The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers
Jan de Baen
JAN DE BAEN, c.1674. OIL ON CANVAS.
Artworks can write history in their image, defining a cultural event beyond its factual happening and representing the age through a quiet artistic bias. In the modern world, we are familiar with this idea after more than a century of photography, taken as truth, defining our understanding of the past and the present, yet we often think of paintings differently. When two brothers who had influence in Dutch parliament for many years were lynched by an angry mob in the late 1600s, it was a national story, and sketches composed by onlookers were reproduced in newspapers across the country. Jan de Baen used these sketches and accounts from attendees to construct his own version of events – trying, as was the philosophy of the Dutch Golden Age, to be as accurate as possible. Yet he still painted with his own astute eye, and the work is aesthetically beautiful not simply by accident. Decisions were made in every brushstrokes and the work was of such quality that it became enormously famous still to this day. The murder of the DeWitt Brothers is now remembered almost entirely through de Baen’s painting, and the truth of what happened on that day no longer matters – art has trumped truth to define the past.