Benjamin Moser: evaluation

Transcript context

…Most of them, I would say. I like Ruisdael, I like Van Goyen, but if I were to see 50–60 together, I would start walking rapidly through the rooms, I suspect, and nodding my head and saying, “They’re all nice.” Well, the thing is, Dutch art is for houses. Coming back to your mansion that you’re building in suburban Virginia, Dutch paintings are for people who have 10 or 15 paintings on the wall. They would have different people and different artists and maybe a few same people. It’s true. I think I say it in the book, that if you go through Dutch galleries and museums, if you go through 20 different rooms and actually try to look at all the pictures, you’re going to get completely bored by the end of it because that’s just not the way they’re meant to be looked at. But for me, when I first came to this country and I started looking at them, the more I looked, the more rewarding it got. Ruisdael, who you mentioned — that’s one I’d have to stand up for. Van Goyen, maybe not. Then you have some of them — not everybody is well served by overexposure. I think this is true of humans in general. Some people are fun to meet for dinner once, but you don’t want to marry them. There are a few that you want to marry. Some of them are just tragic, like Jan Lievens, who is Rembrandt’s best friend/frenemy growing up. If you see too many of his paintings, you actually get almost disgusted by them. It’s more than just boring; it’s gross after a while. But if you see one or two of them, we would think, “Wow, this is great.” Maybe you would challenge the premise, but why does Dutch art become so boring by the early 18th century, maybe even sooner?…

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