Nothing typifies a culture better than its laughing matter.1
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When I retired from Groningen University in 2000, I found a new hobby in translating Gerard de Lairesseâs Groot Schilderboek of 1707 into English. Ultimately, the translation became an appendix to the book that grew forth from my innumerable notes.2 Having discovered how good it can be to study a text by translating it, I tried my hand at Jacob Campo Weyermanâs treatise on the art of the Greeks and Romans. Once again, the initial translation became an appendix, now to an analysis of Weyermanâs four volume collection of artistsâ biographies of 1729.3 Having made myself familiar with Weyerman, I became a fan of this little-known Dutch author from the early eighteenth century. Therefore, my next translation was of texts from his oeuvre that had no relation to my professional past as an art historian. They aroused my curiosity, through their style as well as their content. It is a real pleasure to read these high-quality works of literature, and to relish their humour and wit.
It is not unusual for scholars to behave as vultures, looking down on their field of research from a great height, flying in wide circles around what in the end will be the subject on which they come down. Extensive bibliographies document the wide panorama they observed from above. For cultural historians this seems to be the proper method, but all the same I worked in the opposite direction. My work began by reading and enjoying two of Weyermanâs periodicals from which I made excerpts. Then I ordered my handwritten notes by subject, planning to focus on one of these. In the end, I left nothing out because it all turned out to be well written, very amusing, and highly informative. This bottom-up approach did not start in a library and consequently it did not result in a massive bibliography. In the present book, the reader will not find a comprehensive study of the cultural history of the Dutch Republic in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, but an analysis of one of the most important sources for its study. References to Weyermanâs predecessors and contemporaries are kept as brief as possible.
Among other things, Weyerman was a journalist who published weekly journals filled with his own texts. Their title changed from year to year but taken together they form the nucleus of his extensive oeuvre.4 Two of these weekly papers form the subject of this study: the first, De Rotterdamsche Hermes [Hermes from Rotterdam], and the second, Den kluyzenaar in een vrolyk humeur [the good-humoured, merry Hermit], spanning the years between 1720 and 1733.5 In his first periodical, Weyerman calls himself Hermes, because of his controversy with Hermanus van den Burg, the author of the weekly Amsterdamsche Argus, but also Majaâs son or son of the gods since Hermes or Mercury was a son of Zeus and Maia. One of his other aliases is Anubis, the Egyptian deity who was identified with the Greek-Roman messenger of the gods Hermes-Mercury.
In his periodicals Weyerman presented himself not as a stand-up comedian, but as a write-down comedian. He focused on the vices and follies that drew his attention, ridiculing these habits with the purpose of making his readers laugh, and make them think about their own shortcomings and especially those of their neighbours. I am unable to give examples from American and English theatre and TV, but my Dutch readers will be reminded of Freek de Jonge, Kees van Kooten & Wim de Bie, Arjen Lubach, and other comedians, who not just tried to amuse their audience.
As theirs, Weyermanâs subject is rather limited: customs and manners, the way in which people behave, and the moral implications thereof. This was what Weyermanâs attention focused on and, consequently, mine too. This book is not about the authorâs biography, let alone his psychology. I did not study Weyerman in a wider context of cultural history. I just wanted to lay bare which commonplaces and prejudices dominated the thinking and speaking of that period. Maybe this is easier for the past than the present. Some of his topics were hotly discussed in the early decades of the eighteenth century, but I did not decide who was in the right and who was not, trying to ignore the argumentation on both sides, because prejudices and ingrained thinking patterns nearly always are stronger than attempts at rationality. An issue that remained beyond my horizon because Hermes and Hermit did not mention it, is homosexuality. In the seventeen thirties it was hotly discussed, condemned by all, and defended by no one. A hateful campaign made many victims in lawsuits and otherwise. Weyerman gave his opinion in a 1730 booklet, in which he showed no compassion or tolerance, just like the loud majority.6 The common opinion about slavery was equally undivided. The fact that a human being could be the owner of someone else was seen as unproblematic, and the first discussions on the slave trade found no echo in Weyermanâs periodicals.
Summarizing the information I gleaned from the Hermes and the Hermit, I began to see an image of the urban culture of the Western world, as it was in the first half of the eighteenth century: the world of the well settled bourgeois. Consequently, the lower classes and the have-nots remained largely out of sight, and so did the inhabitants of the rural areas. But sometimes they were given a role as an extra, to create a funny contrast.
The ideas Weyerman expounded in his writings were not just his personal convictions. They are characteristic of the urban culture of his time. This can be corroborated by inspecting the visual arts of the period. Following Walter Melionâs suggestion, which turned out to have drastic consequences, I selected two prints, drawings, or paintings for each subject from Weyermanâs Rotterdamsche Hermes and Merry Hermit that I focus on in this study. Some of the most prominent artists and most successful printmakers adorn my list: Bernard Picart (1673â1733), Cornelis Pronk (1691â1759), Jacob de Wit (1695â1754), Cornelis Troost (1696â1750), Aert Schouman (1710), and Simon Fokke (1712â1780) for instance. I found that in the selected works of art and in Weyermanâs texts the topical issues of his time were approached in a kindred spirit.
Weyerman gave much attention to the sexual ethics of his time and the frequent trespasses he observed among his fellow-citizens. Scenes of sexual misbehaviour are abounding in the lowlife genre art of the early seventeenth century. Later, more subtle forms of seduction are to be seen in the oeuvre of Gerard ter Borch, Frans van Mieris and their many followers. In Weyermanâs time, the behaviour of men and women contacting each other adopted itself to the fashion of the period, but seduction remained an issue of great importance (fig. 16, 17, 19, 21).
The citizens of Hollandâs merchant cities were the standard to which Weyerman compared anyone else. The Dutch were believed to be descendants of the Germanic tribe of the Batavians, having inherited the frugality and moral purity of these ânoble savagesâ (fig. 6). Regrettably these typically Dutch characteristics were threatened by the effeminate customs and manners of the French immigrants, the Huguenots (fig. 17). The ânoble savagesâ from outside Europe were no Christians and therefor it was impossible that they could have a valid ethics, even if they seemed to live in a terrestrial paradise (fig. 30).
The Dutch society was stratified in many thin layers, but it was clear that the nobility lived on the outer edge of the bourgeois culture, having their own customs and manners. Weyerman depicted the nobility and the landed gentry as corrupt and incompetent when they had to play their role as judges and lawyers in local courts of justice (figure 14). Manual labourers and servants in the businesses and households of better situated people formed the bottom layer of the urban society. Weyerman gave them not much attention, using them as painterly extras in his stories. The ethics of the bourgeois world did not fully apply to them (fig. 28).
Weyerman wanted to believe that the nationâs adherence to Protestantism was an essential element of the Dutch identity. He was very critical about the mentality of church goers who went to the Sunday morning service to see and be seen, just like others who went to the theatre to show their fine clothes and jewellery (fig. 39). But his comments on Catholics and their clergy are harsh: the Pope is a hypocrite (fig. 41), monks and nuns are lazy and licentious (fig. 44), and Jesuits are craving for worldly power (fig. 45).
These are just some examples to demonstrate how I structured my book. For practical reasons, most of my illustrations are from the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum and its print room. The online catalogue of these collections can be searched by any word the user fancies. The results of his attempts may often be disappointing or completely useless, but with a lot of patience the most exciting images come popping up. For me, the site worked as a serendipity machine. Only 4 of my 51 illustrations are from other museums.
Specialised historians of this era spend much attention on the earliest traces of Romanticism, and on the divulgence of revolutionary and enlightened ideas, and rightly so. But the reader who wants to know what the period looked like, without these reference to earlier and later years, should take Jacob Campo Weyerman for his guide. The author had a very negative opinion on the radical enlightenment that was spreading clandestinely in his days, and, with one amazing exception, he cannot be caught at uttering romantic ideas.7 He was and remained a clearheaded, sober minded bourgeois.
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Most of my thirty university years were spent on teaching, which I enjoyed very much, hoping that my audience also liked it. A large percentage of my time was consumed by the committees that convened to make new plans for the curriculum offered by our department. We were instructed to make it âbetter and cheaperâ. In theory, research formed a top priority, but as a rule there was not much time left for it.
In the years after my retirement, I began to bring in the harvest of both research and teaching, realising that there never was a clear borderline between the two. When I eventually drifted away from my base in Dutch art history, I had to rely for help and advice of colleagues from a completely different field when studying the work of Jacob Campo Weyerman. Rietje van Vliet, Peter Altena, Jan Bruggeman and Jac Fuchs never failed to give me more than I asked for. The comments Jan de Jong gave on my Introduction helped to improve it tremendously. Three times I sent my manuscript to Walter Melion, believing that it was ready for publication and every time his comments made me understand what I still had to do before it really was.
There is no phrase, paragraph, or chapter, that was not scrutinised carefully by Johanneke, my wife. She spotted typos, misspellings, ineptly chosen words, clumsily constructed sentences, illogical reasoning, and phrases that sounded as translated Dutch instead of proper English. Important as her contribution may be, it fades in the light of all she did for me â and still does â during our life together.
S. J. Gudlaugsson, Ikonographische Studien â¦, 1938, 28: Für eine Kultur ist nichts bezeichnender, als das, worüber gelacht wird.
L. de Vries, How to create beauty, 2011.
L. de Vries, Jacob Campo Weyerman and his collection of artistsâ biographies, 2020.
Initially, these texts were published in (weekly) instalments. At the end of a series, the issues of the past year were reprinted as a book. These books are available through the Digitale Bibliotheek der Nederlandse Letteren (www.dbnl.nl) and/or Google books.
Quotes from the Rotterdamsche Hermes are indicated with the abbreviation RH, followed by number of issue and page; those from the Kluyzenaar in een vrolyk humeur are indicated as KVH.
J. C. Weyerman, Godgeleerde, zeedekundige en historiesche bedenkingen â¦, 1730. See Groenenboom 263 about homosexuality in the male religious orders discussed by Weyerman.
RH 22â114/115. See also: J. C. Weyerman, De Historie des Pausdoms â¦, vol. I, Amsterdam 1724, 48: ⦠de Ongodisten van onze eeuw ⦠die by zommige nog te boek staan voor verlichte verstanden (the atheists of our time whom some still consider as enlightened minds).