Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century/The Landscape and Genre Painters

CHAPTER IV

The Landscape and Genre Painters

It is fairly well established nowadays that landscape-painting for its own sake is mainly of Dutch origin. And, although we are not prepared to go all lengths with Taine's theory of environment, or, at any rate, while admitting it in general, to apply it to individuals and artists, the cause does probably lie in the fact that nowhere, unless it be in Venice, do the natural conditions, the climate, the atmosphere, the light, the sky and their reflection in the endless pieces of water of which the most picturesque regions of the Netherlands, the provinces of North and South Holland, are at is were composed, nowhere do these conditions influence life so strongly as with us. The incessant changes of sunshine and clouds, the broad shadows of the latter over the flat fields, the long twilight, which is never quite dispelled indoors, unless a lighted cloud throws a sharp reflection from without: these all give a movement to the landscape, which, just because of this endless alternation, remains ever charming to the eye and offers to the eye of the painter in particular the greatest and most continuous interest.

Another reason to prove that landscape-painting is of Dutch origin lies in the fact that no country was so independent of both religious influences and princely patronage as the northern portion of the Netherlands; and, even though this does not apply to the fifteenth and a part of the sixteenth century, the fact that artists were free to paint what found favour in their eyes must have had its influence.

Seeing how closely nature and landscape-painting are bound up with the very existence of Dutch art, it can be no matter for surprise that, at a time of a decline such as that into which official painting in general had fallen in our country, there were painters at the beginning of the eighteenth century who had succeeded in keeping their art untouched by foreign influences and who, refusing to deny their kind or the traditions of the great centuries, looked at nature through their own eyes, through their own masters.

For, although, after 1870, the Hague school of landscape-painting attained a height which one could hardly have expected ever to behold again after the rich growth of the seventeenth century, there were very talented landscape-painters in the earlier part of the nineteenth century also; and, though it be true that the new generation but rarely admits the worth of that which precedes it, a time was bound to come when we should learn to appreciate those painters who worthily continued the seventeenth-century traditions and who were the precursors of the new florescence. If we go further into the lives of those painters, we shall find that fame and consideration were their portion, both here and abroad. And we, who have followed the magnificence of the Hague masters with so great an admiration, but who have also seen it fade away in feeble imitation of a misunderstood emotional power, when occasionally we come upon those somewhat antiquated landscapes in a museum, at a dealer's, at an auction sale, in the midst of those imitations, of the weaker works of to-day, we are struck by their vigour and love of nature, by that healthy vigour which was always reserved for the greatest. The composition may have become a little old-fashioned, the thing represented may remain within the limits of an anecdote, the influence of the light on the landscape may not in general have been so very much the one and only moving power as in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, the subject itself may have been heavier, the colouring browned over with a yellow varnish or blackened through the bitumen employed, the filling in may have been made too much a matter for separate treatment: this was, when all is said, done in obedience to the taste of the public, which preferred to buy landscapes with figures and animals, water with accurately-detailed ships upon it. None of the painters of that time would have been capable of making the reply which Willem Maris gave to one who asked him why he always painted cows:


 * "I never paint cows, but only effects of light."

The nineteenth century set in with five landscape-painters who have shown by the work which they left behind them that they never ceased to admire and study the painting of the seventeenth century. And so greatly was this the case that we receive no impression of the eighteenth century at all in the better part of their work and but little in the remainder. The colour and workmanship of two of them was entirely in the beautiful manner of the old masters, while the arrangement of all of them was quite free of that rhetorical side which makes later landscape-painters, for all their skill, seem antiquated. Their names are, in the order of their births, Jacob van Strij, Dirk Jan van der Laen, Jan Kobell, Wouter Joannes van Troostwijk and George Pieter Westenberg. Jacob van Strij was a native of Dordrecht. He was born in 1756 and died in 1815. His work is imbued with admiration for Aelbert Cuyp and he introduced Cuyp's colour-schemes so cleverly into his work that their pictures were often mistaken for one another. Also, the works left behind at his death included eleven copies after Cuyp, although it was not always a literal copying that he applied to his own work. Immerzeel says, as an instance of Van Strij's energy:


 * "His longing to give a faithful rendering of nature was so strong that, however great his physical pain (he suffered for many years from gout), he would drive over the ice in a sleigh in bleak winter to make sketches for pictures which he subsequently painted."

His landscapes with cattle excel through the warm colouring of their sunlight. In a small upper room at the Rijksmuseum is a Going to Market, by Jacob van Strij, which displays in all its purity the bright atmosphere of his vigorous predecessor, although the composition is a little too much filled in after the Van Berchem manner. He was a pupil of the Antwerp Drawing Academy and of the history-painter Lens, but he formed himself principally upon his studies of nature and the old landscape-painters. His work was greatly valued in its day.

Landscape - D. J. van der Laen (Royal Picture Gallery, Berlin)

The second, D. J. van der Laen, was born at Zwolle in 1759. He was a member of an old and considerable family and was educated at Leiden, where, however, he soon left the university for Hendrik Meyer's manufactory of hangings. He began by painting genre-pieces, but soon confined himself more closely to landscape, in which he came to excel in so remarkable a degree that Thoré, when visiting the Suermondt collection at Aix-la-Chapelle, took one of his landscapes for a Vermeer of Delft. The little old house in the middle does certainly resemble the little old houses of the great Delft artist in the Six Museum, only the composition is fuller and the house is overshadowed by a tall tree, behind which appears a stretch of dunes in the manner of Wijnants, who was much imitated at that time. In the foreground, to the left, is an inoffensive "set-off," very usual at the period, in the shape of a splintered tree-stump. To the right is an outbuilding, set at right angles to the house itself and grown over with a vine. Although it reminds one most particularly of Vermeer, this little picture, which was bought at the sale of the Suermondt collection, suggests by turns Ruysdael, Hobbema and Cuyp. But no one suspected that it was painted about 1800. The painting in the Rijksmuseum is greatly inferior. Van der Laen was a friend of Rhijnvis Feith and drew some illustrations for his Fanny. He died in 1829.

Landscape in Gelderland - J. Kobell (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Jan Kobell belongs to a whole generation of Rotterdam artists, all of whom were talented, energetic landscape-painters, greatly in demand in their time, and all of whom died young, at thirty or forty. Jan Kobell, the chief of them, was born at Rotterdam in 1782 and educated at the Jansenist orphan asylum at Utrecht. He received lessons in painting at the school kept by W. R. van der Wall, a son of the Utrecht sculptor and himself a painter of landscapes with cattle. After achieving a considerable name in his native country, he sent a Meadow with three small animals for exhibition in Paris in 1812, which is praised by Landon in his Salon of the same year. He now received commissions from France and was really successful, but he was over-ambitious and dissatisfied. His mind broke down in the following year and he died in 1814.

When we look at Kobell's little pictures in the Rijksmuseum, with their charming presentation, their careful execution, their restful composition and a certain elegiac quality peculiar to his best work, we find it difficult to understand this ending to his life. He seemed to combine the calm execution of Paul Potter with something in the composition that reminds one of Dujardin or of Adriaan van de Velde. This is certain, that he was a cultured painter, who, even if he did not look for a certain poetry of expression in his landscapes with cattle, achieved it in spite of himself. In 1831, one of his paintings, in Professor Bleuland's collection, fetched 2,835 guilders. He left a number of drawings and a few sensitive, delicate little etchings.

Landscape in Gelderland - Van Troostwijk (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

It has been observed, in connection, with Potter's early death, that artists who have been allotted but a short span of life often produce as much, or even more, in those few years than others who live much longer. It is as though they intuitively feel a need for haste. This applies not only to Kobell, but also to W. J. van Troostwijk, a member of the well-to-do class, born in Amsterdam in 1782. He is said to have painted for his amusement; but, whether we regard him as an amateur or a professional, there is no doubt but that he employed his time well. He was taught by the brothers Andriessen, of whom the elder had had Quinckhard for his master, and began by painting portraits, which he soon abandoned for the Potter style, which attracted him more. Two of his landscapes in the Rijksmuseum make a really astonishing impression in the surroundings amid which they are placed. Like Van der Laen's landscape, they impress one with their sheer artistic merit, their fine, wholesome conception, their true Dutch compactness. But, as against the study of the old masters which is apparent in the others, we find here something more modern, a greater freedom of workmanship and ideas. And, although the vigorous colouring, the positive conception, the manner of execution all betray the proficient painter, there is something so very different, so much less artificial in the independent choice of subjects as naturally to suggest an enthusiastic amateur rather than an experienced studio-painter. Again, the sultry blue of a summer sky, the deep green of the heavy thatch of a sheepfold and the white of the cows display a richness of colour which very closely approaches the modern and which is found (true, in a more complicated scheme) in the Barbizon school. Van Troostwijk possessed an originality of ideas that made him say:

"I admire Potter, Dujardin and Van der Velde, but I follow only simple and beautiful nature. If you wish to compare my work, compare it with my earlier efforts or, rather, compare it with nature."

And, notwithstanding his great dissatisfaction with his work, which often he completed only at the bidding of his friends, he knew quite well what he wanted:

"In Potter himself," he once said, "there is something which, it seems to me, ought to have been different and which Potter himself must have felt. But how for ahead of me was this same Potter, who died in his twenty-eighth year!"

Later investigations have shown that Potter lived one year longer. Van Troostwijk, however, did die in 1810, before attaining the age of twenty-eight. He was a talented and, for his period, an astonishing painter. His drawings also were in great request and, towards the end of his life, he produced a few etchings.

View in Amsterdam - G. P. Westenberg (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

The fifth of the group, George Pieter Westenberg, offers for our admiration, in his View of Amsterdam under Snow, all those qualities of good painting which have distinguished landscape-painters at any given time. The picture is painted with directness and sobriety; is simply and yet broadly observed, firm and even in workmanship, without being laboured, and has the depth of penetration of a Ruysdael. Nor need we be acquainted with the fact that Westenberg was a great expert in the works of our old masters, whom he studied here and abroad, to arrive at this knowledge; for, whereas this little picture reminds us of Ruysdael and, more particularly, of the wintry view in the Dupper collection, the town-view in Teyler's Museum as powerfully suggests Vermeer of Delft, not only through the character and treatment of the little old houses, but also through a certain yellow and blue in the jackets of the women sitting on the door-steps.

Westenberg was born at Nijmegen in 1791 and came to Amsterdam in 1808, where he was taught by Jan Hulswit (1766-1822), a tapestry- painter whose drawings in the style of Ostade and Beerstraten were often greatly appreciated. He, in his turn, had as his pupils his kinsman Kasper Karsen (1810-1896), a deserving painter of landscapes and town-pieces, George Andries Roth (1809-1884), Hendrik Gerrit ten Cate (1803-1856) and Hendrik Jacobus Scholten, mentioned in the following chapter. In 1838, he was appointed director of the Museum of Modern Art in the Pavilion at Haarlem. We do not know whether he failed to make a sufficient living as a painter, but in 1857 he resigned his post and went to Java with his family to fill a civil appointment in Batavia. He died at Brummen in 1873.

Still Water - Nicolaas Bauer (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

More important than Westenberg is Nicolaas Bauer, who was born at Harlingen in 1767 and died at the same Frisian village in 1820. He was taught by his father, a portrait-painter, began his career as a tapestry-painter, but afterwards painted town-views and landscapes. A view of Amsterdam seen from the IJ and one of Rotterdam from the Maas belong to his best works. There is a pleasant freshness and movement in these little pieces, combined with a striking originality of conception and colour.

There were many Frisian painters at that period, including Willem Bartel van der Kooi, who was born at Augustinusga in 1768 and who made a name as a portrait-painter at the Hague and Ghent. His masters were, first, a skilful amateur called Verrier and, later, Beekkerk, the painter. Things went differently in those days: it appears that concentration upon one's deliberately chosen profession was not always deemed essential; at any rate, he abandoned his art in 1795 to become the representative of the electors of Friesland and afterwards in favour of various political appointments. These, however, may have belonged to the sinecures that were very common at the end of the eighteenth century; for, in 1804, Van der Kooi went on an art-journey to Düsseldorf, where he copied portraits by Van Dijck and made so much progress that, in 1808, his picture, A Lady with a Footman handing a Letter, won the 2,000-guilder prize at the exhibition. This piece is now at the Rijksmuseum and is no more than pale coloured plaster. The Town-hall at Haarlem has a portrait by him which has something in common with Jan Adam Kruseman's Portrait of Himself although it is much weaker. He died in 1837.

The Laboratory - Johannes Jelgerhuis (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Johannes Jelgerhuis Rienkzn. was born in 1770 at Leeuwarden and was taught drawing by his father, Rienk Jelgerhuis, and painting by Pieter Barbiers Pz. (1748-1842), the landscape-painter. The father, as I have said in an earlier chapter, was best known for his pastel and crayon portraits; the son painted portraits and interiors. We find pictures and drawings by this artist in different collections and even at this date his picture in the Rijksmuseum, The Bookshop of P. Meijer Warnars, strikes one by the typical representation, which, although simpler, does not differ greatly from the concrete manner in which De Brakeleer treated similar subjects. His Apothecary is in the same manner, entirely excellent, very graphically and at the same time concretely executed and yet astonishingly simple. His View of the Choir in the New Church, Amsterdam was greatly praised at the time. He died at Haarlem in 1836.

Notary Köhne and his Clerk - W. Hendriks (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Less stimulating than Jelgerhuis, but excellent genre-painters, were Wybrandt Hendriks (1744-1831) and Adriaan de Lelie (1755-1820), both of whom have left interiors which, while lacking all the concentration of light, all the fine atmosphere in which, in the old masters, the figures move so naturally and freely, still have something that connects them with the older pictures. Hendriks, an Amsterdammer by birth, painted landscapes, portraits, corporation- and family-pieces and still-life pictures of game and flowers. His Woman reading, in Teyler's Museum, bears a distant resemblance to a Metsu. He is more original in his portrait of Notary Kolme and his Clerk, whom he painted in their own environment, at full-length, but in small dimensions. This little piece, which has nothing in common with the seventeenth century, hangs at the Rijksmuseum beside a genre-painting by Quinckhard. It is blacker in tone, but surpasses it in originality and distinction. To judge by the prices fetched by his works after his death, his views of towns, or rather streets, were esteemed more highly than his interiors. The reason may, however, be due to topographical considerations. Hendriks was, for more than thirty years, steward of Teyler's Institute and superintendent of the collection of pictures attached to it.

Woman making Cakes - A. De Lelie (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Although Adriaan de Lelie was, in many respects, far behind Hendriks, he was a deserving painter of interiors. He was born at Tilburg, studied at Antwerp and Düsseldorf and settled in Amsterdam, where he painted mainly interiors, portraits and family and corporation-pieces. His works are to be found in the principal collections and were also valued and sought after by foreigners. The Fodor Museum has a Cook by him which, although somewhat empty and rather flat and narrow in the face, is, like the Woman making Cakes in the Rijksmuseum, a well-painted, well-composed picture.