Gerharda Hermina Marius

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, before 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. ”

“ She, who can hardly be called a landscape-painter, except in her little views of Noordwijk, 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 exceptional and independent artistic utterance. ”

“ 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, like 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. ”

“ He is one of those painters who dare to be themselves, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is, above all, the painter of movement, whose artistic bent inclined him towards the depicting of the bewildering bustle 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ True, the foreground had something of the dry treatment of his rare Pulchri-Studio sketches; 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. ”

“ 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 technique 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 all the painters of the Hague school lost the Intensity of their colour in the search for light in a wider aspect. ”

“ 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 forthwith to change our second conception for a third. Vermeer of Delft was called the sphinx of our seventeenth-century painting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Marius Alexander Jacques Bauer was born at the Hague in 1864. He was a pupil of the Hague Academy, but received his real training at the hands of Jozef Israëls' friend Salomon van Witsen (born in 1833) , a painter who produced but little and whose knowledge and impartial judgment rank higher than his painting. ”

“ 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 Israëls the psychologist.
No more honest artist exists ”