‘The world premier’: Polk Museum celebrating Dutch Masters

LAKELAND — There are multiple parties underway along the walls of the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College, from upper-class fetes to middle-class dinners to working-class marriage feasts.

It’s all part of the museum’s latest exhibit — the largest one it has ever undertaken — “Music and Dance in Painting of the Dutch Golden Age,” which opens Saturday.

Throughout history, music and dancing have been a fundamental part of life in nearly every society, and the 17th Century Dutch were no exception. Many artworks from the period show every strata of people in The Netherlands enjoying themselves.

“There’s never been an exhibition of Old Master paintings with (a focus on) dance and music before, so Polk has the world premier,” said Willem Hoogsteder, director of the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation and gallery, which helped to organize the artworks and exhibit.

The foundation is dedicated to promoting the art and culture of 17th century Netherlands, when it was one of the wealthiest, most cultured and powerful nations in the world.

“We’ve been working on it for two years with the conservatory from The Hague, and it’s a fantastic show,” Hoogsteder said.

The exhibit includes 27 privately owned paintings that line the walls of two of the museum’s large downstairs galleries — artists who are household names in Europe, like Jan Miense Molenaer’s “Peasant Wedding” and Pieter de Grebber’s “The Violin Player.”

“Music and Dance” represents the PMoA’s continued partnership with the Hoogsteder Museum Foundation. The entities also collaborated on the 2017 exhibit “Rembrandt’s Academy,” which featured works by the famed artist, along with some of his pupils and contemporaries.

If you think Old Dutch Masters’ paintings simply depict a bunch of people in black clothes with funny white collars, you’d be giving short shrift to the era and the art movement. There is a unique language to the paintings that, once understood, can reveal the lifestyles of Amsterdam’s rich and famous and even jokes among the working class.

Hoogsteder pointed to “Peasants Making Merry Outside a Tavern” by Isaac van Ostade, which shows an outdoor, working class party, replete with a fiddler, dancers and revelers.

“You can see that everybody’s enjoying themselves. It’s also a bit of a comment because you see these people and they’re, well, on the brink of misbehaving,” Hoogsteder said.

And, he encouraged the viewer to look a little closer to see Holland‘s version of someone’s drunk uncle relieving himself by a bush, mirrored on the opposite side of the canvas by a pig, and a dog in the middle that is clearly not amused.

One painting, “Musical Company” by Pieter Codde, was once owned by Earl Spencer and displayed at Althorp, Princess Diana’s ancestral home.

It shows a very wealthy family being entertained by a drama and dancing troupe. The painting, as with so many from that era, is meant to show off the family’s wealth by depicting their ability to hire entertainment, along with displaying their material possessions.

The women are dressed in rich, dark, silk frocks, with expensive and expansive white collars. One woman is playing a lute, while another clearly wants to dance with one of the performers, who is wearing a mask. Look closer and you’ll see a cello, ladies and gentlemen in fine clothes talking among themselves, hand-blown glass containers (expensive in the 17th Century) and fine tapestries lining the walls — all indications of the family’s wealth.

Alex Rich, PMoA executive director and chairman of Florida Southern College’s art history and museum studies department, said many of the still lifes in the exhibit are messages about the impermanence of life and our looming mortality. In the art world, they are called “vanitas” paintings.

“You could cherish all of these things. You could be an intellect, you could be educated, you can listen to music, you can eat really well. But in the end, what does that amount to?” Rich said. “So you get still lifes like this that encapsulate the concept of the things that somebody had — the commissioner or the patron of the artist who commissioned the paintings — but it’s all about the idea that it will all be gone after your death.”

Rich points to “Vanitas Still Life with Twisted Silver Candlestick” by Reiner Meganck. Like most vanitas paintings, it includes a skull — a physical “memento mori,” Latin for “Remember you must die.” The painting includes two other reminders that life is fleeting: The candlestick holds a just extinguished candle, its wick still glowing orange and smoke continuing to linger, and a nearly expired hourglass flipped on its side.

“Meganck intends for us to search for deeper meaning in these items,” Rich said.

“Music and Dance: in Painting of the Dutch Golden Age” will be open until May 31.

Kimberly C. Moore can be reached at kmoore@theledger.com or 863-802-7514. Follow her on Twitter at @KMooreTheLedger.

“Music and Dance in Painting of The Dutch Golden Age” at The Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m.

800 E. Palmetto St. in Lakeland

863-688-7743

THE EXHIBIT