Rubens in Italy, Van Dyck in London, Bernini in France, are now well-known themes in books and exhibitions that highlight a portion of a major artist's career. Without the indication of locale, that segment of the artist's oeuvre may not have been fully understood. Franits's book is the first to singularly address the Dutch portrait and genre painter Godefridus Schalcken's (1643–1706) move to London, from 1692–96.
Schalcken is most well known for nighttime genre paintings with visible candlelight, carrying the Caravaggesque tradition into the early eighteenth century. There is no better art historian than Wayne Franits to tackle another artist who excelled in nocturnal scenes, having already written monographs on the Utrecht Caravaggisti, Hendrick Terbrugghen, and Dirck van Baburen. Both artists were initially studied by his late mentor, Leonard Slatkes, so he has been steeped in the allure of nocturnal painting radiating with a blaze of light for his entire career. Schalcken, however, is only indirectly a descendant of those Caravaggisti, as he was a student of Gerard Dou's, who, in turn, was a student of Rembrandt's during his Leiden years. Dou's format was small and pristine; his late paintings were often night scenes.
Schalcken executed paintings in that manner, but also larger genre candlelit scenes and many life-size portraits illuminated with candlelight, which, importantly, showed the effects of that light on various textures. (Unfortunately, many of the candlelight images are so dark that one cannot see the details that Franits so carefully points out.) Franits states that “there were no other artists in London in the 1690s who were painting candle-lit portraits” (48). Thus Schalcken had a niche in the portrait market for the wealthy in London, a place of increasing affluence, which had eclipsed the wealth of his native country. By the time we finish reading the introduction, we understand Schalcken's early biography and the economics of the move, and are ready for the five chapters of Schalcken in London.
Although the artist was only in London for four years, Franits ascribes thirty-seven paintings to him (twenty-eight known; nine lost), and another thirty-six which he suggests on stylistic grounds may have been executed during the London sojourn. So with an output of possibly over seventy works, many of them also engraved, the response to his arrival in London appears in the numbers. There was a market there—one that favored the style of portraits similar to those by the then-popular Godfried Kneller, who was also in London with a formidable practice at the same time.
There were, in fact, many foreign artists working in London throughout the seventeenth century, including several Dutch ones. Although Franits addresses their work in terms of style and composition, a list of artists would have created a fuller context of Schalcken's possible rivals, and a concept of an expat community, if there really was a community. In this regard, he locates the residences of his patrons and their relationship to each other. But here too, one would have liked a map of the area, with an indication of where Schalcken was living in relation to others. Franits is surely correct that the patrons who lived near each other saw each other's portraits and recommended Schalcken to each other.
Franits is masterful at developing in-depth biographies of these London patrons. Much of this information, as well as Schalcken's own biographical information, is new, despite a previous catalogue raisonneé (Thierry Beherman, Godfried Schalcken [1988]; curiously, Franits doesn't explain why we now use the Latinized spelling of his first name). The subject of Schalcken's London patrons was also the topic Franits addressed in the 2016 symposium for the exhibition, Godefridus Schalcken: Painted Seduction, later published in the Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch (77 [2016]: 19–42).
Although most of the book is devoted to portraits, including self-portraits, Schalcken did execute many genre scenes in London, as well as some history paintings and at least two flower pieces. Franitz also explores Schalcken's entrance into each of these markets.
Thus, Godefridus Schalcken's sojourn in London is partly about his work, his patrons, and his clientele, but also about the nature of the growing English art market.
