The Modern Dutch School

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

It may be said, therefore, that the art of Josef Israels, though he received his training in Paris, was far more the fruit of his own experience of life than the outcome of French influence. We feel that even if Millet had never existed, Israels would not have painted otherwise than he did, and though the subject matter of their respective pictures are akin, there are considerable differences between them. Millet painted his peasants out-of-doors in the light of the sun; Israels pictured his fisher-folk by preference indoors, in dim interiors. Hence his pictures are usually more subdued in color than those of Millet. Israels painted low life in low tones and built up his visions of life, whether in oil paintings, water-colors, or etchings—and he worked in all three mediums—by broad masses of light and shade. Further, his tendency is to be more tragic than Millet, and many of his picture have not inaccurately been described as ‘piercing notes of woe.’ One of his most famous pictures, ‘Alone in the World’, contains the essence of his art. In the treatment, in the rays of light dimly illuminating the gloom which befits the subject, we see the influence of Rembrandt; while in the bowed figure of the lonely widow, with her open Bible by her side, we have a poignant expression of the artist’s deep feeling for the daily tragedy of life.

In 1870 Josef Israels left Amsterdam and moved to The Hague, where he lived till he died on August 12, 1911, respected, honored, and world-famous. He was a painter who appealed equally to the general public and to connoisseurs and though so many of his works are tragic, this never interfered with his popularity, because he pictured the tragedies of common life which all have experienced and all can understand. Further, if he reached his highest intensity of expression in rendering sorrow, suffering, endurance, and the pathos of old age, Israels was not wholly tragic in his art. Pictures like ‘A Frugal Meal’ and ‘A Happy Family’ show the reverse of the medal, the compensations of poverty, and the happiness of the humble. But even in these scenes of domestic contentment there is something touching, and the philosophy of Israels seems to bid us to ponder on the life of people who can be happy with so little.

When Josef Israels was a young man, working as a clerk under his father, one of his frequent duties was to take a money bag to the bank of a Mr Mesdag. This banker had a son Hendrik Willem Mesdag, born at Groningen on February 25, 1831, who also became a famous painter. For many years H.W. Mesdag practised art as a amateur, and it was not till he had amassed a considerable fortune in business that he retired from banking and devoted himself entirely to painting. Thus Mesdag was not only in the independent position of being able to paint what he pleased, without thinking of the taste of buyers, but he was also wealthy enough to help his brother artists whose works he admired.

In 1886, when he was thirty-five years of age, Mesdag went to Brussels, where his friends and relative Alma-Tadema was then residing. Roelofs also was living in Brussels, and it was under his guidance that the banker began the serious studies which should fit him to make art henceforward his profession. Mesdag stayed three years at Brussels and returned in 1869 to The Hague, no longer an active man of business but an artist. He was not only a painter himself but a collector of paintings, and in course of time he formed a very important collection of modern pictures, chiefly of the Barbizon and Modern Dutch Schools, which in 1903 he generously presented to the public. The Mesdag Museum at The Hague is a lasting monument of his own taste and of the genius of his contemporaries. As a painter Mesdag gave himself almost exclusively to the painting of the sea, and his marines are remarkable for thier luminosity, truth, and the vigor of their handling. ‘A Seascape’ is a good example of his power of suggesting the life and movement of the waves and of his skill in placing shipping, so that his picture is at once absolutely natural and yet decorative in design.

The numerous painters of the Modern Dutch School—almost as numerous as the ‘Little Masters’ of the seventeenth century—may broadly be divided into two classes, the figure of genre painters for whom Israels was the chief influence, and the landscape painters who were inspired by Roelofs and the French painters of Barbizon. Among the genre painters we may mention Albert Neuhuys, born at Utrecht in 1844, who approaches closely to Israels in his grave tender renderings of humble interiors; David Adolf Constant Artz (1837-90), who, in addition to interiors, painted the fisher-folk of Scheveningen out-of-doors, frequently at moments when they were resting on the sandhills; and Bernardus Johannes Blommers, born at The Hague in 1845, who developed in his own way the lighter side of the art of Israels. There is nothing tragic in the pictures of Blommers, whose favorite subjects are children playing on the sands at Scheveningen or paddling in the water. ‘On the Beach’ is a typical example of the happy seaside scenes in which the artist displays alike his love of children and his knowledge of sea and sky.

The Modern Dutch School (continued)