Volume 52, Number 2 · February 10, 2005
Ladies in Satin
By Sanford Schwartz
Gerard ter Borch
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 7, 2004–January 30, 2005, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, February 27–May 22, 2005.
American Federation of Arts/National Gallery of Art, 228 pp., $55.00; $35.00 (paper)
The Dutch seventeenth-century painter Gerard ter Borch was widely admired in his lifetime, both at home and beyond, and he has been sought after by museums in the centuries since. The National Gallery's retrospective, the first he has had in this country—its fine accompanying catalog is also the first comprehensive book on him in English—brings the good news that the taste of generations of collectors and scholars has in no way gone stale. Ter Borch's reputation rests on two distinct kinds of work, genre scenes and, to a lesser degree, portraits, both of which he stamped with an elegance and restraint unmatched in the art of his era—which was, of course, one of superlative painters. This isn't to say that ter Borch sweeps us off our feet. The artist who emerges from the Washington show has a courtly and comic view of people. He was a poet of good manners and human foibles and of an existence where passionate, outsize drives have little meaning. He certainly deserves a place in the pantheon of Dutch painting, even of European painting in general, but his isn't a warming or expansive vision.
Review, 2562 words
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