Gerharda Hermina Marius

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Israëls is far too much of a painter to be preoccupied with any such Tendenz intention. What attracted Israëls 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 livelihood and their affliction. A painter, he beheld in them picturesque 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ For it is not until we are penetrated with the fact that Israëls 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 ”

“ 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 whiteness 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. ”

“ 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 landscape for its own sake. ”

“ 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, lastly, an exotic flower budding in a suburb of Puritan London, reversing Taine's theory of environment. ”

“ Jozef Israëls 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; Gabriël 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 English people are characterized in opposition to the foreigner mainly by their practical sense. ”

“ 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 Israëls. He brought back with him a series of studies so fresh and original that they decided his career for good 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. ”

“ Even in his Sexton, that great pendant of the psychological interiors, that remarkable piece which, in its soberness, of all Israëls' 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 Israëls and who judged him only by his works could readily picture him as a melancholy man, burdened and bent with the suffering which he reproduces in his paintings. Nothing is farther from the truth. He sees the suffering ”

“ 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 ”

“ Jozef Israëls 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, especially, that he has enriched our school with an art that observes the underlying essence of the things depicted. ”

“ 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 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 compositions of Jacob Maris. ”

“ How expressive are Israëls' 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 resignation when they lie squat and square on the knees of the figure in Nothing more ”

“ For, in his own being, he is a Jew, in whom the strength of the old race finds voice; a Jew to whom all philosophy 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. ”

“ Israëls 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. ”

“ Compared with the Marises and Israëls, 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Israëls and, in any case, his brother in art, says:
"Israëls 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 Israëls at 1864. ”

“ 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 not of his own will, but because he was enrolled in the Municipal Guard and was therefore automatically transferred to the troops of the Commune. ”

“ Flemish masters; and, with an evident preference, Dutch masters. No country has collected with greater perspicacity 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 great English portrait-school of Reynolds and Gainsborough, based on Rembrandt and the Venetian masters and especially on Van Dijck. ”