A Dutch master rediscovered.(Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered)

IN his classic essay "Of the Standard of Taste," David Hume asked how we could tell whether a given work was a masterpiece. "Durable admiration" was the criterion he offered. Which is to say, it's not so much our judgment as the judgment of the ages that does the sifting. Faced with the work of our contemporaries, we can announce our likes and dislikes, but we must wait upon the dispassionate adjudications of time to arrive at any authoritative discriminations. When it came to matters of aesthetic judgment, authority, for Hume, was largely a posthumous energy.

I thought about Hume's thesis as I made my way through one of this season's most engaging exhibitions: "Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered." I saw the show twice, once at the National Gallery in Washington and once at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where it is on view in Santiago Calatrava's dramatic building until April 26.

My guess is that, unless you are an expert in 17th-century Dutch painting, you have never heard of Lievens (1607-74). I hadn't, or if I had, I promptly forgot the name. Yet during his lifetime, Lievens was widely considered the equal if not the superior of his friend and fellow Leiden-born artist Rembrandt. The diplomat and cultural impresario Constantijn Huygens, who met them both in 1628, decided that Rembrandt was "superior to Lievens in his sure touch and liveliness of emotions" but that Lievens displayed "greater ... inventiveness and audacious themes and forms."

This exhibition of some 140 paintings, etchings, and drawings aims to promote Lievens from his tenancy among the footnotes of art history to an honored place in the main text. Even a quick look at Lievens's work shows that some such corrective is long overdue. The temptation of course lies in overstating the case. This is something that the curators by and large avoid. Their goal is to rescue Lievens from unjust obscurity, not to elevate him beyond his deserts.

The story of Lievens's reputation offers a fascinating study in the vicissitudes of popular taste. A year younger than Rembrandt, Lievens was clearly the more precocious of the two. Indeed, Lievens began his career as a sort of Mozart of the art world, setting up shop at the age of 12. By 14, he was producing virtuoso works. By 16, he was capable of paintings like The Cardplayers, a work of considerable psychological penetration--the loser's cuirass cannot defend him against the assaults of bad luck--as well as astonishing technical command. (The smiling chap with the blue sash and pipe, by the way, is almost certainly Rembrandt.)

In the scheme of things, the 1620s were not so long ago. But obscurity colludes with the voracious amnesia of time. Our knowledge of Lievens's life and career consists of a dozen visible milestones interspersed by numerous question marks. We know the basic itinerary. A notable debut in Leiden. To London when he was 24: another brilliant performance, with commissions from Charles I and the Earl of Arundel. Lievens learned a lot about portraiture from Anthony van Dyck (b. 1599), who included him (but not Rembrandt) in the Iconography, his famous visual chrestomathy of notable artists.

The word "peripatetic" occurs frequently in discussions of Lievens. In 1635, he went to Antwerp, where he developed a more cosmopolitan style--what the curators refer to as an "international style"--absorbing something of the drama of Rubens, the elegance of Titian. The year 1644 found Lievens in Amsterdam, where Rembrandt's star had risen and, following the death of his wife Saskia, was beginning to fade. He went to The Hague in 1654, back to Amsterdam in 1659, and then back to Leiden.