Tzvetan Todorov: Eloge Du Quotidien (Fr. 1993)

Subtitle: an essay on Dutch painting from the 17C. The title could be translated as: In Praise of Daily Life

If I were to answer questionnaires about my favorite painters, I would naturally mention Dutch Golden Age painters like Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Carel Fabritius (and perhaps Flemish Early Masters from the 15th century too, but that’s another story). but I realized this year how little I know about them.

I seem to have lived with images of their paintings for my whole life, but rather stupidly I’d never actually read a book of them. Or about any painting for that matter. Reversing a tendency of some people to pore over textbooks rather than looking at paintings, I had taken the other extreme: only look at paintings and never try to learn more about them through texts. I mean, how stupid is that? I consider myself rather bookish in any other area, but here, I just looked the other way.

Todorov converted me. His book is nothing like a history of Dutch painters or an academic analysis of their paintings. It’s a brilliant essay to try and define what is this Dutch “genre painting”. Genre doesn’t mean anything by itself, you see, and yet I’m sure I could identify it at first glance. Those quiet scenes of a woman at home with a child. Or a servant lingering at the doorstep, with a broom or a letter in hand, waiting for something we don’t quite see. Or a soldier chatting up with a lady who smiles mysteriously at us the audience, rather than looking at him. Or a lady playing music, her back at us, ignoring us.

Todorov narrows the definition down by highlighting what it is not: it’s often a portrait, but not of anyone in particular. Nobody can really tell the name of the lady or the servant. It’s any lady, any home. Yet it’s not an allegory either. We’re not talking about the allegory of vice and virtue, although these scenes also allude to good and bad behavior, without being judgmental (playing music and drinking with a soldier is bad, in case you wondered). It’s often a scene of a story, but not always. There are so many things left unsaid in those paintings, and that’s one of the reasons why I love them so much.

The other reason why so many people can appreciate these paintings now, even though we’re looking at them 400 years after they were painted and the world has changed so much, is that they represent beauty in the most mundane ways. They demand us to look at our everyday life and enjoy the glass of wine, the moment of sunshine, the satisfaction of having a clean and ordered house (yes, they had servants to do the chores back in those days, but still…). When we do a gratitude journal, or a 3 nice things daily blog, we are not different from the 1650 Dutch bourgeois who bought a nice painting for his home from Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu or Gerard Ter Borch. Don’t you love that idea?

Todorov also highlighted something I had never realized. That Dutch genre painting is so recognizable because never before, nor after, did painters ever find the right combination between technique, bourgeois comfort, and atmosphere of joyful living. The secret was lost at the end of the 17th century. After them, realist painting was sad, even desperate. To me it’s a bit like a miracle.

Todorov says [the translation is mine, the errors and bad grammar too]: “Dutch painters have been, for some time, touched by a grace – not divine or mystical at all – that allowed them to lift  the curse that was set on material things, to enjoy the very existence of things, to make ideal and reality interconnect, and thus to find the meaning of life in life itself.” (this sentence is more convoluted than the rest of the essay, which reads well and flows easily). To paraphrase his conclusion, Dutch painting is not childish, but it comforts us that graceful, unadulterate  joyful moments do exist in real life, and not only during childhood.