Gerard de Lairesse

Gerard de Lairesse: The Blind Man Who Wrote the Rules

Around 1665 Rembrandt painted a young man with a collapsed nose. The sitter was Gerard de Lairesse, then in his twenties, and the flattened bridge of that face was the visible mark of congenital syphilis — a disease he had been born with and which would, a quarter-century later, take his eyesight entirely. It is one of the strangest encounters in Dutch art: the great painter of unidealised human flesh recording, without flinching, the ruined features of the man who would spend his career arguing that art should show nothing of the kind.

Liège, and a Painter's Son

He was born on 11 September 1641 in Liège, the second son of the painter Renier de Lairesse, who lived from 1597 to 1667. He learned to paint first from his father, and then, from 1655, under Bertholet Flémalle. Liège was not a Dutch city but a prince-bishopric looking south and west, and Lairesse's formation was classical from the start — a fact that would define both his success and, two centuries later, his disgrace.

From 1660 he worked for Maximilian Henry of Bavaria, the prince-bishop. He was in his late teens, employed at a court, and by any measure launched.

Flight, and Amsterdam

In 1664 he fled Liège over an affair. He married Marie Salme in Visé and settled in Utrecht. There the art dealer Gerrit van Uylenburgh — from the family connected to Rembrandt — recognised what he had, and Lairesse moved to Amsterdam. He arrived, by the surviving account, with his violin.

What followed was one of the fastest ascents in seventeenth-century Dutch art. Within a few years he was the most sought-after artist in Amsterdam. He produced hundreds of works: history paintings, portraits, and above all large decorative schemes for the great houses and public buildings of a city at the height of its wealth. His subjects were classical and mythological. His compositions were, in the judgement of the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, flawless; his figures highly idealised. He gave Amsterdam's patrician class exactly what it wanted at exactly the moment it wanted it — an art of order, learning and antique dignity, in place of the taverns and kitchens and weathered faces of the previous generation.

The scale of that work is easy to underestimate today because so much of it was architectural and has been dispersed or destroyed. The great surviving example is the pair of enormous organ shutters he painted for Amsterdam's Westerkerk, known as the Angel Wings, canvases so large that they were shown publicly in their full glory for the first time only in the twenty-first century.

1689: The Light Goes Out

In 1689 the syphilis he had carried since birth blinded him. It was sudden, and it ended his career as a painter absolutely. He was forty-eight.

Most artists would have disappeared at that point. Lairesse changed medium. He began lecturing on art — talking, in front of audiences, about pictures he could no longer see — and those lectures became two books. *Grondlegginge ter teekenkonst*, the foundations of the art of drawing, appeared in 1701. *Het groot schilderboeck*, the great book of painting, followed in 1710, the year before he died in June 1711.

Dictating the Rules of Art

The two treatises are the reason his name survived at all. They set out a complete theory of painting founded on classical ideals and on geometry: rules of proportion, of composition, of decorum, of what may and may not be shown. Their target, more or less explicitly, was the Dutch realist tradition — the everyday, the ugly, the accidental, the merely observed.

They were extraordinarily influential. For much of the eighteenth century *Het groot schilderboeck* carried real authority over how painters and connoisseurs thought about pictures. A blind man in Amsterdam had become an arbiter of what art should look like.

The Nineteenth Century Erases Him

Then the verdict reversed with unusual violence. Nineteenth-century critics decided Lairesse was too French and insufficiently Dutch. In the great nationalist re-sorting of the Dutch Golden Age, Rembrandt, Hals, Steen and Vermeer were raised up as the authentic native voice, and Lairesse — the Liégeois classicist who had told Dutchmen to paint gods instead of neighbours — was cast as the villain who had killed Dutch painting. He was berated, and then he was dropped from the story altogether.

Modern scholarship has been undoing this. The Rijksmuseum Twenthe's exhibition *Finally! De Lairesse* argued the case bluntly: that he deserves recognition as one of the most influential and admired artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

Why Gerard Is Called a Genius

The strongest claim on his behalf is not about brushwork. It is about a mind that could work in two entirely different registers, and that could keep working when the first was destroyed.

The first register is a painter's. Lairesse arrived in Amsterdam as an unknown provincial and became its most sought-after artist within a few years, producing hundreds of pictures and vast decorative cycles at a level of finish and compositional control his contemporaries described as flawless. That is craft as much as intellect — a trained hand, an eye for proportion, and enormous speed.

The second register is a theorist's, and it is the more remarkable. In 1689 he lost the sense on which his entire profession depended, and instead of stopping, he converted his practice into doctrine. He had to hold whole compositions in memory, reason about them abstractly, and dictate a systematic theory of visual art without seeing a single image again. *Het groot schilderboeck* went on to shape how painters were taught for generations. Blindness did not diminish his authority; it arguably concentrated it, because a man who cannot look must argue from principle.

The counter-case is real and was for two hundred years the majority view. Lairesse's classicism was borrowed rather than invented — the French and Italian academic idiom was already fully formed when he took it up. His idealised figures can read as cold and formulaic beside the painters he disdained; nobody has ever claimed he saw a human face as Rembrandt did, and Rembrandt's portrait of him rather makes the point. His influence, moreover, was long held responsible for the decline of Dutch painting itself — a charge that stuck for the better part of two centuries. Nobody's word for him is "genius." The Twenthe curators reach for "influential and admired," which is careful and probably right.

Legacy

Lairesse's reputation has run a full circle: the most fashionable painter in Amsterdam, then the most authoritative theorist in Europe, then the man blamed for ruining Dutch art, and now the subject of a rehabilitation. What is not in dispute is the reach. Through *Het groot schilderboeck* he handed the eighteenth century a vocabulary for talking about painting, and the Angel Wings of the Westerkerk still show what he could do with a brush before the light went out.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Banquet of Cleopatra
• Notable work: Achilles Discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
• Notable work: The Glorification of Stadholder-King William III (1650-1702)
• Movement: Baroque