Hendrick Willem Van Loon seemed to be one of those people who was constantly curious, and who wound up knowing more than just a little bit about a whole lot of things. I found this book in an antique mall for only $6.00. Paging through it at random, I found such as this, on the subject of painter Anthony van Dyck. “The English, not spoiled in the matter of painting (having produced very few good painters until then) were delighted with this newcomer. His excellent manners appealed to their love of good form. There was nothing grubby about him. He invited his clients to dinner so that he might the more carefully observe their idiosyncracies over a glass of good port. He did not keep them sitting endlessly in uncomfortable chairs as so many of those other foreign artists did. Instead, as soon as he had finished the face, he let his client go. A professional model could then afterwards pose for the hands, a method which accounts for the unfortunate fact that in so many of Van Dyck’s pictures the hands fail to fit the face. That a person’s hands are apt to be even more of an indication of his character than his face was something these noble customers had probably never noticed. Why would Van Dyck have told them? They were satisfied. He saved himself a lot of time and trouble.”
The whole book, all 632 pages of it, is like that. From the vantage point of 1937, Van Loon tells a sweeping story of the history of art from the cave paintings in prehistoric times to the music of Claude Debussy. Though he is not fond of much art of the 20th Century, or even music from the likes of Stravinsky or Hindemith, he concludes with this sense of possibility: “Fifty years from now we shall undoubtedly know whether these mysterious products of our bewildered contemporaries were just so much waste of time or whether I was just as foolish as those who objected to Bach because his music was a little too elaborate for their taste.
Van Loon is a creature of his time – the book is condescending in places. He imagines his target audience to be a poor boy and a girl he saw standing in a rural field, who he hopes will realize how much more beauty there is in the world outside their home. No mention is made of how they are supposed to, as he suggests, visit various European cities to see architecture and paintings for themselves (though he does occasionally mention books of reproductions, and even recommends picture postcards as a cheap way of acquainting oneself with the work of great painters). Van Loon puts Europe first in all things, and the white male above all others. These references are rare enough in the course of the book that I became aghast each time they showed up.
I was familiar with individual works and movements within the course of artistic history, but this was a very helpful and highly entertaining way to follow the sweep of how things changed through time. He was not afraid to include just enough political and economic (and even religious in the case of the Reformation) history to help explain how artistic output was affected. He is also conscious of the events in Germany in recent years as he wrote, and seemed sore afraid of what was to come next. Meanwhile, with the help of the Internet, I was able to visualize a lot of the works referenced (though not all, for that would have taken years).
The frontispiece proposes that this book will give the reader a better understanding and a greater appreciation that has been done within the realm of painting and architecture and music and sculpture and the theater and most of the so-called minor arts from the beginning of time until the moment we come so close to them that we begin to lose perspective. He does reference each and every one of these art forms, but the fact is that Shakespeare gets barely a page while painters and musicians of lesser merit are given long subsections and even chapters. It may come as no surprise that Van Loon was an amateur musician and an illustrator/painter himself. His greatest enthusiasms come for what he knows best.
Much of Van Loon’s output was in the children’s book field, but he wrote some other adult books which may be worth stumbling upon in the future. I don’t know how many of them have survived to our time – his erudition is one thing, his amiability and wit in the course of covering every topic is quite another. I’m not sure I’ve encountered any critical historian like him.