Rediscovering Metsu, the 'other' Dutch Master

Regarded by many as a lesser Vermeer, a new exhibition at the National Gallery gathers together a collection of work by Gabriel Metsu, and shows him to be an exciting, accomplished artist

FROM OUR point of view, the problem with Gabriel Metsu is that he isn’t Johannes Vermeer. That wasn’t always an issue. Go back to the 17th century, when they both lived, and to the 18th century, and the position was reversed. Unscrupulous dealers were even reputed to offer Vermeers for sale as Metsus. Anything with Metsu’s name attached was sure to sell, but people shied away from Vermeer.

Nowadays, Vermeer’s name is magic, made more magical by the fact that only a handful of his works, virtually all of them masterpieces, are known to exist.

Metsu, a close contemporary of Vermeer, lived only to the age of 37, but he was relatively prolific. The two artists were known to each other and cross-currents of influence are evident between them. Still, as National Gallery curator Adriaan E Waiboer observes, several paintings by Metsu draw directly on aspects of Vermeer’s style, as though made directly in response to works by Vermeer. Thanks to the Beit gift, there are superlative examples in our own National Gallery, the paired paintings of a man writing and a woman reading a letter.

The extraordinarily adept Metsu was something of an artistic chameleon who absorbed and reinvented the work of many of his contemporaries. To the extent, Waiboer writes, “that his oeuvre reflects almost the entire scope of Dutch genre painting” of his time.

Waiboer has curated a major new exhibition, Gabriel Metsu: Rediscovered Master of the Dutch Golden Age, which opens on Saturday at the National Gallery of Ireland. The show features 40 of Metsu's works, including many of his finest paintings, many sourced from private collections, and the only two drawings reliably attributed to him, as well as a range of intriguing, related documentary material — such as the strikingly ornate drinking horn of Saint Sebastian's Guild of Amsterdam.

Metsu isn’t Vermeer, and he frequently shifts style, but he also emerges as a gifted, compelling and extremely accessible artist in his own right.

Optically, there is a photographic quality to Vermeer’s paintings – probably because he used a camera obscura – and a curious stillness and serenity. Metsu kept adding linear and expressive detail; in his later work to an almost microscopic level and, by comparison with Vermeer, who keeps his subjects at a certain distance, he is a chatty, voluble painter who wants to spin a yarn and tell a joke.

He’s a storyteller. Even his simplest paintings are rich in anecdotal or narrative information. The more you look, the more you see; a mischievous little dog you haven’t previously noticed suddenly appears from the shadows, or your eyes light on an absolutely perfect, miniature still life in the corner of a composition, or you abruptly register the sceptical slant of a maid’s eyebrow as her mistress is charmed by a flash suitor.

There’s a wealth of observational detail in every image, illustrative of human nature, 17th century fashion, social customs and attitudes and culinary habits in the Netherlands. And, it should be said, the fantastic material wealth of the Dutch Republic, an unrivalled hub of trade and commerce. Metsu relishes in the exact description of rugs and carpets, furs and fabrics, pewter and glassware, flowers and foodstuffs, musical instruments and domestic interiors.

BORN IN LEIDEN IN 1629, Metsu’s father was a painter who died before Gabriel was born. His mother was a midwife. He was registered as an artist by the age of 14 or 15, and was active in Leiden, Utrecht and, from the first half of the 1650s, Amsterdam. There, he married Isabella de Wolff in 1658. It’s worthy of note that while her father was, fairly conventionally, a potter, her mother was, unusually, a painter.

Metsu progressed through the pictorial modes of history painting, portraiture and still life but settled on and excelled at genre scenes from everyday life.

There is surprisingly little documentary evidence of his life and career, Waiboer notes, and he tended not to date his work, so much of what we know is inferred from indirect evidence, including that provided by the artist in his paintings.

He kept chickens in Amsterdam and lived close to a market. Both feature frequently as subjects. As does the artist himself, who turns up in at least 10 of his own pictures, usually with an element of humour and mockery, posing as an officer or a cavalier and, in one exceptional case, as a nude hunter getting dressed after a swim. Hunting, Waiboer explains, “was limited to the court, the nobility and officers of the state”, though painters often “portrayed hunters as lecherous suitors”. Isabella also features as a model in various guises, and her distinctive head is recognisable in several paintings.

Gabriel Metsuis an exceptional exhibition, meticulously thought out, very carefully selected and bringing together a range of Metsu's works that you are unlikely to see together again. Perhaps that's not surprising given that the curator, Waiboer, who has been with the National Gallery of Ireland since 2004, is working on a catalogue raisonnéon Metsu. He has put together a fine catalogue (published by the National Gallery of Ireland and Yale University Press, €29.95) which will add considerably to your appreciation of the show.

After its Dublin showing, the exhibition will travel on to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Gabriel Metsu: Rediscovered Masterof the Dutch Golden Age at the National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Sq West and Clare St Until December 5. Adm €7, concessions €4.

Making sense of Metsu

A Woman Composing Music, with an Inquisitive Man, which is in the collection of the Mauritshuis in the Hague, is a late painting, made in the last few years of the artist's life. It's a genre scene and, typically, features well-to-do protagonists in a salubrious setting.

Many of Metsu’s genre paintings feature a single room that is treated as a kind of stage set, with various layers of meaning and decoration to entertain us. E Melanie Gifford points out in her essay on Metsu’s technique, he is consciously trying his hand at a contemporary “trend towards an extremely refined and elegant painting style”.

The central figure closely resembles a woman in a painting by Frans van Mieris. Her lush velvet, white fur-lined jacket, or jack, is a garment that turns up in countless paintings of the time, though strangely none have survived in reality. Metsu was celebrated for his ability to convey the textures of fur, fabric, skin – practically anything. He relishes the detail of the richly coloured rug draped over the table and the woman’s luxuriant dress. The tray on top is treated with as much precision as if it is a still life in its own right, as is the gleaming chandelier.

The theme of a male intruder into female space is a common one in genre scenes and in Metsu’s work. Here, the woman seems absorbed in composition, listening to her companion who looks a bit dubious about the plump interloper, a formally dressed though slightly buffoonish man.

The individuals in Metsu’s paintings are always characters, not just figures. He goes to great lengths to convey a sense of what they are like. More often than not there is a dog to be found in his compositions. They are always fondly and beautifully observed, and as strongly characterised as his human subjects.

In a real sense the room in this painting is a stage set. As Adriaan E Waiboer observes, Metsu often set out to aggrandise the subject’s social status by situating them in grand surroundings.

The most notable example of this is found in two exceptional works that feature in the show, both of which once hung in the home of Metsu's most important patron, Jan Jacobsz. Hinlopen. In A Visit to the Nursery and A Portrait of Jan Jacobsz. Hinlopen and his Family, Metsu transposes them to the vast, august setting of what looks very like either the Burgomaster's Cabinet or the Council Chamber in Amsterdam's Town Hall. – Aidan Dunne