The Dutch painter Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) and his teacher Rembrandt delighted in the same tricks of lighting, the same archaic costumes and props. Yet to look at a show of Dou's work, however charming, is a limited pleasure in comparison to with few moments in front of one undisputed Rembrandt.
Dou is being exhibited at Dulwich in a long, narrow gallery that leads you through the mausoleum for the museum's founders. His paintings are slightly morbid exercises suited to this setting, with dark interiors where old men and women read and write by candlelight and skulls are arranged in a vanitas still life.
His paintings are full of references to intellectual life. In The Quack (1652), the scholarly painter - a self-portrait - sees through a purveyor of dodgy remedies while the country folk are taken in. But Dou didn't love books - he loved paper, its crumbly texture. He loved to paint old skin, too, soft and papery by candlelight. He painted both in Old Woman Reading (c 1631-1632). This study in myopia has a walnut-faced woman pushing a volume up to her face to study an engraving. But the myopia is Dou's. This painting is based on one by Rembrandt, using the same model. Where Rembrandt's version is a study of interiority, Dou's is a painting of skin, paper and candlelight.
Dou became Rembrandt's first pupil when he was 14; Rembrandt was 22. While Dou took style from his young teacher, he never seemed to grasp what that style might be about. Dou applies Rembrandt's grand effects to orthodox Dutch genres. He paints a Still Life with Globe, Lute and Books (c 1635) in a muted palette redolent of mortality, the globe's skull-like surface caught in the weak light of the candle.
The appeal of golden age Dutch painters is their concentration on the visual world. Aelbert Cuyp sees so much in a cow's patterned hide. I'd rather look at a Cuyp cow any day than one of Dou's fussy interiors, such as Lady at Her Toilet (1667), into which he puts too many effects - a mirror, a silver vessel reflecting the light - to make the painting anything but a brilliant performance.
Dou died rich and respected; Rembrandt died in poverty. Dou's paintings were highly valued in the 18th century while Hals and Vermeer were forgotten. It was only in the late-19th century, while other Dutch painters were being rediscovered, that Dou's reputation diminished. This exhibition is part of a recent attempt to rehabilitate him, but it won't wash. You only have to stroll across the gallery to see how much he failed to learn from his teacher. The gallery's Rembrandts inhabit another world of feeling.
Until November 19. Details: 020-8693 5254.
