and distinguish the layers.
You can, if you like, tease out how he and others constructed a world. Esaias van de Velde replaces the aerial perspective of Harvesters for Pieter Bruegel with a close view. Moore has continued to collect past the Baroque, too, and a postscript carries him through Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner with their greater confidence and drama. Then again, you can stick with the spirit of a plainer art. When Vincent van der Vinne sketches the Grote Kerk in Haarlem, he leaves family emblems on pillars at peculiar angles. The might show a lesser artist at work, human neglect, or the ravages of war.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.