Gerharda Hermina Marius

“ His first attempts at painting 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. ”

“ 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 ment jamais," 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. ”

“ 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 imitators 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. ”

“ There is a great contrast between his sturdy children of the sea and Israëls' frail, pensive creations. Like most painters, he began by producing powerfully-drawn small figures, like that strong picture, 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. ”

“ There is another painter, or rather there are two others who worked all their lives in a neighbouring country 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 landscape-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. ”

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

“ 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 landscapes 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 translated 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 Hague, thirty years ago, was surrounded on every side by nature in all her fulness: to the south and east lay the endless, luxuriant 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. ”

“ 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 circumstances to accept a position as local drawing-master, displays a true love of his art and devotion to his pupils. ”

“ 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 movement to the landscape, which, just because of this endless alternation, remains ever charming to the eye and offers to the eye of the painter in particular the greatest and most continuous interest. ”

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

“ 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 Allebé 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? ”

“ 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, Israëls and the Maris brothers? ”

“ Thérèse 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 Israëls, had practically fallen into decadence, she honoured her father's tradition as a free art, not devoid of fantasy. ”

“ 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 revolution which has once more enabled us to see what was good in the days before the coming of the great Hague men. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 Franciscus Greive, who was born in Amsterdam in 1811 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 afterwards to distinguish the Hague painter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 humiliation. Our national existence appeared to be wiped out. We were without power of action or, consequently, 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. ”

“ In that branch of landscape-painting in which form and lines 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 admiration for it had aroused, I must first mention Maurits Willem van der Valk, born 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. ”

“ 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 helplessness, their imperfection, in their awkward movements ”

“ Mental and moral characteristics too strongly emphasized 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 Israëls 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 quality at the expense of any other; perhaps only a painter could recognize the painter in the eyes of the portrait ”

“ 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. ”

“ And so it came about that a race of painters arose between 1885 and 1890, formed at the Amsterdam Academy under the guidance of the conscientious Allebé, who impressed a whole generation 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 themselves, each according to his own nature, rather than follow feebly in the footsteps of the Hague masters whom they all so greatly admired. ”

“ And it was this art which was as a revelation 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. ”