The Hague School, a set of articles from the Haag Gemeentemuseum at www.gemeentemuseum.nl/ (search for “Mauve” )

Romanticism and the Hague School

Publishing group VNU recently donated the painting River Landscape (1842) by Willem Roelofs to the Gemeentemuseum. This gift prompted the museum to organize an exhibition of early works by several painters from the Hague School which are clearly inspired by Romanticism.

Hague School artists wanted art to be based on everyday reality. Remarkably, however, several painters of the Hague School had their artistic roots in Romanticism, a movement that took precisely the opposite view. Romantic artists sought to flee reality, drawing on fantasy and history for their inspiration. They also developed a great fascination for distant countries and peoples, whereas the painters of the later Hague School were more interested in the common people they encountered in the street and at the market.

Andreas Schelfhout and Wijnand Nuyen were prominent Romantic landscape painters. Schelfhout had a predilection for Dutch winter landscapes, while Nuyen travelled to France, where he was inspired by the coastlines of Normandy and Brittany. His great example was French artist Eugène Isabey, who also taught Johan Barthold Jongkind.

Johannes Bosboom also travelled to France, where he painted Rouen cathedral and several harbour scenes. During a trip along the Rhine in Germany in 1841 with his master Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen, Willem Roelofs painted Romantic river scenes, one of which was recently donated to the Gemeentemuseum by VNU.

Jozef Israëls took as his example Dordrecht-born artist Ary Scheffer, who caused a stir in Paris with his paintings of dramatic scenes from works by Dante and Goethe. Israëls also encountered the fishing genre developed at the Düsseldorf Academy.

Jacob and Matthijs Maris studied German Romantic book illustrators, including Richter and Rethel. So, although clear Romantic influences can be discerned in the early work of some painters of the Hague School, the Romantic movement in the Netherlands was only small.

The Realism that succeeded Romanticism resonated far more with Dutch artists. France saw the emergence of the Barbizon School, a group of painters who preferred to paint outdoors, in natural surroundings. Their landscapes were simple, direct depictions of the area in and around Fontainebleau forest and the village of Barbizon. Artists like Jozef Israëls and Willem Roelofs travelled to Barbizon to see the new developments for themselves. Their great inspirations were Jean-François Millet and Théodore Rousseau. Dutch artists met up in the summer in Gelderland, particularly in the area around Oosterbeek, to paint and sketch in the woods and by the river. The artists who made the summer pilgrimage to Gelderland – to what some even referred to as the ‘Dutch Barbizon’ – included Johannes and Gerard Bilders, a father a son, and also Willem Maris and Anton Mauve.

Jozef Israëls focused on depicting the lives of farmers and fishermen. Weissenbruch and Mesdag were more drawn to the dunes and the sea. The first reference to the ‘Hague School’ was in 1875, to denote a group of artists, all of whom were Realists, even though some had their roots in the Romantic movement, as can be seen from 18 June in this exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum.

Vincent van Gogh, Woman Grieving (Sientje), 1881-83, ink and pencil on paper, 58 x 42 cm., collection Museum Kröller-Müller

The world-famous artist Vincent van Gogh is often associated with sunflowers and France but in fact his artistic roots lay in The Hague and the painters of the Hague School. This was a group of artists who were inspired by the French Barbizon School and were innovative in terms of their realism and interest in the hard lives of labourers and fisher folk. It was in this artistic environment that the young Van Gogh developed his own brand of realism and laid the foundations for his career as a painter.

The Hague School
The Hague School had a perceptible influence on the life of Vincent van Gogh even before he decided to become an artist. Coming from a family of Protestant clergymen and art dealers, Vincent spent some time in The Hague as a would-be art dealer but found that he was not cut out for the profession. He moved to Belgium, where he tried to become a parson, but soon returned to The Hague determined to become a professional artist. He took lessons from Hague School painter Anton Mauve (a cousin by marriage), who allowed him to make drawings of models – often women from Scheveningen – in his studio and taught him how to go about making a watercolour or a sketch in oils. Vincent also accompanied Breitner to the waiting room at the railway station to make sketches of ordinary people and he looked for suitable models in the old men’s home. However, he was unable to share in the commercial success of the Hague School painters – he chose unsaleable subjects and depicted them in a harsh and unattractive style.

Van Gogh liked the work of Anton Mauve, H.J. Weissenbruch, Jozef Israëls and Jacob Maris and the day-to-day life and country scenes that they recorded in their paintings in subdued colours and loose brushstrokes. The realism of the Hague School attracted him, but the dreamy mood of the paintings was often too tame for him. He himself drew uncompromisingly unpicturesque views of the city and deliberately sought out the seamier side of life. Where the Hague School painters gloried in sympathetic depictions of the lives of peasants and fishermen, Van Gogh wanted to reveal the unpleasantness of the human condition. The influence of The Hague continued even after he left the city – still full of his impressions, he worked on in Drente and Nuenen, where he managed to achieve his ambitions in various versions of The Potato Eaters, a subject closely related to those painted by Jozef Israëls (a shining example to Van Gogh). Right through into his first year in Paris, the influence of the Hague School can still be detected in the work of Van Gogh and towards the end of his career he once again embraced tenets of the artistic philosophy he had absorbed in the city.

With its great collection of Hague School paintings, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag is the ideal place to present the work of the young Van Gogh in the context of his Hague contemporaries. The exhibition will also include works from the collections of the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Kröller-Müller Museum and other lenders.

Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915) was a leading member of the Hague School and the only one of that group to specialise in painting seascapes. As part of the Mesdag Year, this exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag focuses on the greatest ever exponent of Dutch marine painting. Mesdag was unequalled in his ability to produce atmospheric canvases depicting changing weather conditions on the North Sea coast at Scheveningen and the various activities of the fishing community that lived there. Despite his later fame, Mesdag was initially regarded by Hague artistic circles as a well-intentioned amateur; the committee of the Pulchri Studio artists’ association was even doubtful about admitting him as a professional member.

Gold medal
Mesdag was not disheartened. He submitted two paintings for the Paris Salon of 1870 and astonished everyone by carrying off a gold medal for Les Brisants de la Mer du Nord (‘The Breakers of the North Sea’). Mesdag’s mind was immediately made up: he determined to become a marine painter and hired a room in Scheveningen overlooking the sea. His seascapes were soon winning acclaim from leading art critics and Mesdag came to be regarded as one of the leading artists in a new “ultra-radical” movement: the Hague School. Mesdag was also to become a leading light of Pulchri Studio. He co-founded the Hollandsche Teeken Maatschappij (‘Dutch Drawing Society’) – a special water colourists’ section within Pulchri – and in 1889 he was elected chairman of Pulchri Studio. He continued to play a prominent role in the association right through until 1907 and it was partly due to his efforts and business acumen that Pulchri was able to move to its present premises in the Lange Voorhout in the course of that period.

Collector
Mesdag was also an active collector of work by contemporary artists, purchasing paintings not only by other members of the Hague School, but also by Barbizon School artists like Millet, Rousseau and Daubigny. He also acquired several major works by Courbet. His home in The Hague (now the Mesdag Museum) was regarded as a shining example of contemporary good taste, with carpets by Colenbrander, vases from the Rozenburg pottery and a large collection of Japanese bronzes.

Panorama
Mesdag is equally well-known for the largest painting he ever produced: a 1600 m² panorama, painted in 1881 and still on display in its original rotunda in the Zeestraat (The Hague). His wife, Sientje Mesdag-van Houten, and his much younger contemporaries Théophile de Bock, Breitner and Blommers helped in its creation. Mesdag himself regarded his panorama – a view from the Seinpost Dune in Scheveningen showing an immense vista of sea, beach, dunes, the fishing village of Scheveningen and the distant outline of The Hague – as his most important work. Vincent van Gogh (who attended the opening) would have heartily concurred. The same themes of the sea, the beach and the life of local fisherfolk also feature in the work of the other Hague School painters included in this presentation, such as Jozef Israëls, Albert Neuhuys, Anton Mauve, Jacob Maris and J.H. Weissenbruch. The exhibition will include not only items from the Gemeentemuseum’s own holdings, but also many works on temporary loan from a private collection.

125th anniversary programm
In addition to this exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum, the wide range of events celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Panorama Mesdag will include Mesdag exhibitions at the Mesdag Panorama, Mesdag Museum and Pulchri Studio. See www.mesdag.com for more of his works.

Towards the end of the 19th century, artists turned their backs on history painting in favour of landscape, previously regarded as an inferior genre. In France, the Barbizon School emerged as artists began for the first time to paint outdoors en plein air. This presentation of work from the museum’s own collections will show how the painters of Barbizon influenced the Hague School artists, the former seeking to portray the simple life of the French countryside and the latter the life of fishing and farming communities in Holland. Around 1830, artists began making expeditions from Paris to the forest of Fontainebleau, to work in the open air and depict nature as it really was. This marked a real revolution in the thinking of French artists at a time when history painting was still seen as sacrosanct and the Academy and critical establishment regarded landscape as a second-rate genre.

Warm grey
The painters of the new Barbizon School found a warm welcome and comfortable lodgings at the local inn, the Auberge Ganne, which quickly became a favourite meeting-place for the avant-garde. Painters like Millet, Daubigny, Corot and Rousseau applied the new artistic philosophy in their paintings and drawings. Some artists, including Millet, Rousseau and Daubigny, actually settled in Barbizon and Dutch artists like Jozef Israëls and Willem Roelofs visited the village. The work of the Barbizon School painters was soon appearing in exhibitions in Brussels. That was where the young painter Gerard Bilders encountered the “warm grey” and atmospheric tone of Corot’s landscapes and where Jozef Israëls found inspiration in Jean-François Millet’s depictions of peasant life. Hendrik Willem Mesdag admired Daubigny’s coastal landscapes enough to acquire a number of them for his famous collection and Troyon’s pictures of farm animals had an unmistakable influence on the work of Anton Mauve and Willem Maris. Working en plein air also became a tenet of the Hague School; J.H. Weissenbruch, Anton Mauve and Willem Roelofs worked outdoors in all weathers, in boats on the inland lakes near Noorden, in the polders around The Hague, in the dunes, and on the beach at Scheveningen. The Barbizon School painters greatly admired the realism of the landscapes painted by the Dutch Old Masters of the seventeenth century and the artists of the Hague School saw their new approach to landscape painting as part of the same tradition.

Lithographs and etchings
The painters of the Barbizon School were frequently also skilled engravers. Through lithographs and etchings, their work reached a wider public and was disseminated via periodicals. This exhibition will therefore include an important group of French prints from the collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, on show to the public for the first time in many years.

Jacob Maris
Jacob Maris was a founder member of the Hague School. He was inspired initially by the German Romantic illustrator Ludwig Richter. Later he became interested in the revolutionary ideas of the artists of the Barbizon School, who believed in working directly from nature and wherever possible “en plein air” (in the open air). Jacob Maris adopted their philosophy and worked in the woods around Oosterbeek, where artists like Gerard Bilders and Anton Mauve were also setting up their easels. In 1864 he moved to Paris to further his career. He made oil sketches of rocky landscapes in the area around Barbizon and produced work for Parisian art dealers Goupil. ‘The Little Knitter’ is a typical example of a Salon painting from this period. Following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Jacob returned to The Hague, where he became a leading figure in the Hague School that began to emerge in around 1875. He turned to painting typical Dutch landscapes and views of Dutch towns, with an emphasis on the atmospheric effects produced by cloudy skies.

Matthijs Maris
Like Jacob, the young Matthijs Maris was interested in Romantic subjects. He remained true to that movement while studying in Antwerp but in the 1860s he followed Jacob to Oosterbeek – the ‘Dutch Barbizon’, as it was sometimes called. In 1861 he travelled to Germany and to Switzerland, where his visit to Lausanne, on Lake Geneva, made a particularly deep impression on him. Matthijs was a visionary who felt that imagination was more important than recording the real world. In 1869 he too moved to Paris, where his brother had by then made a name for himself. Unlike Jacob, Matthijs never returned to the Netherlands. He stayed on in France and developed a style increasingly divergent from that of the Hague School. His final years were spent in London, living as an eccentric recluse, supported by his art dealer, Van Wisselingh.

Willem Maris
Willem Maris was taught by his elder brothers and took evening classes at the Hague Academy. In Oosterbeek he became friendly with Anton Mauve. Although he travelled with Blommers to Germany and Norway, Willem lived all his life in the Netherlands and devoted himself to sunny polder landscapes featuring cows and ducks. His work had a strong international following. His pupils included Poggenbeek and Breitner.

All three Maris brothers were gifted draughtsmen and water colourists and contributed to the success of the ‘Hollandse Teeken Maatschappij’ (the local water colourists’ association) and the Pulchri Studio artists’ club in The Hague.

The Hague School artists were fascinated by the lives of the labouring classes. For example, Anton Mauve’s 1882 painting Fishing Boat on the Beach shows fishermen using horses to drag their boat up the beach in the absence of a proper harbour. The sea plays an important but ambiguous role as both a friendly and a hostile force, taking life but at the same time saving it by providing an income for the poverty-stricken fishing community.

The Hague School flourished at a time when people in Europe were, for the first time, seeking images of national unity. Previously, people in the Netherlands had thought mainly in terms of their own locality. Now that the concept of the nation was being emphasised, there was a need for a unifying idea of national character. Dutch people saw themselves as indomitable, down-to-earth and hard-working – like the figures shown in the art of the period.

Anton Mauve (1838-1888) was a leading member of the Hague School and gave lessons to Vincent van Gogh. Mauve was regarded as a master in the portrayal of the silvery grey light and hues of the Dutch landscape. He liked to work in the immediate surroundings of The Hague: on the beach at Scheveningen, around the flat-bottomed fishing boats and the fish market, in the dunes, and in the open fields of the polder. He was also a talented draughtsman and water colourist and worked in his youth with Willem Maris. In later life, he withdrew from the artistic world of The Hague and went to live in Laren. His later works depict the nearby heath with its flocks of sheep and their attendant shepherds in a wide range of weather conditions.

Fishing Boat on the Shore, oil on canvas, 115 x 172 cm (Coll. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag)

Jozef Israëls was already a celebrated and popular painter of the Hague School when his son Isaac was born. Isaac’s talent emerged at an early age and it is not surprising that he followed in his father’s footsteps. But he found the traditional painters’ milieu stifling. He moved from The Hague to Amsterdam, and began to paint in a completely different style to his father, indeed he is known as ‘the Dutch impressionist’. That a father and son can be so similar yet so different is the theme of an exhibition entitled Jozef and Isaac Israëls, Father and Son, to be held at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

The Israëls family originally came from Groningen. Jozef was born there in 1824 in a family with a great interest in religion and art. His exceptional talent as a painter was obvious from an early age. Although his first successes were historical works, he came to specialise in paintings of fishermen and these were the works that made him world famous. Jozef triumphed in the salons of Brussels and Paris and he became very prosperous, partly due to the business acumen of his wife Aleida.

In 1865 his son Isaac was born. Shortly after the family settled in The Hague. Jozef sent his talented son to the Drawing Academy but he was not a dedicated pupil, preferring to go his own way. From very early on he also wanted to distinguish himself from his father and the sentiments evoked in the paintings that had made the older Israëls so popular. His mother Aleida concluded that her son had lost his mind, expressing her concerns in a letter to her friend Frederik van Eeden, writer and psychologist. His advice was down-to-earth: ‘Do you really think that an outstanding artist like your son will be lost to us if he has to spend some of his youth brooding and searching for a direction in life?’.

That search led Isaac to Amsterdam, where he developed into a painter of modern life, whose fluid brushstrokes earned him the nickname of ‘the Dutch impressionist’. The difference between Isaac and his father is clear not only from the style but also from the choice of subject: no sentimental representations of dramatic emotions, but a swiftly painted realism. It was perhaps Jozef who expressed the difference most clearly when he wrote that his son painted soldiers on their way to the battlefield, while he himself portrayed their weeping widows. But even when the subject is more light-hearted, the father and son can never be confused with each other. While Jozef Israëls painted fisherwomen and their children against the background of Scheveningen’s seashore and dunes, Isaac portrayed elegantly dressed ladies in summer costumes in the city, and later bathers on the Lido in Venice or the fashionable beach of Viareggio.

The exhibition focuses on the development of the two painters. It also shows how despite the differences between Isaac’s style and that of his father, he nevertheless built on the lessons he learned from Jozef. The rooms of the museum are filled with the monumental, emotional works of the father, and the fresh, luminous paintings of the son.