Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Holland is rich in ideas and, at least to this reader, sometimes provocative in method. This beautifully produced book raises the important matter of ambivalence in seventeenth-century Dutch works of art, using the theme of love in genre paintings, prints, and book illustrations to show how this ambivalence takes shape. Nevitt’s main explanation is that works of art “accommodate the complexity of the culture that produced them” (183). This is not very illuminating, however, as it only moves the cause of the ambivalence from the realm of painting to the broader realm of culture or, more precisely, to the complex culture of youth and love referred to in the book’s title. In Art and the Culture of Love, Nevitt “sets out to explore the dynamic between an imagery of love and its viewers” (17).

In the first chapter Nevitt signals the inherent ambivalence of paintings and prints of garden parties by David Vinckboons and Esaias van de Velde. Although these two artists most certainly were among the early inventors of this new genre, they were by no means the most productive, as Dirck Hals far outdid them. Why Hals is omitted from Nevitt’s analysis remains unclear. Although van de Velde’s and Vinckboons’s paintings seem to be pleasant gardens of love, they also contain references to the changing luck of Lady Fortuna and to overindulgence in wine and love, themes that are traditionally associated with depictions of the Prodigal Son (an association Hals’s paintings generally lack). By pointing to the popularity of amorous songbooks, Nevitt convincingly argues that it would be one-sided to stress a moralistic reading, as has been done so often in past interpretations of these works. The beautifully illustrated songbooks celebrate love, youth, and leisure rather than condemn these qualities.

Nevitt indicates the ambivalence of the iconography by pointing to contradictory opinions about love. This, however, does not explain why painters made their iconography ambivalent. After all, they could also have opted to depict one specific outlook, as was generally the case in the second half of the sixteenth century. In this period artists clearly differentiated among a moralistic (Prodigal Son), idealistic (spring, youth), or witty (bordello) rendering of a merry company. Vinckboons and van de Velde omitted such a choice, most probably because of the new, expanding, and more-or-less anonymous market for paintings. In this situation painters had no clear idea for whom they were painting and subsequently chose not to make their iconography too specific. (See E. Kolfin, The Young Gentry at Play: Production, Function, and Meaning of Northern Netherlandish Scenes of Merry Companies, 1610–1645 [Leiden: Primavera Press, 2004] [forthcoming].)

In his second chapter the author focuses on the few interior scenes by Willem Buytewech and Isack Elyas (Dirck Hals, who produced hundreds of merry companies, again remains out of sight), on Jan Miense Molenaer’s outdoor scenes of peasants with elegant couples, and on two portraits with gardens of love by Frans Hals. Nevitt states that these very different paintings, at first sight, all seem to be morally straightforward, but on close inspection they turn out to be just as ambivalent as the garden parties.

In the paragraph on Buytewech, the author shows how the overdressed dandies in his paintings were being mocked. Nevitt contextualizes this interpretation by referring to a contemporary discussion about national simplicity and foreign overrefinement. It is quite plausible that viewers incidentally discussed such current issues, but with a lack of historical sources this remains mere speculation; Nevitt’s arguments for a political reading (123–140) are based on his associations only. To read Buytewech’s funny satires as “justified signs of the nation’s prosperity, and even of proof of a divine blessing of The Netherlands” (125) is highly unlikely, considering the origins of the iconography, which partly lay in depictions of the Prodigal Son, and the general condemnation of such overrefined behavior in literature—varying from amorous songbooks (indeed!), Jacob Cats’s writings, stage comedies, Petrus Wttewrongel’s sermons, and spiritual songbooks. Buytewech’s paintings and those of other specialized merry-company painters, such as Dirck Hals, Hendrick Pot, Pieter Codde, and Jacob Duck, seem rather to depict young people, whose “reason does not work … other than with great contention,” as Pers states in his 1644 translation of Ripa. In his Houwelick (“Marriage”) from 1625, Cats argues along the same line, suggesting that this was the generally accepted view. It is this alleged foolishness that makes the depicted youth potentially funny.

The next three paragraphs discuss a variety of paintings in which Nevitt sees the transition from youth to adulthood. The first painting under discussion is the well-known Merry Company by Isaac Elyas (here as often, but mistakenly dated to 1620—it dates from 1625 or 1626). Nevitt argues that the painting represents a couple taking leave of their wedding feast, which is to be read as a depiction of the transition from youth to adulthood. However, it is difficult to tell whether the couple is actually arriving, being present, or leaving. Nevitt connects Elyas’s painting to an iconographically comparable print in Crispijn de Passe’s Nieuwe Ieucht Spiegel from 1617. In the copies I know (Royal Library, The Hague, and University Library, Leiden) and in the copy cited by Ilja Veldman (Profit and Pleasure: The Print Books of Crispijn de Passe [Rotterdam: Sound and Vision, 2001], 144–45), this print is accompanied by a different text than the one Nevitt quotes—not a text about the wedding night, but instead a song on the popular theme “Sine Cerere friget Baccho.” Assuming that the copy Nevitt used (he does not specify which) indeed has a different combination of text and image, this claim at least shows how dangerous it can be to relate one specific combination of text and image to a painting in order to uncover general meanings.

Molenaer’s paintings with elegant young couples observing the behavior of peasants fit Nevitt’s model of ambivalence only with difficulty: “Perhaps Molenaer’s paintings occupy some indeterminate point between celebration and admonition. In the end, however, they seem to accommodate both viewpoints … [of] youthful enthusiasm and adult wisdom” (158). This conclusion presupposes that the restrained, elegant young couples identify in some way with the uninhibited behavior of the peasants. Set against the actual relations between these social classes, such an identification is hard to believe. The popular pictorial tradition of the urban elite who visit peasant kermisses and the literary motifs of peasant behavior point in another direction—humor. Scenes such as Molenaer’s were intended as funny paintings, in which the elegant young couples serve both to enhance the contrast with the peasants and to offer the audience, doubtless from the cities, a possibility for identification. The paintings seem to be about youth and restraint rather than love and ambivalence.

The two portraits Nevitt discusses with background gardens of love are Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Young Couple (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) and Portrait of Willem Hethuysen (Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen). Again Nevitt presents the reader with speculation, this time about the sitters’ psychology, linking that loosely to the paintings’ iconography. In the Amsterdam painting, for example, the author writes, “The male sitter has undone his collar: what he says is true and without pretense” (164). Nevitt tries to substantiate such associations by providing an interpretative context that explains the relationship between courtship and marriage, largely derived from texts that have their own conventions and goals, which are here ignored. Including a letter from Constantijn Huygens (167–68), written some forty years after the Portrait of a Young Couple, does not strengthen the case.

The text of the last chapter, on the motif of hidden lovers in Rembrandt’s The Three Trees (1643) and The Omval (1645), includes a string of observations on the theme of nature as the domain of amorous desire. Nevitt offers contemporary associations of the Omval with love and leisure—a beautiful passage, certainly an eye-opener—as well as an associative reading of the motif of the peasant and the boat in terms of the tension between townspeople and peasants. The storm in The Three Trees is plausibly interpreted as a metaphor for love, but less convincing is the suggestion of voyeurism and erotic pleasure in contemporary viewing of Rembrandt’s two prints without any substantiation. How such a viewing would relate to the final association Nevitt presents, transience (located in the gnarled trees), remains unclear. It almost seems as if Nevitt strives to present as many associations as possible, which indeed would go well with the idea of ambivalence. However, even if one would agree with the presence of all these different associations, it still remains unexplained why Rembrandt deliberately chose to include them. In other words, why did he want his two prints to be ambivalent at all? Therefore the main question of the book—why ambivalence?—remains unanswered for these prints.

The large number of possible ideas read into the works of art in Nevitt’s book are meant to show the ambivalence of the paintings and prints. But because the ideas are not always convincingly connected to the works, this ambivalence is not always evident; therefore, the dynamic between the imagery of love and its reception by viewers is not convincingly demonstrated. Furthermore, Nevitt does not clearly outline these supposed viewers in all cases. The core of Nevitt’s method of analysis seems to consist of his associations, buttressed by a thorough and sensitive description of the paintings and prints as well as a selective rendering of contemporary issues that fit his line of argumentation. Such a scientific paradigm is well established and well respected in many parts of the scholarly world, but I am afraid that Nevitt’s book has not fully convinced me of its value.