Miró in Holland : The Dutch Interiors ( 1928 ) •

ion, in the definition of the material. It is in this that the charm of Miro’s surrealist paintings lies, e.g. in that thing of his I have myself.’ (‘Het werk moet mager zijn, of althans dien indruk maken. De materie mag zich niet opdringen. Velen meenen dat de kracht schuilt in het vette en logge der factuur. Doch dat is een vergissing. De kracht der innerlijke spanning ligt niet slechts in de abstractie, d.w.z. de afwezigheid van vorm in de uitbreiding, maar ook in de abstractie, in de begrenzing van het materiaal. Hierin ligt de bekoring van Miro’s surrealis­ie, in de begrenzing van het materiaal. Hierin ligt de bekoring van Miro’s surrealis­ tische schilderijen b.v. in het ding dat ik zelf van hem bezit.’) De Stijl (1932) last issue, p. 23. The work in question has not so far been identified. 40 Rowell 1992, op. cit. (note 2), p. 97. Taken from provenance data in Joconde. Catalogue des Collections des Musées de France (www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/ joconde fr, 10 May 2010). In an interview in La Gaceta Literaria, 1 July 1928, however, Miró said that he went to the Prado chiefly for the (classical) Spanish painting. Quoted in De la Beaumelle 2004, op. cit. (note 10), p. 338. ‘J’ai été séduit par cette capacité des peintres hollandais de faire ressortir des points minuscules comme des grains de poussière et de concentrer l’attention sur une petite étincelle au milieu de l’obscurité. C’est là leur grand pouvoir de fascination.’ Quoted in Dora Vallier, ‘Avec Miró’, Cahiers d’Art (i960), nos. 33-35, p. 168. Umland 2008, op. cit. (note 1), p. 57. See cat. The Hague, Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, Abridged Catalogue of the Pictures and Sculpture, The Hague 1923 (5th edition). These catalogues were published regularly from 1899 onwards for foreign visitors. A French edition also appeared in 1899, but it was not reprinted until 1955. 46 A. Bredius, Jan Steen met honderd platen bevattende 101 afbeeldingen in photogravure van zijne beste werken, Amsterdam 1927; F. Schmidt-Degener and H.E. van Gelder, 40 meesterwerken van Jan Steen afgebeeld in heliogravure, met een karakteristiek van zijn kunst, Amsterdam 1927, published in English as Jan Steen. Forty reproductions in photogravure of the artist’s principal works, 4i

He had been planning the trip for some time, telling his dealer Pierre Loeb on 7 November 1927, '1'11 go to Belgium and Holland, and will be back right away next summer in Spain already married.'1 From Paris he travelled by way of Brussels to The Hague, where he went to see the Royal Picture Gallery in the Mauritshuis, and then on to Amsterdam, where his main objective was a visit to the Rijks museum. The art of the Golden Age in these museums' collections made such an impression on Miró that he still vividly recollected his trip half a century later. 'I went to Holland for two weeks in order to visit the museums. ... 1 was tremendously interested in Vermeer and the seven teenth-century Dutch masters.'2 The Netherlands lived on not just in his memory, but in his work. When Miró got back to Spain in the summer of 1928 he embarked on a series of three paintings that came to be titled Dutch Interior (figs. 2, 4, 5). They were based on two postcard reproductions of paintings by Hendrick Martensz Sorgh and Jan Havicksz Steen that he had seen in the Rijksmuseum (figs. 1, Detail of fig. 4 3, 12,13). The marriage of which he had been so sure did not, though, go ahead. His engagement to Pilar Tey was broken off, but during the trip he began to court his future wife, Pilar Juncosa i Iglesias, by sending her an endless stream of picture postcards.3 Miró finished the three Dutch Interiors in the autumn of 1928. They were shown for the first time at Galerie Pierre in Paris from 7 to 14 March 1930, after which they were almost constantly to be seen in important exhibitions.4 In 1961, consequently, Jacques Dupin referred to them in the first major monograph and oeuvre catalogue as 'the famous series of Dutch interiors'.5 Dutch Interior (1), acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1945, was the best known.6 Dutch Interior (11) was bought by Peggy Guggenheim in 1940 and was on permanent exhibit from 1942 to 1947 in the room of Surrealist paintings in her famous New York gallery, Art of This Century.7 Dutch Interior (in) was less visible. This painting was bought by the Belgian businessman and journalist René Gaffé before the first exhibition even opened.8 In 1950 it found its way into the American Marx (later Marx-Schoenborn) collection, after which it seldom appeared at exhibitions although it frequently cropped up in publications. Finally, in 1995, it was   [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30].9 The Dutch Interiors were almost always discussed at length in the monographs that followed ever harder on one another's heels as Miró's fame grew in the 1950s. The most substan tial of these works also looked at the postcards and the preparatory sketches in conjunction with the paintings. In 1961, on the basis of the sketches, which at that time were still with Miró himself, Dupin showed for the first time how different motifs in The Dancing Lesson had been transformed and combined to create the eventual composition of Dutch Interior (11). In 1973 William Rubin brought out a catalogue of work by Miró in the col lection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in which all the prepara tory material for Dutch Interior (1) was published. On the basis of conversa tions with Miró he also compiled a detailed diagram of all the motifs in this painting. In his 1993 The Roots of Miró Pere Gimferrer, like Dupin, discussed the sketches for Dutch Interior (11) at length andfor the first timethe drawings for Dutch Interior (in). These and other books usually discuss the individual paintings in the series in direct relation to their specific examples.'0 We must, though, bear in mind that it was not just these works that made such an impression on Miró. It was the Dutch painting of the Gold en Age as a whole, as represented in the museum collections in The Hague and Amsterdam, that prompted him to make his own interpretation. Although not much is known about his stay in Holland itself, a great deal of information can be derived from the works and museum collections he saw and the way they were presented. Taken in conjunction with an explana tion by Miró himself, which has never before been considered in the analysis of these paintings, this Dutch context sheds new light on the creative process that led to the Dutch Interiors and on their position in his oeuvre.

Creative Copies
Miró himself attached great value to the Dutch Interiors. 'Now I am work ing at an extremely slow pace, as 1 had not done for many years, and on very important canvases,' he wrote on 16 August 1928 to his childhood friend Josep-Francesc Ràfols, when he had just started work on the first painting in the series." And indeed Miró did return temporarily to the painstaking style in which he was working around 1924, breaking with the poetic, dreamy mood of the paintings he made between 1925 and 1927. But it is not only the fact that Miró returned to an earlier manner for the Dutch Interiors that makes them exceptionalthey also marked the start of an eighteen month period in which he focused on a dialogue with the painting of the past. The Potato (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Still Life with Lamp (private collection), which immediately followed the Dutch Interiors, reference the Dutch portrait and still life painting of the Golden Age, although without any identifiable example, while for the Imaginary Portraits of 1929 he used reproductions of work by, among others, George Engieheart (a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds), Constable and Raphael.'1 This profound interest in old masters at a time when modernism was at its height is remarkable but not unique. With his interpretation of the paintings by Sorgh and Steen, Miró was fol lowing a long tradition of artists who emulated the work of their predeces sorsto copy and hence to learn from them, certainly, but also to compete with them andpreferablysurpass them. They also sought solutions to pictorial problems in the work of the greats. 13  Miró no doubt wanted to discuss his part in the upcoming show with Mesens, but at that moment the gallery was staging an exhibition of the work of Jean Arp, who was there in person. Photographs reveal that the visit was not purely business. Van Hecke, Mesens, Miró, Arp and the Belgian art dealer Camille Goemans, who made up the group, had their pictures taken together several times. It was evidently regarded as a memorable moment, for one of the photographs was published in the |une issue of the cultural magazine Variétés, which Van Hecke had founded not long before ( fig. 6). Mesens, who did a good deal of the image editing and layout work for the magazine, placed the picture above a reproduction of Max Ernst's painting Au rendez-vous des amis (1922), drawing a visual parallel with the meeting in Galerie L'Époqueanother 'rendez vous des amis'." The year before, in January 1927, Miró had moved from rue Blomet in Montparnasse to the studios in the Villa des Fusains in Montmartre, becoming Arp's close neighbour.23 Max Ernst worked in a studio directly across from them, and Goemans lived there too. Miró admired Arp's poetry and in times offinancialtrouble they seem to have helped one another out. He recalled in 1938: 'Things were better, but they still were rather tough. Once, Arp and I shared a meal of radishes and butter.'24 But there was more to it than sharing frugal meals and neighbouring accommodation in the Villa des Fusains in rue Tourlaque. Looking back in an interview in 1962, Miró said, 'In 1928, it seems that Arp and I were influenced by each other. Why not: We lived in the same build ing ... .' Followed in the next breath by, 'Another influence was that of the Dutch masters -Jan Steen, Vermeer, etc.that can be seen in the Dutch interiors I painted that same year. '25 The immediate association with these paintings is an indication that there was a definite connection between his friend ship with Arp and the rest of his trip.
In photographs, the layout of Arp's exhibition looks highly unorthodox. It differed dramatically from Miró's quite traditional exhibition in Georges Bernheim's museum-style galleries, where the works hung close together, side by side, above a dado. 26 In L'Epoque's space, which resembled nothing so much as a living room, Arp's reliefs and paintings were hung with large, irregular gaps between them and at seemingly random heights, as if the individual pieces had to work together on the walls to form a larger composition. In this respect the layout was reminiscent of the asymmetrical division of planes of colour in the space-colour compositions beloved of De Stijl. Something of Arp's recent collaboration with Theo van Doesburg on the decoration of the Aubette in Strasbourg (1927) seems to resonate in this exhibition?7 Unlike the stopover in Brussels, the rest of the trip to the Netherlands seems to have had no ulterior motive -Miró simply wanted to go to the museums. There is nothing to suggest that he either had or wanted to make contacts in the Dutch art world. In Holland, by contrast with Belgium, there were no collectors of any import ance who took an interest in Surrealist art, while Dutch art critics were at best dismissive of the latest developments from Paris. In 1930, when the Amster dam artists' society De Onafhankelijken ('the Independents') included an entry of almost forty works by Belgian and French Surrealists in its annual exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum -Miró was represented, with a paint ing and two collages28the movement was brushed aside by the authoritative art critic W. Jos de Gruyter in Het Vaderland of 3 June 1930 as being 'of no, not the slightest significance!' because it was 'a reaction against all naturalness and humanity'?9 Through out the thirties Surrealism failed to strike a chord in the down-to-earth Netherlands: the Exposition Inter nationale du Surréalisme staged in the Robert Gallery in Amsterdam in 1938with the 1931 Woman Strolling among the Mirós theremet with the same blank incomprehension in the press?0 Opinions about Miró's work were similarly mixed. When a Paris corres pondent reviewed Miró's exhibition at Bernheim's in De Telegraaf of 6 June 1928 -the first lengthy review of his work in a Dutch newspaperhe wrote that 'with his cheerful flags of flat col our and system of open lines he reveals an undeniable personality, one of the strongest in an age when so many people show off as oddly and as affec tedly as possible to conceal their inner emptiness'?' Something over a year later, though, when Miró's work was seen in the Netherlands for the first time at the esac Exposition selectes d'art contemporain in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a critic writing in Else vier's Geïllustreerd Maandschrift rather condescendingly described the paint ing Homme et femme as 'two ghostly little balloons which bind one another together in a ghastly atmospherenot with Vondel's mighty chains, but with a few astral entrails'?2 In the end, the Dutch art world did not warm to his work and very little of it found its way into private or public collections.
For his part, Miró showed equally little interest in contemporary Dutch culture. The only concrete indication is a postcard to his friend Josep Ràfols with a picture of the façade of the apartment block at 13-23 Heinzestraat in Amsterdam South, a classic example of Amsterdam School architecture designed by Piet Kramer." It is not inconceivable that Miró's interest in the Amsterdam School, which had emerged a stone's throw from the Rijksmuseum in the early twenties, was sparked in Paris in 1925 by the Dutch pavilion built to J.F. Staal's design at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The exuberantly decorated Amsterdam School structure with its dramatic curving rear elevation may have evoked memories of Antoni Gaudi's work in Barcelona, Miró's birthplace.

A Monument to the Birds in The Hague
'Un bon record de Miró,' wrote Miró on a postcard he sent from The Hague on Friday, n May 1928 to his friend, the art critic Sebastià Gasch, in Barcelona.'4 We know that he was still in Brussels on 5 May, but the date he went to The Hague has not so far been traced.35 Nor do we know where he stayedin a hotel, a guest house or perhaps at an address supplied by his network of friends in the artists' community. It is quite possible that Theo and Nelly van Doesburg helped him here, since they had numerous contacts in The Hague.'6 Although there is no evidence of direct con tact, they might well have known him personally through their mutual friend Arp in Paris. Be this as it may, they rated Miro's work so highly that Nelly wanted to show it at the esac exhibition she staged in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Pulchri Studio in The Hague in 1929.37 Theo also wanted to include it in the bookwhich never actually saw publication - known the French edition of this monograph, and this could have been an added incentive to study the paint ing of the Golden Age in Holland. Steen's work certainly seems to reflect the pattern of interests that Miró and Ernst developed in the twenties, particularly because animals were so emphatically part of the action. This definitely chimed with the direction Ernst's work took in the 1925-27 period. '1 decided to erect a monument to the birds,' he wrote, the italics alluding to the titles of his paintings: 'It was the beautiful season. It was the time of them the 'all-seeing' eye, which now looks through a window in the wall, and the newspaper ('jour'nal), which has been shifted to the left. Three elements that feature prominently in the composition of The Tilled Fieldthe tree on the right, the suckling mare in the middle with the house above it and the extraordinary flagstaff on the lefthave become three figures in The Family: the mother in the centre, the father on the left and the son on the right. Strikingly, they are in the same position as the girl, the figure of the farmer and the servant in Steen's painting, and this similarity, too, is unlikely to have escaped Miró.
It is, however, extremely improbable that Miró was already familiar with The Poultry Yard when he was work ing on The Tilled Field or The Family. There is nothing to suggest that he had a publication with a reproduction in it at that time and he does not refer to 17th-century Dutch painting until after his trip to the Netherlands, so the visit to the Mauritshuis must have caused a shock of recognition -The Poultry Yard was so close to his own experi ence and corresponded so strikingly in so many respects with his own work. It may well have prompted the particular interest in the genre painting of the Golden Age he evinced during the continuation of his journey.

Amsterdam
In the Rijksmuseum, which Miró must have visited around 14 May,49 two related genre paintings -Jan Steen's Dancing Lesson and Hendrick Sorgh's Lute Playermust in any event have attracted more than his passing atten tion. Miró went to a museum which, after his appointment as director in 1921, Frederik Schmidt-Degener had remod elled with the audacity and energy that seem to have characterized the roaring twenties, drastically modernizing an institution that was still deeply rooted in 19th-century notions of what a museum should be. One of the features of moder-nity, wrote Peter Conrad in the intro duction to his comprehensive cultural history of the 20th century, is that it achieves its freedom 'by anachronistically rearranging the past'.50 It was in this spirit that Schmidt-Degener set to work. The way in which he took the liberty of rearranging the collection was as typical as it was radical. Admittedly not anachronistically, and roughly organized by 'school', he imposed a strictly sym metrical order on utterly incongruent genresportrait, still life, landscape, marine, interior. With the most impor tant work as the focal point in the middle and a mirror-image composi tion of'wings', the walls showing 17thcentury painting were transformed into something akin to geometric Rorschach tests (figs. 10,11). Disparate pictures were compelled to act as pendants by replacing the old frames with uniform new ones and hanging the paintings opposite one another. It was even considered acceptable to make minor changes to their size. 51 From a modern perspective, paradoxically, Schmidt-Degener's relentlessly symmetrical arrangement often looks quite unbalanced and even random, but at the time visitors saw the metamorphosis as refreshing; in consequence enthusiasm for the collec tion and the museum grew at home and abroad.52 The 19th-century aca demic approach that subordinated the individual work to stylistic trends by regarding it as a sort of link in a chain had made way for an emphasis on the individual perception of the work of art, which authors like Johannes Itten had championed. The shotgun marriages into which paintings were forced were intended specifically to throw the separate and distinct quali ties of each picture into sharper relief. The barest minimum of information, tucked away inconspicuously on the frame, likewise did not detract from the aesthetic contemplation of the work. It was experiencing the work of art, not knowing about it, that was paramount. In spirit, if not in form, the Rijksmuseum galleries were as modern and certainly as innovative as the intui tive, asymmetrical structure of Arp's exhibition in Brussels, which Miró had seen a few days earlier ( fig. 6).
The insistent symmetry in the Rijksmuseum may well have opened Miró's eyes to an unexpected aspect of the paintings by Sorgh and Steen that in a way they could be seen as pendants. In terms of composition they are more or less mirror images, for the musicians in the two paintings (the lute player and the girl playing the shawm) turn to the viewer's right and left respectively. And the paint ings correspond in other ways, too. In both pictures the protagonists are at a table; in both pictures there is a jug on the right and a white cloth hang ing over the edge of the table. The dog and cat that are part of the action in Steen's painting, on the other hand, lie quietly in Sorgh's work. In both pictures the scene is played out against a background in which different motifs tell a parallel storythe view of the canal and the painting of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Sorgh, and the man look ing through the window, flanked by a chimney breast and a lute, in the Steen.
The similarities were evidently not enough for Schmidt-Degener to use the works as 'pendants' in a composi tionand indeed they are too differ ent in size and proportions for this to work. The Lute Player hung in a gallery where Jan Steen was the focus and was given Quiringh van Brekelenkam's Reading Aloud as its 'pendant'. These two paintings, virtually the same size, were framed identically; Steen's Feast of St Nicholas hung between them (figs, io, 32). An English guide written in 1927 provides a good impression of the works on display: 'The ... room contains a number of jovial scenes by Jan Steen, which show the different and various aspects of his art. Often he used himself and his family as the actors in little domestic festivals. The "Sick Maiden"... is one of the most attractive character studies ... the suspicious little doctor and his elusive patient being depicted with great human insight. The colour scheme is perfect and original, the grey and yellow of her dress contrasting with the blue-green of the bed-curtains in the quiet background. Steen's remark able skill as a draughtsman is seen in the woman standing in the centre of a homely room and raising her arm to feed the parrot. Another of Steen's more famous works is the "Feast of St Nicholas", Steen exulting in his cleverness in catching the little flaws of early childhood. "The Village Wedding" on the contrary illustrates the childish ness of the grown-up people indulging in harmless pleasure after the bridal dinner, the musicians playing and the dance commencing. A remarkable feature of this room is the stately self-portrait by Jan Steen, just the face we would expect after having seen his pictorial comedies, a keen and rather ironical observer of human weakness and natural enjoyments.'53 various languages for the international market and designed not just to send but as collectibles and to put up on the wall. As the puff in the Stengel catalogue put it: 'Since each card can be purchased individually, anyone can acquire a "Private Picture Gallery" inexpensively. With reusable picture frames, it is possible to decorate the walls with different cards from time to time.'54 The two cards Miró used for the Dutch Interiors were part of a series of hundreds of masterpieces in dozens of important collections. There were fourteen cards with illustrations of works in the Rijksmuseum collection.55 The company used the tried and tested method of chromolithography, which produced a high-quality print, for the reproductions. The manual nature of the technique meant that the propor tions of the original work of art could be adjusted such that the standard size of the card could be used to best advantage without impinging on the composition. Stengel's manipulation of The Dancing Lesson transformed the work from almost square to an upright rectangle, making the mirror symmetry with The Lute Player even more marked. The floor in both paintings was extend ed slightly. By making them the same size in this way Stengel effectively made them one another's counterpart just as Schmidt-Degener constructed his 'pendants' in the galleries.

Montroig
Half a century later Miró recalled that he started processing his impressions as soon as he got back from his trip to Holland. 'I bought a lot of postcards featuring reproductions of their most typical and most famous paintings. When I got back to Paris, I decided to copy some of them in my own style ...'s6  There are two little sketches of a lute player on small sheets of squared paper that must have come from a pocket notebook, which suggests that he got his first ideas down on paper while he was on the way back from Amsterdam (figs. 14,15). On 17 May he was back in his studio in Paris, in early June he went to Barcelona and a month later he arrived in Montroig.57 During these two months, his first impressions led to a firm plan to make five paintings: the set of three  Although Miró gave his set of three paintings the generic title Dutch Inter ior, the musical theme of the two 17thcentury examples seems to have been his specific point of departure. One indication of this is the note 'motif he jotted on the back of the postcard of The Lute Player. 59 He also concentrated on the figure of the lute player in all the knownsketches for Dutch Interior (1) (figs. 14-20). In the smallest sketches the musician holds the instrument away from him and even looks as if he wants to smash it (figs. 14,15). In one of the sketches there are rudimentary indications of the dog and the table, in the other an oval frame has been drawn around the lute player. Miró evidently considered other aspects of the painting as secondary, since he ignored the interior, the view of the canal and the listening woman at this stage. In one of these two sketches, a shape resembling a shoe appears in the place where the cat is lying.  In two other sketches he focused on the outline of the lute player, including his crossed legs (figs. 16,17), as he also drew it in the sketches on squared paper. This led on to a draw ing that is more fully resolved ( fig. 18). Miró evidently took an erotic view of Sorgh's painting, witness the lute player's prominent genitalia, echoing the organic trumpet form the lute has assumed. The listening woman and the table have now been definitively transformed into a linear shape with a knob at the end, while the shoe here is unmistakably based on the rather hard, graphic character that the cat had acquired in the postcard ( fig. 12).
A year later Miró used these initial sketches and the drawing as the starting point for a Collage in which the musical and erotic aspects are much more explicitly linked than they are in the paintings (fig. 33).
In another sketch the shoe turned into a foot ( fig. 19), which was to return later in the painting. The composition was given its final form in the largest sketch, dominated by the huge balloon shape of the lute player's head ( fig. 20). During its working up in the detailed preliminary drawing, the composition suddenly acquired a surprising wealth of secondary details, in the sphere of'serpents, earth worms' that Max Ernst recalled from these years and 'the insects, which have always interested me a great deal,' as Miró put it ( fig. 21).60 All at once the dog and cat are joined by birds flying in and out and a bat fluttering around, a swan and a fish swim in the canal and a frog tries to snap up a little snaila bustling scene reminiscent of The Poultry Yard. The listening woman has merged into the table and everything on it, a knife used to peel an apple lies on the ground, the cat reclines contentedly under a bench and the dog has been given a bone that looks like a pipe.
Working on the painting, Miró wrote to Gasch on 2 August: 'What I'm doing now is different from the past -Enormément pousséhowever, it is parallel to The Tilled Field [ fig. 8] and the Carnival of Harlequin .'6l From the outset, Miró evidently associated the Dutch Interiors with his paintings of the first half of the 1920s. This return to his methods of that period seems to have been prompted in part because he had been immensely impressed by the detailed handling of textures and fabrics he had seen in the paintings in The Hague and Amsterdam,62 and in part because he recognized motifs from his earlier work in Steen's and Sorgh's genre works. Aside from the similarities between The Poultry Yard and The Tilled Field there are, for instance, parallels between The Family, The Dancing Lesson and The Lute Player (figs. 1,3, 9). To start with there is the dog, part of Miro's family scene and in both the Steen and the Sorgh. The all-seeing eye looking in through a window in the back wall in The Family is a reflection of Steen's old man peering through the window at the children and the 'dancing cat'. This motif seems to have caught Miró's at tention straight away: 'after a postcard' he noted on a sketch of a similar figure sticking his head through a window ( fig. 22).63 There are equally striking resemblances between Sorgh's painting and Carnival of Harlequin (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), to which Miró also explicitly referred. Here too, the central figure is a musician, flanked on the right by a window in the wall reminiscent of the little painting of Pyramus and Thisbe, and a table with a white cloth hanging over the edge and a cat lying underneath it.
Miró's second Dutch Interior was painted on the same size canvas as the first, so that he followed the format imposed by the postcards (fig. 4). 64 The process of resolving the diverse motifs seems to have been very different, though, as the various sketches reveal. This time, instead of concentrating on the principal motif and adding elaborate details at the end, as he did in the 'miromorphosis' of Sorgh's painting, he worked out the different motifs in four different sketches.65 Steen's little dog became a chimerical creature pierced with arrows which modelled to some extent on the dog in The Familypisses and defecates simultaneously (figs. 9, 23). The girl playing the shawm was contained in a constricted outline and dissected in sweeping folds ( fig. 24). In another sketch the cat becomes a little dancer    in one variant topless and wearing a short skirtand the man holding the animal turns into a sort of Cyclops with long, sinuous arms ( fig. 25). The fourth and final sketch is a study of various jugs and stools and the sauce pan leaning against a chair. By adding a head and tailanalogous to the lugs of the pewter bowl standing on the chair -Miró transformed the pan into a fish with a long handle to which a miniature chair is attached (fig. 26).
The various motifs were used with out many changes in the final composi tion. Here, Miró remained closer to his starting point than he had in Dutch Interior (1); there are no additions and all the original motifs in Steen's painting are identifiable and readable (figs. 13, 27). Nevertheless, The Dancing Lesson has totally mutated. Two long serpentine shapes now spring from the little dog's body, enclosing the figures and ending in a spider and a triangular 'blade' like the one in Dutch

I.
Interior (i). The spider and the black square beside it are in turn the result of the change experienced by the man in the window ( fig. 22), and the cat has undergone a complete metamorphosis and become a geometrical figure. Miró has transformed the podgy little boy laughing uproariously at the cat's enforced antics in Steen's painting into a giant frowning face in a form strongly reminiscent of the reliefs and paintings Arp had exhibited at L'Époque a few months earlier ( fig. 6).

A Musical Triptych?
Miró had put immense effort into the third painting in the Dutch Interiors series ( fig. 5), as he told René Gaffé on 19 June 1929 when he bought the work: 'I am very happy that the Interior belongs to you ... You cannot imagine the drama the painting of that canvas represents for me, a canvas that has an enormous value as a struggle, a human struggle in my career.'66 We know far less about the background to the creation of this painting than we do about Dutch Interior (i) and (it). Because Miró had used 17th-century examples for the first two paintings, authors have some times assumed that there must also have been an as yet unknown source in Dutch genre painting.67 In 1961 Dupin described Dutch Interior (in) as 'nothing more or less than a woman giving birth to a goat'. 68 With some stretch of the imagina tion a goat's head can be made out in the horned form in the centre of the painting, above the red wedge, but the notion that there could be a 'satanic' example of this kind in the art of the Golden Age is not very plausible. A more likely source would be Hieronymus Bosch, whose work certainly interested Miró when he saw it in the Prado in [uly 1928.69 Similarities to Bosch's work had already struck contemporaries. As the Paris correspondent of De Telegraaf observed drily: 'Miró ... is a greatgrandson of Hieronymus Bosch.'70 There does not, however, appear to be a specific and convincing relation ship between any painting by Bosch and Dutch Interior (in), nor does there seem to be a direct connection with an unknown 17th-century Dutch example.7' In 1965 Miró gave an explanation for Dutch Interior (tn) that shed a different light on the painting and its creation. Although Carolyn Lanchner drew attention to this explanation in 1993, it has not so far played a role of any significance in the discussions of this painting and the series to which it belongs. On the occasion of the inventorying of the Marx-Schoenborn Collection, of which Dutch Interior (in) was then a part, Miró wrote to Monroe Wheeler, head of the exhibi tions and publications department at the Museum of Modern Art: 'Dutch Interior [in] does not relate to any single picture, being a sort of résumé of the ones in this series.'72 The paint ing can thus be seen as a synthesis of different motifs that were explored in the two earlier works.
The white tablecloth in Dutch Interior (1), for instance, returns in broad outline and reversed in the light, meandering form in the middle. It ends on the left in a bluish-black shape pierced by one of the balusters from Sorgh's banister. To this Miró now attached the plume on the lute player's hat and painted an arrow like that in Dutch Interior (n) through it; the blue rectangle above it suggests the remnants of the view of the canal. In Dutch Interior (in) the book of sheet music that lies on the table in front of the lute player floats on a fine thread towards the flying dog. The position of the unattached foot in Dutch Interior (i) corresponds with the hand fastened to a serpentine similar to that in Dutch Interior (n), likewise pierced by an arrow. The small black square upper right, which is a rudimentary window from Steen's painting, also found a place in Dutch Interior (in).
There are two known sketches for Dutch Interior (m) which indicate that the main outline of the composition was essentially fixed right away. The interior from The Dancing Lesson can just about be identified in the first rough sketch, with a window in the back wall and a little dog that already had wings. 'Que vole' -he flies, Miró noted on the sketch. The balloon shape with the point corresponds to the face and hat of the young man making the cat dance ( fig. 29). In the second sketch the central figure has been drawn twice and elaborated with various details. That this is a woman, as Dupin wrote, is suggested by the breast Miró drew on the meandering body, which he took from one of the sketches in which he turned the cat into a topless ballerina (figs. 25,28). What Dupin interpreted as a goat (to the right of the breast) appears rather to have been derived from the cat in Steen's painting. The linear construc tion in the right foreground, which originated in the table in Sorgh's painting, seems to have been taken from the very first sketches for Dutch Interior (1) (fig. 15).
One of the most striking aspects of Dutch Interior (ill) is the red form with two small shoes beside it. Miró had already reworked the folds of the girl's skirt in one of the sketches for Dutch Interior (it) (fig. 24). This time he emphasized its outline, in the same way as he transformed the head of the lute player and the young man with the dancing cat into large, empty shapes. The girl's blue skirt has become as red as her stockings, and she appears to have kicked off her shoes. Shoes like these frequently feature in 17thcentury Dutch interiors, for example in The Feast of St Nicholas, which was hanging in the gallery next to The Lute Player in 1928 (figs. 10,32), but Miró had already drawn a similar shoe and sock himself in The Family ( fig. 9).
As well as reusing different motifs from the preceding two paintings and the preliminary sketches, Miró also returned to his own earlier work for this painting. The 'rainbow' of three parallel curved lines, for instance, can be found in several drawings and paintings from the 1923-25 period, and even an apparently purely formal element like the dark, curved shape just above the shoes derives from a specific motif. At this point in the composition Miró wrote 'taps de suru'wine corkon one of the sketches for Dutch Interior (in) ( fig. 28 Most of the motifs in Dutch Interior (m) can be traced back to different sourcesas, indeed, can the composi tion as a whole. Miró stayed close to his 17th-century examples in the process of mutation and metamorphosis in the first two paintings in the series, but in the composition of the final work in the series an association with a subject that had been occupying him for some time appears to have been the most important factor. In one of the sketches Miró had already transformed the cat in The Dancing Lesson into a ballerina, with prominent breasts and a disproportionately large leg ( fig. 25).  Dancing figures continued to fascinate him throughout the 1920s and led to a steady output of works on the subject. One of the first Portraits of a Spanish Dancer dates from 1921 (Musée Picasso, Paris), and he even worked it up in four object collages shortly before he went to the Netherlands. The relationship with The Spanish Dancer of 1924 ( fig. 31), which was also acquired by René Gaffé, seems to have been of particular significance for Dutch Interior (in). As he had for Dutch Interior (1) and (11), Miró had worked from an illustration, in this case a photograph of a dancer on the cover of the magazine La Union illustrada.73 The composition of this 1924 work is similar in many ways to that of Dutch Interior (in): a vertically placed figure with a pronounced breast, sinuous arms and a large, dark hat. The geo metric division of the planes, too, is echoed in Dutch Interior (in), in which the background is bisected and there is IAO a prominent triangle on the right. The shoes that have been 'kicked off and the skirt spilling forwards give every impression that the form with the sweeping arm in Dutch Interior (in) is also a dancing figure.
Making music is the subject of both The Lute Player and The Dancing Lesson. In Miró's eyes, reflecting Schmidt-Degener's rehanging in the Rijksmuseum and the format imposed by the picture postcards, they became one another's 'pendants'. The step from music as the primary motif in the first two paintings to dance in the third is a small one. The dancing cat that almost disappeared in Dutch Interior (11) reappears on the scene as the central figure in the third painting. Viewed thus, the Dutch Interiors series becomes an imaginary triptych of musicians accompanying a dancer, reflecting something of Schmidt-Degener's extraordinary symmetrical compositions on the Rijksmuseum walls.    Nelly's mother also lived in The Hague.