Notable & Quotable: ‘Colonialist Paintings'

Wall Street Journal

17-07-2025

From Heather Mac Donald's speech at the New Criterion's April 24 gala:
Consider a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show featured the Met's extraordinary collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, that explosion of creativity that produced Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Gerard ter Borch and other masters. Were we to see beauty in those cloud-laden horizons, those serene compositions of domestic order, those haunting portraits of age and vulnerability? No, we were to see what was not there: 'colonialism, slavery, and war,' which, the Met curators reminded us, were major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history, but which were 'barely visible' in the Met's Dutch collections. Or take the still lifes, a new genre that marked Northern Europe's epoch-changing attention to empirical detail. What was a viewer to make of the dragonfly iridescence of ripe grapes, the delicate play of light on cut glass, the puckered skin of a lemon peel? Do not be taken in! The Met advised us. Dutch still-life paintings omitted the 'human cost of colonial warfare and slavery' that underlay the bounty these canvases documented, the wall labels warned. Of course, by definition, a still life features inanimate objects, not human subjects, so any still life would be hard-pressed to portray colonial warfare and slavery. But never mind. . . .