Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century/The New Formula

CHAPTER XII

The New Formula

Johannes Theodoor (commonly known as Jan) Toorop as born in 1860 at Poerweredjo in Java and was the first to bring from France to Holland, viâ Brussels, the so-called Neo-impressionism of the "Vingtistes." Although in Amsterdam he belonged to the generation described in the preceding chapter, he received his real education amid the great movement of the young Belgians and may be said to have introduced a new phase into Dutch art. In 1889, he arranged, at the Amsterdam panorama an exhibition of the XX, in which he showed his Broek in Waterland and his Twilight Idyll, two pieces painted in broken colour under the Vingtiste influence. The exhibition contained much that was interesting and much that was beautiful, but failed to make any general impression.

Whatever Toorop may have produced before this exhibition and he had already made himself known by some drawings of London poverty of astonishing realism it is certain that his work now struck out an absolutely new line and presented a new aspect of Dutch meadows, of the North-Sea coast and of the motives to be found in the lives of the fisher-folk. This was brought out in his Broek in Waterland, a picture in which the sober lines of a North-Holland pastureland were approached for the first time, intersected with rectilinear ditches, broken only by a few stumpy pollard-willows. It is a view entirely without artificial embellishment, without any search for the harmonious in those fields, where the setting sun filled the ditches with orange light, clashing crudely with the dark green of the meadows and the pale sky. There was no question here of beauty or ugliness: it was the brutal reality, powerfully grasped and strongly expressed.

This picture owed its origin to a trip to North Holland taken while Toorop was living in Brussels with the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren. It was only when seen in this way, as it were with a foreign eye, that the sheer plainness of these meadows and ditches could have been observed and rendered in so ruthless and literal a fashion.

The Wave, the most important work of the first portion of Toorop's residence at Katwijk, is a wonderfully clever and elaborate analysis of the sea, a very feast of movement and colour, a mosaic of variegated tints, with the blue of the sky reflected in the bottle-green wave, the yellow of the fishermen's oilskins, the endless facets of the rippling waters. This work, although not painted in broken colour, already shows a tendency towards a more decorative style of composition.

A third important picture was Melancholy, represented by the figure of a woman of Katwijk-Binnen leaning against the doorpost of her house, with quiet eyes set in a pale oval, a slender little figure and narrow sleeves, appearing mediævally small against the breadth of the endless extent of her petticoats. She stares into the twilight; round her is the little garden with sunflowers and low railings, which look strange in the failing light. The predominant tone of the picture is the dark blue of her apron. To my mind, this Melancholy, so distinguished in its conception, so suggestive in its mood, is Toorop's most interesting work in this direction. Later, his ideas became much more intricate and metaphysical; but in no other work have idea and form, or rather mood and form been more perfectly blended and the result charms at the same time both the eye and the mind.

Thanks to an unusually complex ancestry, Toorop inherited the characteristics of the native East-Indian, the Norseman and the Hollander. Richard Muther, after describing the curious impression which Toorop's work made upon the Viennese public, goes on to prophesy that at some future time he will be known as the Giotto of his day. I do not greatly care to anticipate the verdict of posterity and prefer to say that Giotto, the shepherd, who evolved his first vision of life with charcoal on the walls of the sheepcote, transferred the art of painting from the hierarchical forms of the Byzantines to the living being, whereas Toorop, in depicting nature, makes his human beings the exponents of his ideas. But what Toorop has indeed succeeded in expressing, at an earlier period and to a greater extent than our literature and this, no doubt, is what Dr. Muther meant by his comparison is the scepticism of our time, the decline of established religious belief, the search after new dogmas.

His mystic symbolism is popular in the best sense of the word. In his Three Brides, he represents the three aspects of womanhood, personifies the senses of sound and smell: the characteristics of the three women clash against one another in round and angular lines; sound is indicated by threads in a linear design resembling that of a great orchestra, richly and magnificently filled. Now sound had already been personified by Blake; and good and evil in Gothic art and even earlier. But the difference in Toorop lies in the obvious strength of his technique, a rare gift, which enables him almost to represent, set down and fix the abstract, daintily and delicately in his portraits of children, powerfully and nervously in his symbolic and robustly in his realistic works.

The work of Vincent van Gogh fell like a meteor into the plains of our national art in the winter of 1892, two years after the painter's death. A meteor in very truth! Here was no question of gradual, technical, artistic development, that had been followed out year by year. That which first greeted our eyes was the most passionate, desperate and impulsive work, the technical part of which, as it then appeared, before time had matured it, seemed beyond the power of the painter's art. It was the evidence of the artist's struggle with his medium, of his struggle with nature; it was the act of despair of a fanatic; it was the revelation of a visionary.

It was no easy matter for work like that of Van Gogh to find acceptance in an artistic environment such as ours, based upon a culture which we owe to the seventeenth century. The pictures selected for exhibition out of the plenitude which he had left behind him, unframed for the most part, unbridled utterances of artistic passion, swept over the white peace of our artistic effort like a seething lava, bubbling up from depths which only a few were able to understand or to admire.

Van Gogh's work represents not so much a creed as a man-to-man struggle; his colour is not the result of a well thought-out scheme, but is an effort rather to grasp the light, to hold it fast, to suggest colour in light without the use of brown or bitumen. And, as it was his chief object to render life, to express what he saw rather than to produce an harmonious painting, he strove to fling his impressions, as it were, upon his canvas in one breath; for, as he wrote, "faire et refaire un sujet sur la même toile ou sur plusieurs toiles revient en somme au même sérieux." And his painting and drawing alike revealed the same mingling of conscious and unconscious knowledge.

Van Gogh was a born fanatic, a reformer and prophet preaching in the streets of London, an idealist travelling to the mines in the Borinage to carry to the slaves of the mine the gospel which Jesus once carried to the poor fishermen of the Sea of Galilee, a man in the full sense of the word, endowed with the temperament of a fanatic, in whom the balance is never at rest, a prophet by virtue of his belief in his own powers, a prophet also in the artistic sense through his belief in life and colour, a zealot in so far as he endeavoured to propagate the theories of the "Luministes" with all the force that fanaticism lends; but he had not the nature which can long endure a doubt as to its powers. And, notwithstanding the many moments of happiness which he owed to his art, despite the fact that the inspired hours in his short life as a painter were almost uninterrupted and leaving his more rustic Dutch period out of the question, he does in a way suggest the painter in the Japanese cartoon, who lies felled to the ground by his own work. His imaginative drawings and landscapes were the nightmares of a man who was bound to perish in the greatness of his own longings; they were nightmares of light and colour, flooded with the full glare of glistening sunlight, glittering with transparent greens, with sulphurous yellows, with startling violets; sultry atmospheric effects, more alarming at times than the visions of an Odilon Redon.

Many roads lead to Rome. Art is not bound to a few stated formulas; and the only question is whether Van Gogh, in a given subject, has expressed what he desired. This no one will deny. And, whether we see him move amid more attractive surroundings, such as summery parks, avenues of chestnut-trees in bloom, where the sun casts motley patches upon the ground and upon children at play, or the olive-groves of the South, "where the sun burns into the. ground like sulphur;" whether he paints those glowing portraits or those works which we call the illustrations for Zola's novels: this much is certain that, in every case, he largely enriches our sphere of thought and our perceptive faculties.

And his flower-studies too! Who, in our country, has ever painted flowers as he did, so true to nature, so real, so actually lifelike?

"Vincent's flowers look like people," said Pissarro.

And Emile Bernard said:

"Vincent's flowers look like princesses."

To us they are real flowers in their distinction, their form, their bloom, their colour, simple and broad, just as they blossom in a Whitsun meadow before a child's delighted eyes.

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 at Groot Zundert, in North Brabant. He was the son of a clergyman and was brought up to be a dealer in works of art, in which trade his uncle Vincent was of such great assistance to the younger Dutchmen, first at the Hague and afterwards in the firm of Goupil in Paris. His brother too, Theodoor van Gogh, who was also at Goupil's, afterwards helped the artists of Vincent's movement to the best of his power. After Vincent had worked for some time at Goupil's at the Hague, in London and Paris, he grew dissatisfied and left the business, in 1876, in order to go to London as a teacher. He returned to Holland, worked for a short time for a bookseller at Dordrecht and then went to Amsterdam to prepare for his theological studies. Here again he found the road too long: he threw up the university and went to Brussels and, thence, to the Borinage, to become a gospel-preacher among the miners. This environment influenced him more than any other: at any rate, it made him take to drawing.

It is true that, in a letter from London, he had sent home a couple of rather childish, yet well-observed little drawings, but these could hardly give an inkling of his talent and, moreover, they stood alone, for, as a child, Vincent, although scribbling and even modelling, like most children, had shown no particular inclination for drawing and his relations were not aware that, before his visit to London, he had ever produced anything worth mentioning. This is also apparent from the excitement displayed by Theo, who, delighted at hearing that Vincent was sketching in the Borinage, exclaimed:

"Now you shall see something! Vincent has taken to drawing: that means a second Rembrandt!"

No sooner had he begun to draw than he suddenly left for Brussels, where he worked zealously at draughtsmanship. But he did not stay long, for, in 1881, he returned to his father's house at Etten and, towards the end of that year, went to the Hague, where he received occasional advice from Mauve. He worked at the Hague until the summer of 1883 and, after a stay in Drente, went back to his parents, who were now living at Nuenen. In 1885, he went to Antwerp, spent a few months at the academy and, in the spring of 1886, arrived in Paris, where he was strongly influenced by the movement of Monet, Pissarro and Gauguin and himself exercised an influence upon that movement. He next left for the South, went to Arles, later to San Rémy and, lastly, to Anvers-sur-Oise, where he died in the summer of 1890.

After his death, his friend Émile Bernard published, in the Mercure de France, a number of letters addressed to him by Vincent and, later, some fragments of letters to his brother Theo van Gogh, which were supplied by the latter's widow. These letters, continued in a Flemish monthly, Van Nu en Straks although we know only fragments in which he writes of his work and art (how long must we wait before the letters are published in full?) give us an insight into Theo's devotion for his brother, which made him hold the trade of a dealer in works of art as sacred as a religious belief and made him suffer perhaps even more than Vincent himself at the delay in the acknowledgment of the new artistic formula. And they reveal all Vincent's theories and ideals, his goodness, his moods, variable as the mercury in a thermometer, his personality as a man and an artist, young, gay, unsuspecting, indefatigable: untiring, too, in spite of his lack of physical strength. At early as 1882, he wrote:


 * "My hands have become rather too white for my taste. People like myself have no right to be ill."

Most of the letters date from the last period, especially at Arles, the period of the longing to see and grasp all things. They are letters in which, between the cries of despair, gleam his indestructible ideals, hesitations, confessions, shrill contrasts, woven on the golden threads of his dreams, on the golden threads of his love for his brother Theo. Full of this admiring love, he writes that Theo is as great a painter, as great an artist through his selling of pictures, because, by each sale, he enables the artist to produce more pictures:


 * "Si un peintre se ruine le caractère en travaillant dur à la peinture, qui le rend stérile pour bien d'autres choses (vie de famille etc.), si conséquemment il peint non seulement avec de la couleur, mais avec de l'abnégation et du renoncement de soi et le cœur brisé, ton travail à toi non seulement ne t'est pas paye non plus, mais te coûte exactement comme à ce peintre l'effacement de ta personalité, moitié voluntairement, moitié fortuitement. Ceci pour te dire que, si tu fais de la peinture indirectement, tu es plus productif que par exemple, moi."

Or again - and what artist endeavouring to make his own way has not a hundred times exclaimed the same? - he cries:


 * "Si l'on peignait comme Bouguerau, alors on pourrait espérer de gagner!"

Great regret was felt among, his friends at his death: "He felt everything, ce pauvre Vincent, he felt too much, " said old Tanguy, the simple artists' colour-man, the friend of all young painters and of Vincent too, who was always ready to accept pictures or studies instead of payment for his colours. And he was right: Vincent van Gogh felt too intensely to endure passively the greatness of nature, too deeply to work without hurrying, without swerving and with that composure which characterizes the majority of Dutchmen. Judge Vincent's work as we may, one thing is certain, that he, in whom perhaps more than in any other of our painters bubbled the passionate life of the last end of the century, afforded in his work the last great sensation which the art of the nineteenth century was to present to the Netherlands.

In 1891, the Hague Art Club was founded, in which Toorop and Vincent van Gogh were honoured as masters. Their followers included Thorn Prikker, born at the Hague in 1869, the painter who practised symbolism for a short time and who exhibited his dignified Heads of the Apostles at one of the club's shows, but who subsequently devoted himself exclusively to the applied arts.

Another exhibitor was Pieter Cornelis de Moor, born at Rotterdam in 1866, a pupil of Jan Striening, of the Antwerp Academy and of Benjamin Constant, whose little flower-decked Bride showed great promise at the time. He afterwards followed the modern French draughtsmen, to a certain extent, in his choice of subjects, but continued his method of symbolic treatment. He has often succeeded in showing what symbolists exactly desire to express, as for example in his Princesse de Lamballe.

Then there was Theodoor van Hoytema, born at Rotterdam in 1870, the facile draughtsman of ornithological subjects, which he introduced as illustrations in coloured picture-books with a great feeling for design and effect and afterwards lithographed with style and taste.

Paul Rink (1862-1903) exhibited here: he, like Toorop, began by employing the colour-arrangement of the Belgians and brought back a number of bright and pretty studies and pictures from Tangiers, painted in this manner; he afterwards executed the mural decorations of the Hague Art Club, but made his name more generally known by his coloured sketches of Volendam types, often too fluently painted.

And I must also mention Edgard Willem Koning, born in 1869, who, with his Nurses and Children, was the first to show that a mural painting can be taken straight from life.

Simon Moulijn, born at Rotterdam in 1866, is one of those modern younger men who, like Thorn Prikker and, in certain respect, Hoytema, arriving early at a crisis, learn to think sooner than to paint, one of those who are influenced by many movements before they have acquired positive knowledge. The first conscious influence was imparted by the modern Frenchmen and especially by Toorop and Vincent van Gogh. Moulijn too wished to play his part in the new art which was to give so much that was beautiful to the end of the century, but which, at that time, as the painter himself admits, gave rise to anomalous work. His first attempts at painting were attempts and nothing more; and, although he is now busy mastering the difficulties of the craft, he is of significance to us only as the lithographer, the draughtsman of peaceful little spots of nature, little hidden homesteads, which he represents in a refined and contemplative mood.

I must not omit the name of Henri van Daalhoff, born at Leiden in 1867, the painter of stories and fairy-tales. He is a sensitive, but not a powerful artist and is likely to make himself eventually a permanent reputation as an illustrator.

In that branch of landscape-painting in which form and lines were sought after not so much for the sake of mood or emotion as for their own sake, in that search for purity which the increasing admiration for it had aroused, I must first mention Maurits Willem van der Valk, born in Amsterdam in 1857, the amiable theorist who, at an early date, cherished the desire to make of a water-colour a pure water-colour, of an etching an etching, light and transparent, and nothing more. He learnt to see the lines in a landscape at Anvers-sur-Oise; adapted his knowledge to Dutch scenery; and, with something almost Japanese in his arrangement of mass and line, now seeks colour in flat tones.

To his group belongs Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig, born in Amsterdam in 1866, a pupil of Allebé's, who began by painting in the style of Neuhuijs. When he saw the tulip-fields at Bennebroek in all their luminous beauty of colour, he came to the conviction that colour should be rendered more as colour and light as light; and thus, as if of his own initiative, he arrived at the discovery which the great Frenchmen and Vincent and Toorop had made before him, a discovery which is of scientific origin, namely the juxtaposition of unmixed colours in small proportions, without the intervening medium of brown or ochre, so that light becomes lighter and both light and shade more full of colour. Hart Nibbrig, who is especially to be praised for the honesty with which he sets down fields of grass and corn and buckwheat under a blazing sun, lacks something of the passion and enthusiasm necessary to make so systematic a proceeding express all his feelings. The result is that, clever and consistent as his work may be, it does not wholly reach the spectator.

More harmonious is the work of Derk Wiggers, born at Amersfoort in 1866, the painter who, above all, sought for purity of form in the more broken and undulating Guelder landscape. His is an important and distinguished linear scheme, which he occasionally exaggerates, perhaps, but by means of which he succeeds in rendering a few divine moments of nature. Such are The Little Church at Heelsum, Bentheim Castle and other panoramic drawings, in which the cool twilight sky hangs tense behind the hilly landscape.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the attention of many of these younger men was diverted in the direction of the applied arts, which some of them have enriched with exceedingly important works. I will mention only Carel Lion Cachet, born in 1864, and Theodoor Nieuwenhuis, born in 1866, who do not come within the scope of this book, and Gerrit Willem Dijsselhoff, born at Zwollerskappel in 1866, who was the first in our country to achieve something exceedingly beautiful on a basis of East-Indian art. He is the only one who has produced decorative water-colour drawings that were not epicene because, in the colour that of the sarongs of the native states of Java a shrill and spontaneous blue, and on a ground of fine yellow, he has succeeded in introducing in the most decorative fashion all manner of small animals: silvery sticklebacks, drawn in a masterly way, Mediterranean crayfish, with their curious forms, or the motley sea-anemones, all worked up into a decorative, self-contained and absolutely harmonious whole.

In quite recent years, our young painters have been once more attracted by Paris, especially by that great draughtsman Steinlen, and also, though in a lesser degree, by the modern English and German illustrators. But these, the latest artists of all, belong entirely to the present century and not to that which forms the subject of this volume.