The Modern Dutch School

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

It was not till he was nearing thirty that James Maris changed his manner of painting and acquired the style which eventually brought him fame. In 1865 he went to Paris, where he remained for six years, and there, under the influence of the Barbizon masters, he gradually broadened his style, abandoning his former intimacy of detail and now aiming at a more general effect of grandeur. Henceforward he devoted himself almost exclusively to landscape, and though the change of his style was brought about by French painting, his mature work is akin to that of Ruysdael in the nobility and majesty of its outlook. We can hardly escape thinking of Ruysdael’s ‘Mill’ when we see ‘The Stone Mill’ by James Maris in the Mesdag Museum; a picturesque stone mill, with an open gallery round it, makes a stately figure against a sky with white drifting clouds. In the foreground are sandhills, in the distance the red roofs of a village, but though the accessories taken together make up a scene quite distinct from that shown in Ruysdael’s famous picture, both pictures have a touch of sublimity in the dignity of their design. Equally characteristic of the way in which this artist subordinates particular objects to the general effect is his painting of ‘Dordrecht’. All details are merged in these masses of light and shade, yet everyone who has seen this town at eventide will agree that the painter has given us the essential characteristic of the ‘Venice of the North’, its Groote Kerke, its shipping, its wide canals, and the rolling grey sky overhead, and has presented these with incomparable dignity and grandeur.

William Maris is more limited in his range than either of his brothers, and though in their early days the work of all three showed a certain similarity of style, William’s work altered least in style and in subject. He is nearer to Roelofs than either of his brothers, and his favorite subjects were landscapes with cattle, which he painted, as a rule, in full daylight, so that his pictures are rather brighter and gayer in color than those of his brothers. A meadow extending along the border of the sandhills, in which are seen a few stunted trees and some cows, a pond perhaps in the immediate foreground, and a cloudy sky overhead, this is a typical William Maris subject. Less poetic than Mauve, less grand than his brother James, and less romantic than his brother Matthew, William Maris was a happy realist whose rich colored pictures are full of sunshine and mirror the luxuriant greens of Holland’s pasturelands.

Matthew Maris stands apart from his brothers and from all the Dutch artists of his generation. He was different in his temperament, different in his life, and different in his art. Tracing it to his foreign extraction, to his Austrian, or, as we should now say, to his Czecho-Slovak blood, Professor Muther says there broke out in Matthew Maris a ‘Teutonic medieval mysticism’ from which his brothers were free. Matthew no doubt possessed that he was influenced by the romantic mediavalism of Rossetti. It was in England that Matthew Maris painted his most charcteristic pictures, and in England, where he lived for forty five years, he drifted apart from his brethren in his art as in his life.

The beginnings of Matthew were almost parallel with those of James. The two brothers studied, as we have seen, at The Hague and Antwerp, and they were together in Paris. One incident must be chronicled which appears to have had far more influence on Matthew than on James. In 1858 the two brothers were back from Antwerp at The Hague, and three years later, having made some money by copying pictures, the two set out together on a tour through the Black Forest to Switzerland, returning through France by Dijon to the Puy-de-Dôme. Matthew was tremendously impressed by the romantic castles and buildings he saw in Central France; to his poetic imagination they were enchanted palaces. The recollection of this tour never faded from his mind, and in pictures painted years afterwards we catch echoes of the turrets and battlements which remained fixed in his memory. We may see evidence of this in the background of ‘Feeding Chickens’, painted in 1872.

The Modern Dutch School (continued)