RKD STUDIES

Arnold Houbraken’s massive text presents numerous problems even for native speakers and especially for any translator who does not have the luxury of skipping over tricky words or passages. As one might expect, some words used by Houbraken have changed meaning since his days. To list a selection in alphabetical order, ‘akelig’ is now a negative word, meaning something like dreadful or nasty, but it could mean clouded or indistinct, as in ‘akelige oudheid’. Someone ‘berucht’ is now notorious but he or she used to be famous. ‘Braaf’ now means good, well-behaved or virtuous, but only the latter meaning comes close to De groote schouburgh, in which an artist who is ‘braaf’ is commendable or praiseworthy. As for the common word ‘houding’, now attitude or position, Paul Taylor has demonstrated that it is best understood as harmony.¹ ‘Straks’ now means soon, but it used to be at once. A ‘tafereel’ is a scene, but with Houbraken it could also be a panel on occasion. ‘Zich vervelen’ now means being bored, but it meant passing time. Equally deceptive is the now rarely used word ‘welstand’, being health or well-being, which used to mean something like elegance. ‘Woelig’, now usually restless, meant bustling. Finally, there is ‘wyking’, now wijking or deviation, which means recession in De groote schouburgh.²

Houbraken also uses words or word combinations that are so archaic that they may baffle even Dutch readers. ‘Scheitgeel’ (or ‘schietgeel’) is potentially baffling; we have translated it as ‘yellow madder’. ‘Schieten’ (which Houbraken uses as the past participle ‘geschiet’), is now to shoot but could mean something like speculating arrogantly. ‘Veel licht’ (much light) for ‘wellicht’ (possibly) and ‘zo veel’ (so many) for ‘zowel’ (both) also come to mind. Nicknames of artists, such as ‘Slempop’ for a swiller, guzzler or glutton, are accessible only to those who know what ‘slempen’ means. And who still knows that a ‘chassinet’ is a framed painting on glass, intended to be hung before a window, that the ‘mariljons’ collected by Rembrandt are helmets,³ or that ‘the Fryx’ swept off the battlefield by the Greek hero Achilles could be the Phrygians, close allies of the Trojans?⁴ Such words may appear online in repeated transcriptions of bits of Houbraken without any attempt at translation into modern Dutch or English.

It pays to remember that Houbraken’s Dutch, which he occasionally calls ‘the German language’, has connections with low German, so that one can encounter ‘spad’ (spät) for late, ‘hups’ (hübsch) for handsome or beautiful, and ‘kortweilig’ (kurzweilig) for entertaining, being the opposite of today’s more common langweilig. The verb ‘erlangen’, meaning to achieve, is still found in Dutch dictionaries but is much more often used by Germans. As for the ‘krankte’, meaning illness, suffered by Willem Kalf (1622-1693), ‘krank’ is now only rarely used by Dutch speakers except when it is part of ‘krankzinnig’, meaning insane. Regardless of etymology, however, tricky words are very much in the minority in De groote schouburgh. The problems with translation centre on word order and sentence structure or on finding equivalents for proverbs. There is no cause to translate unambiguous words imprecisely or incorrectly to improve on the biographer.⁵

Houbraken’s style also presents problems for any translator or reader. Jacob Campo Weyerman was essentially right in this instance. Reading Houbraken, one trips over countless instances of ineptitude, some of which are no doubt related to his slight formal education. A whimsical example occurs at the end of his life of Johann Spilberg (1619-1690), whose daughter Adriana (1650-1700) ‘married the excellent painter Wilhelm Breckvelt [1658-1687] in Düsseldorf in the year 1684. But after the passing of three years, when she had had three sons by him, he came to die in 1687’.⁶ Still odder is the report that ‘Jacob Isaacsz. [van Swanenburg] (1571-1638) ‘was for a long time in Naples, where he also married a woman’ before heading back to Leiden.⁷ It is tempting to simply have Van Swanenburg marry, but we would lose a glimpse of Houbraken in the process.

Houbraken can also be repetitious. He apparently believed that any point worth making is worth repeating. That is particularly evident from his numerous admonitions to young artists that they need to profit from his iconographic insights. A more pervasive problem is that Houbraken appears to have been addicted to complicated and even run-on sentences. We encounter a good example when he discusses the kinds of subject matter at the disposal of an artist.

Or, finally, we wish to recommend Biblical histories which, being many in number, provide a variety of choice material, as may be seen from the manifold subjects painted and depicted in print, especially from the New Testament, where a painter finds an open field in which to graze and from which to choose subjects with which he can show of what his brush is capable in the way of art, both with respect to histories as to the natural depiction of the hours of day and night, which according to differing light temper the objects with changes in colour, an observation which serves to indicate when the hour depicted by the artist has taken place.⁸

To give only one other example, Houbraken takes Philips Angel II (c. 1618-1664) to task for praising the reliability of a Bathsheba painted by Jan Lievens (1607-1674). ‘But here the writer gropes amiss, because he also praises an addition, namely a cupid (which he calls the child who moves the world) painted there in the air, with a flaming arrow instead of a sharp flash, in the thin smoke of which one sees the tender limbs sweetly hovering’. In Houbraken’s Dutch version, he manages Germanic madness by placing the verb ‘praises’ (pryst) at the very end of the long sentence.⁹ Such gems tend to be limited to Houbraken’s theoretical digressions. We have not broken them down when it is clear what the biographer is telling us.

Nor was Houbraken averse to sentence fragments, some of which, if clear and effective, have survived in Houbraken Translated. In addition we have bracketed subordinate clauses whenever Houbraken does so, even when the effect is a little awkward. Arbitrary changes of tense also occur in Houbraken’s text and are rarely corrected in Houbraken Translated. He further favoured needlessly passive, complicated or indirect ways of rendering simple propositions. We have left numerous instances of such flabby prose intact to help preserve the flavour of Houbraken’s text and, perhaps, to respect his intention.

We have also kept a few of Houbraken’s minor idiosyncrasies, such as his use of ‘proverb’ and ‘saying’ interchangeably or his summing up ‘in one word’ before using several. Houbraken may also write about ‘a handsome painter of landscapes’ when he no doubt meant ‘a painter of handsome landscapes’. Some instances are not easily circumvented, as when he writes about ‘a handsome painter in that part of art’.¹⁰ Houbraken also loved ‘the same’ when referring back to something that he had mentioned a few sentences before. We have occasionally substituted ‘it’, ‘them’, or a name for the sake of clarity. Similarly, De groote schouburgh abounds in obscure pronoun references, which we have clarified only if a perceptive reader is likely to be stymied.

Houbraken will usually tell us that something happened ‘in the year 1604’. We have kept the redundant ‘the year’ in most instances because it is what Houbraken wrote and is not at all confusing. Equally redundant in hundreds of instances is the adjective ‘art’, as in ‘artwork’, ‘art brushes’, or ‘a great master in art’ when the context is already perfectly clear. Finally, Houbraken may use near-synonyms in one phrase; ‘vlijtig’ and ‘naarstig’, both meaning ‘diligent’, come to mind. In fact, Houbraken may even employ adjectives that seem to be altogether incompatible, as in connection with the pen paintings of ships by Jasper van den Bos (1634-1656/60), which are ‘precisely and loosely handled’ [1].¹¹ Even if we translate ‘net’ as ‘neatly’ instead of as ‘precisely’, which sometimes works better, it does not appear to agree with ‘los’. Such conundrums may be resolved in due time.

1
Jasper van den Bos
View of Hoorn, dated 1654
Hoorn (place, North Holland), Westfries Museum, inv./cat.nr. 55027/ Brkl. 92.024