The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

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‘Nature itself on the canvas’
The Painters of the Hague School

‘The art of landscape painting is on the threshold of change,’ announced the French critic René Ménard in 1873 in the Gazette des Beaux Arts. He was writing about the Dutch contribution to that year's international exhibition in Vienna. The work of Jozef Israels, Jacob Maris and Hendrik Willem Mesdag^1. had aroused Ménard's interest and reminded him of the beloved Dutch masters of old. ‘Without making a fuss about it, the Dutch painters have gradually returned to their roots,’ was the critic's conclusion. With a candid glance and a striking feel for local ambience, the modern Dutch landscape artists had captured their own Low Country dunes and canals just as Ruysdael, Hobbema and Rembrandt had done two centuries before. Ménard praised this new development in Dutch painting and applauded the newcomers' unidealised vision: ‘The small group of painters emerging on the coast of Holland possesses a candour that should give us pause.’ The reviewer was remarkably well-informed about recent developments in the Low Countries. Over the past years the coastal city of The Hague had evolved into the centre for the new school of painting, which has come to be known as the ‘Hague school’.

Art critics proclaimed that painting in the Netherlands was undergoing an indisputable revival. Romanticism had never made much headway there. After a prolonged period of decline, the art of Dutch painting finally seemed to be flourishing again in all its ancient glory. ‘Thirty years ago there wasn't a painter in sight in Holland. Suddenly it's become a land of painters once again,’ wrote Edmond Duranty after the 1878 world exhibition in Paris. At an even earlier date Paul Leroi had extolled the painters Jacob Maris and Hendrik Willem Mesdag as welcome innovators in the Paris Salon: ‘They have resolutely broken with the pallid and impotent Dutch school of 1830, which has had such long-lasting and disastrous consequences in the rough and ready fatherland of Rembrandt and Frans Hals (...); along with a number of their countrymen, they are valiantly attempting to join the ranks of that immortal group of seventeenth-century masters, the most independent group of artists and the most painterly painters that the world has ever known.’

1. See The Low Countries 1997-98: pp. 307-309.

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Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, Beach Scene. 1901. Canvas, 73 × 103 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

The rediscovery of the Golden Age

Around the middle of the nineteenth century Golden Age painting was rediscovered, and it achieved unprecedented popularity. One of the reasons for this reassessment was that historical painting had reached an impasse: the traditional historical piece had degenerated into a hackneyed cliché and had lost most of its appeal. In reappraising the function of the artist, progressive art connoisseurs held up the vision of the old Dutch masters, painters who had brought to life the ordinary reality surrounding them, thereby presenting a much more authentic view of history than anyone could have expected from the historical painter. Today we know better, but at the time the paintings of the Golden Age were still regarded as faithful portraits of Holland in which the artists had avoided making any additions of their own. By the middle of the nineteenth century the enthusiasm for seventeenth-century masters had reached such a pitch that progressive art lovers held up the work of these headstrong Dutchmen as an example to their own contemporaries.

The French art connoisseur Théophile Thoré had this in mind when he wrote about older art from the Low Countries. So one can imagine his enthusiasm when he discovered Jozef Israels' Interior of the Katwijk Orphanage at the Salon in Paris in 1866. ‘This painting by Israels is undoubtedly one of the liveliest works of the Salon,’ wrote the critic, ‘providing the finest presentation of the common life with that uninhibited accent that is typical of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, such as Pieter de Hoogh, Jan Steen, Van Ostade and Terborgh.’ One year later the painting was hanging at the World Exhibition in Paris. And once again, the connoisseur praised its simplicity and honesty. This is ‘not fireworks,’ the critic insisted. ‘It is the truth, pure and simple.’ Another painting by Jozef

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Israels, The Last Breath, was awarded third prize by the jury. ‘It is a sentimental drama,’ Thoré wrote, ‘but it is depicted in total tranquillity, with that calm, resigned sorrow that is so characteristic of country folk.’

For years, Jozef Israels would be seen abroad as the dominant figure of the Hague School, a position comparable to that occupied by Rembrandt among the painters of the seventeenth century. But there seemed to be another point of connection between the two artists: both chose for their main subjects the poignancy of human existence. Jozef Israels was able to express profound human sorrow, which he portrayed just as intimately and sympathetically as Rembrandt had done before him.

Of course, the constant comparison with their revered predecessors from the Golden Age did much to boost the success that the Dutch innovators were enjoying abroad. In the Netherlands the initial reaction to the new artistic creed was much more reserved. Only after the painters had been given a warm reception in other countries did Dutch art critics hesitantly come forward with a more positive evaluation. In 1875 the Dutch critic Van Santen

Jozef Israels, When One Grows Old. 1878. Canvas, 160 × 101 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

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Willem Maris, Cows in Reedy Water. Undated Canvas, 56 × 100 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

Kolff published a detailed survey of the new group of painters in the magazine De Banier. He pointed out the most important differences in technique between them and conventional artists. In the Hague school, the perfectly applied stroke had been replaced by a broad sweep of the brush. Instead of smooth, meticulously finished pieces, the new painters had chosen a looser, more sketchy quality. And the vivid, charming coloration had been exchanged for a restrained palette containing mostly shades of grey. ‘What we have before us is realism of the truest, healthiest variety,’ stated the critic. ‘It is my profound conviction that our landscape and marine painters will have to turn in the same direction sooner or later if they want to keep up with the spirit of the times and continue producing art.’ The term ‘Hague school’ was coined by Van Santen Kolff in an attempt to categorise the various artists according to their common denominator.

The Hague

In fact, the term ‘Hague school’ is a very relative one. The Hague did not assume its role as a centre of artistic innovation until after 1870, when a number of important representatives of the new artistic movement came to live in that coastal city within a few years of each other. Artists such as Jozef Israels and Hendrik Willem Mesdag had already made their name abroad. Others such as Gerard Bilders, Anton Mauve and the Maris brothers had been working in the wooded Veluwe region around Oosterbeek near Arnhem, painting directly from nature and laying the basis for their new artistic approach. Johannes Bosboom and Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch were exceptions in that regard. They were the only representatives of the Hague school who spent almost all their lives in the Dutch coastal city itself.

A number of painters left the Netherlands early on because of their dis-

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satisfaction with the artistic climate and the antiquated style of academic instruction. Willem Roelofs, for example, went to Brussels, where he lived for most of his career. He spent the summer months in the Netherlands. Roelofs maintained very close contact with other like-minded artists and participated in group exhibitions with them. He was one of the very first modern landscape painters. He gave lessons to Paul Gabriel, who had also moved to Brussels.

Jozef Israels left for Paris in 1845. He was an admirer of his famous countryman Ary Scheffer, who also lived in the French capital, and he apprenticed himself to the traditional French painter Picot. At least twice he visited Barbizon, the French painters' village, and then followed in the footsteps of Millet and evolved into the beloved painter of the peasant and fisherman genre. For a long time he lived in Amsterdam. It wasn't until around 1870 that he moved to The Hague, where Mesdag, Mauve and Jacob Maris had already settled.

Why these painters all chose to live in The Hague, and all around 1870, is difficult to say. Undoubtedly the rural surroundings (which were still

Hendrik Willem Mesdag, Summer Evening on the Beach. 1900. Canvas, 179 × 139 cm. J. Poort Collection, Wassenaar.

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Jacob Maris, Vegetable Gardens near The Hague. Undated.
Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

quite untouched) with the sea and the shore within easy reach held a strong attraction for them. In the 1870s The Hague had as yet no truck with the urban renewal and expansion from which the painters of the Hague school would ultimately take flight once again. The Hague had come to be known as the most beautiful village in Europe. It lay nestled in a broad, varied landscape that provided the Hague School painters with all the material they needed for their nostalgically tinted vision. Their preference was for areas of unspoilt nature where peasants and fishermen still led innocent, pure lives, undisturbed by modern industrialisation.

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Hendrik Willem Mesdag had a specific reason for moving to The Hague. After Les brisants de la mer du Nord had won him a gold medal at the Paris Salon, he decided to become a marine painter. In Brussels he found it impossible to produce anything good. ‘You have to have the sea right before your eyes, every day, and you have to live with it, or nothing comes of your work,’ he said. Hence his decision to move to The Hague. There was something else attractive about The Hague besides the nearby natural beauty: its artistic climate was actually quite decent. The city's art trade was prospering, as was its social life. Pulchri Studio, the painters' club, gave painters the opportunity to work with live models, and during the ‘art discussions’ that were held there artists could exchange ideas about their most recent work. Jozef Israels and Mesdag both emerged as prominent members of Pulchri's executive committee. Important exhibitions were organised to keep abreast of foreign and domestic developments. Mesdag himself had a unique private collection of modern paintings. His permanent collection of works from the Barbizon school and the Hague school was on display in his home and was well-known by art connoisseurs from both the Netherlands and abroad.

Like Mesdag and Israels, Jacob Maris spent several years in Paris, where he lived for a while with his brother Matthijs. Dissatisfied with his patron at the time, the Goupil Company, who demanded that he produce marketable paintings based on the Italian costumed model, the artist moved to The Hague in order to develop as a landscape painter. He settled in a house in Rijswijk, where splendid quintessentially Dutch motifs were all within reach. His Vegetable Gardens near The Hague is a masterpiece for which the artist must have had Ruysdael's View of Haarlem in mind.

Barbizon

The painters of the Hague school were undoubtedly inspired by their seventeenth-century predecessors, as the foreign art critics so eagerly suggested. But they found a direct stimulus for their approach among the French painters of Barbizon, who were also influenced by the seventeenth-century Dutch masters. The French painters of the Barbizon group were the first to work in situ before their subject, in the open air. This was in contrast to the customary artistic practice of composing mostly fictitious landscapes in the studio. Their impression of the existing landscape was applied directly to the painter's canvas.

Dutch artists learned about this new method through foreign contacts. Gerard Bilders became acquainted with the work of Dupré, Troyon, Corot, Courbet, Millet and Rousseau at an exhibition in Brussels in 1860: ‘I've seen paintings undreamed of, paintings that contained what my heart so longs for. (...) They touched me with their unity, peace and honesty, and in particular with their inexplicable intimacy with nature.’ In the woods of Oosterbeek, in the eastern part of the Netherlands, Gerard Bilders, who died at the age of 27, worked with a circle of like-minded painters. Following in the footsteps of the Barbizon painters they made most of their studies directly from nature. The painters' colony in Oosterbeek was thus dubbed ‘the Barbizon of Holland’. A number of artists felt the need to visit the French painters' village themselves. Willem Roelofs travelled to Barbizon as early

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Anton Mauve, Fishing Vessel on the Beach. 1882. Canvas, 115 × 172 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

as 1851, and while there made studies at Fontainebleau. Jozef Israels also visited the painters' village, as we mentioned earlier, but there are no indications of friendly contacts developing between the French and Dutch painters. Weissenbruch visited the village as late as 1903 and produced a painting of its main street, including Millet's studio. ‘Your goal should be to put nature itself on the canvas,’ said Weissenbruch in summing up what the Hague school was trying to achieve. ‘If anyone has taught me how to see nature, it was our old masters (...). But mostly you learn from nature itself.’

Bilders was one of the first artists to search for what he called ‘a fragrant, warm grey’. This predominantly grey coloration was at first rather coolly received by Dutch critics. It was said of Bilders' friend Matthijs Maris that he ought to try taking off his ‘grey spectacles’ once in a while. And of Mauve the comment was made, ‘It is as though everything he sees is covered in funeral crepe.’ Critics found the colour grey so typical of the new group of painters that they soon labelled the movement ‘the grey school’. In response, Anton Mauve remarked: ‘If my paintings are grey, then they're no good; but if there had been talk of a “silver school”, then I'd have known I was going in the right direction.’

juleke van lindert

Translated by Nancy Forest-Flier.

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Further reading

dumas, ch., r. de leeuw and j.j.th. sillevis (ed.), De Haagse school. Hollandse meesters van de 19e eeuw. Exhibition catalogue. Paris / London / The Hague, 1983.

jansen, hans and wim van sinderen (ed.), De Haagse School. Exhibition catalogue. Rotterdam / The Hague / Zwolle, 1997.

sillevis, john et al., De Haagse school: De collectie van het Haags Gemeentemuseum. The Hague, 1992.

Willem Roelofs, Windmill on the Polder near Abcoude. Undated. Canvas, 47 × 74 cm. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.