Dutch painting in the nineteenth century

REESE LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.

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DUTCH PAINTING IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY

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in 2007 with funding from

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UNIVERStTY

CONTENTS

Chap. Page

I. Introductory ' i

II. The History-painters lo

III. The Romanticists 2"]

IV. The Landscape and Genre Painters 46

V. The Forerunners of the Hague School 58

VI. The Masters of the Cabinet Picture 72

VII. The Hague School: Introduction 82

VIII. Intermezzo 125

IX. The Hague School: Sequel 133

X. The Younger Masters of the Hague School . . . .151

XI. The Reaction of the Younger Painters of Amsterdam 169

XII. The New Formula 184

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Matthys Maris .

RiENK JeLGERHUIS
TiSCHBEIN . .

Hodges . . .

J. W. PlENEMAN

N. PlENEMAN

Daiwaille . .

CORNELIS KrUSEMAN.

J. A. Kruseman

n

Ary Scheffer

Cool . . .
Schmidt . .
Spoel . . .
Van de Laar
De Bloeme .

Souvenir of Amsterdam Frontispiece

To face page

A Family Group 4

Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia . . 5

Mrs. Fraser 7

Mrs. Ziesenis — Wattier 10

The Battle of Waterloo 11

Portrait of an old Lady 12

Mrs. Leembruggen 13

The Surrender of Diepo Negoro . . 14

Portrait of a Child 15

H. van Demmeltraadt 16

Christ with Martha and Mary . . 18

The Three Sisters 20

Ada of Holland 22

Mr. A. Dieudonne' van Baerle . . 24

Reynolds the Engraver 28

Christ on the Mount of Olives. . . 30

Count Eherhard of Wurtemberg . . 31

The Weather- Glass 32

Emilia of Nassau 34

The Procession of the Rhetoricians . . 36

The Divorce 38

Miss Huyser 40

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Matthys Maris .

RiENK JeLGERHUIS
TiSCHBEIN . .

Hodges . . .

J. W. PlENEMAN

N. PlENEMAN .

Daiwaille . .

CORNELIS KrUSEMAN.

J. A. Kruseman
Ary Scheffer

Cool . . .
Schmidt . .
Spoel . . .
Van de Laar
De Bloeme .

Souvenir of Amsterdam Frontispiece

Tofacepage

A Family Group 4

Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia . . 5

Mrs. Fraser 7

Mrs. Ziesenis — Wattier 10

The Battle of Waterloo ii

Portrait of an old Lady 12

Mts. Leembruggen 13

The Surrender of Diepo Negoro . . 14

Portrait of a Child 15

H. van Demmeltraadt 16

Christ with Martha and Mary . . 18

The Three Sisters 20

Ada of Holland 22

Mr. A. Dieudonne' van Baerle . . 24

Reynolds the Engraver 28

Christ on the Mount of Olives. . . 30

Count Eherhard of Wurtemberg . . 31

The Weather- Glass 32

Emilia of Nassau 34

The Procession of the Rhetoricians . . 36

TTie Divorce 38

Miss Huyser 40

viii List of Illustrations

To face page

De Bloeme Baron van Omphal .... 42

J. G. SCHWARTZE .... Portrait of Himself. .... 44

Van der Laen Landscape 48

KoBELL Landscape in Gelderland. . . 50

Van Troostwijk .... Landscape in Gelderland. . . 52

Westenberg View in Amsterdam .... 54

Bauer Still Water 55

Johannes Jelgerhuis . . The Laboratory 56

Hendriks Notary Kohne and his Clerk . 57

De Lelie Woman making Cakes ... 58

Van de Sande Bakhuijzen. Landscape in Holland ... 60

SCHOTEL Rough Water 61

Meijer A Rough Sea 62

SCHELFHOUT Landscape 63

NUYEN The Old Mill 64

B. J. VAN Hove . . . . A Church 65

Hubert W. van Hove . . The Knitter 66

Greive The Return from the Herring-
fishery 68

KOEKKOEK A Forest View 69

J. W. Bilders Wolfhezen Heath 70

The Little Lake 71

Bles Figure of a Woman . . . . yz

The Ninth Day 74

Barker Korf The Ballad 76

Allebe Compulsory Intercourse . . . 78

The Well-Guarded Child . . 80

Jan Weissenbruch . . . Inner Yard of the Town Hall

at Kuilenhurg 82

Hanedoes Landscape in Kennemerland. . 83

A. C. Bilders Landscape 84

Bosboom ....... Interior of a Church .... 90

„ The Treshing- Floor 92

List of Illustrations ix

To face page

JozEF Israels Portrait of Himself ... 94

„ , The woman at the window. 96

„ „ When a Body grows old . 98

„ „ Children of the Sea . . . 100

„ „ The Sexton and his Wife. lOi

RoELOFS After the Rain . . . .102

Jacob Maris View of a Village . . .104

„ „ The Shell- Gatherers . . .105

„ „ A little Girl at the Piano. 106

„ „ The Cradle 107

, The Bird Cage .... 108

Matthijs Maris Portrait of a child . . .109

„ „ The Four Windmills. . .110

„ „ Siska Ill

„ „ In the Slums 112

WiLLEM Maris The White Cow . . . .113

„ „ Luxurious Summer . . .114

„ „ Ducks in their Element. . 115

Mauve Ploughing 116

„ Horses drinking . . . .117

„ Winter 118

Verschuur Stormy Weather . . . .118

Ter Meulen A Sheepfold in Drenthe . 119

H. W. Mesdag Night at Scheveningen . .120

„ A Beach in Winter. . . 121

„ Fishing-smacks returning to

Scheveningen 122

H. J. Weissenbruch .... Landscape 123

Gabriel View near Ahcoude . . .124

JoNGKiND View of Overschie . . .126

Oyens After the Day's Work . .128

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Willem van Saeftinghen . 130

Neuhuys The First Lesson. . . .133

X List of Illustrations

To face page

Blommers Mother's Joy 134

Artz Mourning 135

BisscHOP The Cup 136

„ Winter in Friesland . . .137

RoCHUSSEN A Fish- Cart with Dogs resting 138

JJ.vandeSandeBakhuijzen. View in the Hague . . .139

De Haas Early Morning 140

Nakken Pack-horses 141

Sadee Gleaning 142

HenriEtte Ronner-Knip . . Among Ourselves .... 142

SiNA Mesdag-van Houten . In Twikkel Wood .... 142

Maria Vos Still Life 143

De Bock On the Heelsum Road . . 144

Apol A January Day 144

Klinkenberg The Hofje van Dam . . .145

Van Rossum Duchattel . . Winter Landscape . , . .146

Poggenbeek By the Pool 146

Bastert Oudaen Castle 147

Therese Schwartze. . . . The Baroness Michiels van

Verduijnen 148

JOSSELIN DE Jong Jonkheer Victor de Stuers. . 149

„ . "T . . . The Melting House . . .150

Breitner Portrait of Himself. . . .152

The White Horse .... 153

„ Winter in Amsterdam. . .154

SuzE BisscHOP-RoBERTSON. . Gifl Besting 155

IsaAc Israels On the Beach 156

Tholen A Butcher's Shop . . . .158

De Zwart Girl Reading 160

Van der Maarel .... Little Sis 162

Verster Flowers 164

Bauer At the Well 166

„ The Kremlin 168

Veth ....

» ....

Haver MAN . .

Derkinderen .

Van Looy . .
Voerman . .
Karsen . . .

WiLLEM WiTSEN
TOOROP . . .

Van Gogh . .
Van der Valk

List of Illustrations xi

To face page

. F. Lebret 170

. Professor A. D. Lohman 172

. /. H. Krelage 174

. TTie Knitting-Lesson . 175

. The Postern Gate 176

. Duke Henry of Brabant . . . . . .177

. Portrait of Himself 178

. On the River. 179

. Enkhuizen 180

. Winter 182

. Elsje 184

. The Wave 185

. The Potato-eaters 186

. Bridge at Aries 188

. The Cypresses 190

. A Willow Tree 196

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The seventeenth century bequeathed to the eight-
eenth three painters all of whom — and two in particular
— heralded the spirit of the new age in matters of con-
ception, colour and execution. The greatest of the three,
Jacob de Wit, who was called the Rubens of his
time, is esteemed as an historical painter — he executed
a part of the Orange Room at the House in the
Wood — and is world-famous for his painted bas-reliefs,
the so-called witjgSy in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam
and elsewhere. These not only excel as extraordinary
imitations of marble, to which De Wit owes his
popularity, but the natural attitudes and grouping
of the cherubs prove him to be, without a doubt,
the greatest Dutch decorative artist of the eighteenth
century. The second was Jan M. Quinckhard, who,
as Van der Willigen says, " was a very good, yes,
we venture to say, in many respects an excellent
portrait- painter ; he was particularly fortunate in his
likenesses, his drawing was accurate, his brushwork
good and his colouring soft and delicate. " He, like
De Wit, belongs entirely to the eighteenth century

2 Introductory

in ideas and his work did little to contribute towards
the transition of the painted portrait from the seven-
teenth century to the nineteenth. The same may
be said of the third painter, Cornelis Troost, who,
in spite of certain drawings that remind us of the
seventeenth century and, in particular, of the somewhat
artificial elegance of Nicolaas Maes, was essentially a
man of his time. All his work in various mediums
is too strongly imbued with the eighteenth-century
spirit to permit us to regard him as a result or con-
sequence of the previous century. Not that he can
have troubled much about the matter, for abundant
fame was his portion, so much so that he was known,
in his day, as the Dutch Hogarth, a comparison
which, like most of its kind, contained but a minimum
of truth.

If, nevertheless, we insist upon considering these
three painters as offshoots of our great century,
then we must needs add that they were the last
effort of an exhausted soil. The art of painting declined
into the art of decoration or scene-painting, the pain-
ter's workshop was transformed into the tapestry-
factory. The minute, concentrated charm of our
so-called little masters expanded itself into painted
hangings; the stately portraits of the time degenerated,
with few exceptions, into the pale, powdered pastels
that seemed deliberately designed for the representation
of the caricatural periwig.

Still, if only for the reason that the eighteenth cen-
tury contains the predecessors or, at any rate, the
teachers of the painters of the nineteenth century,
it is well worth while to consider these decoration-
painters from another point of view than that of

Introductory 3

the applied art which owed its prosperity to the
luxury of the merchant-princes of Amsterdam, Rot-
terdam, Dordrecht and Middelburg. For not only
had the best of these decoration-painters learnt their
art as real painters and merely altered the character
of their productions in obedience to the whims of
the day: most of them did paint or draw land-
scapes or portraits and prove that they had it in
their power to satisfy a demand for real painting,
should it ever arise. For instance, in the Fodor
Museum in Amsterdam, certain drawings by the
tapestry-painter and manufacturer, Jacob Cats, display
a strength, an old- Dutch quality, an originality which
we should hardly have expected to find in those
days. This Jacob Cats was born in 1 74 1 at Altona
and came with his parents, at an early age, to
Amsterdam, where he achieved considerable success
with both his hangings and drawings ; and, although
the tapestries are no longer easy to find, his drawings
go to show that he lacked the affectation, if not the
prolixity, that clung to many of those painters,
especially towards the end of the century. They
are very pleasantly executed, were greatly esteemed
in their day and still fetch good prices under the
hammer. Cats died 1799.

Another tapestry-painter of note is Hendrik Meijer,
born in Amsterdam in 1737, who also drew land-
scapes in body-colour, sap-colour and Indian ink.

His Scheveningen Beach, a picture that formed
part of the Des Tom be collection at the Hague,
is said to have been his master-piece and to be pref-
erable in many respects to a sea-piece by Schotel.

4 Introductory

From our point of view, however, this painter's chief
claim to importance lies in the fact that he was
the teacher of various nineteenth-century artists. He
died in London in 1793.

Aart Schouman, an eighteenth-century painter
living at Dordrecht, preserved the seventeenth-century
traditions more intrinsically, in so far as externals were
concerned, and continued to paint corporation-pieces,
which, if they cannot be reckoned among the finest
of their kind, are at least able to hold their own.
The fact is that many of these painters retained the
arrangement of the old masters and copied them so
industriously, often in water-colour or pastel, that they
ended by making their style their own and frequently
lapsed into contenting themselves with the production
of but slightly altered copies. It is even said that
Boymans, the famous collector, was induced to buy
an interior by Laqui, one of those painters, under
the impression that he was purchasing a Gerard Dou.
We may take it, then, that these painters were still
connected by a fine thread with the landscape-painters
of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, so
great were the demands of decoration-painting upon
their strength and energy, that they had sunk remark-
ably low in the matter of portrait-painting. And yet
portraits were asked for not only by the princes
and the aristocracy, but also by the well-to-do mid-
dle class. The tapestry-painters produced a number
of small family-portraits, mostly naive and weak,
although occasionally distinguished by a certain deli-
cacy of conception. In addition to Adriaan de Lelie,
Jean Auguste Daiwaille and others, part of whose

'''^'^ OFTHt >

^' 'JNIVERSIT

H.R.H. PRINCESS WILHELMIXA OF PRUSSIA, CONSORT OF WILLIAM V.
STADTHOLDER OF THE NETHERLANDS — J. F. A, TISCHBEIN

{Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Introductory 5

work comes within the nineteenth century, and a few
miniature-painters, of whom Temminck was one of
the foremost, portraits were executed, for the
greater part, by travelling portrait-painters, including
Rienk Jelgerhuis, who has no fewer than 7,763 stand-
ing to his credit. Or, again, people would sit for
their portraits in the course of the endless journeys
which it was at that time their custom to take.
This applied especially to miniatures, which were
painted, so as to be easily portable, in lockets, on
watch-keys, rings or snuff-boxes. And, although these
were affected by the general decline, they sometimes
displayed a daintiness of draughtsmanship, a softness
of colouring and, above all, a certain "distinction" to
which few of the larger portraits of the time can lay claim.
The French painters who frequented the luxurious
Courts of the Bourbons or who followed in the
wake of Napoleon and had more orders within the
limits of the empire than they were able to execute
were much too busy to visit less favoured countries
on the chance of picking up commissions for portraits.
The case was the same with the great English
painters; so that this branch of industrial art was
reserved, for the most part, for the Germans. Their
portraits were stiff and expressionless. The grouping
of the small family-portraits, usually in pastel, sug-
gested the traditional semi-circle in which Moli^re is
played at the Th6^tre Fran^ais. They seemed, how-
ever, to give pleasure to the purchasers; and,
to tell the truth, on looking into these unpretentious
little family-groups, we find that they present a more
general family-resemblance and are more lifelike than
most of the photographic portraits of thirty years ago.

6 Introductory

The two principal portrait-painters who came from
foreign countries at the end of the eighteenth century
were Tischbein and Hodges. Johann Friedrich
August Tischbein, although born at Maastricht in
1750, belonged entirely to the German school. He
was one of the few younger men who escaped the
prevailing classicism of his time. His preference
for portrait-painting drove him to foreign Courts;
and for fourteen years he painted at the Hague, at
the Court of the Stadtholder and his family. He
was a competent and pleasant painter, who reproduced
the powdered wigs and the features of his sitters
in a refined manner. His portraits of women are of
value for our time; and the many pictures which
he painted of Wilhelmina of Prussia, the consort of
William V., with her powdered hair, vivacious features
and the fine colouring of the green dresses, in which
he excelled, are in good taste on the whole.

He was famed for the naturalness of his ideas,
but, as times were, was unable to exercise any
influence upon the nineteenth century. The eighteenth
century, with its sensibility, its gallantry, its powder,
patches and pastels, had retreated before the
harshness of the heroic emotions, decked in classic
garb, with which David opened the nineteenth.
Tischbein died in 1812.

The other, Charles Howard Hodges (1764 — 1837),
was a painter of greater importance, a man of excellent
gifts, whose portraits strike one at once by their
elegance, their bright colouring and their supple,
if somewhat weak workmanship. Kramm, in his
Lives and Works of the Dutch and Flemish Painters^

II UNIVERSITY

MRS. FRASER — C. H. HODGES
(Rijksmuseiim, Amsterdam)

Introductory 7

praises him for the subtle manner in which he flat-
tered his sitters. To us he is the portrait-painter of
the Empire period; and, although, at a later date,
he painted King William L, he also gave us the
portraits of Grand pensionary Schimmelpenninck and
of Mrs. Ziesenis-Wattier, the famous actress of the
time. If he is not to be compared with the great
English portrait- painters of the eighteenth century,
the fact remains that he possessed something of
their taste and especially something of the supple
method, the easy, fluent modelling that so greatly
distinguished Sir Thomas Lawrence. Hodges was a
member of the commission which, after the restora-
tion of Dutch independence, brought back from
Paris the paintings that had been taken from us by
the French.

It must needs arouse surprise that this portrait-
painter did not become the head of a school in his
day. True, his talent was distinguished rather than
powerful ; but, indeed, the polish and refinement of his
work are not be despised, especially when we consider
at what a low ebb our fortunes then were. His
chief pupil was Cornelis Kruseman, who failed to
acquire or, at least, to retain his bright colouring,
his supple and natural draughtsmanship or his
qualities of distinction . Nevertheless, Hodges may have
exercised an indirect influence upon his contempo-
raries. For instance, we find in Pieneman's Battle
of Waterloo a cast of features which seems related to
those which Hodges portrayed. On the other hand,
this may be simply the English type ; for Pieneman
painted portraits for this picture in England. Per-
haps J. A. Kruseman, Cornelis Kruseman 's kinsman

8 Introductory

and pupil, preserved more of Hodges* characteristics
than any one else.

England, the land of the poets, was at that time
rejoicing in a school of painting which, although
mainly based upon the old Dutchmen and Italians,
had recently, under Reynolds and Gainsborough,
developed into a purely English school. Followed
the passionate figure of the poet-painter William
Blake, who stood at the entrance to a new century
in which Constable and Turner wrought their
artistic revolution. Germany had found in Beethoven
the loftiest expression of her period of musical creation,
an expression which was so brilliantly to influence
the whole of the musical and also of the pictorial life
of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Ger-
many was celebrating the heyday of her civilization
in the little States where, amid this general budding
of great minds, Goethe introduced the experiment-
al novel into literature, Novalis wrote his Hymns
to Night and Heine, a little later, proclaimed the
eternity of romance, while in the art of painting,
overshadowed by the theories of Winckelmann, she
was able to point to his disciple Anton Rafael Mengs
and the fortunately more independent Chodowiecki. In
Spain, the country where great painters appear
like meteors, Goya had opened a new era. In
France, weary of the carnage that had marked her
Revolution, David, the man of iron ability, after
glorifying the Republic under Robespierre, called
into being, on the ruins of the eighteenth century,
an imperial art which came to maturity under
Napoleon and became the foundation of a school of

Introductory 9

painting that kept France at the head of the artistic
world for well-nigh a century.

To us, who had lost our liberty, our independence,
our strength and who possessed so very little in
the domain of art, the beginning of the nineteenth
century brought nothing but humiliation upon humi-
liation. Our national existence appeared to be wiped
out. We were without power of action or, conse-
quendy, of reaction. True, the seventeenth century
had borne fruit in such superabundance that two
successive centuries have not sufficed to make us
realize it fully. The soil had exhausted itself in
producing the miraculous figure of Rembrandt, the
epitome of all latent, conscious and unconscious
forces, of all the instincts of a people, of the gospel
of a nation rejuvenated by its newly-acquired liberty;
of Rembrandt, in whom for us the seventeenth
century is personified and incarnate. And a long
period of rest was needed before the soil would
once more become fertile and produce an artist, a
dreamer whose genius should fall like a ray of light
into a scientific age.

CHAPTER II
THE HISTORY-PAINTERS

It would be impossible to write the history of Dutch
painting in the nineteenth century without naming
Jan Willem Pieneman as its founder, even though
it were only because he was the valued master of
Jozef Israels. This opinion may be regarded as
hackneyed and antiquated; and it may be argued
that Pieneman and Kruseman and their like did more
harm than good to Dutch art, inasmuch as they led
it into strange paths. But, apart from the fact that
this extraneous tendency was the prevailing one in
every country, Pieneman may be credited with having,
by the strength of his personality, raised painting
to the position of an independent art, able to produce
a more powerful school than could ever hope to
arise from the continual copying of seventeenth-
century master-pieces.

Pieneman was born at Abcoude in 1770 and
destined for a commercial career, for which, however,
he was disinclined. He therefore resolved to enter
a factory of painted hangings, intending at the same
time to learn something of the painter's trade. In

MRS. ZIESENIS-WATTIER — J. W. PIENEMAN
{Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

OF THE ^r'

■ERSITV

>^ OF THE ^>'

UNIVERSITY

or y

The History-painters n

the evenings, he drew from the antique and the
nude at the Amsterdam Academy, which appears
to have been very deficiently equipped, so much so
that, according to Van Eynden and Van der Willigen,
Pieneman's chief instructor was his own genius. To
provide for his maintenance, he began to give lessons
at an early date and had to accept commissions to
colour prints. In 1805, he was appointed drawing-
master to the School of Artillery and Engineering,
then still at Amersfoort, and, although he had, in the
meantime, won prizes and painted portraits and land-
scapes, he continued to fill the post until 18 16,
when King William I. gave him the directorship of
the royal collection at the Hague. Four years later,
he was appointed the first president of the Royal
Academy of Fine Arts.

Neither his landscapes nor his portraits brought
Pieneman the fame which was soon to resound beyond
the frontiers of our country. His first success was his
Heroism of the Prince of Orange at Quatre-BraSj a
large picture, twenty feet by thirteen, painted by
order of the government for presentation to the
prince. Before reaching its final destination in the
palace at Soestdijk, it was exhibited in Amsterdam,
Brussels and Ghent and, according to Immerzeel,
was praised for its broad and powerful style, its
accurate drawing and its fidelity to nature.

This was followed by The Battle of Waterloo^ the
sketch for which is in the Duke of Wellington's
possession. The picture, which is twenty-seven feet
wide by eighteen high, represents the moment at
which the Prince of Orange is being carried, wounded,
from the battle-field. The chief figures are painted

12 The History-painters

with attention to details and the wounded prince is
thrown into much less prominence than the figure
of Wellington himself, who stands like an equestrian
statue in the centre of the picture, which serves as an
apotheosis of the British field-marshal. Pieneman
paid three several visits to London to paint portraits
for this historical piece: during one of these, 1819
to 1 82 1, he was the guest of the Duke of Wellington
and, in addition to the necessary studies, painted a
number of portraits of the leading nobility. In order
to produce his large picture, for which he had no
commission, he built a studio outside Amsterdam,
beyond the Leiden Gate. Here he was visited by
King William L, who bought the painting for forty
thousand guilders for presentation to the Prince of
Orange. It was exhibited in Ghent, Brussels and
London and altogether earned about one hundred
thousand guilders for the artist.

Pieneman painted many portraits in Holland as
well as in England and in these his artistic tem-
perament is most strongly displayed. One might say
of him that he had little of the refined classicism
which is to be met with in neighbouring countries ;
that he possessed more temperament than education,
more common sense than intuition and that he was
entirely devoid of the pictorial sense which was
never lacking in the seventeenth century. But that
he possessed a real artist*s temperament is proved
by his often rough, but always forcible portraits;
and, although far from being a quick draughtsman,
he had a good idea of the construction of a head,
which enabled him to turn out his portraits rapidly
enough. He died in 1854.

PORTRAIT OF AN OLD LADY— J. W. PIENEMAN

(Rifksmusfum, Amsterdam)

■Y - OF THE ^K

'{ 'UNIVERSITY

MRS. LEEMBRUGGEN — J. VV. PIENEMAN
[The property of Mr. J. Lecmbrnggen, Amsterdam)

The History-painters 13

The Battle of Waterloo shows none of those pas-
sions, of that hatred born of impotence, which
urged the Allies forward on that summer's day.
The figures of the Duke of Wellington and the
other persons in the foreground are good portraits ;
but neither their attitude nor their action conveys
the impression that a fierce and critical contest is
taking place. Nor has Pieneman's drawing the sup-
pleness necessary to express a great moment. And
yet he possessed what the born artist who, with
scanty means, conquers for himself a place in a
barren period must needs possess : he had energy
and influenced his times. Jozef Israels has said
of him that he was a genius who grew up in an
inartistic age; and it was not his fault if the times
in which he lived prevented him from developing
himself In a society in a state of transformation,
where, on the one hand, men, proud of their reco-
vered nationality, asked for topical pictures representing
the heroic deeds of the day, while, on the other hand,
a pious tendency held sway and called for religious
or kindred subjects strictly confined to the limits of the
middle-class virtues, there was no opportunity for
the exaltation of painting pure and simple and I* Art
pour I' art for once became a misplaced maxim.

And then think of the makeshifts with which
Pieneman had to content himself Burdened by
an early marriage, he painted his Quatre-Bras in
a small upper-part in the Nes, where he had to
roll up one half of his enormous canvas, crammed
with life-size equestrian figures, in order to paint
the other half. He must have possessed a certain
strength of will, a remarkable power of representation,

H The History-painters

to complete a work of this kind in circumstances
such as these. And yet, though he was honoured
in his time and distinguished by his sovereign,
though he was socially esteemed and lived in "a
stately house on a canal, " though one may say
of him that he was a great man in a slack time,
he will never occupy a place in the ranks of our
great painters nor even stand among our " litde
masters." His chief services to art were rendered
as director of the Amsterdam Academy. Israels
describes him as an excellent drawing-master, tho-
roughly acquainted with the mathematics of the
nude and unrivalled in the suggestion of an outline
with a bit of chalk or charcoal. And it is certain
that, as the master of Jozef Israels, who drew for
seven years under his guidance and never speaks of
him other than with respect and esteem, he deserves
an honourable place in the memory of us all.

Nicolaas Pieneman, his son and pupil, was bom
at Amersfoort in 1810, died in i860 and enjoyed —
chiefly at the Hague, where he lived — an even
greater favour than his father, thanks to his many
portraits of the royal family. It is a pure delight
to hear Jozef Israels reply, when asked how the
younger Pieneman painted:

" Klaas Pieneman was a courtier ; at an exhibition,
he used to walk arm in arm with William the Third ! "

He had neither his father's temperament nor vigour
and, possibly by way of a reaction against the
latter's frequent want of polish, he painted in a soapy
and feeble style, especially his royal portraits,
which are smooth and insipid and devoid of all life.

OF THE 'T):?*

'FRSITY

PORTRAIT OF A CHILD — NICOLAAS PIENEMAN
{Fodor Museum, Ainstcrdani)

The History-painters 15

On the other hand, he must not be judged entirely
by his royal portraits: the portrait of his father in
the Rijksmuseum and a Head of a Man in the
Municipal Museum of Amsterdam are better, although
in these too he misses the naturalness that distinguished
his father. And, if he had not that charming Por-
trait of a Child in the Fodor Museum standing to his
credit, there would be little say about him but that
he was greatly liked and lived in a fine house in
the Hague. This portrait, however, places him in
a different category and we will gladly forgive him
his smooth official portraits for the sake of the great
feeling in this little picture.
His contemporaries judged differently. Kramm writes :

" It is a pleasure to me to be able to write a page
in the history of art which gready increases the fame
of the Dutch school of painting of our own times.
It concerns the brilliant talent of that celebrated painter,
Nicolaas Pieneman, who has achieved an European
reputation with his many famous master-pieces."

He mentions a whole array of royal presents, of
gold snuff-boxes richly adorned with brilliants and
enamels, and enumerates an endless series of portraits
of King William II., of the Crown-prince, afterwards
William III., of the latter's sons the Princes William
and Alexander, of Princess Sophie, of the suites of
the King and the Crown-prince. Nicolaas Pieneman
was the first painter to receive the Order of the
Netherlands Lion ; and it must be added that he was
honoured not only in his own country, but also — or
was it his royal models? — in Paris, for, at the

1 6 The History-painters

International Exhibition of 1855, he was given the
Legion of Honour for his life-size portrait of William
III., in naval uniform, and of his royal father.

Jean Augustin Daiwaille was born at Cologne in
1789 and, as a child, accompanied his parents to
Holland, where he was educated for a painter by
Adriaan de Lelie. Although his little genre-pieces
met with considerable favour in their time, he was
valued by his contemporaries mostly as a painter of
portraits distinguished for their breadth of execution
and their resemblance to the originals. He became
director of the Amsterdam Academy of Plastic Arts
and resigned his appointment in order to accompany
an agent of the Dutch Trading Company to Brazil.
Upon maturer consideration, he abandoned this plan
and founded a lithographic establishment. Later, he
settled at Rotterdam, where he occupied himself
with portrait- painting until his death in 1850.

There is a certain want of definiteness about this
short biography by Immerzeel and it is repeated
in the account of Daiwaille's pupil, Cornelis K ruse-
man, who is said to have learnt his broad brushwork
from Hodges, whereas Daiwaille, who was never
satisfied with his work and never succeeded in finish-
ing it, is supposed to have taught him only how
not to paint. However, it often happens that later
generations pass a different judgment ; and many will
discover finer qualities in the hesitations of this
painter and pastellist than in the work of his over-
praised pupil. Daiwaille's Portrait of Himself 2X the
Rijksmuseum confirms the first impression : it shows
us the melancholy face of one whose nature was his

VAN DEMMELTKAADT — J. A. DAIWAILLE

{Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam]

The History-painters 17

own worst enemy. The modernity of the analysis
is astonishing in the pale-blue eyes; and the whole
face is painted with a sincerity which none but a
sensitive character would offer. The Portrait of Him-
self at Boymans' Museum is a more pleasant picture ;
and the same museum contains his very dainty
Portrait of a Woman, in pastel. His best portrait,
however, is that of H. van Demmeltraadt.

Although Cornelis Kruseman dates back to the
end of the eighteenth century (he was born in
1 797 and died in 1854), he can hardly be considered
a man of Jan Pieneman's generation. Not that the
elder Kruseman helped Dutch painting forward: on
the contrary, while Pieneman preserved, if not the
artistic culture, at least the simplicity of the eighteenth
century, Kruseman, endowed with less temperament,
a greater desire for refinement and less vigour,
displayed a hankering after more pronounced forms
and, in the absence of a natural gift of colour, em-
ployed hard tones for his biblical or Italian subjects
and, in general, turned the art of painting into an
uncouth classicism.

Meanwhile, it appears that Kruseman showed a
decided aptitude for painting at a very early age;
anyway, in 18 19, he made a great success at an
exhibition at the Hague with a picture representing
a blind beggar, lighted by a paper lantern, whose
appearance had always impressed him as he went down
the Spui of an evening. People thought that they
had found a Dou, a Schalcken Redivivus; and he
received many orders for candle-light effects, all of
which he refused, because it was not his object in

2

i8 The History-painters

life to imitate candle-light and he took no pleasure
in such things. He strove to express the loftier
matters in human nature and he felt offended that it
had not been recognized at once that he had painted
this picture only because of the venerable head of
the beggar. He aimed further than the Dutch genre-
painters, whose manner he considered insignificant
and undignified. This was the time when David was
decking out his heroes in the form and garb of antiquity ;
it was also the time when Italy was regarded as the
land of promise, as the cradle of art and when
Raphael's smooth outlines were held to possess a
distinction by comparison with which Rembrandt was
often considered vulgar : an opinion shared by some
of the younger literary men until as late as 1880.
In 182 1, Kruseman went via Paris to Italy, stayed
three years in Rome and came back confirmed in his
predilections. He began by painting biblical sub-
jects and Roman peasants, the latter supplying him
with the classical models which he had sought in vain
in his own country. Nevertheless, he sacrificed him-
self in his turn to the national enthusiasm which had
made the elder Pieneman the history-painter of Quatre-
Bras and Waterloo and which drove Kruseman to
paint a later episode : H. R. H. the Prince of Orange
at the moment when his horse was wounded at Bau-
terzeuy 12 August i8ji, a picture which, like Piene-
man's, may be looked upon as a sort of continuation
of the doelen- or corporation-pieces. But this inter-
lude had no influence upon the remainder of his
work. The culture which he had acquired during
his stay in Paris and his Italian journey had gra-
dually alienated him from his own nationality. A

CHRIST WITH MARTHA AND MARY — CORNELIS KRUSEMAN

{The property of Mrs. Labonchere, Zeisf)

The History-painters 19

long stay in Italy has never proved other than
detrimental to any of our painters. It simply meant
that they returned home seeing things from a point
of view quite at variance with our national feeling.
Ecclesiastical art brought into a Protestant country
by a Protestant Dutchman must needs become thea-
trical. And in technique also Kruseman was doomed
to fall short ; for, though his ideas were formed upon
the Italian masters of the Renascence and upon Raphael
in particular, he lacked the feeling and the technical
knowledge necessary to emulate the peculiar qualities
of those masters. All that we can say, therefore,
is that Kruseman knew how, at a given moment,
to give to a certain public exactly what it demanded,
namely, an ideal conception of biblical figures, devoid
of sensual charm or passion. And the result was that,
although theologians wrote in indignant terms to
protest that this great man was indulging in anachro-
nism in his biblical subjects and in spite of virulent
criticism, he enjoyed a fame so universal as to exceed
that ever known by Jozef Israels, Jacob Maris, or
even by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, who was so
much more easily understood outside his own
painting-room than either of the others.

Nor can this be called unnatural. The pictorial
art of the Pienemans, of the Krusemans and, in
particular, of Cornelis Kruseman was a direct echo
of their time. As an historical painter in a period
of newly-awakened national consciousness, Pieneman
was the right man in the right place and he owes
his reputation to his delineation of Quatre-Bras and
the battle of Waterloo, which set the seal upon our
liberty and renewed our compact with the House of

20 The History-painters

Orange, to which the episode of the wounded
Crown-prince lent an emotional side.

Kruseman, who had begun with a similar subject,
devoted himself later on, after the peace had restored
the ancestral Calvinism in a stricter form, mainly
to the painting of Bible subjects, which were
greatly admired for their " idealistic conception, "
to use the then prevailing phrase so popular in pious
circles :

" Probably no people has at any time been more
devoted to home-reading of an edifying character
than our Protestant fellow-countrymen, " says A. C.
Kruseman in his History of the Book-trade.

Cornelis Kruseman's phlegmatic ideas were in the
taste of the day : any passion would have disturbed
the tranquillity of a view of life which demanded that
everything should be gentle, pious and noble. The
seventeenth-century paintings and prints, selected by
a few, were thought low and common compared with
the engravings published in the elegant almanacks
of those days and accompanied by letterpress by
serious authors. And the scenes of Italian peasant-
life, the Neapolitan women, the pifferari, with their
dark features, their sharp outlines against a blue
sky, had what was known as a certain " nobility "
of line which formed a great contrast with the
vulgar Dutch people, the vulgar old-Dutch paintings,
and which pleased the ladies.

And yet it was not only the women who formed
the ranks of Kruseman's worshippers ; these included
practically everybody: the King, the Queen and,
more, the painters. In connection with his St.
John the Baptist^ a painting which he had executed

THE THREE SISTERS — CORNELIS KRUSEMAN
(The property of Mr. J. D. Kruscntan, the Hague)

The History-painters 21

for the most part during his second stay in Rome,
the Hague artists united to offer him a lasting me-
morial of the admiration with which they were
seized at the contemplation of that work. This
testimonial took the form of a silver cup, with
cover and dish, beautifully designed and chased in
the style of the sixteenth century and engraved with
a suitable inscription in rhyme immortalizing the
homage paid by the Dutch school to Kruseman
after seeing his SL John, while a vellum document
with Gothic illuminations spoke in well-chosen words
of the painter's imperishable fame.

Public favour is fickle. The lasting duration
which the inscription prophesied was fulfilled neither
figurative nor literally. Most of his great works no
longer exist. Thanks to his habit of continual repaint-
ing— Kruseman was not easily pleased with himself —
and of constant treatment with some siccative or
other, a process to which perhaps he did not give
enough care, it happened that the paint, which was
never quite dry under the surface, began to sink,
so that the upper portion became unrecognizable,
and, while the hands of the Baptist of the picture,
at that time in the collection of King William II.,
had dropped to the ground, the head hung where
the hands should be and great lumps of paint were
heaped up at the bottom against the frame. The
case is not without parallel: the same thing is
told of English painters insufficiently acquainted
with the secrets of their craft. Only a few of
Kruseman's pictures escaped this fate, including the
four religious paintings in Mrs. Labouchere's chateau
at Zeist, his best work ; a portrait of Three Sisters ;

22 The History-painters

and some of his other portraits and smaller pic-
tures.

But the lasting fame that makes us mourn what is
lost the more we admire what has been preserved, this
also was denied him. His was not an art that excelled
in artistic merit or originality of ideas : it owed its
existence and its success to the conception of the
subject, which, being the product of his time, was
bound to die with the spirit of that time.

His chief pupils were Jan Adam Kruseman, his
cousin, in whose studio Jozef Israels was to work
in later years, Vintcent, who, although he died
young, turned with all his soul towards the romantic
movement, Jan Hendrik and Johan Philip Koelman,
of whom the latter was to prove the last adherent
to classicism, David Bles, whom one would not
expect to find here, Herman ten Kate, De Poorter,
Elink Sterk and Ehnle.

Jan Adam Kruseman, born at Haarlem in 1804,
is best known as a portrait-painter. His portraits
were praised as good likenesses and excellent pictures.
The fact is that, without showing the artistry of
the old Dutchmen, they do impress us by their
simplicity and a certain style. Jan Kruseman did
not try to complete his education in Italy, but, after
the departure of his master, Cornells, for that country,
worked for two years in Brussels under the great
David and went from there to Paris, whence he
returned in 1825 and made a start with The Invention of
Printing by Laurens Rosier. He also began to paint
corporation-pieces for the Baptist community at Haar-
lem and the Amsterdam Leper Hospital. Although,

ADA OF HOLLAND — J. A, KRUSEMAN
{Tcylefs Institute, Haarlem)

The History-painters 23

in his historical and biblical subjects, we are able to
recognize a love of pronounced forms showing the
influence of David or perhaps even more of Ingres,
he possessed neither the vigour nor the tenacity of
these painters. On the other hand, there was some-
thing in his colouring and his modelling that was
more free and natural than in the elder Kruseman's
and yet not to so great an extent that these pieces
can be valued by posterity apart from historical
associations. The case is different with his portraits,
although in these he is terribly uneven. His simple
and natural portrait of Adriaan van der Hoop, his
Portrait of Himself in the museum at Haarlem,
conceived in the style of Ingres, and a portrait of
a more pictorial character exhibited under his name
in the same gallery might have been painted by
three different artists.

He had a great name as a painter and was
especially valued as a portrait-painter, in which
capacity, according to his contemporaries, he made
thirty thousand guilders a year. He led an excellent
life in Amsterdam, was a jolly companion, kind to
his brother- artists, helping them when he could,
and later, as director of the Academy, a zealous
teacher. Together with T6tar van Elven, he founded
the society known as Arti et Amicitise and, with it, the
Artists' Widows and Orphans Fund. He died in 1862.
The best-kown of his biblical subjects is Tlu
Widow's Mite^ popularized through Steelink's engra-
ving. De Genestet wrote a poem on it and the
grave conception — we do not know the painting
itself — and popular subject made it a favourite
ornament for the sitting-room. He had as litde

24 The History-painters

romanticism in him as the elder Kruseman; only
his ideas were a little less uncouth, less prejudiced,
less hard, though quite as passionless.

Of all Cornelis Kruseman*s pupils, the Koelmans
alone remained faithful to the principles which their
teacher proclaimed. Johan Philip Koelman (1818 —
1 893) stood like a solitary on the ruins of classicism and
became the more fanatical the more he saw his fellow-
students and his own pupils departing in another direc-
tion. Jan Hendrik (1820 — 1887), the second of the
brothers, went straight from Kruseman's studio to
Rome and continued to live there till the day of
his death. He painted many portraits and was,
according to Vosmaer, who knew him in Rome, " a
great artistic expert, a philosophical spirit, a most
important man, yes, the type of a certain sort of
artist: practical, experienced and positive in his
execution, he is, at the same time, by nature a
philosopher, whose deep-felt artistic speculations find
utterance in fluent words and thoughts. " Jan Daniel
(i 83 1 — 1 85 7), a younger brother, the talented pupil of
J. B. Tom the animal-painter, made excellent studies
of draught-oxen in the South, went on to paint Dutch
pastures with cattle and gave cause to expect that,
had he not died at the early age of twenty-six, he
might have developed into an independent and ac-
complished landscape-painter.

Johan Philip was born at the Hague and was
brought up to his father's trade as a carpenter. He
soon showed a taste for painting, studied under
Kruseman and followed the latter to Rome, where
he remained for fifteen years, painting, drawing and

M. A. DIEUDONNE VAN BAERLE— J. A. KRUSEMAN
{The property of Dr. C. E. Daniels, Amsterdam)

The History-painters 25

modelling. On his return to the Hague, he painted
Roman scenes, some of them with all the delicacy
of a miniaturist. Later, when he succeeded Van
den Berg at the Academy, he was more of a
sculptor and an architect than a painter. Vosmaer
calls his draughtsmanship severe. In these latter
days, we should be inclined rather to call it unfeeling,
at once hard and slack. At a time of more widespread
culture, his lack of depth and originality would have
been more apparent. He had nothing whatever in
common with our seventeenth century masters, who
above all were good painters, as were the Hague
landscape-painters after them. But, notwithstanding
his theories, notwithstanding the complete set of
thoughts, principles and opinions which he had
acquired from the Italian masters, Koelman was
great enough, as a teacher, to inspire independent
pupils.

The doom of classicism had come. No words,
no theories are able to impede the progress of
imperious life or to arrest the spirit of the age.
Our country, in its turn, underwent the influence
of the romantic movement, which came to us via
Belgium and showed itself first in literature. The
painters followed in the wake of the poets and
novelists. But it was essentially a foreign movement
and, therefore, imperfect in its manifestations.

Henri Beyle, in his Histoire de la peinture en
Italic^ says that what our soul asks of art is the
portrayal of the passions and not of deeds provoked
by the passions. And it was just this passion,
which, in literature, was destined not to flame up
until after 1870, that these natures were unable

26 The History-painters

to render, either because they were over-polished by-
education or because they considered it incompatible
with the calm belief of the time. Even the religious
contests, surely the outcome of the most impetuous
passion that could take fire in the Netherlands,
had become dissolved in a calm, pious, conscientious
life.

When all is said, did not all the romanticism of that
time, with one or two great exceptions, consist
rather in the painting of deeds provoked by
passions than in the portrayal of passion itself?
And did not the Dutchmen of that time lack just
the inspiring vigour with which a Delacroix trans-
lated romanticism into the purely pictorial, while, on
the other hand, they lacked the expressive line with
which the German painters conveyed the emotional
side of romanticism? The passion of the first was
to be kindled with us later in the bursts of colour
of the Hague school, in the visions of beauty of
Matthijs Maris, to blaze most brightly in that not
yet fully understood visionary Vincent van Gogh.
The views of the second were shared (although the
Germans showed more nervous lines) by that Dutch
Parisian, Ary Scheffer, the artist in whom the weak,
but also the emotional aspect of romanticism found
a more than enthusiastic spokesman.

CHAPTER III
THE ROMANTICISTS

Ary Scheffer was born at Dordrecht in 1795.
His father, Jan Baptist Scheffer, was a German, a
native of Mannheim and a pupil of Tischbein the
portrait-painter. He was attached to the Court of
King Louis Napoleon and died in Amsterdam in
1809. He made a name as a painter of portraits
and interiors. He married at Dordrecht the daughter
of Arie Lamme the scene-painter, one of Joris
Ponse's pupils, who also distinguished himself by
his excellent copies of Albert Cuyp and sometimes
himself painted pictures in the same manner. Cor-
nelia Lamme seems to have been a woman endowed
with beauty, charm, artistic talent and a strong
personality, to whose initiative her three sons owe
their training and a great part of their fame. History,
including the history of painting, shows a whole
array of mothers who, through their firm belief in
their sons* talent, their indefatigable material solicitude,
their utter self sacrifice, have smoothed for their sons
the difficult road of art. Ary received his first
training at his father's hands and, when the latter

28 The Romanticists

died, at a time when the art of painting in Holland
had sunk very low, Mrs. Scheffer resolved to take
her children to Paris, where Ary and Henri could
receive a good education. In 1810, the year before
their departure, when Ary was in his fifteenth year,
he exhibited in Amsterdam a portrait that was
ascribed to the brush of a past master in the
art. It has been regretted, by Frenchmen as well
as by ourselves, that he did not remain in Hol-
land and paint in accordance with the traditions
of his own country. But, at that time, when all
eyes were turned to Paris, it was only natural that
those who could should make for this centre of
civilization and refinement. In any case, it was not
easy for the unknown Dutchman, with his defective
education, to conquer a place in the city of those
experts in technique, Ingres, Delacroix and G6ricault;
and, until he made a name with his Gretchen at the
Spinning-wkeely his lack of a firm groundwork of
knowledge often caused him to be looked upon as
an amateur or dilettante painter.

In the meantime, he exhibited, in 1825, a portrait
of M. Destuit de Tracy which was approved in
every respect and considered a master-piece of
draughtsmanship. And, after his Defence of Misso-
longhiy in which he employed the palette of Delacroix,
after The Suliote Women, in which, while adopting
the same colouring, he first displayed the feminine
charm of his talent, he exhibited, in 1831, the
Gretchen aforesaid, one of his best works, regarded by
some as his master-piece, a work, at any rate, with
which he secured a place of his own in the painting
world of Paris. The picture is well known through

REYNOLDS THE ENGRAVER — ARY SCHEFFER

(Municipal Mtiscutii, Dordrecht)

The Romanticists 29

the reproductions. It was admired for the delicacy
of feeling, the expression, the composition and it
was considered affecting, as a whole. It was said
that no one had interpreted Goethe's Gretchen as
Ary Scheffer had done: no painter, no poet, no
actress. Heinrich Heine, who wrote his impressions
of the Salon of 1831 in the A/lgemeiner Augsdurgery
devoted a whole chapter to Gretchen at the Spinning-
wheel and to its fellow-picture, a Faust, which was
not so greatly admired by the painters, but which
roused Heine's enthusiasm ; he called it eine schone
Menschenruine :

" One who had never seen any of this artist's
work, " he wrote, " would be at once struck by a
certain manner that speaks from his arrangement of
colours. His enemies declare that he paints only
with snuff and green soap. I do not know how far
they do him an injustice. His brown shadows are
often affected and hence miss the Rembrandt effect
of light intended. His faces mostly display that fatal
colour which has so often made us take a dislike
to our own face when, after long sleeplessness, we
look at it in those green mirrors which we find in any
inn at which the diligence stops in the morning ....

" If we look into Scheffer's pictures more closely
and longer, we become familiarized with his man-
nerism, we begin to think the treatment of the whole
very poetic and we see that a serene mood peers
through these melancholy colours like sunbeams
through the clouds ....

" Really, Scheffer's Gretchen is indescribable, "
continues Heine, a little lower down. " She has more

30 The Romanticists

mind than face. It is a painted soul. Whenever I
went past her, I used involuntarily to say, *Liebes
Kind! * . . . . A silent tear rolls down the pretty
cheek, a dumb tear of melancholy."

The women especially doted on Ary Scheffer, so
much so that it became an act of courage to publish
any hostile comment on his work. They recognized
the heart in the painter and fell into ecstasies over
his sensitive and emotional nature. " Une larme aux
yeux ne men t jamais y** says Alfred de Musset; and
the somewhat feminine Scheffer, the man of sentiment,
the man grown up in the mutual cult of mother and
son, the man who never really knew what it was
to be young, the man of melancholy poetic ideas,
passionless and devoid of real sorrow, was just the
man to draw that tear.

He understood the emotional side of painting;
what he lacked was technical knowledge. And yet,
notwithstanding his deficiency in that pictorial quality
which we Dutch regard as the one and only essential
of good painting, notwithstanding the feeble sentiment
and often somewhat barren lines of his pictures, this
painter of mixed Dutch and German origin, brought
up from his childhood under the great French
masters of romanticism, has always represented to
us an important talent. It is a talent that stands,
for the most part, outside the Dutch tradition,
even though foreigners are inclined to see a certain
striving after Rembrandt effects in the arrangement
of the light. And the golden brown that may be
so looked upon is no doubt far preferable to the
feeble brown medium which one perceives glancing

CHRIST ON THK MOUNT OF OLIVES —ARY SCHEFFER

{Municipal Museum, Dordrecht)

The Romanticists 31

everywhere through the pale colours; and, though
this blends best with the pale blues of his Gretchens,
it makes the facial colouring seem very unheimisch.
When Scheffer came to Holland in 1844 as a
famous man, he wrote, after visiting the Mauritshuis :

" I have seen wonderful pictures of the old Dutch
school. Meanwhile, I am beginning to have a higher
opinion of my own talent .... I believe that I
have touched a string which the others have never
played upon."

Therein lies his merit.

The two large pictures in Boyman's Museum,
Count Eberhard of Wiirtemberg cutting the Table-cloth
between himself and his Son and Count Eberhard by
the dead Body of his Son, life-size subjects taken from
Uhland's ballad, are painted under Dutch influence
in the matter of colour; but this causes us to miss
the atmosphere all the more. Scheffer was more
powerful in pictures which he painted from nature,
such as the portrait of Reynolds the engraver, in
the Dordrecht Museum, which, with its fluently-
painted design, seems inspired by the English painters.
Towards the end of his life, in painting his biblical
subjects he underwent the influence of the Italian
masters, which produced the more vigorous colour-
scheme and the more positive, although still very
sensitive conception of the Christ bearing the Cross
at Dordrecht.

To many and also to those Dutch painters who
are still able to take account of the works of the
romantic movement his Paolo and Francesca is his

32 The Romanticists

master-piece. The well-known engraving does not
do justice to this picture, whose value consists in
the vigour of the diagonal line by which the painter
lets the figures soar on high. It is well painted
and is not so shadowless as his Gretchen at the
Fountain which, like the Paob and Francesca, is in
the Wallace collection and which, in the arrangement
of its lines, suggests a cartoon by Overbeck.

The sensitiveness of Scheffer's character is easily
perceived in his work. But in daily life he was so
gentle that he could not endure to see a cloud or
a wrinkle on the faces of those who were with him.
Many abused this quality of his, so that he was
forced to work ever harder in order to satisfy the
many demands upon him. His benevolence knew
no bounds nor did he ever spare pains to assure
his mother's comfort.

His studio was difficult of entrance. Mrs. Grote,
who is not always to be trusted in her remarks upon
his work, tells how he refused admission to almost
everybody. Still, he sometimes yielded to the
prayers of his numberless admirers of the other sex.
Then, on a Sunday morning, everything would be
prepared; the visitors entered with hushed voices,
as into a church ; an organ played in the distance ....
but the painter himself, meanwhile, was riding his
horse in the Bois!

Ary Scheffer died at Argenteuil in 1858. His
brother Henri, who was also a pupil of Gu6rin's,
was thought by some to be the better painter,
although he achieved nothing like the same celebrity.
His Charlotte Corday^ an excellent painting, in the
Luxembourg, was copied there no fewer than twelve

THE WEATHER-GLASS — T. S. COOL
{The property of Mrs. Nijhoff-Cool, Schevcningen)

The Romanticists 33

hundred times before the year 1849. There is a
Lying-in of his at Boymans* Museum. More in Ary*s
style is his Joan of Arc in the historical collection
at Versailles ; but he excelled most of all in portrait-
painting. Ernest Renan married his daughter.

Generally speaking, Ary Scheffer exercised no
great influence upon the Dutchmen of his time : the
strongest of them avoided his influence rather than
fall under it. Nevertheless, it may be said that the
same emotionalism that characterizes the work of
Ary Scheffer is repeated sporadically, in other forms,
in the painting of a later date, including the art of
our own country. And, although the figure of the
great Dutch master, Jozef Israels, is too vigorous to
allow of a comparison, still it was his same seeking
for poetry, in another domain, that made Duranty,
the French critic, say of his Alone in the World that
it was painted d' ombre et de douleur. And do we not
sometimes find moments in Toorop which Scheffer,
had his line been firmer, would have loved to paint ?
And, generally speaking, the younger generation of
painters often seems to exhibit a reaction against a
landscape which it considers not sufficiently thoughtful
or, rather, not sufficiently literary.

Thomas Simon Cool, bom at the Hague in 1831,
was an exponent of a more vigorous romanticism.
In 1853, he painted his Atala^ with its life-size
figures, a bold feat for a youth of two and twenty;
in 1859, his Last of the Abencerrages. Standing
before the Chactas in the former picture at the
Hague Museum, we find it difficult to imagine what
the painter could have seen in this subject. And

3

34 The Romanticists

yet, though we may now consider it an unattractive
picture, it was described in its time as a promising
work by a young painter and was thought much of
in Paris also. And, even now, notwithstanding the
emptiness of the composition and the harshness of
the colouring and the workmanship, it shows signs
of conviction. Later, his art turned in a more
national direction : he took to painting portraits and
intimate scenes of Dutch life. But he was never
certain of himself, never satisfied with himself.
Towards the end of a very short life, he became
drawing-master at the Military Academy, where he
did well and was held in high account. He died,
suddenly, in 1870.

Another and even shorter-lived artist, Lodewijk
Anthony Vintcent (18 12- 184 2), never turned his
back upon romanticism, in which lay all his strength
and all his weakness. He worked first under
B. J. van Hove and later under Comelis Kruseman.
He excelled in romantic little genre- pieces: Savoyards,
with eyes of exaggerated size, and the like. His
master-piece is said to be The City Apoihecaryy
which was painted in the cholera year and represents
a crowd of sick and poor waiting for medicines.
The grouping of the figures is lifelike : two dogs are
fighting for a bone in the foreground; round the
corner, in the distance, in a street drawn in fine out-
line, is a hearse. They say that Vintcent was slightly
colour-bUnd — he confused red and green — and that
this defect was not apparent in the grey-brown
tones of this particular picture, which harmonized
so well with the subject. Still, these genre-pieces do

The Romanticists 35

not make the romanticist. It was rather the feeling,
the combination, the conception, the gruesomeness,
as in the case again of his illustrations to Macbeth^
that gave the necessary suggestiveness. And yet we
cannot believe, when we contemplate the false and
sentimental feeling displayed in these Savoyards with
or without marmots or mousetraps, that, even if he
had lived, the young painter would easily have
overcome this romantic condition of soul.

The Rotterdam history-painters, Willem Hendrik
Schmidt and Arnold Spoel, were of much more
importance, in their day, than Vintcent. The former
was the intimate friend of Bosboom, who nursed
him through his last illness; he was also the master
of Christoffel Bisschop and was generally so honoured
that he used to be ironically described as the Allah
of Dutch painting, with Spoel, his pupil, for his
prophet. This celebrity extended beyond his own
country, so much so that, when he showed The
Raising of the Daughter of fairus at Cologne, his
work was spoken of as the first in the exhibition and
Degas' Cain and Abel as the second. He was born
in 1 809 at Rotterdam, received his first lessons from
Gilles de Meyer, another Rotterdammer, who was
more of a teacher than an independent artist, for the
main part formed himself and, later, in 1840, acquired,
in the museums of Diisseldorf, Berlin and Dresden,
that culture which cannot be denied him. When
he died, in 1849, at Delft, where for some years he
had taught drawing at the Training-school for Engi-
neers, people wrung their hands in despair for the
future of Dutch painting after such a loss.

36 The Romanticists

He is said to have possessed an original manner,
to have succeeded in giving colour, dignity and
charm to his works, especially in the painting of
fabrics and all sorts of accessories, which reminded
one of the old masters. And yet how intensely
tedious are just those very qualities in the painters
of so-called old-Dutch interiors ! It would appear as
though they all excelled in this, for we become sick
and tired, in these shiny little pictures, of those
" excellently limned " accessories and stuffs and silks.
Still, Schmidt demanded more of art — and here we
see his romanticism come peeping round the corner — •
began to feel that art must become something nobler
and more exalted. We, who really known little of
his work besides the picture of the monks in Boymans*
Museum, in which naturally we cannot expect to
find any lively colouring, see in him merely a good
painter, with a rather wearisome method, a narrow
modelling and a notable lack of harmony. His
great, if short-lived fame must have rested on more
important work than this.

It would appear that the history-painter Spoel is
a little closer to us than his master. This impression
is perhaps due to the engraving of his Procession of
the Rotterdam Rhetoricians on the occcLsion of the progress
of the Queen of England, ig March 1642, which
was published as a prize of the Society for the
Encouragement of the Plastic Arts and distributed
in every corner of our country. Westrheene says
of the original picture that it unites all Spoel's good
qualities and, moreover, displays a strength of colour,
an ease and firmness of touch of which he did not

The Romanticists 37

often give proof. Jacob Spoel was born at Rotter-
dam in 1820 and died in the same town in 1868.

Another contemporary of Jan Kruseman, of Klaas
Pieneman, of Hendrik Schmidt, of Van de Laar is
Petrus van Schendel, who was born in 1805, in a little
village near Breda, and studied at the Antwerp
Academy under Van Bree. He resided consecutively
at Rotterdam, Amsterdam, the Hague and Brussels,
painted portraits, historical pictures and genre-pieces
and excelled in his little candle, lamp or torch-light
scenes, which were thought much of in his day.
As an historical painter, he did not object to big
canvases : his Birth of Christ measured three Dutch
ells by four. The distance between Van Schendel
and Da Vinci is great, but he had one thing in
common with Leonardo: the love and success with
which he practised the science of mechanics. He
patented, among others, an important improvement
in the propelling of locomotives. Petrus van Schendel
died in 1870.

A much more genuine adherent of the romantic
movement was Jan Hendrik van de Laar, born at
Rotterdam in 1807, a pupil of the miniature-painters
C. Bakker and G. Wappers. Although, once in a
way, he felt drawn towards historical subjects, as
when he painted an Heroic Death 0/ Herman de
Ruiter, he preferred to move among the romantic
episodes of Walter Scott or the romantic poems of
Tollens, who provided the subject of his picture in
Boy mans' Museum. And yet his art has really as
little in common with the romantic movement as has

38 The Romanticists

ToUens* poem. Van de Laar*s Divorce overflows
with middle-class sentimentality, with unnatural, feeble
staginess. He died in 1874.

This is how things stood in those days: as in
Belgium, men were genre-painters in the style of the
old masters; or historical painters — but here Belgium
had the advantage, inasmuch as she shared French
ideas more strongly and therefore was more power-
fully moved — or painters of biblical subjects — and
here, again, Belgium had the advantage, inasmuch as
she was a Catholic country and her painters therefore
were bound to observe a certain decorum and found
a place for their work in the Catholic churches; ^
or else — and in this they were always more or less
excellent — they painted portraits, or they painted
fashionable interiors, which were generally somewhat
sugary and insipid, or they painted landscapes —
but this was a separate tendency — or else they
painted all these subjects by turns. We had no
Leys, who united colour and style in his renascence,
even though Huib van Hove, in his little vistas,
often gave good evidence of these two qualities;
with us, everything was covered with a sauce of
romanticism, which expressed itself in somewhat
uncouth contrasts and which showed a decided
preference for scenes with monks in them. One of
the most sickly and self-satisfied instances of this

* Whereas we had only the Frisian painter Otto de Boer, who painted
The Raising of Lazarus for the church at Woudsend (where he was born
in 1797) and The Sermon on the Mount, his best work, for the church
at Heerenveen and, who therefore, like the painters in Catholic countries,
was not obliged to adopt a flabby sentimentality in order to flatter the taste
of the pietistic Protestants. De Boer died in 1856.

The Romanticists 39

Is a boudoir with a lady and a monk behind her,
by Charles van Beveren (1809- 1850), that feeble
painter who is so richly represented in the Fodor
Museum. Schmidt also shared this predilection, as
witness his Five Monks in Meditation at Boymans*
Museum; and even Bosboom, that always eminent
and distinguished painter, who from the beginning
saw his way clear before him, took part in the fashion
in his grand manner with Cantabimus ei psallemur and
The Carmelite playing the Organ.

The painters of that time, including Cool and
Van Trigt, nearly all began by sacrificing to romance
or history, although many of them soon returned to
the traditions of their race. The Msecenases asked
for historical painting. Amsterdam, the ever serious
city, in whose daily life nature does not play so
great a part as in that of the Hague, continued to
place before the painters what it considered to be
a useful and worthy aim.

This historical romanticism is displayed in the
most comical and, at the same time, in the most
surprising light in many of the little pictures in the
Historical Gallery, the outcome of the running com-
mission given by Mr. de Vos, to which any painter
could contribute lavishly and to which, although the
payment was but modest, a large number of painters
did contribute with commendable readiness. For it
was as sure as that twice two are four that whosoever
stood in need of ready money at that time would
paint one of these pieces in a day or two, although
there are a few fortunate exceptions.

The contents of this Historical Gallery, now accom-
modated in the Municipal Museum of Amsterdam,

40 The Romanticists

were painted between 1848 and 1863 to the order
of Mr. J. de Vos Jzn., of Amsterdam, a lawyer and
a well-known collector, who, in addition to the 253
little pictures, all of the same size and shape, which
form the gallery, possessed an important collection
of which the acme consisted of drawings by the old
Dutch masters, now partly housed in the Rijksmuseum.
The historical plan, embracing the whole national
history from A. D. 40 to A. D. 1861, the year of
the great floods, was, if am not mistaken, arranged
with much taste and insight and described in the
catalogue by a well-known author, Mr. Jacob van
Lennep.

All that remains of any value to posterity, besides
an attractive lesson in the history of the motherland
for the youth of Amsterdam, is represented by the
pictures of Alleb6, Alma Tadema and Jozef Israels
and the twenty-six pieces by Rochussen, which excel in
colour, style and, in the case of the last, in unity of
treatment and great facility. Johannes Hinderikus
Egenberger (1822 1897), first a professor at the
Amsterdam Academy, afterwards director of the
Academy at Groningen, divided the lion's share
with Bernardus Wijnveldt Jr. (1821-1902), who
succeeded him in the former appointment. Their
contributions, except in those cases where Egenberger
confined himself to the eighteenth century, in which
he is sober and deserving, all belong to the most
violent kind. The diagonal lines of the battlesome
arms in The Heroic Death of Jan van Schaffelaar
are perhaps the most characl eristic instance of that
rude, theatrical system of historical painting which, like
popular historical melodrama, is content to emphasize

MISS HUYSER — H. A. DE BLOEME

{Municipal Museum, the Hague)

OF THE '^K

■'ERSITY

^.^^P"

The Romanticists 41

the hero, the traitor or the coward without troubling
about the claims of the art concerned. As for the
Kenau Hasselaar painted in collaboration by the
two artists for the Town-hall at Haarlem, the violence
of the Dutch Amazons, in view of the nature of
the defensive weapons employed, is well worthy of
the descriptive pen of a Huysmans.

In the midst of all these painters bound to their
period, in the midst of so many mediocrities, in the
midst of a long array of " famous masters " whom
we should nowadays find it impossible to enjoy,
De Bloeme stands apart as a sturdy painter, showing
neither the influences of his own time nor those of
the seventeenth century, but entirely himself, honest
and simple. Born in 1802 at the Hague, where
he died in 1867, Hermanus Anthonie de Bloeme
started under J. W. Pieneman, working in his studio
at the Hague and afterwards following him to Amster-
dam when Pieneman was appointed director of the
Academy. It was inevitable that he should sacrifice
to the spirit of the time and begin by painting
historical, followed by biblical subjects, of which his
Mary Magdalen is considered the best. Nor do I
see any reason to believe that he excelled his con-
temporaries in this regard, for his best portraits also
were painted during the last twenty years of his life.
What was most remarkable at that period was that
he did not go to Italy in search of what he could
find at home and this is the more noteworthy inas-
much as the fact, fortunate for him is it was, arose
not so much from any convinced idea as from his
strong affection for his parents' house and its ways;

42 The Romanticists

nay more, when he had to take part in the great
competition at the Amsterdam Academy, he pur-
posely sent in his Adam and Eve by the body of Abel
in an unfinished state to escape an award which
would have taken him for four years far from home.
Probably the sheer artistic merit which he so
unconsciously betrayed in a bad period is partly
due to this, even though it is also probable that he
brought home an occasional idea from his shorter
journeys. For it must be admitted that the delicious
Portrait of a Lady in the Hague Museum and that
of Baron van Omphal in the Rijksmuseum, his best
portraits, show some conformity of conception with
a portrait by Gallait in our Municipal Museum, even
though it be true to say that the comparison is to
the disadvantage of the once so renowned Belgian.
The drawing is thoughtful and compact, without the
superfluous flourish with which his contemporaries
used to fill in their portraits. Moreover, the attitude
of the head in the portrait of Miss Huyser above-
mentioned displays an engagingness which we do not
expect to find in that period. De Bloeme's colouring
is simple and refined, as is his workmanship; and
everything is so nicely balanced that we forget to
analyze. He was not easily pleased and would
rather smear out an almost completed portrait with
a couple of smudges than deliver it against his will,
a habit which necessitated endless patience on the
part of his sitters. We are told how, after many
sittings. Princess Marianne of the Netherlands, on
paying her last visit to the studio at the appointed
hour, found the painter engaged in smudging out
her portrait, whereupon there followed a "scene"

BARON VAN OMFHAL^ — H. A. DE BLOEME
[Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

OF THE ^)^

The Romanticists 43

which did not subside until mutual promises had
been exchanged to start again from the beginning.

There is a great contrast in temperament between
the simple Hague portrait-painter and the somewhat
younger romanticist Johan George Schwartze, his rival
in Amsterdam. Thanks to a wider conception, to
a certain tendency towards romanticism, to a search
after not only the outer but also the inner aspect
of his sitters, Schwartze may be said to have aimed
higher in his portraits than the less complex Hague
artist. And, in view of these qualities, one would
be disposed at once to allot the first place to this
Rembrandtesque painter, whose Portrait of Himself
is in many ways so charming, so distinguished, so
soulful. But, when we look at it again, the thing
becomes different : from under that soulful performance
peeps something weaker, even though it be a very
lovable weakness, against which De Bloeme*s simpler
excellence is well able to hold its own.

The fact that Schwartze, for all his great and
attractive qualities, did not exercise a greater influence
over his younger contemporaries is perhaps due
to this very inclination towards romanticism, to this
very striving to imbue his portraits with characters.
Mental and moral characteristics too strongly empha-
sized can captivate us, in the long run, only when
they are there unconsciously, or as an important
piece of painting, or at any rate executed in a
certain style. When Jozef Israels painted the portrait
of his brother artist, Roelofs the landscape-painter,
full of suggestion as it is, while seeking for the man
under the social varnish, he emphasized no single

44 The Romanticists

quality at the expense of any other; perhaps only a
painter could recognize the painter in the eyes of the
portrait; and even this is quite subordinate to the
intense life that breathes through the wide-open
nostrils, under the high forehead, in the eyes beneath
the bushy brows. Whereas, when Schwartze paint-
ed the portrait of Professor Opzoomer, the philo-
sopher, a portrait the conception of which was so
greatly admired by the professor's friends because
Schwartze painted the thinker as Faust, in a moment
of despair, of powerlessness, he was condemned by a
later generation, which sees that there is something
so theatrical in the attitude, something so much of
an actor playing his part, that the portrait resem-
bles a rhetorical phrase rather than a human being.

We are not saying that Schwartze was not an
excellent painter or that in him, as in the later
Lenbach, the painter was sacrificed entirely to the
psychologist; for, although of German origin, he
shows in his painting the pure Dutch characteristics :
fine, warm shadows, strong half-tones and boldly
modelled light, solid workmanship, thought in the
execution, fulness, completeness. His own portrait
is certainly one of the very finest expressions of
Dutch romanticism ; the portrait of his wife, with
which he made a great success at the time, pos-
sesses that charm which we alw-ays value in a
woman's portrait, however much the forms may alter ;
in a certain sense, his portrait of Dr. Rive may be
described as powerful ; while his portraits of children
are also conceived in an interesting way.

Schwartze left his native Amsterdam as a child, with
his parents, for Philadelphia, whence he returred to

POkTKAIT OF HIMSELF — J. G. SCHWARTZE
[The property of Miss Therese Schwartze, Amsterdam)

^ OF THE ^h^

"^ERSITY

The Romanticists 45

Europe in 1838, at the age of t^^enty-four, and
spent six years at the Dusseldorf Academy under
Schadow and Sohn. At the same time, he took
private lessons from Lessing, the well-known land-
scape-painter. In 1846, he settled in Amsterdam,
because he had made so great a success in that
city with his first portrait. Here he began by paint-
ing The Prayer^ Puritans at Divine Service and
The Pilgrim Fathers, which was lost on the way to
America, but which is known through Alleb6's litho-
graphic reproduction. He made a name with these
subjects and people are said to have regretted that
he was obliged to abandon this style in order to
execute his many commissions for portraits. We
prefer, however, to think that the many and great
admirers of his portraits will have regretted this decree
of fate as little as did the subsequent generation,
for this is certain, that, in his later years, his reputation
was exclusively that of a sensitive portrait- painter,
capable occasionally of genius. His great merit lies
in this that, although of German descent, he chose
Rembrandt, whom he admired above all other Dutch-
men, as his model from the start.

Schwartze died in 1874. His chief pupil was his
talented daughter. Miss Th6rese Schwartze, so well-
known as a portrait-painter to-day.

CHAPTER IV

THE LANDSCAPE AND GENRE-
PAINTERS

It is fairly well established nowadays that land- \
scape-painting for its own sake is mainly of Dutch J
origin. And, although we are not prepared to go
all lengths with Taine's theory of environment, or, at
any rate, while admitting it in general, to apply it
to individuals and artists, the cause does probably
lie in the fact that nowhere, unless it be in Venice,
do the natural conditions, the climate, the atmosphere,
the light, the sky and their reflection in the endless
pieces of water of which the most picturesque regions
of the Netherlands, the provinces of North and
South Holland, are at is were composed, nowhere
do these conditions influence life so strongly as
with us. The incessant changes of sunshine and
clouds, the broad shadows of the latter over the
flat fields, the long twilight, which is never quite
dispelled indoors, unless a lighted cloud throws a
sharp reflection from without : these all give a move-
ment to the landscape, which, just because of this
endless alternation, remains ever charming to the eye

The Landscape and Genre-painters 47

and offers to the eye of the painter in particular
the greatest and most continuous interest.

Another reason to prove that landscape-painting
is of Dutch origin lies in the fact that no country
was so independent of both religious influences and
princely patronage as the northern portion of the
Netherlands; and, even though this does not apply
to the fifteenth and a part of the sixteenth century,
the fact that artists were free to paint what found
favour in their eyes must have had its influence.

Seeing how closely nature and landscape-painting
are bound up with the very existence of Dutch art,
it can be no matter for surprise that, at a time of
a decline such as that into which official painting
in general had fallen in our country, there were painters
at the beginning of the eighteenth century who had
succeeded in keeping their art untouched by foreign
influences and who, refusing to deny their kind or the
traditions of the great centuries, looked at nature
through their own eyes, through their own masters.

For, although, after 1870, the Hague school
of landscape- painting attained a height which one
could hardly have expected ever to behold again
after the rich growth of the seventeenth century,
there were very talented landscape-painters in the
earlier part of the nineteenth century also ; and, though
it be true that the new generation but rarely admits
the worth of that which precedes it, a time was
bound to come when we should learn to appreciate
those painters who worthily continued the seventeenth-
century traditions and who were the precursors of
the new florescence. If we go further into the lives
of those painters, we shall find that fame and con-

48 The Landscape and Genre-painters

sideration were their portion, both here and abroad.
And we, who have followed the magnificence of the
Hague masters with so great an admiration, but who
have also seen it fade away in feeble imitation of a
misunderstood emotional power, when occasionally
we come upon those somewhat antiquated landscapes
in a museum, at a dealer*s, at an auction sale, in the
midst of those imitations, of the weaker works of
to-day, we are struck by their vigour and love of
nature, by that healthy vigour which was always
reserved for the greatest. The composition may
have become a little old-fashioned, the thing repre-
sented may remain within the limits of an anecdote,
the influence of the light on the landscape may not
in general have been so very much the one and
only moving power as in the last thirty years of
the nineteenth century, the subject itself may have
been heavier, the colouring browned over with a
yellow varnish or blackened through the bitumen
employed, the filling in may have been made too
much a matter for separate treatment : this was, when
all is said, done in obedience to the taste of the
public, which preferred to buy landscapes with figures
and animcds, water with accurately- detailed ships upon
it. None of the painters of that time would have
been capable of making the reply which Willem
Maris gave to one who asked him why he always
painted cows :

"I never paint cows, but only effects of light."

The nineteenth century set in with five landscape-
painters who have shown by the work which they
left behind them that they never ceased to admire

LANDSCAPE — D. J. VAN DER LAEN
{Royal Picture Gallery, Berlin)

OF THE T^p^

The Landscape and Genre-painters. 49

and study the painting of the seventeenth century.
And so greatly was this the case that we receive no
impression of the eighteenth century at all in the better
part of their work and but little in the remainder. The
colour and workmanship of two of them was entirely
in the beautiful manner of the old masters, while
the arrangement of all of them was quite free of
that rhetorical side which makes later landscape-
painters, for all their skill, seem antiquated. Their
names are, in the order of their births, Jacob van
Strij, Dirk Jan van der Laen, Jan Kobell, Wouter
Joannes van Troostwijk and George Pieter Westenberg.
Jacob van Strij was a native of Dordrecht. He
was born in 1756 and died in 181 5. His work is
imbued with admiration for Aelbert Cuyp and he
introduced Cuyp's colour-schemes so cleverly into
his work that their pictures were often mistaken for
one another. Also, the works left behind at his death
included eleven copies after Cuyp, although it was
not always a literal copying that he applied to his
own work. Immerzeel says, as an instance of Van
Strij's energy:

" His longing to give a faithful rendering of nature
was so strong that, however great his physical pain
(he suffered for many years from gout), he would
drive over the ice in a sleigh in bleak winter to
make sketches for pictures which he subsequently
painted. "

His landscapes with cattle excel through the warm
colouring of their sunlight. In a small upper room
at the Rijksmuseum is a Going to Market^ by Jacob

4

50 The Landscape and Genre-painters.

van Strij, which displays in all its purity the bright
atmosphere of his vigorous predecessor, although
the composition is a little too much filled in after
the Van Berchem manner. He was a pupil of the
Antwerp Drawing Academy and of the history-painter
Lens, but he formed himself principally upon his
studies of nature and the old landscape-painters. His
work was greatly valued in its day.

The second, D. J. van der Laen, was born at
ZwoUe in 1759. He was a member of an old and
considerable family and was educated at Leiden,
where, however, he soon left the university for
Hendrik Meyer's manufactory of hangings. He
began by painting genre-pieces, but soon confined
himself more closely to landscape, in which he came
to excel in so remarkable a degree that Thor6, when
visiting the Suermondt collection at Aix-la-Chapelle,
took one of his landscapes for a Vermeer of Delft. *
The little old house in the middle does certainly
resemble the little old houses of the great Delft artist
in the Six Museum, only the composition is fuller and
the house is overshadowed by a tall tree, behind which
appears a stretch of dunes in the manner of Wijnants,
who was much imitated at that time. In the foreground,
to the left, is an inoffensive "set-off," very usual
at the period, in the shape of a splintered tree-stump.
To the right is an outbuilding, set at right angles to
the house itself and grown over with a vine. Although

» Dr. Bredius, in 1883, published in Das Zeitschrift fur bildende Kunst
an article entitled Ein Pseudo- Vermeer in der Konigliche Getndlde-Gallerie^
in wLich he showed that this fine little landscape was not a seventeenth-
century picture, but was painted about 1800 bij Van der Laen.

The Landscape and Genre-painters. 51

it reminds one most particularly of Vermeer, this
little picture, which was bought at the sale of the
Suermondt collection, suggests by turns Ruysdael,
Hobbema and Cuyp. But no one suspected that it
was painted about 1 800. The painting in the Rijks-
museum is greatly inferior. Van der Laen was a friend
of Rhijnvis Feiih and drew some illustrations for his
Fanny. He died in 1829.

Jan Kobell belongs to a whole generation of Rotter-
dam artists, all of whom were talented, energetic
landscape-painters, greatly in demand in their time,
and all of whom died young, at thirty or forty.
Jan Kobell, the chief of them, was born at Rot-
terdam in 1782 and educated at the Jansenist
orphan asylum at Utrecht. He received lessons in
painting at the school kept by W. R. van der
Wall, a son of the Utrecht sculptor and himself a
painter of landscapes with cattle. After achieving a
considerable name in his native country, he sent a
Meadow with three small animals for exhibition in
Paris in 181 2, which is praised by Landon in his
Salon of the same year. He now received com-
mis.sions from France and was really successful, but
he was over-ambitious and dissatisfied. His mind
broke down in the following year and he died
in 1814.

When we look at Kobell's little pictures in the
Rijksmuseum, with their charming presentation, their
careful execution, their restful composition and a
certain elegiac quality peculiar to his best work, we
find it difficult to understand this ending to his life.
He seemed to combine the calm execution of Paul

52 The Landscape and Genre-painters.

Potter with something in the composition that reminds
one of Dujardin or of Adriaan van de Velde. This
is certain, that he was a cultured painter, who, even
if he did not look for a certain poetry of expression
in his landscapes with cattle, achieved it in spite of
himself. In 1831, one of his paintings, in Professor
Bleuland's collection, fetched 2,835 guilders. He left
a number of drawings and a few sensitive, delicate
littie etchings.

It has been observed, in connection, with Potter's
early death, that artists who have been allotted but
a short span of life often produce as much, or even
more, in those few years than others who live much
longer. It is as though they intuitively feel a need
for haste. This applies not only to Kobell, but also
to W. J. van Troostwijk, a member of the well-to-do
class, born in Amsterdam in 1782. He is said to
have painted for his amusement; but, whether we
regard him as an amateur or a professional, there
is no doubt but that he employed his time well.
He was taught by the brothers Andiiessen, of whom
the elder had had Quinckhard for his master, and
began by painting portraits, which he soon abandoned
for the Potter style, which attracted him more. Two
of his landscapes in the Rijksmuseum make a really
astonishing impression in the surroundings amid which
they are placed. Like Van der Laen's landscape,
they impress one with their sheer artistic merit,
their fine, wholesome conception, their true Dutch
compactness. But, as against the study of the old
masters which is apparent in the others, we find
here something more modern, a greater freedom of

LANDSCAPE IN GELDERLAND — W. J. VAN TROOSTWIJK
(Rtjksmuseum, Amsterdam)

' OF THE '''^

The Landscape and Genre-painters. 53

workmanship and ideas. And, although the vigorous
colouring, the positive conception, the manner of
execution all betray the proficient painter, there is
something so very different, so much less artificial
in the independent choice of subjects as naturally to
suggest an enthusiastic amateur rather than an
experienced studio-painter. Again, the sultry blue of
a summer sky, the deep green of the heavy thatch
of a sheepfold and the white of the cows display a
richness of colour which very closely approaches
the modern and which is found (true, in a more
complicated scheme) in the Barbizon school. Van
Troostwijk possessed an originality of ideas that
made him say:

" I admire Potter, Dujardin and Van der Velde,
but I follow only simple and beautiful nature. If
you wish to compare my work, compare it with
my earlier efforts or, rather, compare it with nature."

And, notwithstanding his great dissatisfaction with
his work, which often he completed only at the bidding
of his friends, he knew quite well what he wanted:

"In Potter himself," he once said, "there is
something which, it seems to me, ought to have
been different and which Potter himself must have
felt. But how for ahead of me was this same Potter,
who died in his twenty-eighth year!"

Later investigations have shown that Potter lived
one year longer. Van Troostwijk, however, did die
in 1810, before attaining the age of twenty-eight.
He was a talented and, for his period, an astonishing
painter. His drawings also were in great request
and, towards the end of his life, he produced a few
etchings.

54 The Landscape and Genre-painters.

The fifth of the group, George Pieter Westenberg,
offers for our admiration, in his View of Amsterdam
under Snow, all those qualities of good painting which
have distinguished landscape-painters at any given time.
The picture is painted with directness and sobriety ;
is simply and yet broadly observed, firm and even
in workmanship, without being laboured, and has the
depth of penetration of a Ruysdael. Nor need we be
acquainted with the fact that Westenberg was a great
expert in the works of our old masters, whom he
studied here and abroad, to arrive at this knowledge ;
for, whereas this little picture reminds us of Ruysdael
and, more particularly, of the wintry view in the
Dupper collection, the town-view in Teyler's Museum
as powerfully suggests Vermeer of Delft, not only
through the character and treatment of the little old
houses, but also through a certain yellow and blue in
the jackets of the women sitting on the door-steps.

Westenberg was born at Nijmegen in 1791 and
came to Amsterdam in 1808, where he was taught
by Jan Hulswit (i 766-1822), a tapestry- painter
whose drawings in the style of Ostade and Beer-
straten were often greatly appreciated. He, in his
turn, had as his pupils his kinsman Kasper Karsen
(18 1 0-1896), a deserving painter of landscapes and
town-pieces, George Andries Roth (1809- 1884),
Hendrik Gerrit ten Gate (1803-1856) and Hendrik
Jacobus Scholten, mentioned in the following chapter.
In 1838, he was appointed director of the Museum
of Modern Art in the Pavilion at Haarlem. We do
not know whether he failed to make a sufficient
living as a painter, but in 1857 he resigned his
post and went to Java with his family to fill a

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The Landscape and Genre-painters. 55

civil appointment in Batavia. He died at Brummen
in 1873.

More important than Westenberg is Nicolaas Bauer,
who was born at Harlingen in 1767 and died at
the same Frisian village in 1820. He was taught
by his father, a portrait-painter, began his career as
a tapestry-painter, but afterwards painted town-views
and landscapes. A view of Amsterdam seen from
the IJ and one of Rotterdam from the Maas belong
to his best works. There is a pleasant freshness
and movement in these little pieces, combined with
a striking originality of conception and colour.

There were many Frisian painters at that period,
including Willem Bartel van der Kooi, who was
born at Augustinusga in 1768 and who made a
name as a portrait-painter at the Hague and Ghent.
His masters were, first, a skilful amateur called
Verrier and, later, Beekkerk, the painter. Things
went differently in those days: it appears that con-
centration upon one's deliberately chosen profession
was not always deemed essential; at any rate, he
abandoned his art in 1795 to become the represent-
ative of the electors of Friesland and afterwards in
favour of various political appointments. These,
however, may have belonged to the sinecures that
were very common at the end of the eighteenth
century; for, in 1804, Van der Kooi went on an
art-journey to Dusseldorf, where he copied portraits
by Van Dijck and made so much progress that, in
1 808, his picture, A Lady ivith a Footman ha7iding a
Letter, won the 2,oooguilder prize at the exhibition.

56 The Landscape and Genre-painters.

This piece is now at the Rijksmuseum and is no
more than pale coloured plaster. The Town-hall
at Haarlem has a portrait by him which has something
in common with Jan Adam Kruseman*s Portrait of
Himself although it is much weaker. He died in 1837.

Johannes Jelgerhuis Rienkzn. was born in 1770
at Leeuwarden and was taught drawing by his father,
Rienk Jelgerhuis, and painting by Pieter Barbiers Pz.
( 1 748-1842), the landscape-painter. The father, cis I
have said in an earlier chapter, was best known for his
pastel and crayon portraits ; the son painted portraits
and interiors. We find pictures and drawings by
this artist in different collections and even at this
date his picture in the Rijksmuseum, The Bookshop
of P. Meijer Warnars S strikes one by the typical
representation, which, although simpler, does not
differ greatly from the concrete manner in which
De Brakeleer treated similar subjects. His Apothecary
is in the same manner, entirely excellent, very
graphically and at the same time concretely executed
and yet astonishingly simple. His View of the Choir
in the New Churchy Amsterdam was greatly praised
at the time. He died at Haarlem in 1836.

Less stimulating than Jelgerhuis, but excellent genre-
painters, were Wybrandt Hendriks (i 744-1 831) and
Adriaan de Lelie (i 755-1820), both of whom have
left interiors which, while lacking all the concen-
tration of light, all the fine atmosphere in which, in

* Johannes Jelgerhuis, who for many years was an actor at the
Amsterdam Theatre as well as a painter, wrote a work on gesticulation
and nimicry which was published by Meijer Warnars in 1827.

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NOTARY KOHNE AND HIS CLERK — W. HENDRIKS
(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

The Landscape and Genre-painters. 57

the old masters, the figures move so naturally and
freely, still have something that connects them with
the older pictures. Hendriks, an Amsterdammer by
birth, painted landscapes, portraits, corporation- and
family-pieces and still- life pictures of game and flowers.
His Woman reading, in Teyler's Museum, bears a
distant resemblance to a Metsu. He is more original
in his portrait of Notary Kolme and his Clerk, whom
he painted in their own environment, at full-length,
but in small dimensions. This little piece, which
has nothing in common with the seventeenth century,
hangs at the Rijksmuseum beside a genre-painting
by Quinckhard. It is blacker in tone, but surpasses
it in originality and distinction. To judge by the
prices fetched by his works after his death, his views
of towns, or rather streets, were esteemed more highly
than his interiors. The reason may, however, be due to
topographical considerations. Hendriks was, for more
than thirty years, steward of Teyler's Institute and
superintendent of the collection of pictures attached to it.

Although Adriaan de Lelie was, in many respects,
far behind Hendriks, he was a deserving painter of
interiors. He was born at Tilburg, studied at Antwerp
and Diisseldorf and settled in Amsterdam, where he
painted mainly interiors, portraits and family and
corporation-pieces. His works are to be found in
the principal collections and were also valued and
sought after by foreigners. The Fodor Museum has
a Cook by him which, although somewhat empty
and rather flat and narrow in the face, is, like the
Woman making Cakes in the Rijksmuseum, a well-
painted, well-composed picture.

CHAPTER V

THE FORERUNNERS OF THE
HAGUE SCHOOL

The Van Os family of painters, of whom Jan,
the oldest (i 744-1808), his son Georgius Johannes
Jacobus (i 782-1861), the flower-painter, and the
latter*s brother Pieter Gerardus (i 776-1839), the
cattle-painter, were the best known, can boast of
good qualities in spite of the fact that each of its
members now counts mainly as a master of later
generations. In addition to the above, there were
Pieter Frederik (1808- 1860), a son of the last-
named, and Margaretha (i 780-1 862), a sister of
the same Pieter Gerardus, completing a painting
family of five that covers the period between 1744
and 1862, over a century in all. The father, Jan
van Os, was a painter of flowers, but was far sur-
passed by his son and pupil, who, in some respects,
may be called an excellent flower-painter. His pic-
tures of still-life and flowers were much sought after
and one of them fetched 5,650 guilders at auction
in 1845. His brother, Pieter Gerardus, also made
a name for himself. He painted in the manner of

WOMAN MAKING CAKES — A. DE LELIE

{Rijksmuscum, Amsterdam)

OF THE

The Forerunners of the Hague School. 59

Potter and, though he received his earliest lessons
from his father, he formed himself, by industrious
copying, upon his illustrious model. His incidents
of the Siege of Naarden, in which he took part as
a volunteer, are more important than the ordinary
historical pieces of his time ; and there is something
spontaneous in his Cossack Outpost which almost
recalls Breitner in the unity between the landscape
and the group of soldiers. His chief pupils are
Wouterus Verschuur (i 8 12-1874), Simon van den
Berg (18 1 2-1 891), who left some cabinet- pieces
not devoid of feeling, Guillaume Anne van der
Brugghen (1811-1891), a fine dog-painter, whose
studies remind one of Maris, and Jan van Raven-
swaay (1789- 1869), who continued his master's
ideas, while Pieter Frederik, his son, became the
valued master of Mauve, whose early work con-
stantly betrays the influence of Van Os. As in the
case of his more famous father, the arrangement of
his pictures was inspired principally by Potter and
not always by that painter's best side. He seemed
to prefer to take the composition from the left —
the spectator's left — of Paul Potter's Young BuUm the
Mauritshuis, variations on which are continually found
in Mauve's early drawings. In any case, though
Van Os may have been deficient in pictorial instinct,
it is pretty certain that both Mauve and his fellow-
pupil, J. H. L. de Haas, must have learnt much
from him in the anatomy of cows and sheep.

In this respect, perhaps Hendrik van de Sande
Bakhuijzen showed better work. Born at the Hague
in 1 795, he was the pupil successively of S. A. Krausz

6o The Forerunners of the Hague School.

(i 760-1 825), a Hague painter and a pupil of
L. Defrance of Li^ge, of J. W. Pieneman and his
pupil J. Heymans and of the Hague Sketching Club.
He did not possess Kobell's gifts of agreeable and
distinguished composition, but he was a good
draughtsman and painted his pictures with simplicity.
His landscapes are entirely free from mannerism and
artificiality ; and, if they contain no trace of feeling
and as little merit of colour, at least we find not an
atom of borrowed sensibility or borrowed colour in
the pictures of this honest landscape-painter. He
had many pupils : Willem Roelofs, the pioneer, who
first came from Barbizon to tell of the beauty of
nature as seen through the painter's temperament;
Jan Willem van Borselen, who loved to paint those
blustering moments when the colourless side of the
leaves is blown upwards by the wind and who
produced excellently-painted and daintily-conceived
little pictures on panels smaller than a man's hand ;
Jacob Jan van der Maaten (1820-1879), whose
Cornfield in the Hague Museum shows that he was
an attentive, if not an emotional painter; Christiaan
Immerzeel, born in 1808, who painted romantic,
but feeble moonlight scenes; Jan Frederik and
Willem Anthonie van Deventer (182 2- 1866 and 1824-
1893), of whom the first was a landscape-painter
and the second a deserving painter of sea and river-
views. Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuijzen died
in 1864.

When we look at the sea-pieces of Johannes
Christianus Schotel (i 787-1838) at the Rijksmuseum,
we are inevitably reminded of the Pienemans and

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Krusemans. Any objects that have not to do with
pure painting are perfect and those qualified to judge
have said that his ships are equipped with so much
technical accuracy and ride the waters so admirably
that the most expert skipper could not improve upon
them. Small wonder that he enjoyed the same
esteem as the painters of le grand art. It is true
that his skies were often out of harmony with the
sea and appeared to be made of cardboard and that
the water displayed more paint than transparency;
still, he was a thoughtful painter, who cleverly sup-
ported the movement of his ships by the composition
of the waves and knew how to put a picture together.
These qualities appear particularly in his drawings,
which surprise us agreably with the untrammelled
outlook, the firmness of the execution and the
majestic effects which, seated in his boat and drawing
direct from nature, he often succeeded in attaining.
Here we see none of that antiquated soapy hardness
or hard soapiness which clings to all his painted work
however clever the latter may be. His first master was
the Dordrecht candle-light painter Adriaan Meulemans
( 1 766-1835) and he received his artistic training
at the hands of Martinus Schouman (i 770-1 841),
the best sea-painter of his time. His pictures often
fetched considerable prices and his success descended,
in a certain measure, to his son and pupil Petrus
Johannes Schotel (1808- 1865).

A sea-painter of the same school was Johan Hendrik
Louis Meijer, who was born at Amsterdam in 18 10,
studied under Pieter Westenberg and, later, under
J. W. Pieneman, lived for some years at Deventer,

62 The Forerunners of the Hague School

settled in Paris in 1841 and afterwards moved to
the Hague, where he died in 1 866. At the commence-
ment of his career, he used to introduce history-
painting into his sea-pieces, but seldom to such an
extent as to interfere with his seeking for good effects
of light. He was a very systematic and successful
painter. Among his pupils he may be said to include
Jacob Maris, who, however, really attended his studio
rather to assist him with his seascapes, and, in any
case, Matthijs Maris, although Meijer told the latter,
when he came this studio as a child of ten, that
there was nothing that he could teach him, for Thijs
knew everything.

Andreas Schelfhout formed himself as a landscape-
painter upon Meijer's seascapes. He was bom at
the Hague in 1787 and worked until his twenty-
fourth year in the shop of his father, who was a
, maker of picture-frames, devoting his spare hours to
painting. A landscape which he exhibited in 18 15
was seen to possess something out of the ordinary
and this was confirmed by a Wintry Vieiv exhibited
a couple of years later. Some of his earlier land-
scapes display a certain freshness of idea, nor should
any painter generally be judged exclusively by the
work of his later years. Schelfhout's first little pictures
often impress us by the original colouring of their
skies, by the reflection of those skies in the cold
blue of the frozen water below, even though the smooth
and unreal treatment lead us to entertain a not
un mingled appreciation of his merits. He was an
indefatigable worker, never wasting a moment, and
achieved a certain reputation beyond the confines

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The Forerunners of the Hague School 63

of his own country. As late as 1870, most collectors
thought themselves fortunale to possess one of his
ice-pieces. And his colouring— I am speaking of his
best period — undoubtedly entitles him to take rank
among the founders of the modern landscape school.
Schelfhout died at the Hague in 1870. His chief
pupil was Jongkind, who for many years was unable
to free himself from his master's method. He also
taught Nuyen, whom I will mention below, Jan
Bedijs Tom, the animal-painter, Charles Henri Joseph
Leickert, born in 18 18, who also painted under
Nuyen, but never achieved any considerable distinc-
tion, and Dubourcq, a deserving Amsterdam land-
scape-painter.

Wijnand Jan Joseph Nuyen was born at the Hague
in 1 813. There have perhaps been few painters
who roused such confident hopes in their fellow-
artists as did Nuyen; few young artists — Nuyen died
in 1839, in his twenty-seventh year — who were so
greatly mourned for the sake both of their own
personality and of their promising work; few who,
at so young an age, wielded so great and so seductive
an influence over their contemporaries. The young
Catholic painter possessed more of the true artist's
passion than his contemporaries : most of his pictures
in spite of their treacly brown, display a yearning
for colour, a search for the splendid, a groping after
the romanticism of the middle ages that inspired all
his work and induced others to follow in his
footsteps.

He has left church-porches in which the persons
streaming out of the edifice count not as separate

64 The Forerunners of the Hague School

figures, but as a connected group, lit up by a warm
and life-giving sun. He also painted river-scenes
in the style of his friend Waldorp, less pretty,
perhaps, but also much less illustration-like. One
of these river-scenes, known sometimes as Le Coup
de Catiotiy is in the Wallace collection in London.
He also painted many admirable Gothic church-
interiors.

His short life was one mighty effort, one incessant
artistic enthusiasm, of a kind which had not been
known in recent years. It seems surprising that he
should have had Rochussen for a pupil, if we
remember only the latter's illustrative talent. But
many a little painting of Rochussen's shows a rela-
tionship with Nuyen — minus the brown sauce; and,
when all is said, are not the wagon and horses in
Nuyen's 0/d Mill in the Hague Museum typical and
illustrative in the best sense?

Antonie Waldorp (i 803-1 866) was a pupil of
Breckenheimer's, whom he helped in his scene-
painting, and it was not until after his marriage, in
his twenty-third year, with the sister of his fellow-
pupil Bart van Hove, that he began to apply
himself entirely to the practice of painting proper,
executing various subjects : church-interiors, portraits
and domestic interiors. When he reached the age
of thirty-five, he confined himself more particularly
to river-scenes, for which he had a great reputation
in his time. He was a friend of Nuyen, with whom
he took a journey to Germany and Belgium, and it
is not improbable that, although his young and more
gifted friend was ten years his junior, Waldorp was

THE OLD MILL — W. J. J. NUYEN
{Municipal Museum, the Hague)

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A CHURCH — B. J. VAX HOVE
[Boymans' Museum, Rotterdam)

The Forerunners of the Hague School 65

nevertheless influenced by Nuyen in his choice of
subjects and especially in their romantic conception.
Although Waldorp's river-scenes are painted in too
treacly a fashion to find much favour in our days,
although their shadows show signs of affectation, we
are bound, on the other hand, to recognize a certain
freedom of treatment and a well-considered com-
position.

Of much greater importance than Schelfhout to
nineteenth-century painting was the Hague scene-
painter Bartholomeus Johannes van Hove (1790-
1880), who may be described as the foundation upon
which a whole generation of artists has built, either
directly through himself or indirectly through his son
and pupil Hubertus van Hove. There are little pictures
of his, representing churches seen from the entrance
to the choir, which anticipate his pupil Bosboom;
and, while he displayed a certain grandeur in his
acceptance of his art, although he is not to be
compared with his pupil, he was an excellent instruc-
tor, who, following the good traditions, directed
the art of painting into another and wider channel.

B. J. van Hove, like most scene-painters, was a
Jack-of-all-trades. He painted a complete set of
scenery for the theatre at Nijmegen, where the curtain
is admired to this day; for the Hague he designed
the side-scenes for The Wreck of the Medusa, which
are considered his best stage work. In this his
pupils assisted him and it is quite possible that, in
so doing, they acquired that boldness and breadth
in painting which they could never have learnt from
Van Hove the painter of town-views. As a lad, he

66 The Forerunners of the Hague School

had begun with engraving ; afterwards he worked
under his father, who was a frame-maker and also
did a little engraving, and through him he became
acquainted with the scene-painter of the Hague
Theatre, J. H. A. A. Breckenheimer, who trained
him in his own art. Van Hove's little pictures,
mostly town-views, were much valued in their time
and, though there is no question of direct drawing
and the colouring is feeble, yet, in the general
conception of his subject, usually a piece of a large
church, he undoubtedly proves himself a precursor
of Bosboom. His seventieth birthday was splendidly
celebrated at the theatre and by Pulchri Studio, the
well-known artists' club, which presented him with
an inscribed silver goblet. That uncommonly gifted
singer, Mrs. Offermans-van Hove, pressed a crown
of laurels on his silvered brow. He Hved to be
nearly ninety years of age. His chief pupils were
Bosboom, Sam Verveer, H. J. Weissenbruch, Ever-
ardus Koster (i 8 17-1892), who painted river-scenes
in the manner of Waldorp, but whose drawings of
Gothic architecture rank higher, and his eldest son
Hubertus.

Hubertus or Huib van Hove (18 19-1865) was
taught painting not only by his father, but also by
Van de Sande Bakhuijzen and, though he constantly
kept pace with Bosboom and painted churches in
the latter's manner, he started as a landscape-painter.
But the force of this none too forcible painter lay
in neither of these two styles. His love of colour
and bright light was best displayed in his so-called
doorktjkjes, or domestic vistas, in the style of Pieter

THE KNITTER — HUBERT VAN HOVE
{Jeylefs Institute, Haarlem)

The Forerunners of the Hague School 6 7

de Hooche, that is to say, views of outdoor light
seen through an interior, a room or kitchen situated
between the street-door and an inner yard. Teyler's
Museum possesses an excellent specimen in The
Knitter, a picture which, although it lacks all the
essence of his sublime model, is of a lively composition
and shows an inclination for a stronger and fresher
colouring than prevailed in Van Hove's day.

Among his pupils were Jacob Maris, Christoffel
Bisschop, Stroebel, Maurits Leon (i 838-1 865), who
died so young and whose Interior of a Synagogue,
although not his best-known work, aroused great
expectations at the time, and Hendricus Johannes
Scheeres (i 823-1 864), who continued his master's
teaching in his Armourer and Linen-shop and who
enjoyed the appreciation of his brother-artists. He,
also, died too young to establish his name.

A painter who rendered excellent service to Dutch
art not only through his own performances, but also
by his influence upon his pupils was Petrus Fran-
ciscus Greive, who was born in Amsterdam in 1 8 1 1
and died in 1872. He was "a painter to the
bottom of his heart, " as his contemporaries used to
call him, and was closely related to Huib van Hove
in his love for Hooche-like interiors. But, whereas
neither of them really had anything to speak of in
common with Pieter de Hooche, Greive had not the
command of light, shade and colour that was after-
wards to distinguish the Hague painter. It is true
that the enormous number of his lessons prevented him
from quite coming into his own as a painter; and,
moreover, he started in much less favourable circum-

68 The Forerunners of the Hague School

stances than Huib van Hove. In the first place,
his master, the feeble history- painter Christiaan Julius
Lodewijk Portman (i 799-1867), was not to be
compared with B. J. van Hove either for his old-
Dutch cabinet-pieces or for his composition and
workmanship. And then the difference between his
surroundings and those at the Hague amid which
Bosboom, Huib van Hove's fellow-pupil, worked!
Nevertheless, the Rijksmuseum possesses of this
estimable artist, who was perhaps more of a draughts-
man than a painter, an Old- Dutch Serving-maid^ in
a De Hooche setting, which lacks nothing except
truth to life, while Teyler's Museum has a Marken
Interior which contains more movement and which,
as regards the subject, reminds one rather of Jozef
Israels' more romantic period.

Greive is of most importance to our own period
through his pupil Alleb6. He had many others,
including Leon, whom I have already named, Diederik
Franciscus Jamin (i 838-1 865), who died young
and who, within the bounds of a Hmited talent, was
full of promise, Hendrik Jacobus Scholten, bom in
1824, who excelled in the depicting of satin and also
painted from a more emotional point of view, in
addition to his nephew, Johan Conrad Greive Jr.
(i 837-1 891), who became known as a painter of
river-scenes with barges and of views on the IJ.

Barend Cornells Koekkoek (i 803-1 862) was
esteemed as highly as a landscape-painter in his time
as Jacob Maris in ours. Although he is now antiquated
and out of fashion, his value remains. And this is
not without good reason. When hung between

The Forerunners of the Hague School 69

indifferent works by modern landscape-men, his work
impresses the spectator by its power, by the firm
and correct construction of the trees, by the broad,
natural growth of the leaves and boughs, by the
careful and elaborate reproduction of the wooded
landscape, even though the representation be, as I
have said, antiquated and somewhat cold. He seems
to have based his method by turns upon Hobbema
and Wijnands, but mainly upon the latter, while he
lacked the simple distinction of his illustrious models,
however excellent he may have been in the portrayal
of heavy trees. His best pieces are those which
show but little of the open air, for the landscape
fell more within his scope than the sky, which in
his pictures often suggests scene-painting.

B. C. Koekkoek was a native of Middelburg ; he
was the eldest son of Johannes Hermanus Koekkoek
(i 778-1 851), a well-known sea and river-painter,
who, after learning his trade in a tapestry- factory,
formed himself by studying from nature and after-
wards brought up all his sons — he had four, of
whom, after Barend, Hermanus was the best-known —
as painters. Our Koekkoek did not confine himself
to the landscape of his own country and found the
scenes that best satisfied his taste in the Harz
Mountains, the Rhine Provinces, Belgium and, parti-
cularly, in Gelderland and the Cleves district. His
work was greatly valued and highly paid in Paris,
Brussels and St. Petersburg.

Johannes Warnardus Bilders (181 1- 1890) was
born at Utrecht and took lessons from Jan Lodewijk
Jonxis ( 1 789-1866). In the phrase of that time,

70 The Forerunners of the Hague School

however, "nature," or, more correctly, "his own
genius was his best master." After a course of travels
in Germany, he settled down at Oosterbeek, which
had not yet become a " park" of villas and " de-
sirable residences. " In 1854, he went to Amsterdam,
where his friend N. Pieneman, Schwartze, who had
already made his name, and their junior, Jozef Israels,
were living. Bilders had exhibited for the first time
in 1 840 ; Schwartze's first work was shown between
1845 ^"d 1850; Israels had exhibits his Aaron
in Amsterdam in 1854, painted his romantic By
Mother's Grave in 1856 and followed this up in 1858
with his well-known Little Knitter and, somewhat
later, with that little master-piece of romanticism.
After the Storm.

I doubt whether Bilders' great talent ever reached
its full development. He stood alone, absolutely
alone. The phlegmatic painters who were content
slavishly to copy nature, the eminent painters of
fields and cattle had little or nothing in common
with him and the studies which were sold at the
auction held in the studio of the late Mrs. Bilders-
van Bosse, his second wife, prove that he felt a
longing for more colour, that, directly or indirectly,
he had experienced the influence of a Delacroix.
At any rate, there were some among them which
exhibited a great tendency towards modern methods
with their sharp colour-scheme, into which no bitumen,
no brown sauce entered to spoil the clearness of the
impression conveyed.

As his pupils, I may name his son, Albert Gerard
Bilders, who died young, and Miss Marie van Bosse,
who afterwards became his wife. I will return both

1 1

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I-)
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The Forerunners of the Hague School 7 1

to the former, who proved himself a pioneer, if not
by his painting, at least by recording his wishes
and longings in the matter of the painter's art, and
to the latter, who was a well-known landscape-painter.

CHAPTER VI

THE MASTERS OF THE CABINET
PICTURE

David Bles was the foremost painter at the Hague
when Jozef Israels was feeling his way in Amsterdam,
from 1854 to 1864, and when Bosboom, at the
Hague, was following the road which he had seen
clearly before him from the beginning. Israels has
described how honoured he felt when, as a promising
painter, he was permitted to walk round an exhibition
arm in arm with Bles and how lucky he thought
himself to receive a word of approval from the great
man, who, nevertheless, told him pretty frankly that
he did not understand the so-called poetry in Israels*
painting and that, for the rest, he had never under-
stood what poetry and painting had in common.

Nor was this to be expected from our rather
cynical artist, with his humorous subjects borrowed,
to a great extent, from la vie galante. He was a
clever draughtsman and a good painter, who improved
upon the soapy method of his time by means of
cunning after-touches, smart strokes and powerful
shadows and who placed his cleverly-conceived little

FIGURE OF A WOMAN — DAVID BLES

(Municipal Museum, Amsterdam)

The Masters of the Cabinet Picture 73

figures freely and spaciously and yet in such a way
that the action was concentrated and the point of
his anecdote invariably realized. Still, he was in
every respect the very opposite of an Israels or a
Bosboom, though he was artist enough to entertain
a great respect for the work of the latter.

Born at the Hague in 182 1, he first studied, for
three years, under Cornelis Kruseman and afterwards
worked in Paris in Robert Fleury's studio. At a
very early age, he painted, under the influence of
his first master and even more under that of the
romanticism of his day, such genre-pieces as a
Savoyard Hurdy-gurdy Girl, an Hungarian Mousetrap-
vendor^ or else he made offerings to history in the
shape of a Rubens and young Teniers or a Paul
Potter taking his afternoon Walk, until, after his return
from Paris, at twenty-two, he found himself soon
devoting his powers to those littie anecdotal paintings
which attained so widespread a fame both in his
own country and abroad.

His subjects were taken from our middle-class
moral life. He almost created a special type of
soubrette, with roguish, ogling brown eyes, tiny
fingers and dainty, neatly-rounded figures. He began
at a time when brunettes were in fashion, at a time
when one half of the public went mad about the
tear on the cheek of a Monica, while the other half,
brought up on French literature, enjoyed the smallest
suggestion of a double entente. It was also the time
when collectors attached importance to a picture
according to the number of pretty figures of women
which it contained, the time when they would put
their littie paintings on the table before them in order

74 The Masters of the Cabinet Picture

to examine them at their ease, discuss the qualities
and the expression and, magnifying-glass in hand,
smack their lips over the piquancy of the anecdote
represented. It goes without saying that so-called
miniature-painting was then in great favour ; but the
carefully- executed subjects, details and figures, the
natural poses, lively presentation and warm colouring
and, especially, the clever little lights and touches,
so very comformable with the spirit of the subject,
are all qualities which we can even now afford to
appreciate.

And yet his sketches, heightened with sepia, often
show something that attracts us still more. A
swiftly-grasped movement, such as that of a girl
pulling on her slipper with one finger, bending
slighty aside, her shoulder thrust back in the doing
of it; a flute-player; a soubrette hurrying past on
her high heels ; a fragile figure of a woman recovering
after her confinement (in the completed picture, the
young husband bends over her, while a healthy
peasant-woman nurses the child) : these are the figures
in his sketches, which we find repeated in his favourite
subjects, reproduced in a bright, life-like and
natural style.

A time came, a time was bound to come when
people had had enough of these anecdotes, of these
stories in paint, when they were no longer able to
laugh at the ready-made gaiety of these pieces. This
was the time when the masters of the Hague school
offered their inner vision for our contemplation instead
of an anecdote, when the depth of emotion of the
Barbizon painters, the epic simplicity of Millet, the
large view of nature of Daubigny, the more rugged

THE NINTH DAY — DAVID BLES

{Municipal Museum, Amsterdam)

The Masters of the Cabinet Picture 75

greatness of Rousseau and the tortured Dupr6, as
contrasted with the classic Corot, made their influence
felt. It was the time, too, when the Marises, with
the magnificence of their conception of things, against
which Bles seemed so trivial, and with their purity
and their wealth of colour, when Israels, with the
biblical grandeur of his interiors, Bosboom, with the
sober stateliness of his churches. Mauve, with his
simplicity, saw the world from a nobler standpoint
and rendered in pure plastic form not so much
external objects as the depths of their own feeling.

Time is just.

The pictorial qualities for which, at this or that
time, a given painter has been valued remain the
same. His good qualities are often thrust into the
background, because of a change in the accepted
formula ; but, at each new turn of the road we catch
a fresh glimpse of the former period, which is then
weighed and frequently valued anew. But what can
never be made good is the sorrow that must needs
be felt by a painter who, after passing through years
of triumph, is forgotten in his own lifetime. David
Bles died in 1899, too early to witness the revo-
lution which has once more enabled us to see what
was good in the days before the coming of the
great Hague men.

If we place David Bles side by side with Bakker
Korfif, the Leiden painter (and there is due reason
for the comparison), we feel inclined to compare the
subjects of the first with a spicy French farce and
those of the other with a drawing-room play at a
girls boarding-school, performed mainly for the sake

76 The Masters of the Cabinet Picture

of the " dressing-up" involved. David Bles's pictures
are seldom complete without some allusion to la vit
galante aforesaid, whereas Bakker Korffs afford a
genial laugh at the affectation of the pompous and
stately old spinsters, with their scent-bottles, bonbon-
boxes and fiddle-faddles, continuing the greatness of
their forefathers in the sumptuous decoration of their
houses, chatting and enjoying themselves with friends
who resemble them in every respect, waxing senti-
mental over a forgotten ballad, sitting rapt in admira-
tion round a fine fuchsia or a bowl of gold fish, talking
scandal, arch, simple, but always with a suggestion
of that same "dressing-up" and always seen with
the eyes of a painter of still-Hfe. It is in this that
the value of these little panels lies. The Saxony
soup- tureens, the lacquered Chinese urn-stands, the
flounced skirts, the black silk aprons, the costly
tea-services, the motley carpets, all reproduced with
cunning touches of colour in a dignified, eighteenth-
century living-room, the faces with the prominent
noses, the little curls on the temples and all the
coquettish gestures of the old belles who had been
flirts in their day, the delicious effects of light, which
Bakker Korff employed so sparingly, but to such
good surpose, the firm painting and witty brush-
work, with something of Meissonier in the drawing :
all these cause him to rank perhaps a little higher
than David Bles, even though the latter displays
more variety in his subjects, more expression in his
figures and more point in his anecdotes.

Alexander Hugo Bakker Korff was born at the
Hague in 1829, attended C. Kruseman*s studio
together with David Bles, H. ten Kate, Jan and

o ^

< M

/ ^ or THE '

The Masters of the Cabinet Picture 77

Philip Koelman and Vintcent, took lessons under
J. E. J. van den Berg at the Hague Academy and
afterwards worked in the studio of Huib van Hove.
His first pictures consisted of biblical and historical
subjects: life-size figures, exacted by the classic
painters in imitation of the antique statues, as though
there were no salvation outside the giant cartoon.
He excelled to better purpose in smaller compositions
drawn with the pen, after the manner of Rethel
and Flaxman. And, soon, driven to the painting
of miniature-pieces either because of his near-sight-
edness or because of the taste of the day, we find
him at Oegstgeest, far from all schools of art,
taking up that genre-painting in which he was es-
sentially himself and for which his unmarried sisters
sat as voluntary models. Although the pictures with
many figures are more interesting, I prefer the
single figures for their colour-scheme: it is more
unconstrained and often contains more tone. I
know a little piece in which a portly person of the
middle-class, in pink cotton, is mending a calico
coverlet. The woman in this bright pink contrasting
with her black apron, with the many-coloured coverlet
on her lap, against the elaborate background of an
old-fashioned kitchen, or else a single delicate little
figure, all in white against a rich background : these
are the pictures that stand highest as specimens of
his powers. He is also admirable in such pieces
as The Mischief- makers The School for Scandal^ The
Fuchsia, while, of his larger works, The Ballad is
perhaps best- known, because of the engraving. Less
well-known is a still-Hfe picture of fine glass seen
against a mirror, a problem which seems hardly

78 The Masters of the Cabinet Picture

solvable, but which he was nevertheless able cleverly to
decipher. Bakker Korff himself regarded this as his
best work. He died in 1882 and, though his work too
was disregarded for a time, it is now valued more
highly than that of Bles. It is something that both
escaped the soapy influence of Cornells Kruseman.

As much cannot be said of Bakker Korff's pupil
Herman Frederik Karel ten Kate (1822-1891).
His pictures illustrative of the Eighty Years' War
appear, at first sight, to be treated in lively fashion
and a certain roughness of colour gives them a
spurious air of strength. But, on reconsideration,
everything about them — the colour, the workman-
ship, the composition — becomes tedious and nothing
remains but a considerable adroitness. His soldiers,
clad in mail or jerkin, endowed with huge jack- boots,
drinking, dicing, courting the wench at the inn, are
all cut from one pattern and, though we know that
their costumes are authentic, they remain stage
characters in a stage scene. Herman ten Kate's
was an affected method. He lacked the certainty
of workmanship which give Bles's subjects their
pictorial value. Nevertheless, his work was greatly
sought after and he was personally highly respected.

Johan Mari ten Kate, born in 183 1, his younger
brother and pupil, borrowed his subjects from child-
life ; his work is often weak and, at the same time,
a little exaggerated in the conception of it. Mari
ten Kate's best work consists of the studies which
he made at Marken with his brother Herman.

COMPULSORY INTERCOURSE — A. ALLEBE
{The property of Mr. T. G. Dentz van Schaick, Amsterdam)

'. UNIVERS/TY

The Masters of the Cabinet Picture 79

Alleb6 may be regarded as the fine painter who
closes one period and introduces a new one. He
belongs to the anecdotal painters in so far as his
subjects are concerned, while the composition and
the execution of his best works approach very near
to the finest that we possess. It is owing to the
distinguished quality of his talent that this artist,
who, for some years, has practically ceased production,
is rated perhaps even more highly in this twentieth
century than when he was most constantly at work.

Alleb6 is a born painter of cabinet-pieces. These
are well-considered compositions, often endowed with
a touch of anecdote, at times romantic, but rarely
sentimental. One would have to collect all his works
together in order to trace any sort of gradual de-
velopment. To judge from what we know — and this
is constantly increasing in volume in proportion as
our admiration increases of late years — he is one of
those artists who confirm the rule that a man is either
an artist or not. All that we do know is distinguished
by a certain completeness. The subjects are interiors
such as that with the little old Brabant woman winding
up her clock, a more or less witch- like type which
he repeated later and strengthened by adding one
of those tortuous, stretching cats which often recur
in his work. Would you see how a little picture
such as this is painted? You can tell neither where it
begins nor where it ends. Muther once said of Menzel
that he added up with too many small figures. The same
remark, differently applied, might be made regarding
Alleb6, were it not that every detail of the treatment
in his case is covered with so delicate a gloss,
while all those tiny dots of colour are mingled so

8o The Masters of the Cabinet Picture

inextricably that it is hopeless to look for any
weakness.

From the point of view of the effective distnibution
of light, The Well-watched Child at the Rijksmuseum
stands highest of all Alleb6's pictures. The subject
is an old-fashioned farm-house, containing dwelling
and stable in one. In the background is a cradle
with a child, watched over by a placid cat, a cow
and a number of yellow chickens, which trip close
past the cradle: a deliciously homely and delight-
fully-painted slice of life, enUvened by the rays falling
from the skylight upon the cradle and deepening
all the colours in the foreground, so that the blue
becomes bluer, the green real, mellow grass-green,
and the scene of the cradle, the cat, the cow and
the chickens, with a few objects around, placed in
the full light, forms the centre of the picture.

Auguste Alleb6 was born in Amsterdam in 1838
and received his first lessons at the Academy. Later,
he followed the course at the Ecole Normale in
Paris, where he learnt much of Mouilleron, the well-
known lithographer, and it is perhaps to the latter's
lessons that we owe those immaculate lithographic
portraits of Alleb^'s, which are models of simple,
unaffected draughtmanship. Together with Jamin
and Maurits Leon, he worked for two years in
P. F. Greive's studio, subsequent to which came
his Early in Churchy formely in the Van Lynden
collection. In 1868, he went to Brussels and, on his
return, in 1870, was appointed professor at the
State Academy of Plastic Art, under De Poorter,
whom he succeeded as director on the latter's death
in 1880.

THE WELL-GUARDED CHILD — A. ALLEBE
(Rijksmiiscum, Amsterdam)

The Masters of the Cabinet Picture 8 1

Many have regretted the fact that this fine painter,
with his pronounced talent, should, after ten years
of success and general appreciation, have abandoned
his artistic career. Perhaps, at first, he flattered himself
that he would be able to combine the two callings and
allowed himself to be persuaded accordingly. But,
even as he had been a conscientious painter, so now
he became a careful and scrupulous teacher. The two
were not to be combined and the artist was swallowed
up in the professor. And, however much we may
regret this from the point of view of our national
art, it is not for those who have enjoyed his teaching
to complain : the excellent pupils whom he has formed
bear witness, in many respects, to the culture that
distinguished his teaching.

His years of study and his principal years of
work, from i860 to 1870 (although some of his
best water-colours are dated after 1870), coincided
with those of Matthijs, Jacob and Willem Maris and
with the time when the masters of the Hague school,
while preparing for the full flight which they were
to take after 1870, had already produced some of
their most finished work. It was a time rich in
promise, strong in reserved force; for the Hague
school it was the burgeoning of the buds, the
beginning of a spring which was soon to burst into
full blossom and become a luxurious summer of
latter-day Dutch art.

CHAPTER VII

THE HAGUE SCHOOL: INTRO-
DUCTION

If we look back upon the painters of whom I have
written in the previous chapters, we behold a proces-
sion of teachers who displayed their talent to its
fullest extent in their pupils. We find in Amsterdam
J. W. Pieneman and J. A. Kruseman, who have the
honour of having introduced Jozef Israels to Dutch
painting; B. J. van Hove, who gave us Bosboom,
but also Weissenbruch — two painters who, despite
the different forms of their art, and probably owing
to the influence of their master, show so many traces
of resemblance — and also his son Huib, who, in
his turn, produced Jacob Maris, Bisschop and both
David Bles and Bakker Korff; Schelfhout, who, in
Jongkind and Weissenbruch, gave us the best that
he had to give and, through his pupil Nuyen,
prepared Rochussen for us; Samuel Verveer, who
contributed to Jan Weissenbruch's artistic training;
Louis Meijer, the pupil of J. W. Pieneman, who
taught Matthijs Maris the rudiments of his art, and
P. F. van Os, to whom Mauve and Roelofs owe much.

INNER YARD OF THE TOWN HALL AT KUILENRURG— JAN WEISSENBRUCH
(Municipal Museum, Dordrcclit)

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The Hague School: Introduction 83

while Roelofs, to a certain extent, formed Mesdag.
We find H. van de Sande Bakhuijzen, who taught
his son Julius and his daughter Gerardina, the
flower-painter, and who was also the master of Weis-
senbruch and Ter Meulen; B. C. Koekkoek, who
formed Hanedoes (b. 1822) and J. W. Bilders, the
teacher of his own son Gerard (i 838-1 865); Gijs-
bertus Craejrvanger (b. 18 10), the painter of town-
views, who for a time had Albert Neuhuijs as his
pupil, while Bisschop gave Blommers and Israels Artz
lessons which they turned to good account.

And in these names we see the whole glorious
array of the masters of the Hague school. The
Hague school ! An approximate title invented by the
Amsterdam painters of a younger generation. A
name for which there would be no room in our
little Holland, but for the fact that, in general, Am-
sterdam and the Hague differed so greatly in their
methods of painting. A name that expresses the
loftiest point reached by Dutch painting since the
seventeenth century.

And yet, when Bosboom, in 1833 to 1834, painted
his first town-view in his master's manner; when
Israels, in 1848, sent his first picture, a biblical
subject, from Amsterdam to an exhibition at the Hague;
when Rochussen, the oldest of them all, who did not
begin to paint until 1836, exhibited his small pictures
and Weissenbruch painted his Schelfhout-like land-
scapes ; when, lastly, during all those years, Schelfhout
and Koekkoek, the Pienemans and the Krusemans
remained the great men and, of the work of all those
who were afterwards to be known as the Hague
masters, only that of Bosboom was distinguished by

84 The Hague School: Introduction

those same qualities for which he was to be admired
all his Hfe and long after ; nay, even when a member
of a younger generation, Jacob Maris, painted in oils
or water-colour his now so highly valued genre-pieces
and when, in 1863, Matthijs and Willem Maris raised
a contest through their personal views at a Hague
exhibition, a contest which Jacob was afterwards to
wage in a more lasting fashion : even then there was
no mention of a Hague school!

Matthijs Maris in his Back Slum and Willem in his
Landscape with Cattle display a quality of colouring
of which young Bilders, painting in the same style
as Willem Maris, gave the formula, oddly enough,
before it had actually come into existence. Their
colours are worked up into a tonality out of which
the light draws the forms to the foreground, whereas,
before their time, the sky was generally no more
than a piece of scene-painting, against which each
form was traced out separately and positively. In
1 860 (Willem Maris was then sixteen), Bilders wrote
to Mr. Kneppelhout:

" I am looking for a tone which we call coloured
grey, that is a combination of all colours, however
strong, harmonized in such a way that they give the
impression of a warm and fragrant grey."

And again :

"To preserve the sense of the grey even in the
most powerful green is amazingly difficult and whoever
discovers it will be a happy mortal.*

Later, he wrote:

" It is not my aim and object to paint a cow for
the cow's sake or a tree for the tree's, but by means

OF THE ^V

The Hague School: Introduction 85

of the whole to reproduce an impression which nature
sometimes gives."

And, although he was not given time (he died at
twenty-six) to attain in his work that symphonic result
which a riper generation achieved, he did, in his
little landscape in the Rijksmuseum, come near to
finding the grey for which he was seeking and he
showed that he did not paint the cow for the cow*s
sake. In the same year, 1 860, in which he voiced
his longing for a warm grey, he received the revelation
of what painting can be, a revelation which the painters
who came after him received in the same measure:

"I have seen pictures," he wrote, speaking of
Brussels, " of which I had never dreamed and in
which I found all that my heart desires, all that I
nearly always miss in the Dutch painters. Troyon,
Courbet, Diaz, Dupr6, Robert Fleury have made a
great impression on me. I am a good Frenchman,
therefore; but, as Simon van den Berg says, it is
just because I am a good Frenchman that 1 am a
good Dutchman, since the great Frenchmen of to day
and the great Dutchmen of the past have much in
common. Unity, restfulness, earnestness and, above all,
an inexplicable intimacy with nature are what struck
me most in these pictures. There were certainly also a
few good Dutch pieces, but, generally speaking, when
you place them next to the great Parisians, they
lack that mellowness, that quality which, so to speak,
resembles the deep tones of an organ. And yet
this luxurious manner came originally from Holland,
from our steaming, fat-coloured Holland ! They were

86 The Hague School: Introduction

courageous pictures; there was a heart and a soul
in them."

Probably this is the place once more to show how
these so-called Barbizon painters, who were so entirely
un-French in all their being, could be developed in
France, in Paris; how an accumulation of foreign
methods in England kindled the spark which ignited,
in that country, a flourishing renascence of Italian and
Dutch painting and, in so doing, transferred the art
of absolute painting to modern times.

The Enghsh people are characterized in opposition
to the foreigner mainly by their practical sense. This
quality has, from an early date (and perhaps by way
of reaction), prompted the English to cultivate all
that is beautiful and has produced that series of poets
of whom they are so justly proud, while their wealth
has always enabled them to supply the lack of a
native art of painting by inviting to their country
successive famous painters from abroad, of whom
Holbein and Van Dijck are the chief. They have
done more. Since the days of Charles II., they have
never ceased buying pictures from the Continent:
Italian and especially Venetian masters; Flemish
masters; and, with an evident preference, Dutch
masters. No country has collected with greater per-
spicacity than England; no people have so thoroughly
realized the value of Dutch landscape, for which
reason, perhaps, it has been said that, after the
Japanese, no people are more devoted to what is
nowadays called "nature" than the English.

This was bound to have an effect ; and, eventually,
from all these imported painters and paintings arose

The Hague School: Introduction 87

the great English portrait-school of Reynolds and
Gainsborough, based on Rembrandt and the Venetian
masters and especially on Van Dijck. And, as the
aristocratic life of the English was spent mainly at
their country-seats and as these portrait-painters, with
Gainsborough in particular, painted the portraits of
the women of their time with unparalleled elegance
against the backgrounds of their parks, the natural
result was that, together with the portrait, the love
of the landscape must lead to the painting of land-
scape for its own sake. And so it happened that,
from the stately parks of his portraits, from the rustic
village in which he was born, Gainsborough derived
the first modern landscape based upon Rubens, but
gently modulated, full of style and great. For, though
he may afterwards have painted landscapes illu-
minated by his admiration for Cuyp, though he may
occasionally remind us of Watteau and sometimes
presage Corot, he was the first painter who, in the
Netherlands manner, rendered the English landscape
in the English style and thus became the harbinger
of a renascence of the Dutch school of landscape-
painting.

The question has also been asked by the English
whether Van Dijck was not, in his turn, influenced
by England, a question which, to judge by his Eng-
lish portraits, seems very possible, the more so
as their particular qualities are those which we find
most frequently repeated in the later English school.
For, however much both Van Dijck, who was
Gainsborough's exemplar, and Rubens inspired Gains-
borough's landscapes, however Dutch Constable
showed himself to be, to whatever degree these two

i^8 The Hague School: Introduction

reproduced their English landscape in the pure picto-
rial form of our seventeenth-century masters, there
is no trace of plagiarism, no question of copying:
their art, like that of Bonington, was purely
English. And it was this art which was as a reve-
lation to the French landscape-painters, whose works,
exhibited in Brussels and Paris, in their turn gave
the Dutchmen an understanding of their own being
and a clearer insight, which, at first, perhaps, with
a suggestion of borrowed riches, led them back at length
into their own domain.

It is easy to overestimate an influence. For, although
the art of painting, colour and the sense of a powerful
movement can be taught and learned, it is not often
that a foreign tradition leads to great display of
strength. And the style built up from the classic
Dutch landscapes has passed away in both England
and France and survives in Holland alone of all the
countries where it was introduced. Holland alone
perpetuated it in its purity, stripped of all foreign
adornments. And, although numbers of Germans,
Swedes and Englishmen set out for the Forest of
Fontainebleau to catch something of the spirit of the
Barbizon masters and sat by the edge of the ponds
at Ville-d'Avray, seeking for the genius of Corot, or
came to Holland to study the old and new land-
scape-painters, the essence of the national art of
the country remained as foreign to them as the land
itself and the race.

The Hague masters did not at once achieve their
complicated solutions of light, their breadth of view,
their masterliness of touch.

The Hague School: Introduction 89

The genesis of our art follows the same law at
all times. Every painter, every school of painting
passes through that which is symptomatic of the whole
art of painting : stiffness and precision at first, breadth
and width in the fuller expansion, more open in the
measure as it commands more and occupies a freer
position towards the technical power of representation.
Is not the progress of Rembrandt, from the naive
and compact little portraits of his early years to the
Syndics of the Cloth-hall and after, on a line with the
development of Bosboom, Israels and the Maris
brothers? An immensity of talent and work were
needed to bring our school of painting out of its
latent power to the rich aftermath which it produced.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, almost
all our cities — Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam,
Utrecht, Leeu warden, Dordrecht, Delft — had their
own painters. In 1870, the Hague, like Paris, became
a centre to which all the painters flocked. Nor was
this due to accident. The Hague, thirty years ago,
was surrounded on every side by nature in all her
fulness : to the south and east lay the endless, luxu-
riant meadows, with the distant horizon, absorbing
every colour, unchanged since Potter's days ; to the
north and west, the delicious low-lying dunes and
rich dune-valleys, with the great North Sea, which
communicates its pale-grey atmosphere to the greater
part of the Hague, and the long Scheveningen beach,
with its active fishing life, all under that same silvery
sky. Here, surely, if anywhere, the grey of which
Gerard Bilders had dreamt was to find its realization.

To a certain extent, the Hague of 1870 to 1890
may be best compared with fifteenth-century Bruges.

90 The Hague School: Introduction

Even as the skilled painters of all the northern coun-
tries gathered at Bruges, so, in 1870 to 1871, did
the skilled painters of these later days come to settle
at the Hague, attracted by the sea and the landscape,-
by the painters already residing there and, as at
Bruges, by more material advantages, which consisted
not, as at Bruges, in the presence of wealthy merchants,
but in the recent establishment of the Maison Goupil,
which in Paris, under Vincent van Gogh, had so
strenuously supported the younger Dutch painters.
Israels came to the Hague in 1 869, from Amsterdam,
as " a made man, " although his greatest and most
philosophical works were yet to come ; Mesdag came
in the same year, after achieving his first successes
in Brussels; Mauve arrived in 1870; Weissenbruch
was a native of the Hague; Bisschop, the Frisian,
Wcis living there as a young painter; Jacob Maris
returned to the Hague in 1871, after the Paris Com-
mune, and Artz a few years later. Albert and Jozef
Neuhuys moved to the Hague from Utrecht in 1875;
Gabriel from Brussels in 1884; Roelofs a little later;
Breitner about 1880; and Tholen, Toorop and others
joined the rest in 1886. When the first of these
painters came to the Hague in 1869 or 1870, they
found Bles there, as well as Samuel and Elchanon
Verveer and such painters as Tom, Destr6e, the
Van Deventers, Van Everdingen, Nakken, Stroebel
and Hanendoes and also Bosboom, in the full vigour
of his powers, and Willem Maris, who had pursued
his own road as calmly as Bosboom himself.

The nucleus of the Hague school consists of
Bosboom, Israels, Matthijs and Willem Maris and

3|

The Hague School: Introduction 91

Mauve. It is true that Matthijs Marls' Dutch period
proper occurs before 1870 and that, in this case, the
painter would be outside the circle of the school;
but I have purposely, for practical reasons, drawn
this circle pretty wide and, moreover, the more we
come to know this painter's earlier work, the more
we realize his great significance for his contem-
poraries, from i860 to 1868, and the great influence
which he exercised upon those who were to follow
him in this school.

Bosboom was the master continuously from 1833,
the year in which he first exhibited, to 1891, the
year of his death. He may have been influenced
by the Romanticists and, in particular, by Nuyen;
later, he may have striven after heavier effects in his
admiration for Rembrandt; after 1870, he may have
allowed himself to be seduced by the modern breath of
a budding impressionism (and this was incontestably
the case) : all this does not detract from the fact that,
from the start, he remained himself, and was recog-
nized for his gifts of heart and hand.

And the artist who influenced him more than any
other was Rembrandt. The influence is seen in the
motives of his Synagogue at Amsterdam and his
Treves Cathedral^ heavy and monumental in the second,
glowing with rich effects of colour and light in the
first. These are the pictures which brought him into
general consideration about 1870, for the sake of
the grandeur of their conception and their poetic mood,
although a later generation prefers the simpler and
more open drawings illumined by a less direct Rem-
brandt light, because they perhaps come even nearer
to the essence of the master whom he held so high.

92 The Hague School: Introduction

These drawings date to 1863, a year of adversity
for Bosboom, of an adversity rich in consequences.
In this year — incredible though it may seem, when
we contemplate the well-balanced work of this classic
painter — he was smitten, not for the first time, with
an attack of melancholy and with so great a feeling
of impotence that he wished that he might never
have to paint again. He recovered his equilibrium
at the country-seat of Jonkheer van Rappard, with
whom he and his wife, ihe well-known novelist, went
to stay. Van Rappard acted as his Maecenas and
bought all the drawings which he produced, while
urging him not to confine himself to church-interiors.
The hospitality and liberty which Bosboom enjoyed
enabled him to wander peacefully between Utrecht
and Loosdrecht, where he was struck by the mas-
sive build both of isolated trees and of the great
farm-houses whose intimacy, whose ample construc-
tion he so well succeeded in reproducing. In later
years, the number of his water-colours began to
exceed that of his oil-paintings considerably. And, after
1 89 1 , the year of his death, portfolios came to light
crammed with drawings, sketches and scrawls, by
the hundred, which suggested great art even where
the paper was barely touched, as in the sketch of the
great church at Alkmaar, in the cloister- stairs, in
lightly-washed chalk-drawings, and made the same
revelation to the more modern that his more solid
work had made to an earlier generation.

And Bosboom's water-colours! Compared with
the analytical water-colour art of Alleb^, how great
is his power to solve the most intricate difficulties
by the simplest means, in his stately church-interiors,

The Hague School: Introduction 93

in his cloistered corridors, in his sacristies, as in his
suites of apartments or his drawings of the Hofje
van Nieuwkoop, the old home of Palchri Studio. It
is inconceivably simple ; and, even if one stood behind
him, following those little drawings, the simple move-
ments of his hand, the brush flowing, dragging or
serving as a drawing-pen, the fixing of a few details
in those fluent, colourless spaces until everything
is there, light and shade, the full, absorbed tone,
the bright lights and, above all, a great, simple
truthfulness : even then it appears to us a mysterious
movement of the fingers, under which — O wonder! —
that pure plastic art comes into being and gives its
value to Bosboom's slightest sketch.

This great artist, who used to declare that he
had known no other master than Rembrandt, adopted
all that we most admire in Rembrandt's etchings:
the stately design, the noble line, springing straight
from the heart, the generous riot of his lines, the
spacious gestures which have been handed down to
us in his least scrawls, in his most ingenuous
drawings or sketches in oils. But Bosboom did not
inherit all his master's attributes. Rembrandt saw
mankind : he was the seer who beheld the divine
revealed in humanity ; he saw men in their helpless-
ness, their imperfection, in their awkward movements;
he saw them poor, hideous or honourable; out of
his rich life he saw them as they are: beautiful,
because of that life ; beautiful, because they live their
piteous lives simply and manfully; great, because
they are men and, therefore, of divine origin. He
saw them with the eyes of the Bible: the halt and
the lame, the blind, the Samaritans ; he also saw

94 The Hague School: Introduction

the Pharisees. And it was this side of him that Bos-
boom was unable to touch, the side which none in
these days was able to approach save Israels alone.

Jozef Israels sprang from a very different environ-
ment. Bosboom succeeded Van Hove, Schelfhout,
Waldorp, Nuyen, the natural precursors of the
Hague school, and saw his road lie straight and
smooth before him. Israels had not only to rid himself
of the conventional conceptions of his masters, Pieneman
and Kruseman, but also to shake himself free from Picot
and Delaroche and his early admiration of Ary Scheffer.

Richard Muther fixes " the decisive year which led
the stream of Dutch painting back into its old course"
at 1857, "the very year when a new movement in
Dutch literature was begun with Multatuli." Max
Liebermann, in many respects a pupil of Israels and, in
any case, his brother in art, says:

"Israels first realized himself at an age at which
most painters have already produced their best work ;
and, had he had the misfortune to die at forty,
Holland would have been unable to boast of one of
her greatest sons."

He, therefore, fixes the date of the present Israels
at 1864. Jan Veth gives i86oas the commencement
of the Hague school; and, although there is truth
in all these views, I prefer to place the date at about
1870, the period when Israels settled at the Hague,
when Jacob Maris came home from Paris, when Mesdag
and Mauve moved to the Hague and when Artz
also came here for a time from Paris, to setde down

PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF — JOZEF ISRAELS

[The property of^'Pulcltri Studio," the Hague)

The Hague School: Introduction 95

definitely a couple of years later. For, if fate had
decreed that such painters as Israels, Jacob and
Matthijs Maris, Willem Maris, Mauve, Mesdag and
Weissenbruch should have ceased production about
1870 (as in the case of Alleb6, Matthijs Maris's con-
temporary), there is no doubt that, in spite of the
precious pieces which they bequeathed to us between
i860 and 1870, there would have been no question
of a modern, of a Hague school of painting. They
had, it is true, produced master-pieces which, to
a certain extent, remained unsurpassed by their later
and more matured works ; but these mark the zenith
of the art of 1830 to 1840 rather than an inspired
and inspiring new birth. Only in Bosboom's sketches
should we have perceived an unknown spirit, the
announcement of an unfulfilled promise, while from
the little pictures of the Thijs Maris of that time
we should have seen that the seventeenth-century
powers of Rembrandt and De Hooche were not
entirely lost.

We can trace the general development by following
Israels' studies. Bom at Groningen in 1824, he was
brought up in the traditions of the old faith and was
destined for the rabbinate. He seems to have been
a promising lad, who was handy with his pencil, read
the Talmud diligently, played the violin and wrote
little poems. When he grew up, his father, who had
a small business as a stock and share-dealer, required
his services ; and Israels loves to tell how, as a boy,
he used to go with his bag of notes and securities
to the office of old Mr. Mesdag, where H. W.
Mesdag was afterwards himself to sit on a high stool.
About 1840, upon the persuasion of a Groningen

96 The Hague School: Introduction

Maecenas, Mr. de Witte the lawyer, Israels' father
consented that he should go to Amsterdam to study
under Kruseman and, for seven years, he worked in
Kruseman's studio and followed Pieneman's classes
at the Academy. But it was not to be expected
that this lively, emotional, Jewish nature, brought
up on the flowery, colourful narratives of the Old
Testament, should rest content with the systematic
methods, based at it were upon formal recipes, of
his two painting-masters. He received his first great
impression in 1855 fr^"^ Ary Scheffer's Gretchen at
the Spinning-wheel, then exhibiting in Amsterdam.
He here found something different from the "calcu-
lated preciseness" that had been dinned into him
and sentiment and poetry attracted him more than
mere craftsman's skill. In the following year, he went
to Paris and worked in the studio of Picot, a painter
of the school of David. He returned in 1848, the
year of the revolution ; and it was clear that he had
seen nothing in Paris of what was already brewing
in the world of art, for, in that year, he exhibited
in Amsterdam, where he had a studio in the Warmoes
Straat, his Aaron discovering the Corpses of his two
SoftSf a biblical subject, in the style of his master,
which met with as little success as his portrait of
Madame Tagny, a Parisian actress at that time per-
forming in Amsterdam. He continued, in spite of
his inward leanings, to cling to tradition. Once,
when he had painted the head of an old and ugly
woman, Jan Kruseman told him that it was not right
to paint ugly people, because this spoilt one's taste;
and, although he proved later that out of old, crumpled
faces he was able to create a beauty that was impe-

THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW — JOZEF ISRAELS
(Boymans Museum, Rotterdam)

The Hague School: Introduction 97

rishable, he still hesitated between his master's and
his own inclination to the extent of producing his
Reverie in 1851, a violinist, Adagio con espressione
(afterwards lithographed by Alleb6), in 1852 and, in
1855, The Prince of Orange for the first time opposing
the orders of the King of Spaiuy which was hung in
the Paris Exhibition. Lastly, after he had found his
province at Zandvoort and, in 1856, had painted
that dramatic episode, taken from the fisherman's
life. By Mother s Grave, he exhibited at the Hague
a Hannah vowing Samuel to the service of the altar.

But the impression made upon him by the existence
of the fisher-folk at Zandvoort was a lasting one.
Israels had gone to Zandvoort for his health and
stayed in the house of a small shipwright, whose
domestic life he shared ; and here, far from studios,
painters and the precepts of his masters, he began
to observe for himself the daily routine of the
fishermen's lives : their quiet movements, their natural,
simple existence, with its sorrows and terrors and
also its little joys, all unspoiled by social forms. In
this environment, his eyes were opened to the beauty
of real life, to the poetry of truth ; and he came
to see that there was a drama in life well worth
depicting and yet far removed from the biblical, the
historical and the heroic.

In 1856, he took a studio in Amsterdam, on the
Rozengracht, in the house of a Mr. Helwig, whose
portrait, now in the Rijksmuseum, shows how far
Israels* art had already advanced. In 1863, he
married and settled on the Prinsengracht ; but it
was not until 1869, the year in which he moved to
the Hague, that he began to earn the title of head

98 The Hague School: Introduction

of the modern Dutch School which he has ever
since retained. In this year, he began to paint that
memorable series of interiors which, commencing as
dramatic and romantic episodes, gradually expanded
into more philosophical conceptions, wherein some-
times the family was exalted to the level of the
patriarchal sense of the word. He not only painted his
figures with extraordinary truth to nature, sitting at
the frugal board, with all the dignity that characterizes
the simple of heart, eating their dinners from the
common dish, or folding their hands at grace before
meat, or, in the case of the housewife, baking her
cakes, or cooking food for the cattle, or sewing, or
tending her child (this last was an inexhaustible
source of subjects for the painter), but he knew
how to make the surroundings, the atmosphere of
those steaming fishermen's homes so tangible that
the figures moved in it, breathed and lived their own
unvarnished lives, at first amid a mass of symbolic
details, afterwards with the latter merely suggested
to the spectator, while the whole of these small
happenings was transferred to the wide domain of
humanity.

How expressive are Israels' hands ! Van Dijck is
said to have had a model with beautiful hands,
whom he used for all his portraits of men. Here,
the hands are the bearers of a sentiment, they serve
to express the incident, they fill an important place
in the painter's psychological powers of expression;
they tell so soberly what they have to tell : they tell
of the coldness of the hands which the shivering
woman puts out to catch the last gleams of warmth
of the dying peat-fire ; they tell of impotent resigna-

WHEN A BODY GROWS OLD— JOZEF ISRAELS
(The property of Mr. M. Hijmans van Wadenoijen, the Hague)

The Hague School: Introduction 99

tion when they lie squat and square on the knees
of the figure in Nothing more; they tell of the
spiritual weariness of A Son of the Old People as they
hang limply between his knees; and they tell of
ecstasy in the passion with which a harpist strives
to draw tones from his classic instrument.

Israels is, above all things, a psychologist, to
whom no picture is complete without thought. He
endeavours always to achieve the highest form of
expression and never aims at rousing admiration by
la belle peinture. But we must not imagine that, for
this reason, he is any the less important as a painter.
For it is not until we are penetrated with the fact
that Israels gropes rather than paints with his colours
and brushes, that his pictures are born of hesitations
and approximations rather than of regular painting:
it is not until then that we come to be impressed
by the mighty colour-schemes with which he has made
tangible the atmosphere of a room, by solutions of
light so subtle that everything concerts to draw the
figure forward and to support it with light, colour
and tone, so that the figure is firmly fixed in its
environment, which nevertheless hangs quite freely
around it ; and we then see that Israels is a painter
who has a perfect command of the instrument which
he himself has created, but seeks not so much to
draw sweet tones from it as to turn it into the
representation and symbol of life itself.

Nor, again, is anything less true than to say, as
has lately been so often and so variously said, that
Israels painted his fisher subjects with an idea of
raising the "fourth estate:" this classification of
estates is not mine. No proof is needed to show

loo The Hague School: Introduction

how great is the misconception. Israels is far too
much of a painter to be preoccupied with any such
Tendenz intention. What attracted Israels in the lives
of the fishermen was the natural manner in which
these unpolished people displayed their little joys, their
sufferings, their fears, against the majestic background
of the sea, the source alike of their Hvelihood and
their affliction. A painter, he beheld in them pictu-
resque figures in harmonious surroundings filled with
atmosphere and with that incalculable light which is
but seldom to be found in a solid, square interior
fashioned of bricks and wood; he saw the children
playing freely in the pools left behind by the retreating
tide; he saw the mothers lulling their children to
sleep; he saw death striking at the household; he
saw the fishermen in touch with the sea. And his
art is great even outside these subjects ; and, without
speaking of his portraits, which come so near to life,
we admire the same breadth of view, the same
expressiveness, the same poetry, whether he paints
himself under the light of a lamp, or a harpist seated at
her instrument, or a fashionable woman at her window,
or a woman bathing. Even in his Sexton, that great
pendant of the psychological interiors, that remarkable
piece which, in its soberness, of all Israels' mighty
work perhaps approaches nearest to Rembrandt and,
at the same time, is allied to the greatness of our
little masters : even here there is not a vestige of what
we may call Tendenz.

One who did not know Israels and who judged him
only by his works could readily picture him as a
melancholy man, burdened and bent with the suffer-
ing which he reproduces in his paintings. Nothing

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The Hague School: Introduction loi

is farther from the truth. He sees the suffering; he
penetrates into the loneliness, the poverty, the very
being of forlorn humanity; he has the imagination
necessary to exalt his single figures into types, to
raise his episodes of the fisherman's life from the
particular to the general. But he need no more
be identified with the figures in his paintings than
the novelist with those in his books. For, in his
own being, he is a Jew, in whom the strength of
the old race finds voice; a Jew to whom all philo-
sophy is experience of life; in bone and marrow a
son of the old people, not according to the letter,
but according to the spirit, with a healthy dislike
of all feeble sentiment.

Jozef Israels is incontestably the head of the Dutch
school of painting in so far that he, the powerful
painter, the great psychologist, ranks with the most
important artists of all countries, in so far, espe-
cially, that he has enriched our school with an art that
observes the underlying essence of the things depicted.
His influence, which at first related chiefly to his
subjects, afterwards had the most far-reaching effects
upon a much younger generation, owing to the
purity of his psychology and his ever more and
more magical powers of expression, while the delicate
culture of his mind and his truly unsystematic philo-
sophy made him the centre of a vast circle of
admirers and friends.

On the other hand, Jacob Maris, thanks to his
powerful palette, his masterly touch, his classical
method, exercised a greater and a much more
direct influence upon his contemporaries and the
younger painters. This was not only through his

I02 The Hague School: Introduction

work, but also through the force of his personality,
which gathered all the younger painters around it, daily
and incessantly, in evenings at which, in the intervals
between the music, painting was discussed and all his
words remembered and reported.

Eckermann tells, in his Gesprdche mit Goethe^ of
the German painters in Rome, who, whenever there
were enough of them collected in the osteria, came
to loggerheads touching the respective merits of
Michael Angelo and Raphael and, when the dispute
was at its height, rushed off in two bodies to the
Vatican, there to demonstrate in the presence of the
paintings, and returned to the tavern to make friends
over a bottle of wine and ... to begin all over again
on the morrow.

Even so men have quarrelled about other great
artists : about Rembrandt and Velasquez ; or, as they
did and do to this day, about Jozef Israels and Jacob
Maris. Israels was the first to give us, in the nine-
teenth century, life, living man in conflict with every
phase of life, psychology, in short. Jacob Maris
was the first to give us, in our day, colour, the joy
of colour revealed in the gladness of Holland's skies
and cities and fields, colour in light, colour in shade:
he brought us master qualities of painting, the equi-
librium between form and colour and the glory of
light. All that he sought to achieve he achieved
fully; he was in harmony with his conception; he
was one with his art. This cannot always be said
of Israels. But Israels aimed at something that lies
outside the painter's art, something that may be
described as metaphysical.

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The Hague School: Introduction 103

Although Bosboom stood first in the series of the
Hague masters and Jozef Israels was destined to
represent Dutch painting, we must always look upon
the three Marises, but especially Jacob and Willem,
as the founders of the Hague School. There were
great landscape-painters before them, including Hane-
does and Willem Roelofs (182 2- 1897), of whom
both had, long before, felt the inspiring influence
of the Barbizon painters and of whom the second
had shown an early disposition as a colourist and the
first, in his Sunset^ in the Hague Museum, had
proved that he realized how the sky gave life to
the landscape, long before the Marises had learnt
to know the French painters. But, though Roelofs,
the Amsterdammer, drank with deep draughts of
the wealth of colour which the Barbizon masters
retained from the romantic period; though he was
the precursor; though, at times, he was successful
in his application of their colour-schemes : for all that,
he never felt that the real being of their art was
Dutch. And the result was that he saw the Dutch
pastures, the fat fields, the great pools of water through
their eyes, but did not, through them, come to
realize and acknowledge the art of his country and
his race. This does not do away with the fact that
he was a strenuous painter, who often succeeded in
reproducing the influence of wind and weather on
the landscape.

When, in 1870, Jacob Maris made his appearance
with his Ferry-boat, the difference became evident.
To him had been revealed not so much the masters
of Barbizon and their works, but the nature and

I04 The Hague School: Introduction

essence of the lowlands of Holland. In the case of
Roelofs, we behold a generous admiration and an
admiring compliance; in that of Jaap Maris, an
understanding, a revelation of his own country.
And not one of them all (I am leaving Bosboom
outside the question), about 1870, brought forth a
work in which the traditions of our country and our
people, the essence of our Dutch atmosphere are so
exquisitely understood and reproduced as in this
Ferry-boat which, once and for all, marked the return
to sheer painting.

He restored to the Netherlands, first of all, colour,
which none of our nineteenth-century painters before
him had displayed so purely. He also brought with
him the art of painting, art in the sense in which
the littie masters of the seventeenth century under-
stood it. For none of his works betrays Barbizon
influences. No doubt, from the very beginning, he
sought his way through formulas of every kind; no
doubt, Matthijs Maris exercised a great, a very great
influence upon him ; but, starting with this first painting
in which he proved that he had seen his country,
he was the real Dutchman : full of colour, lucid, great,
above all, in those light skies in which Ruysdael
and Vermeer of Delft before him so gloriously expressed
their love of their country, firm of touch, sensitive
in delineation, broad in expression, steadfast in work-
manship and endowed with a colourful, but pure
palette. The first of his town-views, smaller in
dimensions than the later ones, more compact in
composition, more pronounced in form, displays all
the merits for which Jan Vermeer's View of Delft,
the pearl of the Mauritshuis, is so dear to every

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The Hague School: Introduction 105

Dutchman. All the merits? Maris gave us more,
but also gave us less, for, if the work of the modem
master was more symphonic, he was not able to give
that unfailing, self-contained representation which,
when all is said, makes Vermeer so unapproachable.
Still, the emotion in this apparently unemotional work
is, as in that of the Delft master, of the purest order.
His art is purely pictorial, his moods, his agitation,
his admiration have their source in a rhythmical
disposition which, seeing things in their own splendour,
places them on view in the delicious colour-gradations
of its own rich nature.

If we mention not only Vermeer, but also Rembrandt
and Jacob Maris in one breath, we must remember
that they who shout, "Rembrandt! Rembrandt!"
the loudest, without being impressed by Jacob Maris*
greatness, would certainly have belonged to those
who, in Rembrandt's own day, most violently reviled
him, or, for lack of understanding, denied him. And
yet our delight, the nature of our emotion in the
presence of Jaap Maris is less intense than in that
of Rembrandt. It is the same insatiable feeling;
the same sense of not being able to grasp so much
that is grand and majestic and beautiful and instruc,
tive; the same growing admiration for the range-
the wealth and the variety of the subjects, for the
richness of the colour and the luxuriance of the
treatment, for that noble structure and calm power of
expression, for that same simplicity of heart, even
though the later painter lacks the childlike faith
that roused the visionary in Rembrandt. But all
Jacob Maris* existence lies in the stately equilibrium,
the glorious sense of measure which enable him to

io6 The Hague School: Introduction

balance tall, burly windmills with huge banks of
clouds, low-lying towns with the light of water and
sky, smooth beaches with the rugged clouds in their
grandeur, until, in a glorious equipoise, they set
the very soul of the Dutch landscape before us.

Has it ever happened before that one family has
produced three sons, artists all three, all masters, all
great in different manners? Three brothers, all entering
upon life with the same ideal before their eyes, each
moving along his own appointed road: Willem, the
youngest, enamoured of the sunlight, the full sunlight
as it lies spread in a golden glory over medes and
meres or as, in the morning, it dispels the mists,
absorbs the dew of the pastures and plays upon
the moist twigs of the ditch-side willows; Matthijs
who turned his dreams into revelations with the
reality of his memories ; and Jacob, who, as it would
appear, expressing himself more slowly and gropingly,
prepared himself for the loftier flight which he was
to take up, preceding his younger brothers, influenced
by Thijs (especially in Paris) and caring for him,
with his nature broad and great from the beginning :
three brothers, all largely gifted, all three pure painters,
who, from their childhood, felt the road that lay before
them and who were painters at an age when most
lads are still at school. This was how it came about
that, from the beginning, they thought, felt and
expressed themselves in paint, with never a hterary
tendency to disturb their intellectual power, concen-
trated wholly upon the logical execution of their paint-
ing: Jacob, who, discovered, in a certain sense,
by his schoolmaster, began to study under Stroebel
when he was twelve; Matthijs, who went to Louis

A LITTLE GIRL AT THE PIANO — JACOB MARIS
(Thcpropaty of Mr. C. D. Reich, Jr., Amsterdam)

The Hague School: Introduction 107

Meijer at the same age; and Willem, who received
no other direct tuition than that of his eldest brother
and who worked untrammelled and uninfluenced from
1863 onwards. The three grew up in very fortunate
circumstances, in a happy, simple household, of which
the father, an Austrian on the paternal side, with
Maresq for his name originally, was a compositor,
earning twenty shillings a week and free from one-
sided intellectual prejudices ; simple, sensible people,
who acknowledged their sons' talents and looked upon
painting as a fine, a very fine profession and not as
a luxury. Brought up under these conditions, the
two elders were soon obliged to work for their
livelihood and for the common good and they learnt
their trade by copying old and modern pictures
in water-colours, working for painters and studying
under them: an artistic education in our old-Dutch
manner.

Johan Anthonie Balthazar Stroebel, whose solid
instruction Jacob Maris received, was born at the
Hague in 182 1 and was the pupil consecutively of
B. J. and Hubertus van Hove. Like his second
master, he was distinguished for his old-fashioned
doorkijkjes^ or domestic vistas, but expressed him-
self in warmer, sometimes a little fiery, but so-
called Rembrandt tones. He made his pupil draw
water-colours after still-life and also from models
employed by himself, a method of instruction to
which, in later years, he attached great importance.

A dealer in works of art, Mr. Weimar, found
Jacob sitting one day with Matthijs on the Groen-
markt, where the first was making a drawing of the old
Town-hall; and this meeting had as its result that

io8 The Hague School: Introduction

the youg painters (Jacob was then fourteen or fifteen
years of age) came to work for him and, in particular,
made water-colour copies of the pictures in his gallery,
which contained the best products of Dutch and
Belgian art. Weimar also introduced Jacob to the
studio of the excellent Huib van Hove, which Wcis
then in the Hofje van Nieuwkoop, afterwards the first
home of the Hague Artists' Club, best known by its
motto of Pulchri Studio. In the evenings, Jacob
visited the Hague Academy, as did Thijs, who, in
his twelfth year, began to study under Louis Meijer.
In 1853, he accompanied his master to Antwerp,
where he visited the Academy from 1854 to 1856,
Matthijs following him there in the latter year. After
Antwerp, the brothers settled in the Hague, where
Jacob made himself useful to the ailing Louis Meijer
and also found time to work for himself. They
were also for some time at Oosterbeek, where they
met the elder and the younger Bilders, De Haas,
Mauve and Gabriel and where the three brothers
painted elaborate studies.

Jaap Maris felt his younger brother's influence
most strongly after the trip which they undertook
together to the Black Forest, thanks to a little fortune
which they had earned by their copies of the Frederick
Henry and Amalia of Solms in the House in the
Wood, for which they received seven hundred guilders,
or nearly sixty pounds, apiece. The return journey was
made over Cologne to Mannheim by boat, Heidelberg,
Carlsruhe, Basel and Lausanne and back by Neuch^tel,
Dijon, Fontainebleau and Paris. At Cologne, they
found an exhibition in which the painters of the
German romantic school, Moritz, Von Schwind,

THE BIKU CAGE — JACOB MARIS
{In the collection of the late Mr, J. Staats Forbes, London)

44fORN'

PORTRAIT OF A CHILD — MATTHIJS MARIS

{The property of Messrs. E. J. van Wisseliiigh & Co., Amsterdam)

The Hague School: Introduction 109

Kaulbach, Rethel and others confirmed to Matthijs
all that he had learnt to surmise at Antwerp,
while Jacob admired only the cartoons. In any case,
although we find the subjects taken from this journey
elaborated in a higher degree in Matthijs' work,
we may take it that his ideas carried Jaap Maris with
them, for the Paris period, which followed soon after,
gives the masterly Marlotte, that little pearl-grey
French town painted in full detail against a hill. The
Cradle and other pieces which, like his romantic
church-interiors and The Bird-cage^ we are disposed,
at first sight, to ascribe to Thijs. The pictures
are compactly painted and almost as elaborate as the
younger brother's. Only, the difference here, too, is
that Jacob was simpler and, from the first, inclined
to look rather for the purely pictoral and that his
work, therefore, did not possess that laboured quality
which has from the beginning and always distinguished
Thijs, if we except just one or two studies. He also
underwent the influence of Hubert's studio, to which
we owe a series of figures of Italian girls that had
a quick success in Paris and in our own country.
After his death, a number of fine, thoughtful little
paintings were discovered, dating back to his Paris
period; but it was not until he stood all alone in
Holland that he became himself a pure painter of
the old Dutch stock, powerful and delicate, dis-
tinguished and intimate at one and the same time.

Matthijs Maris' Dutch period really precedes the
movement which was afterwards described as the
Hague school. He never sought or hankered after
what has been called impressionism; and it seemed

no The Hague School: Introduction

rather as though he disregarded all other painters
to follow only Pieter de Hooche, a perhaps unconscious
endeavour which sometimes made him go in search
of an even earlier method of painting : the early Flemings
and Cranach.

As a lad of twelve, studying under Louis Meijer,
he soon surprised him by the manner in which he
had painted a boat with figures into a little sea-
piece of Meijer's, a manner so excellent that his
master admitted that he himself could not have done
it so well and confessed that the picture was increased
in value because of it. And we can safely say that
his apprenticeship was devoted exclusively to self-
realization. As Jacob Maris said of him :

"Thijs knew everything of himself; he was a
genius."

The archives of the Hague Drawing Academy
contain some drawings by Matthijs which are remark-
ably mature for a boy of fourteen or fifteen. One,
a head of Christ with a crown of thorns and a naked
breast, was drawn when Thijs was only thirteen and
already shows wonderful qualities.

It may occasion surprise that the work of the
Marises, who visited Fontainebleau and Paris as early
as 1866, betrays so little of the influence of the
Barbizon school. Although a few complete studies
made by Thijs in the Forest of Fontainebleau show
something of the luxuriant green, of the heavy tonality
of this school, we can take the wonderfully perfect
little piece exhibited some time ago at the Biesing
galleries at the Hague — a rustic bridge in a wood,
with a couple of figures on it — and compare it quite
as effectively with the angler in Isaac van Ostade's

SI

a: -^

SISKA — MATTHIJS MARIS

(The piopci ty of Mrs. van WisselitigJi- Angus, Northwood)

The Hague School: Introduction m

etching; for, in point of fact, the drawing in this
little piece is of a quite different order from that
of the French painters of 1830. And again, if we
take all the known work of Thijs Maris together —
sketches, drawings, studies, elaborate paintings and
academic studies — it would appear that the only
work which betrays a trace of the broad, full tone
of the French landscape-painters is the superb Head
of a Ram in the Mesdag Museum. He is said to
have been a boy still when he painted this admirable
work ; and, although this seems hardly credible, the
fact remains that it stands alone, whether, as some
think, it was painted in Paris or in our own country.
Undoubtedly the most perfect work of this earlier
period is the famous Souvenir d' Amsterdam. It shows
an extraordinary clearness and breadth of vision,
combined with an unfailing touch, and the whole is
permeated with a sentiment that seems to have its
being in the essence of the capital rather than in
the depths of the painter's soul. This view is the
purest and most complete portrait that has ever been
produced of Amsterdam ; and there is not a painting
in the world that can be quite compared with it,
unless it be the perspective in Van Eyck*s Vierge
au donaieur in the Louvre, which compels our ad-
miration through the same accuracy of vision. True,
Jacob Maris, in later years, painted views in the
city of Amsterdam in which, in the Inspiration of
the moment, the touches seem almost more brilliant ;
he built up skies under whose movement the canals
beneath appear small and low ; constantly he took Am-
sterdam as a Motif with which he raised the harmony
of light and colour and line, in rhythmic swellings,

112 The Hague School: Introduction

into a symphonic poem. Later again, Breitner set
up the great town movement of Amsterdam, piece
by piece, full of colour and full of life, against the
old background of the canals or the Dam, with
mighty and vigorous strokes. But neither has repre-
sented the imperishable type of the old trading-city,
in all its complicated essence of restfulness and
bustle, with such absolute completeness as Matthijs
Maris.

Thijs Maris went to France in 1869 at the instigation
of his mother, who did not know what to do with this
unpractical son of hers who preferred to erase and
hide his work rather than sell it. Jaap, who was
always good to his brothers, had invited him to Paris,
where he was living with his wife and child, and it
was no great burden to him to receive the ascetic
Thijs into his household.

The parting with his output continued to be the
difficulty which Thijs was ever less and less able to
surmount. Jaap has described how Thijs would work
at the most exquisite things, until the time came
when the picture could easily be finished in a
day. Then he would upset the whole work and
utterly refuse to be convinced of its excellence. He
painted, for instance, a Mother and Child for which
Mrs. Jacob Maris and her baby sat. This, according
to Jacob, developed into one of his finest pictures,
both as regards the faces and, in particular, the
modelling of the child's little legs and feet. When
it was almost finished, he began to paint it all over
again, in a stiff, old-German fashion, and to make
it look like a Cranach, with the result that all his
work was wasted.

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IN THE SLUMS — MATTHIJS MARIS
(27f^ property of Jonkhccr J. R. H. Ncervoort van de Poll, Dricbcrgen)

The Hague School: Introduction lU

Nevertheless, Thijs produced some of his most
charming pictures in Paris, such as, in 1870, his View
of a Town and, in 1874, The Butterflies, that sunny
page in his work : a little girl, in a blue frock, with
a face lit up with an indescribable smile, not unlike
those which curl the lips of Leonardo's women, her
hair the colour of that old red gold of which Wagner
speaks; this fairy-like, but positively-rendered child,
in an environment of Dutch sand-dunes, in which the
sweetbriar grows around her and, a little further on,
the sedge stands in rhythmical rows ; and two butter-
flies, at which the child reaches with upraised hand,
in the sultry summer sky. A little before this, he
painted The Woman baking Cakes, that half- mediaeval,
half-modern, French- Flemish kitchen interior, a pearl-
grey master-piece that has its home in the Mesdag
Museum ; also the magnificent Montmarire, of which,
as of The Butterflies, a second similar work is in
existence; drawings of Gretchens, or, at least, of the
type which we call Gretchens; of churches with
figures, sketches executed on his travels or from
memories of them, such as the interesting Black
Forest drawings. The View of Lausanne, the scarcely
rivalled Outskirts of a Town, the Three Mills: memories
also of Oosterbeek; and portraits, of which that of
Artz the painter is a model of simplicity in the
rendering of a face.

Amid all these works imbued with the peace of
by-gone centuries, in the midst of the thought which
he devoted both to the conception of his subject and
to its immaculate execution came the Commune,
which coincided so entirely with his views, but in
which, nevertheless, this Hamlet-like nature took part

8

114 The Hague School: Introduction

not of his own will, but because he was enrolled
in the Municipal Guard and was therefore automati-
cally transferred to the troops of the Commune.

After the Commune, Jacob Maris left Paris, leaving
Thijs behind him. Although Matthijs worked and
occasionally sold a picture (Goupil's bought his
Butterflies for ^^50, which was not a bad price at
the time, although the picture has since fetched forty
times as much), he passed years of distress before,
in 1877, he was discovered in a sorry plight by
young Van Wisselingh, the son of the artistic art-
dealer of the Hague, at whose suggestion he went
to London.

There was a time when innocent sceptics had
drawn a Hne through his name. But, slowly and
gradually, through works despatched by Van Wisse-
lingh's London branch to Amsterdam, through auc-
tions at which his early works came under the
hammer and through select exhibitions, the wonderful
personality became a living thing to us, the dreamer
better known to us; his stately fancies roused new
sensations; and, when the masters of the Hague
school, in 1890, had already displayed the extent
of their glorious talent, Matthijs Maris revealed
himself in his full force, of past and present, as the
noblest of our possessions. And this revelation
concerned not only his sovereign imagination, but
also his peerless knowledge and the perfection of his
workmanship.

There came a time, in this English period of his,
when Thijs Maris, who was, as the poet Surnburne
has said of Blake, " beautifully unfit for walking in
the way of any other man," was no longer content to

DUCKS IN THEIR ELEMENT— WILLEM MARIS
{The property oj Mr. P. Langcrhuyzen, Biissum)

The Hague School: Introduction 115

paint things in their sheer being, as they were, when
complete representation made way for imagination, for
the dreams that haunted him, when his thoughts
wandered aside in lonely musings that brought before
his eyes forms which defied all positive knowledge,
musings that summoned poetic figures which he
endeavoured to grasp and to embody. And these
figures were full of life : laughing with their perturbing
smiles as in The Butterflies; more monumental in
the etching of the woman with the distaff; fleeting
joyfully towards the heyday of life like The Bride ;
figures of exquisite refinement as in Priinavera, of a
princess's fairy-tale as in The Promenade or in The Lady
of Shalott : all with that intensity of life which thrills
in its pure form, all with something of the exquisite
longing for life of the Florence of Botticelli and Da

Vinci His figures, monumental and child-like,

constitute a type of woman of their own : they are
women through and through, with something of the
child and something of the bacchante, Juliet rather
than Beatrice, living and full of life, rhythmical of
shape and, at the same time, figures of light, with
raised hands and sphinx-like smiles, a wonder in our
day, a wonder of feminine charm and, lasdy, an
exotic flower budding in a suburb of Puritan London,
reversing Taine's theory of environment.

Outwardly considered, Willem Maris, the youngest
of the brothers, has little or nothing in common
with Matthijs, as regards either the technique or
the conception of his subjects. Nevertheless, there
are studies and also pictures of the Oosterbeek
period in which all the three brothers show an

ii6 The Hague School: Introduction

inward similarity with one another ; there are carefully-
executed sketches in which we find a closer link
between Willem and Thijs than between Willem
and Jaap Maris. And, like Bosboom and Israels,
the three Marises all have something of the central
point round which all Dutch art revolves : Rembrandt.
In Willem Maris, this lies in the expression of the
sunlight, in the broad, sketchy touch, in that pure
impressionism of which Rembrandt, in his later period,
appeared to be the originator.

Willem seems to have "arrived" at an early date,
for we know, through Gerard Bilders, that the fame of
his talent reacted Amsterdam as early as 1863 through
his two little pictures. Cattle at a Pond and Young
Calves at the Milk-pail, which he sold for ^^ 1 2 each
at the same Hague exhibition at which Thijs received
^i6 for his Back Slum. Willem Maris was then
just nineteen. Mauve has hold how, at Oosterbeek,
a pale, delicate little lad came up to him and modestly
asked leave to introduce himself and to accompany
him, so that they might work together:

"At first," says Mauve, "I did not feel much
inclined to agree, but I did not like to refuse the
little fellow flatly, so we went off together. My
companion did not suffer from loquacity ; and, coming
to a field with cows in it, I sat down to go on
with a drawing which I had begun that morning.
The little chap strolled around a bit and then settled
down to work himself. We sat there for hours under
the pollards, until I grew curious to see what the
little fellow was at. He sat sketching with a bit of
chalk ; but, oh ! I stood astounded. I seized him by

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The Hague School: Introduction 117

the hand and stammered in my turn, 'My boy, what an
artist you are ! You stagger me ! It^s magnificent !' "

Even as with Jacob, so for Willem a painting
has always been a material reproduction of a mo-
mentary aspect of nature. His glorious ditches with
their waving reeds, with the gold-green duckweed,
so full of rich colour, are the synthesis of a series
of close observations of such a character that their
expression, synchronizing with the painter's mood
and with an impregnable truthfulness, presents a scene,
simple in itself, so marvellously that we learn through
it to see and admire nature. Willem Maris is the
last of the great lyrical painters of our time. His
sentiment is what it was in the glorious days of
1880 to 1890 and there is none too approach him
in that artistry in which every point of view at once
becomes lyrical.

Anton Mauve has not the depth of colour, nor
the rich palette, nor the powerful and supple touch,
nor the rhythmical line, nor the symphonic composition
of the Marises. He does not wield the plastic
powers of Jozef Israels. And, compared with Millet,
whose influence and personality held perhaps even
greater sway over the painters of northern countries
than over the Parisians, Mauve is so domestic, so
unspeakably simple, that the two painters are not to
be named in one breath. Millet — and herein lay
his greatness — saw the peasants in the great biblical
simplicity of their existence. His art is a sentimental
art, full of style, representing the husbandmen with
all the purity of form of the ancient Greeks. Mauve's

ii8 The Hague School: Introduction

relationship with Millet lies in the inward calmness
with which they both set down the little actions of
the simple labourers, without comment. But Millet's
was a more far-searching formula, whereas Mauve's
best works, his water-colour drawings, are more spon-
taneous. He followed the old painters, the Ostades and
Esaias van de Velde, but he was more refined in
his representation ; he had a modernity that was all
his own.

It is a sort of privilege to find, in the shop of a
Paris art-dealer, one of these drawings of Mauve's
surrounded by an environment of French boudoir
art, an environment in which this drawing is even
more full of surprises than an old Dutch painting
in a foreign museum. It is pleasant to admire the
unartificiality, the delicate truthfulness of it; to
contemplate just that ditch, with the little white
goat, among all those cold and clever things.

To this first period belong those masterly studies
of calves on the dunes and in the fields, painted so
firmly and broadly; those scenes on the sea-shore
with donkeys, horses, fishing-boats drawn up on the
beach, brown horses in the silky light of the Scheveningen
sands; those delicate, grey roads; those water-ways
with the sluggish barges; those admirable pictures
of cows.

Compared with the Marises and Israels, Mauve*s
pictures of the Laren period are sometimes dry
and colourless and inferior both to his earlier work
and to the water-colours which he produced at
Oosterbeek or in the dunes. They have not the
same power of colour or of workmanship as his
earlier studies of cows, nor the attentiveness of his

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The Hague School: Introduction 119

water-colours: they betray a certain weariness and
hurry.

And yet, in his later drawings, he never entirely
lost his touch, never neglected the delicacy of the
representation. He painted the still, pearl-grey days
of autumn and winter, when the sheep stand out
warm against the withered green of the meadows
and the labour in the fields is confined to ploughing
and potato-digging ; or when the snow lies untouched
over the farms; or when there is thaw in the air
and pale-yellow and lilac streaks appear above the
sheep-fold. Or else he painted those exquisite days
marked by neither sun nor wind, white days on which,
as they say in Overijssel, " the weather stands listen-
ing:" this is the atmosphere in which he preferred
to place his figures.

Mauve was born at Zaandam in 1838 and died in
1888. He was taught at Haarlem by the animal-
painter P. F. van Os and by Wouter Verschuur
(181 2-1874), the gifted but not powerful follower of
Wouwerman. At Oosterbeek, he painted in the
company, especially, of Bilders and, later, of the
Marises, without whom he himself declared that he
would never have become the personality which we
recognize in him and value.

Among the talented and honest admirers of Mauve,
the first place is occupied by Francois Pieter ter
Meulen, born in 1843, who was intended for literature,
but studied painting instead under H. van de Sande
Bakhuijzen. He never possessed the purely pictorial
point of view of his illustrious exemplar and his
colouring, generally, is somewhat cold. Nevertheless,

I20 The Hague School: Introduction

in his water-colour in the Mesdag Museum, A D rente
Sheepfold by nighty the colour is higher than we usually
find in Ter Meulen.

Many other Dutch painters of similar current
subjects have, with more or less success, followed
the fluctuations of the American market, that degrad-
ing market which now, as in Mauve's day, asks
one year for "Sheep going to pasture" and the
next for "Sheep returning" and the year after for
something else, much as the height and breadth
of our hyacinths is laid down for us by the exigencies
of Anglo-American taste. Mauve himself suffered
from these conditions in a certain measure, as did
all our leading painters. Jacob Maris would receive
a commission for four pictures all of the same size,
all four to contain white clouds ; Jozef Israels is asked
for countless replicas of his works or else has orders
for pictures with one or more figures, according to the
sum to be expended on the purchase; Gabriel and
Weissenbruch are asked for windmills to the exclusion
of all else. Hence, the appearance of the American
dollar would be unwelcome in the midst of our
art, but for the fact that great painters commit
these domestic crimes as it were with the left hand
and that the reaction against this degrading toil gives
birth to the purest works and to moments of inspiration.
Only the weak succumb.

At a time when the nineteenth-century sea-painters,
in imitation of Ludolph Bakhuijzen, composed their
tempestuous seas as the history-painters composed
their historical episodes ; at a time when they threw

The Hague School: Introduction 121

a huge wave in the foreground in the shade the
better to enhance the effect of light towards the
horizon ; at a time when they dramatized the sky
and the waves in accordance with the horrors of the
shipwreck depicted, Hendrik Willem Mesdag came,
with his direct, realistic point of view, to surprise
the world with the fact that the unbiased painting
of the sea, straight from nature, was not only possible,
but even so desirable that the aspects of the North
Sea coast were now for the first time, in the nine-
teenth century, represented as they appeared daily
before our eyes.

It does not often happen that one who has sat
on a high stool in his father's office until his thirty-
fifth year ends by becoming a painter, even though
he may have sketched and painted in his spare
moments. The greatest painters tried to dissuade
Mesdag, who was born in 1831, from his plan.
But a man like Mesdag is not so easily dissuaded;
moreover, he was firmly supported by his wife, who
herself afterwards became a deserving artist. For
that matter, if all men followed the wise counsels
lavished upon them in their youth, there would never
have been a great man in the world. In any case,
Mesdag, with his wife, went to Brussels in 1866.
He there found his friend and kinsman Alma
Tadema and also the Dutch landscape-painter Roelofs.

In the summer of 1868, Mesdag visited Norderney,
not so much for the purpose of painting, as for
relaxation and health. This visit was to be for him
what the stay at Zandvoort was for Israels. He
brought back with him a series of studies so fresh
and original that they decided his career for good

122 The Hague School: Introduction

and all. From an industrious pupil he had become
an original painter. In the same year, he settled at
the Hague, so as to be near Scheveningen, and, in
1870, he received the gold medal in Paris for a
sea-piece. The fact that the French painters were
readier than the Dutch to admit Mesdag*s talent in
doubtless due to this, that his simple, natural, artless
realism seemed to them refreshing after their own
affected academicism and the profundity of the Bar-
bizon men, whom the Parisians had never understood.
There is something so open in his work, so much
frankness in his subjects and their treatment, such
an utter absence of introspectiveness, that one could
almost describe his pictures as decorative, although
this is not wholly the case, for the painter loves
above all things the broad whitenass of the open
air and, if he does not always find unity in the light,
it is there in the treatment, so that Mesdag's least
scrawl possesses the allure which distinguishes his
completed paintings wherever exhibited. This painter,
ill-suited to spend his life on an office-stool, was not
the one to sit patiently bending over the easel,
plunged in the secrets of his craft; and we may
here seek the reason why he did not achieve fame
in the land of pure painting so early as in France.

Mesdag may be described as the transition between
landscape-painters like the Marises and Hendrik
Johannes Weissenbruch. In neither of the two artists
is colour the impelling force of his art : form, rather,
predominates. The white clouds in Weissenbruch's
pictures are connected with the landscape through
their outline; they counterbalance the mills, the

FISHING SMACKS RETURNING TO
SCHEVENINGEN — H. W. MESDAG

^ ^^

The Hague School: Introduction 123

houses and trees by their form rather than that they
exist as the result of a logical connection of the light
falling on the earth, as in the more symphonic compo-
sitions of Jacob Maris.

What matter if Weissenbruch, nicknamed the merry
Weis, was not the man to sink into his own moods?
All roads lead to Rome ! He belonged to the real
stamp of those landscape-painters who, starting betimes,
receive quick impressions, ready subjects, nimbly-
seized moments of the day. He was a passionate
fisherman and, perhaps more than any other, caught
the atmospheric influences on the marshy lands, the
construction of the broad pools and water-ways and
dykes and polders, while his water-colour sketches
are about the finest in modern Dutch art.

This artist did not receive the public recognition
due to him until late in life. It is true that he had
never to complain of lack of appreciation by the
artists. And then his early pictures were so different:
works with fine artistic qualities, better works per-
haps than his later, somewhat too facile productions.
Still, like most of the painters of his generation,
Weissenbruch delivered his purest work after 1870.
He was born at the Hague in 1824 and died in
1890. The Dutch Frenchman, Victor Bauffe, and
De Bock were both pupils of his.

Although Paul Jozeph Constantin Gabriel was
also impressed by the low clouds hanging over flat
polders, this delicate painter never belonged to the
real impressionists in manner and one might more
justly describe as natural problems, scientifically
solved, his polders, his canals with windmills,

124 The Hague School: Introduction

his expanses of water with eel-traps, with the light
reflected in the water or influencing the land.
For they are rendered with so much certainty, so
much calmness and precision that they place the
spectator in the presence of a fact that admits of no
discussion. Speaking of these somewhat concrete
landscapes, Gabriel used to say that he preferred
subjects that did not contain much in themselves.
And no simpler subjects could well be imagined:
great splashes of water, which he selected in the
bogs round Giethoom, in which the only accident
is a punt, an eel- trap or a duck-fence ; canals cutting
straight and square through the fields, with the tall
windmill at the end ; pools with a few willows ; huts
by the water-side. And all painted with the simplest
means, clearly and thinly, with finely-chiselled outlines.
Gabriel carried his painting so completely in his head
that the setting down of it on canvas seemed to cost
him no trouble and scarce a repentir. To make sure
of his tone, he used to place the picture upside-down
or sideways on his easel. He was one of the few
Dutch painters whose delicate poetry was understood in
Paris. Geflroy, writing of the Dutch exhibitors,
rarely mentions any save Israels and Gabriel.

Gabriel was born in Amsterdam in 1828. He
received his first tuition at the Amsterdam Academy
and afterwards went to the landscape school set
up by B. C. Koekkoek at Qeves. He lived for
some time in Brussels and settled at the Hague
in 1884, when the Hague school was at the height of
its fame. He died in 1903. Gabriel's chief pupil is
W. B. Tholen, who worked in his studio in Brussels.

CHAPTER VIII
INTERMEZZO

An attempt has been made in this volume to
group the nineteenth-century painters. The Hague
masters, in particular, have been collected under the
heading of the Hague school, which, however, can
hardly be made to include such painters as Jongkind,
the Oyens brothers or Alma Tadema. And yet,
even as Bisschop is essentially related to Tadema
and, properly speaking, has very little in common
with the Hague school, so Jongkind is essentially
related to this particular circle.

If we could lay side by side a beach-scene by
Bosboom, one by Weissenbruch in the Mesdag
Museum and one by Jongkind in the Hoogendijk
collection, water-colours all three, we should be struck
by the same sensitive sureness of construction, the
same manner of design, the same treatment in each
case. It is true that Bosboom and Weissenbruch
were pupils of B. J. van Hove and that Weissen-
bruch and Jongkind were also pupils of Schelfhout.

Jongkind's art, like Bosboom's, was rooted in
Schelfhout, the master whom he always held so high ;
and, like Bosboom again, Jongkind, with his water-

126 Intermezzo

colours, came near to the most modern feeling: to
Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. Edmond de Goncourt
constantly praises him ; and, not long ago, the writer
heard a modern Parisian artist tell how, at Durand-
Ruel's, where a Jongkind was hanging among a
number of Monets, Sisleys, Seurats and Maufras,
he had said to Pisarro that all these things seemed
feeble beside Jongkind, whereupon Pissaro replied:

" Yes, if he had not existed, none of us would
have been here."

Despite his modernity, he was and remained a
genuine Hollander. Year after year, he left Paris
for the pools between Rotterdam and Dordrecht.
He sketched his water-colours direct from nature
and painted his pictures from them. When, in 1891,
the year of his death, his works were exhibited
before the auction at the H6tel Drouot, all Paris
stood amazed not at the paintings, which were known
to every connoisseur, but at the exquisite, fresh,
spontaneous water-colour sketches.

Gustave Geffroy called him the inventor of the
atmospheric shades, but, at the same time, admired
in him the careful composition, the fine division into
back- and foreground peculiar to the old Dutchmen.
Despite the appreciation which he met with, things
did not go well with him. He appears to have
been content to earn his 3,000 francs a year, whereas
his Maas at Rotterdam was sold, in 1892, for 28,000
francs and his Canal at Brussels for 17,000 francs,
not to speak of the comparatively even higher prices
fetched by his water-colours.

Johan Bartholt Jongkind was born in 18 19 at
Latdrop, near Ootmarsum, and died in 1891 at C6te-

X I
o

Intermezzo 127

Saint-Andr6, mourned by his Parisian colleagues for
both personal and artistic reasons. Holland must admit
that she did but little for this pure national painter.
Boymans' Museum bought a Moonlight Scene of
his and the dealers occasionally exhibit one of his
precious little paintings or some of those water-colour
drawings which roused so much admiration at the H6tel
Drouot after his death and won for him that unstinted
recognition for which he yearned when living.

There is another painter, or rather there are two
others who worked all their lives in a neighbouring
county as real descendants of the seventeenth century,
robust and delicate, artists and observers, painters
of still-life and painters of manners, combining the
palette of a Brouwer with a structure of line not
unlike that of the classic Degas, while either their
own nature or their long residence in Brussels caused
them to couple the copiousness of a Jordaens with
Adriaan Brouwer's greater delicacy. The work of
these two brothers, David and Pieter Oyens, has,
in point of fact, little in common with our modern
Dutch art; at any rate, their work has none of
the sentiment or emotion displayed by this art,
though they had a very correct sense of what we
call "values." They selected the subjects of their
pictures for the most part in their studio, where the
brothers sat to each other by turns, sometimes with
a third or fourth figure added. One of them is
turning over a portfolio, or painting, or peering
through his eye-lashes at the model, or arranging
his palette while the model is getting ready to pose.
They supplemented this with new attitudes or curious

128 Intermezzo

incidents, observed in a caf6, which they studied
together, one of them the next day adopting the
pose with a full sense of the situation. In this way,
that witty litde piece came into being in which a
broad-backed man is holding an open newspaper
before him, the paper forming a diagonal across the
reader's outspread arms, and also The Beer-drinkers^
which is so very old-Dutch — just a figure at a little
table — and at the same time so modern, taken as
it is from life. Sometimes we see more complicated
little scenes, such as Le Farceur, who is amusing a
couple of servant-girls.

The difference between David and Pieter is consider-
able. Pieter was the robuster of the two in his
work, more flamand perhaps, whereas David's talent
was more supple and pliant, his workmanship more
delicate, his wit more abundant. Pieter was the
sturdy worker who, producing with greater difficulty,
brought forth good and solid work; David was the
one who gave life to things.

These two real painters were born in 1830 (they
were twins) of an important Amsterdam commercial
family and it is surprising to see how little their
birth hampered them and what thorough painters
they were, reading little (except Dickens, whom they
read from cover to cover) : painters, no more and no
less. They received their education in Brussels under
Portails and in Amsterdam under P. F. Greive.
Pieter died in 1894 ^^id David eight years later.

Very different from the quiet life of these two
artists is that of the Parisian Dutchman, Fr6d6ric
Henri Kaemmerer, who, born at the Hague in 1839,

AFTER THE DAY'S WORK — DAVID OYENS

{The property of Jonkhcer C. N. Storm van ' s-Gravesandc, Schevenitigen)

Intermezzo 129

gradually freed himself from the culture of his native
land and cleverly conquered a place of his own in
the French art of the Salon. He excels in the
reproduction of Directoire costume and has made a
name by his Wedding and his Baptism under the
Directoire. The photogravures of these paintings have
been favourites even in Holland and the former
has been reproduced as a living picture at wedding-
feasts innumerable. We are compelled to admire
the cleverness of his pretty figures, with their coquettish
colouring, even though that cleverness lies entirely
outside the frontiers of our own art of painting.
Nevertheless, Kaemmerer, who has since painted
mondain subjects for the Paris Gobelins factory,
began by painting familiar Dutch topics. He ex-
hibited a Wood-cutters in 1863 and also had a
few subjects in common with his friend Artz.

In mentioning the English "Sir Lawrence," I run
a danger of being accused of wishing to adorn the
cap of Dutch painting with a foreign feather. It
is true that Laurens Alma Tadema, born at Dronrijp
in 1836, in accepting naturalization, fairly turned his
back on his countrymen. But the early period of this
painter's career is inseparable from the Leeuwarder
Bisschop, while his first years of tutelage under
Leys, whose art constituted a renascence of the old
Dutchmen and Flemings, added to the fact that he
was the master of Mesdag, cause Tadema to figure
at least in part in the history of Dutch painting.

It is easy to see that Alma Tadema and Bisschop
came from the same district. There are so many
points of unison in their view of their art; both

9

I30 Intermezzo

were wholly immersed in by-gone times, although
Bisschop's Hinlopen is of very much more recent
date than Tadema's Pompeii or Byzantium ; while
their minute rendering of antique objects with no
other aim than to serve as a scene and setting for
the figures makes them, however greatly they may
differ from each other, stand side by side as against
the Hague masters, their contemporaries. And
there was reason enough for this in Friesland. When
these two painters were young, many Leeuwarder
woman still wore their gorgeous costume, with its
Eastern cachet : the free Frisians had not yet submitted
to the shackles of Paris or London fashions. And,
although, probably, as boys, they paid but little
attention to this circumstance, the difference must
have made all the greater impression upon them in
their subsequent residence at Antwerp and the Hague.
Add this fact, that Friesland contains not only a mass
of Merovingian antiquites, distributed over the private
houses as well the museums, but also many treasures
of artistic craftmanship of the eighteenth century and
earlier, so that the love of pretty things grew in
these painters with their imagination and their
memory. Again, the dallying with the past, the
search for historical surroundings formed part of the
time in which they both "arrived," although Tadema
was a good deal younger than Bisschop.

Alma Tadema enjoyed the privilege not only of
having Leys for a master, but of assisting him, in
1859, with his frescoes for the Antwerp Town-hall,
which at once introduced him to monumental painting.
It is a pity that Tadema did not keep more to this
trend, even as, from a Dutch point of view, it is

w

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^ ^-
^ O

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Intermezzo 131

to be regretted that heallowedhimself to be diverted
from his first artistic ideas, possibly by German
influences.

I do not propose to trace the career of this well-
known painter, who was a Frisian by birth, a Belgian
by training, an archeologist by inclination ; who, it
is true, had Mesdag for a pupil, but finds his followers
in London ; and who has exercised no influence upon
modem Dutch art and has remained uninfluenced
by it. Not his manner of reproducing textures,
nor his composition (and herein lies his chief force),
nor his workmanship, nor his colouring, nor even his
modelling or drawing is Dutch or ever has been
Dutch. His art has always been decorative, even
as our seventeenth-century art and that of the
nineteenth-century Hague painters are, in their essence,
concentrated. He has never been anything of a
tonalist, not even in the more pictorial sketch of
Willem van Saefiinghen^ which, after the manner of
the great Leys, has something rather of the hot
colouring of burnt glass. He has never envied
anything in the modern Dutchmen, as, from the
start, he saw colour prettily as colour and, in a
cunning sequence of equivalents (see his Prcetex-
tatus in the Amsterdam Municipal Museum), set it
down flat and smooth into a well-ordered colour-
scheme, governed not so much by lines as by a
monumental architecture amid whose forms the
figures play their decorative parts. To imagine that
Alma Tadema looked for colour only in the second
place would lead to mistaken conclusions, for, although
his art is not emotional, he does not belong to the
literary painters and all his works, although decorative

132 Intermezzo

rather than purely pictoral, are " observed" from the
painter's point of view. Nevertheless, superb as is
the composition of his larger paintings, as in his
Vintage Festivals and PrcBtextattcs ; unsurpassed as is
the cleverness of his reproduction of marbles, of
textile fabrics; beautiful as is the colouring of his
smaller pieces, the quality in which he excels first and
foremost is that in which all the figure-painters of
all time have ever excelled in England: the depict-
ing of pretty Englishwomen in nicely-chosen attitudes.
Whether the great painters of the eighteenth century,
in a more frivolous age, painted the charms of
Lady Hamilton as a bacchante, or Rossetti imbued
his English models with the passion of a Juliet or
the sensual charm of a Venus Astarte, or Lord
Leighton, following Ingres' example, gave them the
impassivity of goddesses, or Alma Tadema, in his
turn, paints Englishwomen as Pandora or Sappho or
dancing at a vintage festival or reclining upon panther-
skins, they remain, for all that, with their fair, full
faces, their phlegmatic movements, their studied
attitudes, their invariable classic outlines, types of
English beauty of their day. Here we have the
lasting side of Alma Tadema's art. His archaeological
pictures may prove his originality and his sound
acquaintance with by-gone ages ; but it is the beauty
of his female types that gives them their value.

THE FIRST LESSON — ALBERT NEUHUIJS

{Mniiicipal Miiscnm, Dordnxlit)

CHAPTER IX
THE HAGUE SCHOOL: SEQUEL

Albert Neuhuijs, Blommers and Artz followed the
example of Israels and infused new life into our art
of ^^«r^-painting.

Neuhuijs belongs to the school of Israels in his
choice of subjects and to that of Jacob Maris in
his colouring. He has shown himself a painter of
feeling who is able to represent the calm workaday
life of the people of Laren or Brabant in a natural
and unforced manner: a woman tending her child,
or preparing dinner, or watering flowers; an elder
sister teaching a younger child to knit: all against
the rich red of a cupboard, or a white wall, or a
low dresser. Although his work of 1875 ^o 1885
possesses the solid merits of the cabinet-painters and
will undoubtedly stand the test of time, he altered
his methods afterwards to this extent, that he now
paints in the houses themselves that form the back-
ground of his subjects, thus giving a more spontaneous
effect, although he misses the precious side of his
earlier pieces. The studio gives him no ideas and
so he goes off with his big canvases to those Laren

134 The Hague School: Sequel

interiors where, as he says, " nature herself places
the colours in his hands and the movements and
attitudes of the figures are there, in their natural
environment." And, even if the picture, as such,
suffers occasionally through the defective lighting of
his work, we gain the natural little child-figures upon
which, in the ripe tone of the whole picture, the
sunny light falls that gilds a profil perdu, a downy
neck, a head of yellow hair.

Albert Neuhuijs was born at Utrecht in 1 844 and
received his first instruction at the hands of Gijs-
bertus Craeyvanger, studying later at the Antwerp
Academy. He began as a history-painter in the
Antwerp manner and is said to have excelled at
that time in the painting of satin. The portraits of
women which he produced during this period were
noted for their elegance. He did not begin to
turn his attention to the painting of interiors until
1870 or later.

Bemardus Johannes Blommers, the youngest of this
generation of painters, was born at the Hague in
1845. He is a pupil of Bisschop and of the Hague
Academy, but he formed himself and his work has
nothing in common with that of his master, nothing
of Israels and but little of Jacob Maris, whom he
admires above all others. As against the tender
conception of his subjects displayed by Neuhuijs,
Blommers sees his fisher-folk from the glad and robust
side. There is a great contrast between his sturdy
children of the sea and Israels' frail, pensive creations.
Like most painters, he began by producing power-
fully-drawn small figures, like that strong picture,

mother's joy — B. J. BLOMMEKS
(Municipal Museum, Amsterdam)

UNIVERSITY

MOURNING — D. A. C. ARTZ

{Maison Artz, the Hague)

The Hague School: Sequel 135

Maternal Joys, at the Municipal Museum in Amsterdam :
a cabinet-piece which possesses every quality save
that of atmosphere. It belongs to the time when
our painters felt more strongly bound to the old
masters and to their model, the time when the trend
towards wider harmonies, subtler analyses of colour,
quicker solutions of light was still slumbering.
However delicately treated and powerfully modelled,
the young mother in this picture already shows that
healthy side of his art which, afterwards, about 1882,
found its most forcible expression in The Fish-woman^
engaged in gutting fish, in the Hague Museum : a
strong figure painted in deep red tones, against
which the white of the fish lying on the red tiles
in the foreground stands out as a delightful still- life,
completing the warm browns and reds of this truly
imposing work.

Next to or together with Hein Burgers, David
Adolphe Constant Artz was undoubtedly Israels'
principal pupil. He first came into contact with
Israels at the evening- classes under Royer at the
Amsterdam Academy, where he painted by day from
the living model, under Egenberger. From that time,
he worked with his master, whom he followed to
Zandvoort. Afterwards, when he had selected his
tendency, he resolved to go to Paris, where he became
very intimate with Jacob and Matthijs Maris (who
painted the well-known portrait of Artz) and with
Kaem merer.

If we compare Artz, Israels' pupil, with his
master, we are struck by the absence of those mystic
qualities which the latter's later works reveal and

136 The Hague School: Sequel

which Artz admired so whole-heartedly and lacked
quite consciously in his own work. In a picture
such as Mournings despite the fine expression of
sorrow, despite the fine sentiment that places the
sobbing woman bending forward against the rosy,
utterly unconscious child, we are struck by the fact
that this sorrow does not, as it would have done
were the picture painted by Israels, permeate the
whole figure, the fall of the folds of the woman's
dress, the fall of the light, every detail of the apartment,
which would have been dramatized as it were in
and through the human tragedy; we see that Artz
is more positive and more practical, that he prefers
to follow his model, to give his attention to each
object and that, from this point of view, the folds
of that dress are beautifully painted, beautiful too
and seventeenth-century those squat little baby-shoes
on that empty floor, a detail upon which Jan Steen
could not have improved.

Properly speaking, Artz was one of the first
realists in our country. Loving nature, he carefully
followed her in his models and, especially in his studies
painted from nature, showed a very complete, correct
and delicate sense of the pale tonalities of beach and
dunes. He was particularly happy in his open-air
pictures, in which his work showed a great charm.
The studies, again, for his most famous picture. The
Refectory of the Katwijk AlmsJwuse, belong to the best
and the most original that we possess in this respect.
Artz was bom in 1837 and died at the Hague in 1 890.

In addition to Hein Burgers (i 834-1 899), Jozef
Israels' only actual pupil, who, it is true, adopted mainly

THE CUP— CHRISTOFFEL BISSCHOP
(The property of H.M. the Queen of the Netherlands)

^^S£-

'"'The'

p 5

X -

I -2

The Hague School: Sequel 137

the somewhat morbid side of his intrinsically sound
and healthy master, but who left some delicately-painted
little pictures, Valkenburg, the painter of interiors,
was a faithful and capable follower of Israels. Hendrik
Valkenburg (18 2 6- 1896) was a painter who was
prevented by circumstances until he had almost
attained his fiftieth year from devoting himself, free
of all school-lessons, to an art to which he had felt
attracted all his life and in which he eventually
succeeded in making a respectable name, in the
style of Israels. He painted farm-house interiors,
honestly and simply rendered, mostly of those
enormous Twente kitchens, simply and truthfully
and well and unpretentiously drawn. Valkenburg once
related, before falling under the charm of Mauve
in his Laren period, that Israels had said to him
that, in every tone and every shadow, a colour
should retain its own principle, so that blue remained
blue, red red and so on. The Hague master, the
inscrutable painter of luminous browns, had long
abandoned this principle for a less narrow solution
of light, for a freer analysis of space; but Valken-
burg held fast to it and we must admit that it
constitutes his strength. Fot that matter, at Laren
too and especially in his little kitchen-gardens this
painter showed great merit.

Though Bisschop's conception of the interior is not
related in respect of artlessness and not at all in
that of the joy of life with the pictures of the old
"little masters," neither was his conception that of
Israels or of Jacob Maris. It is true that he gave
a portrait of the old Hinlopen life, a peinture des

138 The Hague School: Sequel

mceurs of the old popular life in Friesland, of everyday
happenings in the household, but he failed to expand
it into something generally human. Nor did he aim
at doing so; for, whereas Jozef Israels looks upon
things only as a means to increase the expression
for his model, Bisschop was above all a painter of
still-life, to whom the figures were necessary attributes
to give life to the precious objects of a past age
and to justify their use. Nevertheless, I know
pictures of Bisschop's in which the figures form the
main feature, such as those young women standing
before a mirror or reading at a writing-table; and
in The Mennonite Supper at Hinlopen figures and
still-life are very happily combined.

Christoffel Bisschop was born at Leeuwarden in
1828. In 1846, after receiving an elementary
education in his native town, he went to Delft to
work under Schmidt, then in the zenith of his fame.
After Schmidt's death, Bisschop studied under Huib
van Hove. From 1852 to 1855, the year in which
he settled at the Hague, he worked in the studio
of Le Comte and Charles Gleyre, formerly the
Atelier Delaroche, in Paris. He made a considerable
name. The house which he occupied with his wife,
an Irish lady by birth, in the woods between the
Hague and Scheveningen, was arranged as an old
Frisian dwelling-house and might be looked upon
as a museum of domestic art. He died recently,
in 1904.

The art of painting in water-colours underwent great
changes in the hands of the Hague masters. A
water-colour ceased to be either the compact picture

H "S

The Hague School: Sequel 139

in oils which an earlier generation had produced or
the pencil, chalk or pen-and-ink drawing, lightly-
washed with colour, of the old masters. In the hands
of our impressionists, water-colour painting, like oil-
painting, became an emotional art, an harmonious
whole, until, with the aid of this thinner medium,
our Dutch impressionism went further, arrived at
subtler results and attained a more general modernity
then the more classic oil-paintings.

Long before the institution of the exhibitions of
the famous Hague Sketching Club, the views held
by the Pulchri Studio Society at the Hague and
Felix Mentis and Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam
had given occasion for the display of water-colours.
At first, these took place only in the evenings. For
a time, they were attended regularly by Queen
Sophie and Prince Henry of the Netherlands and
by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar and his daughter.
The general public continued reactionary in matters
of art and I can remember the speeches delivered
about 1880 on the subject of Jacob Maris' delicious
water-colour drawings, speeches embodying grue-
some anticipations concerning the future of an art
in which sketches, as Maris' drawings were called,
were exhibited as completed works. And this was
at a time when Jaap Maris had long been acknow-
ledged as a master, a title which was denied him
by the older generation of Hague painters for many
a long day.

The original members of the Hague Water-colour
Society were Van de Sande Bakhuijzen, Miss van de
Sande Bakhuijzen, Bisschop, Mrs. Bisschop-Swift,
Bles, Blommers, Bosboom, Henkes, Israels, Jacob

MO The Hague School: Sequel

and Willem Maris, Mauve, Mesdag, Sad^e and Pieter
Stortenbeker. These were immediately joined by
Artz, Duchattel, Nakken, Albert Neuhuijs, C. S.
Stortenbeker, E. Verveer and Weissenbruch, as or-
dinary members; while Alma Tadema in London,
Alleb6 and J. W. Bilders in Amsterdam, David and
Pieter Oyens, the Famars Testas, Gabriel and
Roelofs in Brussels, Rochussen in Amsterdam and
a few Belgians, including Emile Wouters, and many
Italians, including, at a later date, Segantini, took
part in the famous August exhibitions as honorary
members.

First, in chronological order, among the minor
artists of the Hague school is Charles Rochussen,
born at Rotterdam in 1815, who was looked upon,
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the
only illustrative talent of importance among us.
Teyler's Museum at Haarlem has a Hunting Party ^
painted in 1857, a scene filled with lords and ladies
on horseback on a hilly heath in Gelderland, which,
for observation, delicate drawing and happy colouring,
is quite excellent of its kind. The Fodor Museum
in Amsterdam possesses similar litde pieces and also
a Dog-cart, which is cleverly drawn and admirably
painted. Rochussen died in 1894. It is a pity
that this painter of very considerable talent and origi-
nality was eventually merged, as it were, in the draughts-
man and illustrator ; and yet he was the only illustra-
tor of any importance that our country has produced.

Elchanon Verveer (18 26-1 900), like Israels, Artz
and Blommers, took his subjects from amid the life
of the fishermen on the sea-coast.

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The Hague School: Sequel H'

Pieter Stortenbeker (i 828-1 898), the animal
painter, may be said to have surpassed both his
masters, H. van de Sande Bakhuijzen and J. B. Tom.

Johannes Hubertus Leonardus de Haas, the Guelder
artist, born in 1828, had the same master as Mauve.
He moved to Brussels at an early age and, though
he there learnt to make a perhaps superfluous use
of white paint, he nevertheless displays, in his Early
Morning at the Rijksmuseum, a great power of form
and a strenuous search after atmosphere.

Julius Jacobus van de Sande Bakhuijzen, born in
1835, 2- pupil of his father's, is a moderately good
landscape-painter who has found his level more par-
ticularly in forest-views.

Willem Carel Nakken, bom in 1835, ^ P^pil o^
Dona's, has some very good paintings with horses
scattered through various museums.

Paulus van der Velden, born in 1837 at Rotter-
dam, is a full-blooded painter of interiors.

Philip Sad6e, born at the Hague in 1837, is a
painter not without importance.

Jozef Hendrikus Neuhuijs (i 841- 1890), a younger
brother of Albert Neuhuys, displayed a very delicate
and sensitive talent.

Gerke Henkes, born at Delftshaven in 1844, en-
joyed a not undeserved success at a time when
anecdotal painting was more generally appreciated
than now.

Pieter ter Meulen, born in 1843, a pupil of H. van
de Sande Bakhuijzen, although lacking Mauve's
fulness of tone, is one of the most honest followers
of that great painter.

142 The Hague School: Sequel

Far above any of these stood Eduard Alphonse
Victor Auguste van der Meer (i 846-1 899). Although
he was not a painter of wide scope, he possessed
the merit of portraying well and faithfully the
polderlands reclaimed by Weissenbruch and Gabriel.
If he were not at the same time such a pure painter,
one might call him the topographer of the pools
of South Holland, for none of them all was able
so simply and succinctly as he to write upon the
smooth surface of those pools, whether in autumn
or winter, the little accidents pertaining to it: the
thin reeds, a boat or a belt of underwood. His
work may be somewhat too even and this is pro-
bably due to the fact that he was deaf and dumb,
which caused him to turn his thoughts too much
upon himself; but, on the other hand, his sense of
still nature became all the greater.

A few women-painters belong to this period.
Henriette Ronner-Knip, born in Amsterdam in 1 8 2 1 ,
a pupil of her father, J. A. Knip (i 777-1847), was
doubtless the most popular woman-painter of her
time. From the first, she applied herself to the painting
of animals, of dogs and especially cats; and she
owes her name to the natural movements which
she knew how to give to her pet cats and kittens.

Maria Philippine Bilders-van Bosse (i 837-1900)
proved herself a ready pupil of painters such as
Bosboom, Van de Sande Bakhuijzen and, especially,
J. W. Bilders, who subsequently became her husband.
She had a very simple feeling for landscape-painting.

Sina Mesdag-van Houten, born at Groningen in
1834, married H. W. Mesdag and began to paint

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at the Hague. She received her first instruction
(her real education came to her from the French
painters whose works Mesdag had collected), as far
as regards drawing, from D'Arnaud Gerkens and she
declares that she also learnt much from a talented
woman painter, Harriet Lindo. Mrs. Mesdag has
proved herself to be an artist of emotional power,
able to set before us in the grand manner the
spacious solitude, the startling loneUness and abandon-
ment of our heaths and dunes.

Margaretha Vogel-Roosenboom ( 1 84 3- 1 899), grand-
daughter of Schelfhout and wife of Johannes Gijs-
bert Vogel (born in 1828), the landscape-painter,
and Gerardina Jacoba van de Sande Bakhuijzen
(18 26- 1 89 5) represented the female element at the
Hague exhibitions and made a fair name for them-
selves with their flowers and fruit. Technically, the
latter was the superior of the two ; but the former
had more artistic feeling, in so far that she selected
her own arrangement of colour.

Neither of them possessed the solid talent of their
senior, Maria Vos, born in 1824 and a pupil of
Petrus Kiers, whose painting partook rather of the
old Dutch excellence. She is represented in Boy mans*
Museum by a picture of still-life which goes to show
that she is unsurpassed by any woman-painter of this
style in our country.

J. B. Tom's mantle may be said to have descended
upon Johannes Martinus Vrolijk (i 846-1 896), an
unemotional but serious painter of fields and cattle.
Vrolijk was a pupil of Pieter Stortenbeker, distinguished
himself by his own etchings and managed the Pulchri

144 The Hague School: Sequel

Studio press, which produced Jacob Maris* Mill
and so many other famous etchings.

Richard Bisschop, born at Leeu warden in 1849,
is a cultured painter of church-interiors, which he
executes with great thoroughness and completeness.
Occasionally, in his water-colour drawings of CathoUc
churches, in the twilight of the columns seen against
the candle-light and the faint light from outside, he
shows his relationship with Israels; while, on the
other hand, his painting reveals the influence of his
uncle and master, Christoffel Bisschop.

Marinus Boks (i 849-1 885) was an immediate
pupil of Mauve's and a pure landscape-painter. In
the few pictures of his short life known to us, he
has said something about the dunes that none had
said before him. Yet it is not possible to judge
with certainty, because, during his illness, Jacob Maris
often completed his unfinished pictures for him with
his own powerful hand.

Lodewijk Frederik Hendrik (known as Louis) Apol,
born at the Hague in 1850, was a pupil of the
Hague Academy, of Johannes Franciscus Hoppen-
brouwers (181 9-1 866) and of P. Stortenbeker. He
is a skilful painter, who achieved the full measure
of his talent at an early age, making a name, when
only twenty-five, with a snow-piece, A Janttary Day,
now in the Amsterdam Municipal Museum.

A more powerful figure is Theophile de Bock,
born at the Hague in 1851. Although he was a
pupil of Van Borselen and Weissenbruch, he began
by painting important landscapes, inspired by Corot,
and afterwards passed over to Jacob Maris, with
whose palette, as it were, he painted some quiet pools,

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conceived in a virile manner. He displays his talent
not only in his earlier pictures, but also and more
especially in his chalk drawings relieved with a
touch of colour. Here he shows both strength and
delicacy and also his later originality, without a certain
clumsiness which spoils the harmony of his boldly-
constructed landscapes.

Johannes Christiaan Karel Klinkenberg, born at
the Hague in 1852, is a painter of town-views, an
illusive limner of bright sunlight on house-fronts, quite
as topographical as Springer, but less colourful, less
studied in his composition, painting the old buildings
and squares and canals of our country cleverly and
unemotionally, in a manner that is always reminiscent
of his master, Christoffel Bisschop. Klinkenberg is
a painter of whom one might have expected that he
would have taken the excellent Jan Weissenbruch,
with his fine, sound workmanship, for his guide in
a style which, separately considered, has been pro-
duced by no later artist with the same amount of truth
and value. However, he found himself and worked
out his own ideas, which, if they do not fall within
the domain of pure painting, are, in any case, popular.

George Poggenbeek ( 1 8 5 3- 1 902), the Amsterdam
representative of this generation following immediately
upon the great Hague masters, has more than any
other reproduced the sense of this school in his dis-
tinguished conception of our landscape with meadows
and cattle, which has been painted in so many
various ways. To the delicacy of Mauve he added
the luxurious green which Willem Maris gives us in

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146 The Hague School: Sequel

his " duck" motives ; and, though he lacks the passion
of the latter and the simplicity of the former, he
commands a daintiness of line, of a more or less
decorative quality, by which he atones in distinction
of composition for his shortcomings in power,

Poggenbeek was destined for commerce ; his inter-
course with that talented and short-lived painter,
Hamrath, made him take to drawing and painting
when he was nineteen. He received his instruction
from Z. H. Velthuizen, a painter who was not much
heard of in his day, but who formed a number of
pupils. He also learnt much from his connection
with Bastert, with whom he lived for seven years at
Breukelen. He also painted in Normandy and
Brittany : fresh, bright town-views drawn with a quick
sense of French nature.

Nicolaas Bastert, bom at Marseveen in 1854, is
a pure landscape-painter, a pupil of the Antwerp and
Amsterdam Academies and of Marinus Heyl. He
formed himself more especially at the Hague, under
the influence of the clarity of Mauve and the Marises,
and has produced good work in a strong and restful
manner : views on the Vecht, subjects taken from the
Amsterdam water-ways, also old castles. He excels
particularly in views of rivers and other waters.

Fredericus Jacobus van Rossum Duchatel, bom
at Leiden in 1856, attained fame as a painter, both
at home and abroad, thanks to the natural facility
of his talent, for he had no other masters than the
painters and paintings he observed around him. He
was known in particular for those Vecht views which

WINTER LANDSCAPE— F. J. VAN ROSSUM DUCHATTEL
{^Municipal Museum, the Hague)

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The Hague School: Sequel 147

Bastert rendered in a more pictorial fashion. He pos-
sesses a dexterity in painting with water-colour which
would, I verily believe, enable him te set down a
view of the Vecht on a brown-paper coffee-bag as
easily as on a sheet of Whatman drawing-paper.
From the beginning, this sort of water, with country-
villas, summer-houses and barges along its banks,
formed his favourite subject.

Jacobus Simon Hendrik Kever, born in Amster-
dam in 1854, is a pupil of P. F. Greive, but soon
began to follow in the footsteps of Albert Neuhuijs.
He appears to belong to those painters who, endowed
with a good palette and an easy method of painting,
require another's formula in order to be able to
express themselves. And often our Amsterdam Kever
paints excellent Neuhuijs pictures, notable for good
workmanship and a fine composition.

Tony Lodewijk George Offermans, born in 1854
at the Hague, paints shop-interiors, somewhat in
the style of the Hague school with an admixture
of the earlier Mesker, well-painted pieces which have
a merit of their own, thanks to the capital work-
manship and the faithful rendering of the types repre-
sented. He is a pupil of Blommers and, indirectly,
of Artz ; and, what is more, he is the son of our
greatest lyrical singer, Mrs. S. Offermans-van Hove,
who came of a family that has always produced
painters and musicians.

The portrait-painters of this period were Th6r^e
Schwartze, bom in Amsterdam in 1852, and

148 The Hague School: Sequel

Pieter de Josselin de Jong, bom at St. Oeden-
rode in 1861. Strictly speaking, neither of them
belongs to the Hague school; but they accompany
this earlier period, as it were, as its official portrait-
painters and must needs be reckoned with it, although
they have been surpassed in power of expression
by a later generation. Th6rese Schwartze is not
only the most widely-known Dutch woman-painter
of the last thirty years, or even of the whole of
the nineteenth century, but she is to be credited
with the fact that, at a time when portrait-painting,
notwithstanding a few masterstrokes of Jozef Israels,
had practically fallen into decadence, she honoured
her father's tradition as a free art, not devoid
of fantasy. She is a born painter, whose fluent
modelling seems to be something quite her own,
and, although draughtsmanship is not her strong
point, although her faces could not withstand the
criticism of an academic expert, although — true
woman that she is — she occasionally enlarges the eyes,
reduces the mouths, refines the finger-tips of her sitters,
she has sometimes produced portraits, swiftly seized
in a few days' sittings, of such great excellence
that we come to know the originals better through
them. Of this first period, the portraits of Mr. Fre-
derik Muller and of Mr. Toewater, the advocate,
are doubtless the most powerful. The whole con-
struction of the first, the heavy head, shaded
by a soft black hat with a broad brim, lighted
with Rembrandt effects, brisk in colour, excellent
in attitude, square and stately, points to the quickness
of comprehension which is one of this painter's fore-
most qualities.

THE BARONESS MICHIELS VAN VERDUIJNEN - VAN BRIENEN VAN DE

GROOTE LINDT — THERESE SCHWARTZE

{The property of the Baroness Michiels van Verdtnjnen, the Hague)

JONKHEER VICTOR DE STUERS — P. DE JOSSELIN DE JONG
{The property of Jonkhecr Victor de Stuers, the Hague)

The Hague School: Sequel 149

Th^r^se Schwartze is a woman and her womanly
intuition led her to woman's domain and to the use
of a material in which womanly intuition rather than
practical knowledge points the way. She began to
produce pastel portraits in 1885 and soon achieved
technical perfection, particularly in the modelling of
the face, which is more natural and simple, at least
in so far as regards the portraits of women, in this
medium than in oils. And, whereas, before, she
was reproached with being able to paint only men's
portraits, that is to say character-portraits, since this
period she has shown, in a series of charming por-
traits of women and children, that pastel is a very
beautiful medium in which to make the fleeting,
evanescent, pale qualities of a woman's face tell
against the brilliancy of the white silks or muslins
in which she prefers to array her sitters. Of these
portraits, perhaps that of the Baroness Michiels van
Verduijnen is, as regards both composition and exqui-
siteness of colouring, the most elegant, the most
mondain portrait painted of late in our country, while
the likeness has not suffered through the well-thought-
out arrangement of the picture.

De Josselin de Jong received his first lessons from
P. M. Slager, at 's-Hertogenbosch ; afterwards he
frequented the Antwerp Academy and completed
his education in Rome. His training, like Th^rese
Schwartze's, was quite foreign to the ideas existing
at the Hague. And he excels rather as an academic
draughtsman than as a powerful painter, so that it
would appear as if the building up of a head or
the outline of a hand never cost him the slightest

I50 The Hague School: Sequel

trouble. We do not find in his work the little defects
which mark that of Miss Schwartze, nor, for that
matter, her charm. He has painted a series of por-
traits, honest, free from exaggeration and soberly
observed, which amply satisfy the general require-
ments. He has also painted horses ploughing,
water-colours that often display great power and are
original by reason of the stiff lines of the agricul-
tural slopes of Limburg, a very happy subject, to
which he afterwards added glimpses of the life of
the foundries, which give occasion for forcible illus-
tration-work rather than for a well-considered har-
monious whole, although we are bound to admire
his powers as a draughtsman when he represents
his puddlers at work.

When we think of the Hague masters to whom
this school owes its name, we realize that, sad though
the fact may be, they too are subject to the universal
law that the things of this earth de not endure.
The first blow fell in February 1888, when Mauve
died while the Hague painters were at the height
of their productiveness. In the midst of his work,
in the full flower of his life, he was snatched away,
unexpectedly, from among that host of powerful
masters. Bosboom died in 1890, Artz in 1892,
Jacob Maris in 1899, Weissenbruch, Gabriel and
Roggenbeek early in the twentieth century. The
death of Jacob Maris in August 1899 was a blow
from which the Hague school was never to recover.
He had been a tower of strength to his juniors, a
constant assistance, a helping hand; and his loss
was irreparable.

CHAPTER X.

THE YOUNGER MASTERS OF THE
HAGUE SCHOOL

All who followed the older masters of the Hague
school based their methods upon them at the start
and in this sense, therefore, followed in their footsteps.
But the more powerful figures in this second gene-
ration, as soon as they were able to dispense with
the crutch of the older men, struck out lines of their
own. Their names are Bauer, Breitner, Isaac Israels,
Van der Maarel, Kamerlingh Onnes, Suze Robertson,
Tholen, Verster and De Zwart.

George Hendrick Breitner, bom at Rotterdam in
1857, was the oldest and also the most vigorous of
his contemporaries. He was a pupil of Willem
Maris, whose broad smooth touch he applied, together
with the colour-schemes of Jaap Maris, to a more
passionate colouring in his charges of cavalry, in
his artillery seen in profile against the sky-line, power-
fully built up, with the long foreground represented
clearly and evenly in forcible tonalities. He is, above
all, the painter of movement, whose artistic bent inclined
him towards the depicting of the bewildering bustle

1^2

The Younger Masters

of military life : mounted artillery-men displaying their
outlines against the smooth sky, or galloping down
the dunes, full of screaming yellows and blacks, of
horses and of the bright, white sand ; or a shoeing-
smith; or a halt by a Brabant homestead, one of
those moments in the manoeuvres which he would
attend sketch-book in hand. Afterwards, it drove
him to paint the huge complication of the trams
starting from the Dam at Amsterdam, with all its
noisy life and bustie of motley pedestrians and
passengers and vehicles, or else of overburdened
coal-wains, standing out high and huge against the
petty life of a still canal. These town-views are
pieces of a magnificent naturalism, of a passion that
contains none of the spacious quietude in which
Jacob Maris sees the town lying under the fleeting
clouds, none of the latter's melodious harmonies,
none of his symphonic view of nature, but rather a
modem instrumentation, in which the brasses prevail.
For Breitner is essentially a modern painter, who,
coming from the restful Hague, must needs have
been impressed with the great movement of a capital
city ; a passionate painter for whom it was reserved
to reproduce in large and mighty and truthful strokes
the monumental greatness of the old town and also
its modern street-life, with the dissonance of the
shrill street-lamps, the brightly-lighted shops, glaring
through the peace of the evening, shining fiercely
upon the passers-by, turning the wet asphalt into
a mirror in which the figures are lengthened in an
unreal fashion.

But for us who acknowledged Breitner from the
beginning it was finer than all this to watch him

PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF — G. H, BREITNEK
[The property of Mr. H. J. van der Week, the Hague)

W r-

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of the Hague School 153

on the drawing evenings at Pulchri Studio, in
the little sketching-room, with the tobacco-smoke
floating up to the ceiling and obscuring the model.
There he sat fixing a water-colour, holding the
drawing-block between his ankles, dripping the paint
from his brush according to its true values. And
in a moment there would come into being the
white of an apron, the blue of a soldier's uniform,
amid the admiration of those who stood gathered
round this perfect virtuoso in colour.

This was in the Hague time of his period of
storm and stress, when he painted as and because
he must. I remember later an occasion at the
short-lived, but uncommonly distinguished art-club
on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam, how Lord
Leighton's Phryne compelled our admiration by the
magnificent soundness of its qualities and how we
were in the same moment impressed by a brilliant
colour-sketch of Breitner's, a woman in yellow with
a withered tulip in her hand, painted entirely with
cin eye to beauty. It was thus that Frans Hals
painted his master-pieces : The Laughing Cavalier^ the
corporation-pieces at Haarlem ; thus that Rembrandt
painted The Lesson in Anatomy : not thinking of the
public, disregarding commercial values, from sheer
love of beauty, following nature's promptings alone.
And it was thus that Breitner, who, in the matter
of his tones, is himself an old master, painted
that woman with the black cat, painted those por-
traits of himself in that warm, yellow tone, painted
those firm, yet delicate, living flowers, painted
those powerful Amsterdam studies from the naked
model.

154 The Younger Masters

Although his artistic training was very different
from that of Jacob Maris, Breitner never ceased
seeking for means to overcome his defects of form.
And, notwithstanding the effective hints which he
received from that fine horse-painter, Rochussen;
notwithstanding the fact that he passed an examination
in intermediate drawing (he used to say that, if you
stood in the Veenestraat pelting people with potatoes,
nine out of every ten men hit would have one of
those certificates in his pocket : nevertheless, his own
enabled him to give a course of lessons at Leiden,
where, among others, Floris Verster was his pupil) ;
notwithstanding his having painted for twelve months
in the studio of Willem Maris, who then lived at
Oud-Rozenburg ; nay, even after he had already
made an absolute name for himself among the
younger and even among some of the older painters
of his time, he resolved to go for two years to the
Amsterdam Academy, to learn drawing under Alleb6.
I know not in how far he here found what he had
come to seek; but one thing is certain: he saw
Amsterdam, was smitten with its strenuous life,
became the great painter of the great city and never
returned to the more contemplative Hague.

If Breitner, in his later paintings of moorlands on
the bright outskirts of Amsterdam, was obliged to
subordinate his rich tonalities to a more open tech-
nique of line, Suze Robertson, on the other hand,
born at the Hague in 1857, although more closely
related to him at the start, was able not only to
retain, but even to increase the wealth of her palette.
Nearly cdl the painters of the Hague school lost the

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GIKL RESTING — SUZE BISSCHOP-KOBERTSON
{The property of Mr. E. V. F. Ahn, the Hague)

of the Hague School i55

Intensity of their colour in the search for light in
a wider aspect. She, who can hardly be called a
landscape-painter, except in her little views of Noord-
wijk, of which she only borrows the form to employ
it as a subject for her colourful temperament, has
made splendid studies of figures in her studio, worked
up occasionally to something very complete, as in
the little dark figure of a girl seen against a yellow
silk background, a subject which, thanks to its heavy
modelling and its heavy tone, became a quite excep-
tional and independent artistic utterance. Combined
with great technical qualities, she has displayed this
wealth of ripe tones both in oils and in water-colours,
a feeling for colour that is visionary rather than
realistic. Her models do not command the gloriously
outspoken veracity of Breitner's : they approach more
nearly Rembrandt's conception ; and I doubt whether
Suze Robertson has ever admired any Rembrandt
more than the Suzanna in the Mauritshuis, seen
through her own rich temperament.

She is of the same age as Breitner; but, although
born at the Hague, she hails by origin from Rot-
terdam, the great commercial city on the Maas.
Like Breitner, she began by passing her examination
for intermediate education at the Hague Academy
and, like him, began by giving lessons. Her
circumstances compelled her to remain first for six
years at the secondary girls' school at Rotterdam
and for one year in a private intermediate school
in Amsterdam.

If Th6r^e Schwartze may be described as the
most famous Dutch female painter of her time, Suze
Robertson is undoubtedly the greater artist, perhaps

1 56 TheYounger Masters of the Hague School

the only woman of our day whose femininity betrays
itself in her art not as weakness but as strength.
In 1892, she married Richard Bisschop, the painter
of church-interiors.

It is a remarkable fact that Isaac Israels, who,
born at the Hague in 1865, grew up as much
as or even more than Breitner in the florescence
of the Hague school, never really belonged to it.
For, when he began, he was first attracted by sol-
diers (I do not know if this was in imitation of
Breitner) and painted them according to his own
ideas, in small, compact, daintily-drawn pictures, in-
dependently of his father's work and very cleverly for
so young a painter. At the same time, he produced
some very delicately-painted little portraits of women,
including one with a park for its background, without
troubling about any considerations oi plem-air. Still,
these portraits were noticed only by a few in a time
of broad brushwork in portrait-painting and it was
the scenes of military life that made his name at a
comparatively early age. His picture of colonial
troops on the bridge at Rotterdam had a success
in Paris.

How he brought himself to fling away what he
had achieved before he had found a new pair ot
shoes to fit him I do not know; but one thing is
certain, that the Amsterdam Academy, Amsterdam
life, the influence of the Hterary movement that circled
round the Nieuwe Gidsy that this half-literary, half-
pictorial, but in any case wholly intellectual life was
well-adapted to change his point of view. In Paris,
he would have belonged to that array of immense

I

^,

t]^

I^H

of the Hague School i57

draughtsmen who reproduce the life of the boulevards
with so much sadness, but also with so much refine-
ment of form. With us, he also became a peintre de
mceu7's ; but through it all, in spite of himself, there
gleamed the impressionism of the Hague school.
He began by making chalk-drawings, straight from
nature: canals with figures, streets seen from some
well-placed window ; and in these very first drawings
everything had disappeared that one used to admire
in him: they were clever scrawls and scribbles,
snapshots that presented an interesting glimpse of
Amsterdam, without supplying anything new, unless
we except The Kalverstraat The first important
production was The Dancing-house^ an interior showing
a stifling atmosphere, where, in a thick haze, sailors
stare at women spinning round, a sickening episode,
crudely and inexorably outspoken, Hke a scene from
Zola, while in that perturbing painting. Women
smoking, he displayed types that belong to the most
naturalistic pages of our nineteenth- century art.

We must not look in these works nor in any
others of his later period for the harmony of the
great Hague men his masters, nor for their colouring,
their sheer beauty, their charm of workmanship, their
well-balanced composition. Nor again must we
look to find in him a subject developed into a
complete picture. What Isaac Israels aims at is
to seize the moment, the movement, the street types,
the street life forming part of the streets, of the
town. He is essentially one of the younger men,
endowed with more sensitive nerves and less balance
than the Hague men, a son of his time, a son too
of Jozef Israels the psychologist.

158 The Younger Masters

No more honest artist exists ; and, like that virtuoso
of the brush, Manet, he might have said, in the
catalogue of his first exhibition :

"Come here to see not complete, but upright
work."

He sacrifices nothing to commercial values; one
knows of no concession made by this restless worker ;
he adds nothing conventional, nothing acquired by
knowledge or experience to his work. The faces are
characterized with a stroke or two; the figures and
the whole episode are reproduced with a genuine
realism which is never touched up in the studio or
elaborated into an imposing colour-scheme. His work
is one long array of human documents, unique in our
country for their unvarnished truthfulness. Never-
theless, in quite recent years, he has produced works
which show that he is adopting a more synthetic
manner of seeing and a more monumental, though
always life-like mode of expression.

Pure landscape-painting is represented in this
generation by De Zwart and Tholen. Willem Bastiaan
Tholen, born in i860, was. like Voerman, denied
the privilege of being born at the Hague or, rather,
of growing up there amid the riot of beauty to which
the work of the great masters contributed daily. Both
of them were natives of Kampen and received their
education first under Hein, the landscape-painter, who
was not able to instil much life into his pupils, and
later under J. O. Belmer, the painter and drawing-
master, who, newly-arrived at Kampen, encouraged
his pupils, prepared them for the Amsterdam Academy
and reconciled their parents to the idea of bringing

of the Hague School i59

up their sons to an artistic career. At the Hague
and even in Amsterdam, it is easy to become a
painter, almost too easy, in fact. But in the smaller
towns, which possess no academies, no animated art-
life, no picture-galleries, we cannot show sufficient
appreciation of a painter who, compelled by circum-
stances to accept a position as local drawing-msister,
displays a true love of his art and devotion to his
pupils. Tholen never fails to admit that, without
this guidance, he would never have become the man
he is. All his later masters might have been different ;
but he would have been nowhere without Belmer.
After the Academy, he took Gabriel, then still in
Brussels, as his master. This choice is an early
characteristic of the practical painter that Tholen
has since become.

Practical, sure of himself, learning in the midst of his
admiring commerce with the Hague masters, Tholen
made an early name with a couple of water-colours
of the children's playground in the Scheveningen
Woods. Later, at an exhibition of the Dutch Drawing
Association, he showed the interior of a dairy, in
which the reflections of the brass milk-pails, the
white walls and a touch of blue were carried to a
pitch of uncommon purity. Perhaps even more
elaborate was The Butcher s Shop, an admirable
interior with a vista, which, thanks both to the
execution and the water-colour treatment, gained the
admiration of all painters, young and old masters
alike. A country-house in a labyrinth of bushes and
bracken, green-houses, a toll-house, Scheveningen
streets, the Scheveningen canal may be numbered
among his most precious water-colours.

i6o The Younger Masters

Tholen's work shows no trace of an endeavour
in any other direction than the picturesque. From
the first, he proves himself a sound and powerful
landscape-painter, whose streets and landscapes, with
their boldness of construction and brightness of tone
and firmness of line and colouring, tell all that they
have to tell, without ever degenerating into illustrations.
He is one of those painters who dare to be them-
selves, who place strength above feeble sentimentality,
who do not consider our Dutch art of landscape-
painting to be bound to any one formula and who
do not object if they are called cold because of their
cool expression of a fact, for the reason that they are
convinced that strength and not weakness is their
motive power. Years passed in which his work
was sent straight to England, so that we but rarely
saw an)^hing of it. At present, his subjects are
taken to a great extent from the Zuider Zee or rivers.
And, if a change be perceptible in his work, this
is in consequence of the reflections in which a painter
often indulges at about his fortieth year, the age
when we throw off the influences received from without
and recover our own natures.

Tholen's nature is not an expansive one and
therefore his merits as a painter are not always
equally obvious. And, in the ever-growing admiration
for a more fixed art, for the older men, he, with
the best of the younger masters, stands alone.

Willem de Zwart, who is before all a colourist,
was born at the Hague in 1862. He was a pupil
of the Hague Academy and, what is more, he is,
in point of fact, the only direct pupil of Jacob Maris.

S I

of the Hague School i6i

The influence is seen in his "Sand-pits" of about
1885 to 1890. Mellow, firmly-painted, bright and
full of tone, these sand-pits, lying in the yellow dunes
under the grey skies, reflected in a canal, enlivened
by the movement of sand-boats and navvies, belong
to the best that he has yet painted. At that time,
he was living at the Hague in the Beeklaan, a
favourite quarter with artists, lying between the dunes
on the one side and the fat fields, canals and farm-
steads on the other. Here he would also surprise
us with his figures of women, full of the breath of
life, like Breitner's women, like Jacob Maris* portrait
of his sister, Hke Terburgh's women, although less
refined. And, above all, he was the first to turn
into a sheer feast of colour the bright squares of
the town, with the gleaming black panels of the
passing carriages, pieces filled with rich tones, tho-
roughly intelligent performances which, nevertheless, did
not go beyond the just demands of landscape-painting.
A turning-point arrived in his career too. This
was when the Hague ceased to be the artistic centre,
when Breitner and Isaac Israels were settled in Am-
sterdam, when Bauer went to Bussum and when
De Zwart himself had gone to Hilversum. Was this
for private reasons, or to enter the environment of
the younger Amsterdammers, or from the longing for
the country, for solitude, that drove the strongest
to seclusion? One thing is certain, that De Zwart
had his work cut out for him to recover his " form. "
He drew in chalks, he etched, he painted, until, a few
years ago, he again began to produce paintings
which attracted notice through the robust, not always
harmonious colouring, through the powerful draughts-

II

1 62 The Younger Masters

manship which he displayed in somewhat Old-Dutch
subjects, such as a Poultry-market, a water-colour,
or in bright-coloured little interiors, or in pictures
of slums. From that time, he hcis shown compa-
ratively little connection with his master or with the
traditions of the Hague school.

The talented colourist Johannes Evert Akkeringa,
born in the isle of Banka in 1864, though not a
pupil of De Zwart's, belongs to his school. He
studied at the Hague and Rotterdam Academies
and has produced supply-painted little pieces — figures,
dunes, flower-gardens — real little cabinet-pieces, which
are greatly valued and yet are modern, like something
lying half-way between De Zwart and the earlier
Rochussen. He has this in common with all the
younger painters of the Hague school, that he has
not yet said his last word.

Van der Maarel is a colourist of a different type
from either Breitner or Mrs. Bisschop-Robertson.
Verster, in his colour period, and Voerman, in his
early flower-pieces, both had something in common
with him ; nevertheless. Van der Maarel's aspirations
in the matter of form and colour find a different
expression. In reality, he is more nearly related
to the Venetian masters, with their passionate love
of colour, than to the Dutch. I remember, many
years ago, seing a figure of a little Italian girl by
Van der Maarel, leaning against the stone balustrade
of a Paris bridge, with a grey sky just broken up
by harmonious orange. The purity of the red in
the little figure and the charm of colour in the sky

LITTLE SIS — M. VAN DER MAAREL
(The property of Mr. J. J. Biesing, the Hague)

OF THE ^^^

•ORJ

of the Hague School 163

at once- attracted the attention of the younger men,
whereas some of the older painters did not think
it worth while to make so much fuss of a bit of sky-
like that, which anyone might have painted in a
happy moment.

Van der Maarel is also, is, in fact, before all a
painter of portraits; at least, he has produced his
most important work in this direction. Yet he must
not be regarded as a professed portrait- painter ; for
the demands of this branch of art are not, in his
case, confined to a more or less simply-painted coun-
terfeit presentment nor to that penetration into
character which leads to psychological portraiture.
For him, a portrait, even as a still-life piece or a
landscape, is a piece of temperamental art, a problem
in colour, so much so that he is unable to start
upon his portrait, has no inclination to do so, be-
fore all the conditions of tonality in the face of his
model and in the environment selected by him are
such that they respond in a measure to the painter's
own sense of colour.

Marius van der Maarel was bom in 1857 at the
Hague and began by attending the Hague Academy.
Afterwards, he became a pupil of Willem Maris.
Thanks to the distinction that marked his efforts, to
the taste and refinement of his art, he was, in his earlier
years, a leader of many. Bauer, in his richly-painted
pieces of fashionable life, Verster and several others
underwent the influence of this painter who had
been fully formed at an early age. The superior
colour-arrangements of Anna Adelaida Abrahams
(bom in 1849), the still-life painter, may be regarded
as belonging to his school, while, as a direct pupil

i64 The Younger Masters

of his later period, we can reckon Frederik Salberg
(bom in 1876), who, up to the present, follows his
master's ideas in figures and flowers.

Floris Henric Verster, bom at Leiden in 1861,
is rather difficult to understand. No sooner do we
think that we have caught the intention of this pure
artist than he changes his formula; and, when we
penetrate this, he comes up with a work so directly
opposed to the last that we are constrained forth-
with to change our second conception for a third.
Vermeer of Delft was called the sphinx of our
seventeenth-century painting. I do not wish to sug-
gest a direct analogy ; but it must be admitted that
Horis Verster is our latter-day sphinx, who, refusing
to allow his riddles to be solved, poses a new riddle
with each new picture.

In 1887, he produces a work representing two
plucked fowls on a newspaper, painted in cool,
firm tones of an original order, yet closely related
to De Zwart and Jacob Maris: a master-piece, this
drawing. Next, with mellower pigments and in
deeper tones, he paints hollyhocks, with something
of the passionate enthusiasm of Breitner. Then he
changes his colour-scheme for more cruel tones in red
and purple anemonenes, in pale-violet chrysanthemums,
blood-red tulips, deep red and yellow roses and
amaranth phlox, colours that suggest passages of
Berlioz' Faust Again, after turning over so many
new leaves, he produces his gourds, his eucalyptus,
his flowering branch in a Japanese vase, executed in
childish detail with a wax-pencil: powerful, this, but
suggestive of a woman picking out a flower on

FLOWERS — F. H. VERSTER
{The property of Messrs. E. J. van Wisselingh & Co., Amsterdam)

of the Hague School 165

a tapestry; beautiful, but so coldly beautiful. Then,
suddenly deserting his spontaneous landscapes, he
builds you up his houses and streets and churches
carefully, brick by brick. What next? Yet all these
different phases are the work of one man, spring
from the temperament and the sense of colour of
one artist, intelligent always, a fine and true painter
in his first, a turbulent painter in his second period
and, in all, a distinguished master of the technical
side of his art, who has undoubtedly not yet shown
us his last formula and is keeping many exquisite
surprises in reserve for us.

Menso Kamerlingh Onnes, born in i860, is first
and foremost a flower-painter, though he has also
painted portraits. He, in his turn, has enlarged the
technique of water-colour. Herein lies his strength.
He is like a conjuror with his water-colours, with
his solutions of colour, his fluent colours, in which
he is able to produce his flowers with diaphanous
delicacy. None of our artists is able to juggle with
technique in the way that he does. And, although
technique is far from being everything and his work
often springs rather from a sort of cleverness than
from an endeavour to represent what he sees or feels,
yet he has given us, for instance, a drawing of quinces
on a white plate, in a simple arrangement of yellow-
green, white and a touch of black, that has seldom
been surpassed as a pure reproduction in water-
colour.

Man Alexander Jacques Bauer was born at the
Hague in 1864. He was a pupil of the Hague

i66 The Younger Masters

Academy, but received his real training at the hands
of Jozef Israels' friend Salomon van Witsen (born in
1833), a painter who produced but little and whose
knowledge and impartial judgment rank higher than
his painting. From his earliest days at Pulchri Studio,
Bauer seems to have held the " muddy ditch * style in
abhorrence; for what we know of him consists of
glimpses of a music-hall, or an elegantly painted
piece taken from a suburban restaurant. He was
much talked about, but worked little. When, on
his return from his first visit to Constantinople in
1888, he brought back with him a view of a town
in chalks and water-colours, this was considered
really inadequate for one of whom so much had
been heard. True, the foreground had something
of the dry treatment of his rare Pulchri- Studio sket-
ches ; but, at the same time, the composition of the
many-cupolaed city, seen in the distance against a
yellow sky, was full of suggestion, both as regards
form and, especially, in the matter of the conception,
which caused an oriental city to spring up on the
horizon in all the haziness of a Dutch town.

Bauer, who had litde in common with the Hague
painters, sought to find a common standard abroad;
and, despite the great difference, despite the eastern
subjects amid which Bauer, the Hague man, prefers
to move, despite the fact that he is more of a
glorious imaginer than a mighty painter, we can
look upon him as springing from the Hague school.
For not only does he display Rembrandt's manner
in his etchings, not only is the influence of Bos-
boom's drawings very evident in his work, but he
has " seen " and reproduced the East after the man-

< ^

I ^

of the Hague School 167

ner of a painter of the Hague school, of one who
has grown up under its masters.

Certainly, no one can expect of an occidental that
he should see the East with the fatalistic impas-
siveness reflected in the art of that region. Nor
can one expect that every one who visits the East
should contemplate it with the same eyes. In how
many different ways has not our simple, methodical
Holland been viewed by foreigners? I have heard
of travellers who have disliked Egypt because the
Sahara does not differ greatly in appearance from
our dunes, while the dust provides an equivalent
for the atmosphere of our country; whereas others
will never cease dilating upon the glaring white of
the sunlight on white walls, upon the light blue
shadows under the motionless blue of the sky, a
view which shows that not every one shares Bauer*s
acceptance of the East. It is true that to many
northern natures the East is often a sentiment rather
than a fact, a longing for mother earth, a craving
for miracles, for the land of the Bible, a dream of
Paradise. And, if we are convinced that all art
proceeds rather from self-recognition, then it follows
that intuitive natures are able to feel and see the
East, without ever having been there. Delacroix
for many years produced his scenes of the East,
full of the colours which we associate with that
world, from studies of the local colour brought
home to him by a friend. And, while it is true that
the dream is often fairer than the reality, yet
there must also be artists, impressionable natures,
who, going to the East full of expectations, but
free from prejudices, have gazed upon the land

1 68 The Younger Masters

with admiring eyes and returned overflowing with
impressions.

I would include Bauer among the latter. It was
about 1889 that he produced a swarm of etchings,
studies, impressions, drawings, little paintings, a
medley of bright green, hard pink, Indian yellow
and Persian blue; scrawls of colour from which
emerges a street, a troop of cavalry, a procession;
or else an undecipherable harmony of grey-white,
blue-white, rose-white, brilliant colours in subdued
tones, whence arises Stamboul with its bright cupolas,
like a flock of sheep rounding themselves against a
pale copper sky; or, again, the caravans, biblical in
their primeval surroundings, marching or halting,
camels, riders, loads : one of them stands silhouetted
against a town merged in twilight.

In later years, he saw Egypt: his realistic Sphinx
dates from this time ; it is faithfully drawn, spaciously
observed. In 1896, he travelled through British
India, delighting in the monumental character of the
country, in the symbolism of the buildings, of the cities
reflected in the Ganges. Bauer is said to have
always dreamt of illustrating the Arabian Nights in
their entirety. He could not do so in a livelier,
more real, more fantastic way than he has already
done in the colours which he makes us feel in his
etchings.

THE KREMLIN — M. A. J. BAUER
{The pi opcrty of Messrs. E. J. van Wisselingh & Co., Amsterdam)

CHAPTER XI.

THE REACTION OF THE YOUNGER
PAINTERS OF AMSTERDAM

A crisis came.

There were many who did not see it. Many-
refused to see it. Others, who did, almost refused
to believe — so great was their instinctive hatred
of the new that were to supplant the old ideals ; and
yet they were bound to accept it, because this
new form of artistic utterance forced itself upon us
with an undeniable cleverness, with strength and
conviction, with an overwhelming importance. The
formula adopted by the new men was not intimate,
was not " pretty, " did not captivate the eye, rarely
betrayed a mood of some sort. What they sought
for was a more decorative composition; what they
wanted was a more concrete form ; what they longed
for and found was line, outline, a reaction that must
necessarily follow upon a form of art that dissolved
its lines in atmosphere, subjected colour to the
influence of light and regarded a line merely as the
division between two pieces of colour. It was the
reaction by virtue of which an art of outlines was

ijo The Amsterdam Reaction

as inevitably bound to succeed an art of mere
brushwork as the conventional music of Beethoven
was succeeded by Wagner's more outspoken phrases.

And so it came about that a race of painters
arose between 1885 and 1890, formed at the Am-
sterdam Academy under the guidance of the con-
scientious Alleb6, who impressed a whole gene-
ration of younger men with the stamp of his culture.
The men of this race or generation soon showed
that they were determined to seek a road for them-
selves, each according to his own nature, rather than
follow feebly in the footsteps of the Hague masters
whom they all so greatly admired. Most of them
were figure-painters, either from personal inclination
or because of their training.

The reaction of these painters, known as the
reaction of 1880, moves within a period of ten years.
Their names are Van Looy, Van der Valk, Voerman,
Haverman, Derkinderen, Toorop, Witsen, Karsen
and Veth. If we wish to sum up the endeavours
of these artists in a formula, it may be expressed
as a mistrust of any sort of impressionism, of any
passion or painter's enthusiasm, a mistrust sprung
from a reaction against the inane and feeble imita-
tors of the Hague school, against the impressionism
which Gerard Bilders went so far as to think that
he could see in the imitations of the Barbizon school,
and, consequently, as a conscious striving after form,
pronounced line and purity of colour.

Jan Pieter Veth was born at Dordrecht in 1864.
As a child, he used to draw historical subjects,
perhaps in consequence of the spirit prevailing in

F. LEBRET — J. P. VETH
(Municipal Museum, Dordrecht)

The Amsterdam Reaction i7»

his father's house, where Potgieter was much read ;
perhaps also through the influence of Ary Scheffer.
He went to the Amsterdam Academy in 1880 and
exhibited portraits of his sisters in 1884 and 1885.
These and his other painted portraits, including those
of Dr. de Vrij and of Mr. Lebret in the Dordrecht
Museum, are clever works and show power of colour
analysis. They belong to an early transition-period
which soon made room for portraits aiming more
exclusively at the reproduction of expression and
character and were often inlaid and paint-drawn
rather than painted in the strict sense of the word.
The same reasons that led to the great development
of his criticcil powers caused him also to adopt a
critical method of painting, that is to say, to portray
heads showing character, to seek for the causes
that bring lines and wrinkles into a face, to enter
into the minds of his sitters. It goes without saying
that his method was most successful when applied
to eminent men who had distinguished themselves
in any sphere of activity.

In 1892, the portraits of well-known contemporaries
published in the Amsterdamsch Weekblad attracted
general attention. They were lithographs by Veth,
the painter, who was just becoming known at the
Hague, but who had already made a definite name
for himself in Amsterdam through the personal note
of his portraits. One of this series, the little por-
trait of Jacob Maris sitting at his easel, was a reve-
lation not only as a likeness of the painter, whose
head, in full-face, reminds one of Jupiter, while,
viewed in profile, the round forehead and the peculiar
blue eyes show something at once refined and

172 The Amsterdam Reaction

childlike, but also on account of the manner in
which, after many years, photography had again been
beaten by drawing pure and simple. Not all were
executed in the same way: some were in outline,
others elaborately drawn, others again set down in the
old-Dutch fashion. Some were rather exaggerated
and looked a little forced when seen beside Alleb6*s
simple and complete little portraits. But still they
were so characteristic, they showed such perfect
grasp of the nature of the model (as in the por-
traits of Louis Couperus and of Dr. Frederik van
Eeden) and they were so much admired by the Hague
men that, later on, they often detracted from the appre-
ciation that would otherwise have been evoked by
his painted portraits. It is a remarkable ting that
this painter, who so greatly admires Jozef Israels,
the brothers Maris, Bosboom and Mauve, should
have deliberately turned aside from any of the magni-
ficence or display which they showed in their work.
He was like an ascetic, who knows how to value
the pleasures of life and yet rejects them.

These psychological portraits, in which character-
analysis is so clearly visible, must, necessarily, often
be more attractive to the philosophical spectator
than to the sheer painter, who, moreover, frequently
considers that portraiture does not come within the
scope of pure art. Nevertheless, Veth has proved
himself a master in this series of portraits, not only
by his search for the intellectual qualities of the
sitter, but by his systematic construction of the por-
traits, in which good modelling of the head, minute
and careful drawing, expression and will-power are
evident. We must needs make our choice and it

PROFESSOR A. D. LOMAN — J, P. VETH

{In the possession of the Artist at Bussuni)

^- OF THE

iJNIVEf^SITY

^■^ °'' r

The Amsterdam Reaction 173

is difficult in our day to reconcile one of these
complete representations of character with a portrait
painted with a free brush. At the same time, we
must remember that Veth is still young and it is
quite possible that he may wish to acquire in his
painted work something of that quality which he so
greatly admires in the masters of the Hague school.

One of Veth's pupils is Miss Johanna Cornelia
Hermana (Nelly) Bodenheim, who was born in Am-
sterdam in 1874. She made her first appearance
in 1896, in the Kroniek, with a coloured lithograph,
a sort of illustration to a well-known folk-song, in
which she recalled the middle-ages in fresh and
simple colours, without pomp or display, but with
the same candour as the song itself; and I can only
hope that she will not forsake this style altogether
in favour of her clever and amusing illustrations to
our national nursery-rhymes.

Miss Walburga Wilhelmina (Wally) Moes, born in
Amsterdam in 1856, the painter of Laren interiors,
although a pupil of Alleb6 and Richard Burnier,
deliberately chose Veth as her leader, both in the
modelling of the features as in general style, with
the result that the expression of her women and
mothers often acquires something very sensitive.
Dutchwoman though she be, her talent often leans
towards the German, inasmuch as her work is painted
for the sake of the expression of the subject rather
than for the sake of the general effect or of the
colour.

In this respect, she resembles Louise Eugenie
Steffens (i 841-1865), a Catholic painter who died

174 The Amsterdam Reaction

very young, not, however, before producing a few
excellent pictures, convent-scenes or ^^^^r^-pieces, all
more or less German in sentiment.

Hendrik Johan Haverman was bom in Amsterdam
in 1857. He entered the Academy in that city in
1878 and, two years later, began to attend the
Antwerp Academy under Verlat. Afterwards, he
worked for a time in Brussels, where he admired
Henri de Brakeleer and Stevens and was impressed
by the powerful tradition of Jordaens, and then, not
feeling certain of his own strength, returned to Am-
sterdam, to work under Alleb6, from whom he received
private lessons at the Academy. He painted mainly
from the nude; and, although as early as 1880 he
had sent a town-scene for exhibition from Antwerp, he
made his first real start with figure-painting. To judge
by The Flighty which he presented to the collection of
modern pictures in the Amsterdam Municipal Museum,
his style at that time was dry and his draughts-
manship correct rather than lifelike; yet this was
a good foundation, upon which he worked at a
much later date and more nearly approached the
reality and beauty of the nude. He had learned a
great deal at the different art-schools; but, like
nearly all who have passed through a complete
academic training, he had to drudge long before he
was able to achieve anything of importance and
before he discovered the formula which was to reveal
him to himself.

He returned from a trip to Spain, Tangiers and
Algiers, in 1890, with a number of studies and
small paintings, remarkable for striking realism, well-

J. H. KRELAGE — H. J. HAVERMAN
(The property of Mr. E. H. Krclage, Rotterdam)

^ OF THE ^r^

UNIVERSITY

THE KNITTING LESSt)N — H. J. HAVERMAN

{The property of Mi. W. Nijhoff, the Hague)

The Amsterdam Reaction 175

painted and broadly-conceived. In 1892, he made
in wash, on a small scale, a full-length portrait-study
of an uncommonly fat female figure, which he exhibited
at Arti in 1893. The happy thought of reproducing
the stoutness of this large sitter, who is wearing
a tea-gown, of expressing the exact truth and yet
producing an harmonious whole by means of careful
colouring attracted the attention of the younger men.
It is this frankness, this representation of a person
not as what he should be, but as what he is, as
himself, as what even his friends do not know him
to be, it is this revelation of personality which
distinguishes Haverman even as, in another sense,
it makes Veth remarkable.

Other important portraits followed — Dr. van Delden,
Dr. Birnie, Richard Bisschop, the artist's wife — until,
in 1897, Haverman began to draw portraits of
" celebrities of the day " for the then newly-started
(and now no longer existing) monthly, Woord en Beeld.
And, although wood-cuts rarely do justice to an
artist — and it is to this day to be regretted that
he did not himself prepare the lithographs for the
press — still it is the original drawings for these
reproductions that have made him a permanent
name.

If I were to compare the two most successful
portrait-painters of late days, Haverman and Veth,
I should say that, in the drawn portrait, Haverman's
powers are more virile, the focussing of the features
on the whole more sure and the likeness often sharper,
whereas Veth, who searches rather for the mind of
his sitter, draws out not so much his strength as
his gentieness and goodness. That there are ex-

176 The Amsterdam Reaction

ceptions goes without saying: Veth's portrait ot
Dr. Kuyper, the late premier, and Haverman's
Portrait of Mrs. S. are cases in point.

Antoon Derkinderen was born at 's-Hertogenbosch
in 1859 and grew up under the majestic shadow of
its cathedral, where both he and his father sang in
the choir. It was, therefore, by no accident that he
was the first in our country to dream of monumental
art, the first to achieve success in it. Moreover,
his father was a goldsmith ; and in his father's
workshop he admired the monstrances and ciboria
which were sent there for repair. He was brought
up at the State training-school for school-teachers
at the Bosch, where instruction was given in the
arts of music and drawing, and he afterwards con-
tinued to receive drawing- lessons from J. P. Strack^,
the sculptor, who was the director of the Royal
School of Arts and Crafts in the Brabant capital.
In 1880, he entered the Amsterdam Academy.

Imbued with the Catholic spirit, he went to
Brussels in 1882 to work in the Royal Academy
under Portaels. While there, he received his first
commission, to paint a religious and commemorative
fresco for the church of the Amsterdam B6guignage :
The Procession of the Miraculotcs Blessed Sacrament
as held in Amsterdam up to the sixteenth century.
Never was ecclesiastical painting executed in a more
pious and joyful mood, more pervaded with the
spirit of the Te Deum^ as personified in this procession
bearing the Blessed Sacrament along the shore of
the IJ, with the shipping of the commercial capital
for its background.

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The Amsterdam Reaction 177

Nevertheless, the painting was not approved of
and was indeed refused by the church. If Der-
kinderen had remained within the circle in which
he spent his childhood and his first youth, if he had
never known and admired the pictures of Puvis de
Chavannes, if, above all, he had retained his early
admiration of the services of the Catholic Church, his
ideas would have been conceived in the spirit rather
than according to the letter of Puvis de Chavannes
and he would have understood that the works of Puvis,
with his conception of colour, would have been as
much out of place in a Roman Catholic church as a
Fra Angelico in a Pantheon. Even though the church
in the B6guignage were whitewashed in the style
of the Reformation, a picture of this description has
to serve for devotional purposes: its colours must
harmonize with the stained glass and the brilliant
vestments; it must keep its form and colour in the
twilight of the columns and in the pale candle-light.
And then too the young painter might gradually
have developed into an artist who would have helped
to raise the Catholic Church out of the slough of
chromo-lithography into which she had sunk. This
pale-golden painting, as it now stands, owes its origin
almost entirely to a Germanic feeling and gives an
exquisite representation of the religious life of the
time, as seen through modern eyes that are them-
selves yearning to believe.

The paintings at the Bosch, which rank at the
present moment as Derkinderen's finest works, owe
their origin not so much to the wishes of his fellow-
townsmen as to the initiative of a few amateurs.
The dignity and distinction with which the artist,

12

178 The Amsterdam Reaction

following the old chronicles, has, on the first wall,
depicted the founding of the city in pure architectural
forms make this work the master-piece of a transition-
period, a master-piece in which the great lines of
history are imbued with the spirit of the building
of the city until they form an harmonious and truly
monumental whole. The second painting, representing
the construction of the interior of the cathedral, has
more logical quality if regarded as a fresco, inasmuch
as the whole design is on one plane. Yet it cannot
be denied that the somewhat Byzantine character of
the subject robs this work of that pious simplicity
which makes the two earlier paintings so attractive.

Among the different forces and ideals of this age,
Jacobus van Looy occupies a place apart. Bom
at Haarlem in 1855, he is a true artist, whose
pictures, in spite of their strong brushwork, have
nothing in common with those of Breitner or Isaac
Israels. Van Looy first made his name as a writer
of stately prose, in which he describes external things
in such a way that they stand out, as it were,
in the full glare of everyday life, a prose which
becomes purely plastic in the hands of this painter
in words, even as it is purely lyrical in those of
Lodewijk van Deyssel. Those who know his prose
know the subjects of his pictures. Both are the
outcome of his impressions and are as closely related
as are Rossetti's pictures to his sonnets.

He was one of the first in our country to make
a study of the daily life of the streets. Take, for
exemple, his Peepskow; or a barrel-organ, in a back
slum, with a group of fat Jewesses and street-girls

PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF — J. VAN LOOY

(The property of Mrs. van Looy-van Geldcr, Soest)

is

i «

p'

The Amsterdam Reaction 179

dancing to its strains, amid effects of light that
remind the spectator of The Night Watch. His
colouring is often unreal and betrays a search after
colour in the studio; but the action is taken from
everyday life and seen with the eyes of an artist.

He was brought up for a carriage-painter, studied
under Poorter and Alleb6 at the Academy and was
subject to no other influences. His greatness is
due to the power of his painting, but as an artist
in words he is greater still: the prose of his Spain
has perhaps never been surpassed in our literature.
Who shall fathom the complex nature of this positive
and strenuous painter-author?

Jan Voerman, born at Kampen in 1857, is, after
Van Looy, the oldest of this younger generation.
His first work, produced and exhibited in 1882,
was a genre-painting of Jews, painted in the heavy
manner of the Amsterdam school, a cleverly executed
study. But his native preference was for landscape
and nature: in 1883, he began to paint impres-
sionist town-scenes and flowers; in 1889, he settled
at Hattem and produced those pure water-colours
of violets or azaleas in coloured ginger-jars, exqui-
sitely drawn, full and dainty in form, which were
to be seen at the exhibitions of the Sketching Club
and of which an example now hangs in the Mes-
dag collection. Voerman was an impressionist and
nothing more in those days, although he was already
beginning to feel that he would need a different
formula to express his own nature. By degrees he
grew to understand that the work of the Dutch
painters was not pure enough in colour; and he

i8o The Amsterdam Reaction

was struck with this fact more especially by ob-
serving the contrast between the works of Maris and
Toorop and those of all the other artists at an ex-
hibition held at Arti in 1891 or 1892. He had
not visited an exhibition for years. It now became
evident to him that he must alter his methods ; and
from that day he began to paint everything with
pure colours and to mix as little as possible.

This simplicity, which the works of Maris and
Toorop made manifest to him, expressed itself in his
productions in a very different way. His Irises^
shown at the Utrecht Exhibition of 1892, revealed
a purity of colour, a beauty of form which, for
the first time, perhaps, rendered the firmness of
the petals with justice and already exceeded the
efforts of a Jaap Maris. And afterwards, both in
the exquisite lines and colouring of his La France
roses in a crystal bowl and in his later landscapes,
all painted in a kind of wash-coulour, his style (perhaps
against his own will) approached Toorop's more
nearly than that of Jacob Maris, to which, in point
of fact, Voerman's method but rarely showed any
resemblance.

Eduard Karsen, born in Amsterdam in i860,
should no more than Voerman be said to belong
to the Hague school. If he did, it could be objected
that his treatment of his pigments is not supple,
his manner uninspiring, his view of things narrow,
that his colour would be more properly described
as negative, that his work is lifeless, while the melan-
choly which it breathes is not such as music can
give us; and yet, despite all this, there are few

Painter of Amsterdam i8i

who, like Karsen, understand the charm of still-life,
few who so well know how to reproduce the dark
side of nature, that contracted side which tends so
greatly to sadden sensitive characters. This is the
spirit in which he renders those silent North- Holland
farmhouses, lying in their heavy masses on the wide
fields, or those small low houses by the side of the
canals, lonely and still, mirrored in the water as
though waiting for the coming of the night.

To the names of these artists must be added that
of Pieter Meiners, who was born at Oosterbeek in
1854 and died in 1903. He had an impressionable
talent, though he made no great name for himself
and left but few works behind him. He was a pupil
of his father (himself a comparatively unknown
painter) and also of the Amsterdam Academy, which
he left with a pronounced feeling for form, softened
by the supple touch of the Hague Masters. He
produced carefully-observed pictures of still-life, no-
table for their silky tone, their inoffensive composi-
tion, their light shadow, their striking technique.
His work was peculiarly placid and seemed never
to have cost its author an effort. His talent was
not great, but he had the good taste to make no
endeavour to force it in any way.

In 1885, the younger men founded the Nether-
lands Etching Club, with Jan Veth for their presi-
dent. This promotion of the arts of drawing, etching,
lithography, of black-and-white work generally, to an
honourable position was to the later generation all
that the Sketching Qub of twenty years before had

1 82 The Amsterdam Reaction

been to the Hague men. The result was that the
etchings of the Hague masters, of Israels, Jacob and
Matthijs Maris, Mauve, now saw the light of day;
that the crayon-sketches of these masters were rescued
from studio corners; and that, above all, graphic
art once more began to enjoy the consideration of
the art-loving public.

True, we had two professional etchers, one of
whom, Jonkheer Carel Nicolaas Storm van 's-Gra-
vesande, born at Breda in 1 84 1 , a pupil of Roelofs
and of F^licien Rops, had, long before this club
came into existence, made himself a name at home
and abroad by a set of distinguished etchings, nearly
all of them of Dutch river-scenes. The other was
Philippe Zilcken, born at the Hague in 1857, a pupil
of Mauve and, like Jonkheer Storm, a painter, but,
first of all, an etcher. His etchings after Thijs
Maris' A Baptism in the Black Forest and Alfred
Stevens' La Bete au Bon Dieu are triumphs in their
way. His original etchings include a number of
well-known profiles in dry-point.

When the Etching Club was founded, Willem
Witsen, born in i860, at once established his repu-
tation as a great etcher by his series of open-air
figures in the manner of Millet or Mauve. And,
in spite of his water-colours and oil-paintings — his
London bridges, his Millet figures standing out
distinctly marked against the evening sky, his cha-
racteristic old Amsterdam houses — Witsen, like Bauer,
is an etcher first and foremost and builds up his
paintings and especially his water-colour drawings from
subjects seen with an etcher's eye, with the same

The Amsterdam Reaction 183

firm hand, the same preference for the massy, the
same distaste for detail, the same powerful line and
the same pure sense of values. Nevertheless, his
pictures lack the compactness, the charming effects
of light and shade which he succeeded in giving to
his monumental London etchings produced between
1888 and 1 89 1.

Witsen also lapses occasionally, as a painter, into
the style in which the last word has been spoken
by Breitner and this is not the style in which one
would prefer to see him work; but I am inclined
to think that this will prove to belong to a tran-
sition-period, for a man who has been able to produce
such master- pieces as the London etchings and water-
colours must needs have at his beck both ideas and
powers which he will set forth for our admiration in
his own good time.

CHAPTER XII.
THE NEW FORMULA

Johannes Theodoor (commonly known as Jan)
Toorop as bom in i860 at Poerweredjo in Java
and was the first to bring from France to Holland,
via Brussels, the so-called Neo-impressionism of the
" Vingtistes. " Although in Amsterdam he belonged to
the generation described in the preceding chapter,
he received his real education amid the great move-
ment of the young Belgians and may be said
to have introduced a new phase into Dutch art.
In 1889, he arranged, at the Amsterdam panorama
an exhibition of the XX, in which he showed his
Broek in Waterhnd and his Twylight Idyll, two
pieces painted in broken colour under the Vingtiste
influence. The exhibition contained much that was
interesting and much that was beautiful, but failed
to make any general impression.

Whatever Toorop may have produced before this
exhibition — and he had already made himself known
by some drawings of London poverty of astonishing
realism — it is certain that his work now struck
out an absolutely new line and presented a new

ELSJE — J. TH. TOOROP
(The property of Mr. B. Ltikwcl, Jr., Rotterdam)

o ^
p ^

The New Formula 185

aspect of Dutch meadows, of the North-Sea coast
and of the motives to be found in the Hves of the
fisher-folk. This was brought out in his Broek in
Water land, a picture in which the sober lines of a
North-Holland pastureland were approached for the
first time, intersected with rectilinear ditches, broken
only by a few stumpy pollard-willows. It is a view
entirely without artificial embellishment, without any
search for the harmonious in those fields, where the
setting sun filled the ditches with orange light,
clashing crudely with the dark green of the meadows
and the pale sky. There was no question here of
beauty or ugliness : it was the brutal reality, power-
fully grasped and strongly expressed.

This picture owed its origin to a trip to North
Holland taken while Toorop was living in Brussels
with the Belgian poet 6mile Verhaeren. It was
only when seen in this way, as it were with a foreign
eye, that the sheer plainness of these meadows and
ditches could have been observed and rendered in
so ruthless and literal a fashion.

The Wave, the most important work of the first
portion of Toorop's residence at Katwijk, is a won-
derfully clever and elaborate analysis of the sea,
a very feast of movement and colour, a mosaic of
variegated tints, with the blue of the sky reflected
in the bottle-green wave, the yellow of the fishermen's
oilskins, the endless facets of the rippling waters.
This work, although not painted in broken colour,
already shows a tendency towards a more decorative
style of composition.

A third important picture was Melancholy, repre-
sented by the figure of a woman of Katwijk-Binnen

1 86 The New Formula

leaning against the doorpost of her house, with
quiet eyes set in a pale oval, a slender little figure
and narrow sleeves, appearing medisevally small
against the breadth of the endless extent of her petti-
coats. She stares into the twilight ; round her is the
little garden with sunflowers and low railings, which
look strange in the failing light. The predominant tone
of the picture is the dark blue of her apron. To
my mind, this Melancholy, so distinguished in its
conception, so suggestive in its mood, is Toorop*s
most interesting work in this direction. Later, his
ideas became much more intrcate and metaphysical ;
but in no other work have idea and form,or rather
mood and form been more perfectly blended and
the result charms at the same time both the eye
and the mind.

Thanks to an unusually complex ancestry, Toorop
inherited the characteristics of the native East-Indian,
the Norseman and the Hollander. Richard Muther,
after describing the curious impression which Toorop*s
work made upon the Viennese public, goes on to
prophesy that at some future time he will be known
as the Giotto of his day. I do not greatly care
to anticipate the verdict of posterity and prefer to
say that Giotto, the shepherd, who evolved his first
vision of life with charcoal on the walls of the
sheepcote, transferred the art of painting from the
hierarchical forms of the Byzantines to the living
being, whereas Toorop, in depicting nature, makes
his human beings the exponents of his ideas. But
what Toorop has indeed succeeded in expressing,
at an earlier period and to a greater extent than
our literature — and this, no doubt, is what Dr. Muther

The New Formula 187

meant by his comparison — is the scepticism of our
time, the decline of established religious belief, the
search after new dogmas.

His mystic symbolism is popular in the best sense
of the word. In his Three Brides^ he represents the
three aspects of womanhood, personifies the senses
of sound and smell : the characteristics of the three
women clash against one another in round and
angular lines; sound is indicated by threads in a
linear design resembling that of a great orchestra,
richly and magnificently filled. Now sound had
already been personified by Blake; and good and
evil in Gothic art and even earlier. But the
difference in Toorop lies in the obvious strength
of his technique, a rare gift, which enables him
almost to represent, set down and fix the abstract,
daintily and delicately in his portraits of children,
powerfully and nervously in his symbolic and robustly
in his realistic works.

The work of Vincent van Gogh fell like a meteor
into the plains of our national art in the winter of
1892, two years after the painter's death. A meteor
in very truth! Here was no question of gradual,
technical, artistic development, that had been followed
out year by year. That which first greeted our eyes
was the most passionate, desperate and impulsive
work, the technical part of which, cis it then appeared,
before time had matured it, seemed beyond the
power of the painter's art. It was the evidence of
the artist's struggle with his medium, of his struggle
with nature; it was the act of despair of a fanatic;
it was the revelation of a visionary.

1 88 The New Formula

It was no easy matter for work like that of
Van Gogh to find acceptance in an artistic environ-
ment such as ours» based upon a culture which
we owe to the seventeenth century. The pictures
selected for exhibition out of the plenitude which he
had left behind him, unframed for the most part,
unbridled utterances of artistic passion, swept over the
white peace of our artistic effort like a seething lava,
bubbhng up from depths which only a few were
able to understand or to admire.

Van Gogh's work represents not so much a creed
as a man-to-man struggle; his colour is not the
result of a well thought-out scheme, but is an effort
rather to grasp the light, to hold it fast, to suggest
colour in light without the use of brown or bitumen.
And, as it was his chief object to render life, to express
what he saw rather than to produce an harmonious
painting, he strove to fling his impressions, as it
were, upon his canvas in one breath; for, as he
wrote, ^'faire et refaire un sujet sur la meme toile
ou sur plusieurs toiles revient en somme au mime
serieux. " And his painting and drawing alike revealed
the same minghng of conscious and imconscious
knowledge.

Van Gogh was a born fanatic, a reformer and
prophet preaching in the streets of London, an
idealist travelHng to the mines in the Borinage to
carry to the slaves of the mine the gospel which
Jesus once carried to the poor fishermen of the Sea
of Galilee, a man in the full sense of the word,
endowed with the temperament of a fanatic, in whom
the balance is never at rest, a prophet by virtue of
his belief in his own powers, a prophet also in the

OF THE ^K

UNIVERSITY

OF ^

The New Formula 189

artistic sense through his belief in life and colour,
a zealot in so far as he endeavoured to propagate
the theories of the " Luministes " with all the force that
fanaticism lends; but he had not the nature which
can long endure a doubt as to its powers. And,
notwithstanding the many moments of happiness
which he owed to his art, despite the fact that the
inspired hours in his short life as a painter were
almost uninterrupted and leaving his more rustic
Dutch period out of the question, he does in a
way suggest the painter in the Japanese cartoon, who
lies felled to the ground by his own work. His
imaginative drawings and landscapes were the night-
mares of a man who was bound to perish in the
greatness of his own longings ; they were nightmares
of light and colour, flooded with the full glare of
glistening sunlight, glittering with transparent greens,
with sulphurous yellows, with startling violets ; sultry
atmospheric effects, more alarming at times than
the visions of an Odilon Redon.

Many roads lead to Rome, Art is not bound
to a few stated formulas; and the only question is
whether Van Gogh, in a given subject, has expressed
what he desired. This no one will deny. And,
whether we see him move amid more attractive
surroundings, such as summery parks, avenues of
chestnut-trees in bloom, where the sun casts motley
patches upon the ground and upon children at play,
or the olive-groves of the South, " where the sun
burns into the^ ground like sulphur ; " whether
he paints those glowing portraits or those works
which we call the illustrations for Zola's novels: this
much is certain that, in every case, he largely

I90 The New Formula

enriches our sphere of thought and our perceptive
faculties.

And his flower-studies too ! Who, in our country,
has ever painted flowers as he did, so true to nature,
so real, so actually lifelike?

" Vincent's flowers look like people, " said Pissarro.

And Emile Bernard said:

" Vincent's flowers look like princesses. "

To us they are real flowers in their distinction,
their form, their bloom, their colour, simple and
broad, just as they blossom in a Whitsim meadow
before a child's delighted eyes.

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 at Groot
Zundert, in North Brabant. He Wcis the son of a
clergymzm and was brought up to be a dealer in
works of art, in which trade his uncle Vincent was
of such great assistance to the younger Dutchmen,
first at the Hague and afterwards in the firm of
Goupil in Paris. His brother too, Theodoor van
Gogh, who was also at Goupil's, afterwards helped
the artists of Vincent's movement to the best of his
power. After Vincent had worked for some time
at Goupil's at the Hague, in London and Paris, he
grew dissatisfied and left the business, in 1876, in
order to go to London as a teacher. He returned to
Holland, worked for a short time for a bookseller
at Dordrecht and then went to Amsterdam to
prepare for his theological studies. Here again he
found the road too long: he threw up the univer-
sity and went to Brussels and, thence, to the Borinage,
to become a gospel-preacher among the miners.
This environment influenced him more than any
other: at any rate, it made him take to drawing.

k-.f^':y

THE CYPRESSES — V. VAN GOGH
{The property of Mr. J. Cohen Gosschalk, Bussiini)

The New Formula 191

It is true that, in a letter from London, he had
sent home a couple of rather childish, yet well-
observed little drawings, but these could hardly give
an inkling of his talent and, moreover, they stood
cdone, for, as a child, Vincent, although scribbling
and even modelling, Hke most children, had shown no
particular inclination for drawing and his relations
were not aware that, before his visit to London,
he had ever produced anything worth mentioning.
This is also apparent from the excitement displayed
by Theo, who, delighted at hearing that Vincent
was sketching in the Borinage, exclaimed:

" Now you shall see something ! Vincent has taken
to drawing: that means a second Rembrandt!"

No sooner had he begun to draw than he sud-
denly left for Brussels, where he worked zealously
at draughtsmanship. But he did not stay long, for,
in 1 88 1, he returned to his father's house at Etten
and, towards the end of that year, went to the
Hague, where he received occasional advice from
Mauve. He worked at the Hague until the summer
of 1883 and, after a stay in Drente, went back to
his parents, who were now living at Nuenen. In
1885, he went to Antwerp, spent a few months at
the academy and, in the spring of 1886, arrived in
Paris, where he was strongly influenced by the
movement of Monet, Pissarro and Gauguin and himself
exercised an influence upon that movement. He
next left for the South, went to Aries, later to San
R6my and, lastly, to Anvers-sur-Oise, where he died
in the summer of 1890.

After his death, his friend 6mile Bernard published,
in the Mercure de France, a number of letters ad-

192 The New Formula

dressed to him by Vincent and, later, some fragments
of letters to his brother Theo van Gogh, which were
supplied by the latter's widow. These letters, con-
tinued in a Flemish monthly. Van Nu en Straks —
although we know only fragments in which he
writes of his work and art (how long must we wait
before the letters are published in full?) — give us
an insight into Theo's devotion for his brother,
which made him hold the trade of a dealer in works
of art as sacred as a religious belief and made him
suffer perhaps even more than Vincent himself at
the delay in the acknowledgment of the new artistic
formula. And they reveal all Vincent's theories and
ideals, his goodness, his moods, variable as the
mercury in a thermometer, his personality as a man
and an artist, young, gay, unsuspecting, indefatigable :
untiring, too, in spite of his lack of physical strength.
At early as 1882, he wrote:

"My hands have become rather too white for
my taste. People like myself have no right to be ill. "

Most of the letters date from the last period,
especially at Aries, the period of the longing to see
and grasp all things. They are letters in which,
between the cries of despair, gleam his indestructible
ideals, hesitations, confessions, shrill contrasts, woven
on the golden threads of his dreams, on the golden
threads of his love for his brother Theo. Full of this
admiring love, he writes that Theo is as great a
painter, as great an artist through his selling of
pictures, because, by each sale, he enables the artist
to produce more pictures:

The New Formula 193

" St un peintre se mine le caract^re en travail/ant
dur a la peinturey qui le rend sterile pour bien d'autres
choses (vie de famille etc.), si cons^quemment il peint
non seulement avec de la couleur, mais avec de I' ab-
negation et du renoncement de soi et le coeur brise^ ton
travail a toi non seulement ne t'est pas payd non plus^
mais te coute exactement comme a ce peintre I'effacement
de ta personalitdy moitie volontairementy moitie' for-
tuitement. Ceci pour te dire que, si tu fais de la pein-
ture indirectementy tu es plus productif que par ex-
emple, moi."

Or again — and what artist endeavouring to make
his own way has not a hundred times exclaimed the
same? — he cries:

" Si I' on peignait comme Bouguerau, alors on pour-
rait espdrer de gagnerf"

Great regret was felt among, his friends at his death :
"He felt everything, ce pauvre Vincent y he felt too
much, " said old Tanguy, the simple artists' colour-
man, the friend of all young painters and of Vincent
too, who was always ready to accept pictures or
studies instead of payment for his colours. And he
was right: Vincent van Gogh felt too intensely to
endure passively the greatness of nature, too deeply
to work without hurrying, without swerving and with
that composure which characterizes the majority of
Dutchmen. Judge Vincent's work as we may, one
thing is certain, that he, in whom perhaps more
than in any other of our painters bubbled the pas-
sionate life of the last end of the century, afforded

13

194 The New Formula

in his work the last great sensation which the art
of the nineteenth century was to present to the
Netherlands.

In 1 89 1, the Hague Art Club was founded, in
which Toorop and Vincent van Gogh were honoured
as masters. Their followers included Thorn Prikker,
born at the Hague in 1869, the painter who practised
symbolism for a short time and who exhibited his
dignified Heads of the Apostles at one of the club's
shows, but who subsequently devoted himself exclu-
sively to the applied arts.

Another exhibitor was Pieter Cornelis de Moor,
born at Rotterdam in 1 866, a pupil of Jan Striening,
of the Antwerp Academy and of Benjamin Constant,
whose Htde flower-decked Bride showed great promise
at the time. He afterwards followed the modem
French draughtsmen, to a certain extent, in his choice
of subjects, but continued his method of symbolic
treatment. He has often succeeded in showing what
symbolists exactly desire to express, as for example
in his Princesse de Lamballe.

Then there was Theodoor van Hoytema, born
at Rotterdam in 1870, the facile draughtsman of
ornithological subjects, which he introduced as illus-
trations in coloured picture-books with a great feeling
for design and effect and afterwards lithographed with
style and taste.

Paul Rink (i 862-1 903) exhibited here: he, like
Toorop, began by employing the colour-arrangement
of the Belgians and brought back a number of bright
and pretty studies and pictures from Tangiers,
painted in this manner; he afterwards executed the
mural decorations of the Hague Art Club, but made

The New Formula 195

his name more generally known by his coloured
sketches of Volendam types, often too fluently painted.
And I must also mention Edgard Willem Koning,
bom in 1869, who, with his Nurses and Children,
was the first to show that a mural painting can be
taken straight from life.

Simon Moulijn, bom at Rotterdam in 1866, is
one of those modern younger men who, like Thorn
Prikker and, in certain respect, Hoytema, arriving
early at a crisis, learn to think sooner than to paint,
one of those who are influenced by many move-
ments before they have acquired positive knowledge.
The first conscious influence was imparted by the
modem Frenchmen and especially by Toorop and
Vincent van Gogh. Moulijn too wished to play his
part in the new art which was to give so much that
was beautiful to the end of the century, but which,
at that time, as the painter himself admits, gave
rise to anomalous work. His first attempts at paint-
ing were attempts and nothing more; and, although
he is now busy mastering the difficulties of the craft,
he is of significance to us only as the lithographer,
the draughtsman of peaceful little spots of nature,
little hidden homesteads, which he represents in a
refined and contemplative mood.

I must not omit the name of Henri van Daalhoff,
born at Leiden in 1867, the painter of stories and
fairy-tales. He is a sensitive,but not a powerful artist
and is likely to make himself eventually a permanent
reputation as an illustrator.

196 The New Formula

In that branch of landscape-painting in which form
and Unes were sought after not so much for the
sake of mood or emotion as for their own sake,
in that search for purity which the increasing ad-
miration for it had aroused, I must first mention
Maurits Willem van der Valk, bom in Amsterdam
in 1857, the amiable theorist who, at an early date,
cherished the desire to make of a water-colour a
pure water-colour, of an etching an etching, light
and transparent, and nothing more. He learnt to
see the lines in a landscape at Anvers-sur-Oise ;
adapted his knowledge to Dutch scenery; and,
with something almost Japanese in his arrangement
of mass and line, now seeks colour in flat tones.

To his group belongs Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig, born
in Amsterdam in 1866, a pupil of Alleb6's, who
began by painting in the style of Neuhuijs. When he
saw the tulip-fields at Bennebroek in all their luminous
beauty of colour, he came to the conviction that
colour should be rendered more as colour and light
as light; and thus, as if of his own initiative, he
arrived at the discovery which the great Frenchmen
and Vincent and Toorop had made before him, a
discovery which is of scientific origin, namely the
juxtaposition of unmixed colours in small propor-
tions, without the intervening medium of brown or
ochre, so that light becomes lighter and both light
and shade more full of colour. Hart Nibbrig, who
is especially to be praised for the honesty with
which he sets down fields of grass and corn and
buckwheat under a blazing sun, lacks something
of the passion and enthusiasm necessary to make so

A WILLOW TREE — M. W. VAN DER VALK
[In the possession of the Artist at Scherpenzccl)

The New Formula 197

systematic a proceeding express all his feelings.
The result is that, clever and consistent as his work
may be, it does not wholly reach the spectator.

More harmonious is the work of Derk Wiggers,
bom at Amersfoort in 1866, the painter who, above
all, sought for purity of form in the more broken
and undulating Guelder landscape. His is an import-
ant and distinguished linear scheme, which he occas-
ionally exaggerates, perhaps, but by means of which
he succeeds in rendering a few divine moments of
nature. Such are The Little Church at Heelsum,
Bentheim Castle and other panoramic drawings, in
which the cool twilight sky hangs tense behind the
hilly landscape.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the
attention of many of these younger men was diverted
in the direction of the applied arts, which some of
them have enriched with exceedingly important works.
I will mention only Carel Lion Cachet, bom in 1864,
and Theodoor Nieuwenhuis, born in 1866, who do
not come within the scope of this book, and Gerrit
Willem Dijsselhoff, born at ZwoUerskappel in 1866,
who was the first in our country to achieve something
exceedingly beautiful on a basis of East-Indian art.
He is the only one who has produced decorative
water-colour drawings that were not epicene because,
in the colour — that of the sarongs of the native states
of Java — a shrill and spontaneous blue, and on a
ground of fine yellow, he has succeeded in introducing
in the most decorative fashion all manner of small
animals: silvery sticklebacks, drawn in a masterly

198 The New Formula

way, Mediterranean crayfish, with their curious forms,
or the motley sea-anemones, all worked up into
a decorative, self-contained and absolutely harmo-
nious whole.

In quite recent years, our young painters have
been once more attracted by Paris, especially by
that great draughtsman Steinlen, and also, though
in a lesser degree, by the modern English and
German illustrators. But these, the latest artists of
all, belong entirely to the present century and not
to that which forms the subject of this volume.

THE END

INDEX OF PAINTERS

Page

Abrahams, Anna Adelaide 163

Akkeringa, Johannes Evert 162

AUebe, Auguste 79

Abna Tadema, Sir Lawrence, O. M., R. A 129

Apol, Lodewijk Frederik Hendrik (Louis) 144

Artz, David Adolphe Constant 135

Bakker Korff, Alexander Hugo 75

Barbiers Pz., Pieter 56

Bastert, Nicolaas 146

Bauer, Mari Alexander Jacques 165

Bauer, Nicolaas 55

Bauffe, Victor 123

Berg, Simon van den 59

Beveren, Charles van 39

Bilders, Albert Gerard • 83

Bilders, Johannes Wamardus 69

Bilders- Van Bosse, Maria Philippine 142

Bisschop, Christoffel 137

Bisschop, Richard 144

Bisschop-Robertson, Suze 154

Bisschop-Swift, Kate 139

Bles, David, Joseph "ji

Bloeme, Hermanns Anthonie de 41

Blommers, Bemardus Johannes 134

Bock, Theophile de 144

Bodenheim, Johanna Cornelia Hermana (Nelly) 173

Boer, Otto de 38

Boks, Marinus 144

Borselen, Jan Willem van • ... 60

Bosboom, Johannes 91

Breitner, George Hendrick 151

Bru^hen, Gviillaume Anne van der 59

Burgers, Hein 136

200 Index of Painters

Page

Cachet, Carel Lion 197

Gate, Hendrik Gerrit ten 54

Cats, Jacob • 3

Cool, Thomas Simon 33

Craeyvanger, Gijsbertus 83

Daalhoff, Henri van 195

Daiwaille, Jean Augustin 16

Derkinderen, Antonius Johannes 176

Deventer, Jan Frederik van 60

Deventer, Willem Anthonie van 60

Dijsselhoflf, Gerrit Willem 197

Egenberger, Johannes Hinderikus 40

Ehnle, Adrianus Johannes 22

Gabriel, Paul Jozeph Constantin 123

Gogh, Vincent van 186

Greive, Petrus Franciscus 67

Greive Jr., Johan Conrad 68

Haas, Johannes Hubertus Leonardos de 141

Hanedoes, Louwrens • 83

Haverman, Hendrik Johan 174

Hendriks, Wybrandt . 56

Henkes, Gerke 141

Heymans, J , 60

Hodges, Charles Howard 6

Hoppenbrouwers, Johannes Franciscus 144

Hove, Bartholomeus Johannes van 65

Hove, Hubertus van 66

Hoytema, Theodoor van 194

Hulswit, Jan 54

Immerzeel, Christiaan 60

Israels, Isaac 156

Israels, Jozef • 94

Jamin, Diederik Franciscus, 68

Jelgerhuis, Rienk 5

Jelgerhuis Rienkz., Johannes 56

Jongkind, Johan Barthold 125

Jonxis, Jan Lodewijk 69

Josselin de Jone, Pieter de 149

Kaemmerer, Frederic Henri 128

Kamerlingh Onnes, Menso 165

Karsen, Eduard no

Karssen, Kasparus 54

Kate, Herman Frederik Karel 78

Index of Painters 201

Page

Kate, Johan Man ten 78

Kever, Jacobus Simon Hendrik 147

Kiers, Petrus 143

Klinkenberg, Johannes Christiaan Karel 145

Knip, Josephus Augustus 142

Kobell, Jan 51

Koekkoek, Johannes Hermanus 69

Koekkoek, Barend Cornells 68

Koelman, Jan Daniel 24

Koelman, Jan Hendrik • 24

Koelman, Johan Philip 24

Koning, Edgard Willem 195

Kooi, Willem Bartel van der 55

Koster, Everardus 66

Krausz, Simon Andries 59

Kruseman, Comelis 17

Kruseman, Jan Adam 22

Laar, Jan Hendrik van de 37

Laen, Dirk Jan van der 50

Laqui, Willem Joseph 4

Leickert, Charles Henri Joseph 63

Lelie, Adriaan de 57

Leon, Maurits 67

Lindo, Harriet 143

Looy, Jacobus van 178

Maarel, Marius van der 162

Maaten, Jacob Jan van der 60

Maris, Jacobus Hendrikus . . • 103

Maris, Matthijs 109

Maris, Willem 115

Mauve, Anton 117

Meer, Eduard Alphonse Victor Auguste van der 142

Meiners, Pieter 181

Mesdag, Hendrik Willem 121

Mesdag-Van Houten, Sientje 142

Meulemans, Adriaan ..!..... 61

Meulen, Francois Pieter ter 119

Meijer, Johan Hendrik Louis 61

Meijer, Hendrik 3

Moor, Pieter Comelis de 194

Moulijn, Simon 195

Nakken, Willem Carel , . . . 141

Neuhuijs, Albert 133

202 Index of Painters

Page

Neuhuijs, Jozef Hendrikus 141

Nibbrig, Ferdinand Hart 196

Nieuwenhuis, Theodoor 196

Nuyen, Wijnand Jan Joseph 63

Offermans, Tony Lodewijk George 147

Os, Georgius Jacobus Johannes van 58

Os, Jan van 58

Os, Maria Margaritha van 58

Os, Pieter Frederik van 59

Os, Pieter Gerhardus van 58

Oyens, David 127

Oyens, Pieter 127

Pieneman, Jan Willem 10

Pieneman, Nicolaas 14

Poggenbeek, George 145

Poorter, Bastiaan de 22

Portman, Christiaan Julius Lodewijk 68

Quinckhard, Jan Maurits i

Quinckhard, JuUus 57

Ravenzwaay, Jan van 59

Rink, Paul 194

Rochussen, Charles 140

Roelofs, Willem 103

Ronner-Knip, Henrietta 142

Rossum Duchattel, Fredericus Jacobus van 146

Roth, George Andries 54

Sadee, Philip 141

Salberg, Frederik 164

Sande Bakhuijzen, Gerardina Jacoba van de 143

Sande Bakhuijzen, Hendrik van de 59

Sande Bakhuijzen, Julius Jacobus van de 141

Scheeres, Hendricus Johannes . • 67

Scheffer, Ary 2']

SchefFer, Henri 32

SchefFer, Jan Baptist 27

Schelfhout, Andreas ! 62

Schendel, Petrus van 37

Schmidt, Willem Hendrik 35

Scholten, Hendrik Jacobus 68

Schotel, Petrus Johannes 61

Schotel, Johannes Christianus 60

Schouman, Aart 4

Schouman, Martinus 60

Index of Painters 203

Page

Schwartze, Johan George 43

Schwartze, Therese 148

Slager, P. M I49

Spoel, Jacob • 3^

StefFens, Louise Eugenie 173

Sterk, Elink 22

Storm van 's-Gravesande, Jonkheer Carel Nicolaas . . , .182

Stortenbeker, Pieter 141

Stroebel, Johannes Anthonie Balthazar 107

Strij, Jacob van 49

Tholen, Willem Bastiaan • .... 158

Thorn Prikker, Johan 194

Tischbein, Johann Friedrich August • 6

Tom, Jan Bedijs 63

Toorop, Johannes Theodoor (Jan) 184

Troost, Cornelis 2

Troostwijk, Wouter Joannes van 52

Valk, Maurits Willem van der 196

Valkenburg, Hendrik 137

Velden, Paulus van der 141

Verschuur, Wouterus 119

Verster, Floris Henric 164

Verveer, Elchanon 140

Verveer, Samuel Leonardus 66

Veth, Jan Pieter 170

Vintcent, Lodewijk Anthony 34

Voerman, Jan 179

Vogel, Johannes Gijsbert 143

Vogel-Roosenboom, Margaretha Cornelia Johanna Wilhelmina. 143

Vos, Maria 143

Vrolijk, Johannes Martinus 143

Waldorp, Antonie • . . 64

Wall, Willem Rutgaart van der 51

Weissenbruch, Hendrik Johannes (Jan) 123

Westenberg, George Pieter 54

Wiggers, Derk 196

Wit, Jacob de i

Witsen, Salomon van 166

Witsen, Willem 182

Wijnveld Jr., Bernardus , 40

Zilcken, Philippe 182

Zwart, Willem de 160

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