Painters of secrets in the Hague

In the lovely Mauritshuis in the Hague so many of the paintings from the Dutch Golden Age seem to portray an unrevealed secret. Almost all have a domestic setting, but something intruding from beyond is frequently suggested. Jan Verkolje's painting is of someone delivering a message to the housewife in an impeccable Dutch home, but we don't know what's in the message. There is no melodrama, scarcely a hint about whether the message is tragic or joyful. The message seems important, but enigmatic. One of the greatest of all Dutch painters, Pieter de Hooch, portrays a man reading a letter to a woman. Again we don't know what the letter says, and their facial expressions give only clues, not answers. Judith Leyster's painting is of a man offering money, but for what? So strong are the hints and the innuendoes that even where there appears to be no hidden meaning, no secret, such as in Jacob Ochterveld's painting of a fishmonger at the door, the viewer, having looked at all the other paintings with their incinuations and implications, starts to wonder whether there is some hidden possibility. Why exactly is the fishmonger at the door?

Everywhere under the pall of discretion is hidden the possibility of joy or loss. Whether the emotions are glad or tragic, they must best be expressed in private, so privately that even the person looking at the painting who has been admitted into the domestic space cannot know the whole story. The door must be closed on solitude before the entire truth comes out. Until then everything is hints, echoes and possibilities. As in Chekhov, the turbulent world always incinuates itself into even the most orderly existences, but only in private and beneath the surface calm. Without the surface calm all would be chaos.

Adriaen Coorte is a minor master painter of the Dutch golden age. His life, not just his work, is a total secret. Nothing of note is known about him. All is guesswork. And his exquisite painting offer precious little to guess at. He emerges fully formed as a painter. His palate of colours, his subjects and genres are decided from the off and they never change throughout his life's work. There is no development, no journey, no destination. He painted still lives almost exclusively. Almost all are set against black backdrops, rather like Spanish still life paintings. And the subject matter is always selected from the same range: bowls of strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, grapes, redcurrants. All are shown, shining, ripe and unspoilt. Occasionally the white flowers produced by all these fruits which grow in the cool, soft shade are depicted. Bundles of white asparagus endowed with an almost ethereal luminescence are set alongside the bowls of fruit. Exquisite butterflies with filigree wings as fine as a spider web hover over the fruit. He also painted sea shells covered with patterns of random symmetry that only nature and evolution could produce. No human eye or mind could conceive them. Nothing happens, nobody is present. The infinite refinement of the natural is complexity enough. That's not a secret, it's a revelation almost divine.