Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century

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DUTCH ART IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY G. HERMINE MARIUS TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS with a photogravure and 130 reproductions in half-tone LONDON ALEXANDER MORING LIMITED (THE DE LA MORE PRESS) 32 GEORGE STREET, HANOVER SQUARE, W. - 1908

I. | Introductory

II. | The History-painters

III. | The Romanticists

IV. | The Landscape and Genre Painters

V. | The Forerunners of the Hague School

VI. | The Masters of the Cabinet Picture

VII. | The Hague School: Introduction

VIII. | Intermezzo

IX. | The Hague School: Sequel

X. | The Younger Masters of the Hague School

XI. | The Reaction of the Younger Painters of Amsterdam

XII. | The New Formula

Introductory

CHAPTER I

Introductory

The seventeenth century bequeathed to the eighteenth three painters all of whom and two in particular heralded the spirit of the new age in matters of conception, colour and execution. The greatest of the three, Jacob de Wit, who was called the Rubens of his time, is esteemed as an historical painter he executed a part of the Orange Room at the House in the Wood and is world-famous for his painted bas-reliefs, the so-called witjes, in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam and elsewhere. These not only excel as extraordinary imitations of marble, to which De Wit owes his popularity, but the natural attitudes and grouping of the cherubs prove him to be, without a doubt, the greatest Dutch decorative artist of the eighteenth century. The second was Jan M. Quinckhard, who, as Van der Willigen says, "was a very good, yes, we venture to say, in many respects an excellent portrait-painter; he was particularly fortunate in his likenesses, his drawing was accurate, his brushwork good and his colouring soft and delicate." He, like De Wit, belongs entirely to the eighteenth century in ideas and his work did little to contribute towards the transition of the painted portrait from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. The same may be said of the third painter, Cornelis Troost, who, in spite of certain drawings that remind us of the seventeenth century and, in particular, of the somewhat artificial elegance of Nicolaas Maes, was essentially a man of his time. All his work in various mediums is too strongly imbued with the eighteenth-century spirit to permit us to regard him as a result or consequence of the previous century. Not that he can have troubled much about the matter, for abundant fame was his portion, so much so that he was known, in his day, as the Dutch Hogarth, a comparison which, like most of its kind, contained but a minimum of truth.

If, nevertheless, we insist upon considering these three painters as offshoots of our great century, then we must needs add that they were the last effort of an exhausted soil. The art of painting declined into the art of decoration or scene-painting, the painter's workshop was transformed into the tapestry-factory. The minute, concentrated charm of our so-called little masters expanded itself into painted hangings; the stately portraits of the time degenerated, with few exceptions, into the pale, powdered pastels that seemed deliberately designed for the representation of the caricatural periwig.

Still, if only for the reason that the eighteenth century contains the predecessors or, at any rate, the teachers of the painters of the nineteenth century, it is well worth while to consider these decoration-painters from another point of view than that of the applied art which owed its prosperity to the luxury of the merchant-princes of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Middelburg. For not only had the best of these decoration-painters learnt their art as real painters and merely altered the character of their productions in obedience to the whims of the day: most of them did paint or draw landscapes or portraits and prove that they had it in their power to satisfy a demand for real painting, should it ever arise. For instance, in the Fodor Museum in Amsterdam, certain drawings by the tapestry-painter and manufacturer, Jacob Cats, display a strength, an old-Dutch quality, an originality which we should hardly have expected to find in those days. This Jacob Cats was born in 1741 at Altona and came with his parents, at an early age, to Amsterdam, where he achieved considerable success with both his hangings and drawings; and, although the tapestries are no longer easy to find, his drawings go to show that he lacked the affectation, if not the prolixity, that clung to many of those painters, especially towards the end of the century. They are very pleasantly executed, were greatly esteemed in their day and still fetch good prices under the hammer. Cats died 1799.

Another tapestry-painter of note is Hendrik Meijer, born in Amsterdam in 1737, who also drew landscapes in body-colour, sap-colour and Indian ink.

His Scheveningen Beach, a picture that formed part of the Des Tombe collection at the Hague, is said to have been his master-piece and to be preferable in many respects to a sea-piece by Schotel. From our point of view, however, this painter's chief claim to importance lies in the fact that he was the teacher of various nineteenth-century artists. He died in London in 1793.

A Family Group - R. Jelgerhuis (The property of Mrs. Nijhof-Cool, Scheveningen)

Aart Schouman, an eighteenth-century painter living at Dordrecht, preserved the seventeenth-century traditions more intrinsically, in so far as externals were concerned, and continued to paint corporation-pieces, which, if they cannot be reckoned among the finest of their kind, are at least able to hold their own. The fact is that many of these painters retained the arrangement of the old masters and copied them so industriously, often in water-colour or pastel, that they ended by making their style their own and frequently lapsed into contenting themselves with the production of but slightly altered copies. It is even said that Boymans, the famous collector, was induced to buy an interior by Laqui, one of those painters, under the impression that he was purchasing a Gerard Dou. We may take it, then, that these painters were still connected by a fine thread with the landscape-painters of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, so great were the demands of decoration-painting upon their strength and energy, that they had sunk remarkably low in the matter of portrait-painting. And yet portraits were asked for not only by the princes and the aristocracy, but also by the well-to-do middle class. The tapestry-painters produced a number of small family-portraits, mostly naive and weak, although occasionally distinguished by a certain delicacy of conception. In addition to Adriaan de Lelie, Jean Auguste Daiwaille and others, part of whose work comes within the nineteenth century, and a few miniature-painters, of whom Temminck was one of the foremost, portraits were executed, for the greater part, by travelling portrait-painters, including Rienk Jelgerhuis, who has no fewer than 7,763 standing to his credit. Or, again, people would sit for their portraits in the course of the endless journeys which it was at that time their custom to take. This applied especially to miniatures, which were painted, so as to be easily portable, in lockets, on watch-keys, rings or snuff-boxes. And, although these were affected by the general decline, they sometimes displayed a daintiness of draughtsmanship, a softness of colouring and, above all, a certain "distinction" to which few of the larger portraits of the time can lay claim.

The French painters who frequented the luxurious Courts of the Bourbons or who followed in the wake of Napoleon and had more orders within the limits of the empire than they were able to execute were much too busy to visit less favoured countries on the chance of picking up commissions for portraits. The case was the same with the great English painters; so that this branch of industrial art was reserved, for the most part, for the Germans. Their portraits were stiff and expressionless. The grouping of the small family-portraits, usually in pastel, suggested the traditional semi-circle in which Molière is played at the Théâtre Français. They seemed, however, to give pleasure to the purchasers; and, to tell the truth, on looking into these unpretentious little family-groups, we find that they present a more general family-resemblance and are more lifelike than most of the photographic portraits of thirty years ago.

H. R. H. Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, consort of William V., Stadtholder of the Netherlands - J. F. A. Tischbein (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

The two principal portrait-painters who came from foreign countries at the end of the eighteenth century were Tischbein and Hodges. Johann Friedrich August Tischbein, although born at Maastricht in 1750, belonged entirely to the German school. He was one of the few younger men who escaped the prevailing classicism of his time. His preference for portrait-painting drove him to foreign Courts; and for fourteen years he painted at the Hague, at the Court of the Stadtholder and his family. He was a competent and pleasant painter, who reproduced the powdered wigs and the features of his sitters in a refined manner. His portraits of women are of value for our time; and the many pictures which he painted of Wilhelmina of Prussia, the consort of William V., with her powdered hair, vivacious features and the fine colouring of the green dresses, in which he excelled, are in good taste on the whole.

He was famed for the naturalness of his ideas, but, as times were, was unable to exercise any influence upon the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century, with its sensibility, its gallantry, its powder, patches and pastels, had retreated before the harshness of the heroic emotions, decked in classic garb, with which David opened the nineteenth. Tischbein died in 1812.

The other, Charles Howard Hodges (1764-1837), was a painter of greater importance, a man of excellent gifts, whose portraits strike one at once by their elegance, their bright colouring and their supple, if somewhat weak workmanship. Kramm, in his Lives and Works of the Dutch and Flemish Painters, praises him for the subtle manner in which he flattered his sitters. To us he is the portrait-painter of the Empire period; and, although, at a later date, he painted King William I., he also gave us the portraits of Grand pensionary Schimmelpenninck and of Mrs. Ziesenis-Wattier, the famous actress of the time. If he is not to be compared with the great English portrait-painters of the eighteenth century, the fact remains that he possessed something of their taste and especially something of the supple method, the easy, fluent modelling that so greatly distinguished Sir Thomas Lawrence. Hodges was a member of the commission which, after the restoration of Dutch independence, brought back from Paris the paintings that had been taken from us by the French.

Mrs. Fraser - C. H. Hodges (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

It must needs arouse surprise that this portrait-painter did not become the head of a school in his day. True, his talent was distinguished rather than powerful; but, indeed, the polish and refinement of his work are not be despised, especially when we consider at what a low ebb our fortunes then were. His chief pupil was Cornelis Kruseman, who failed to acquire or, at least, to retain his bright colouring, his supple and natural draughtsmanship or his qualities of distinction. Nevertheless, Hodges may have exercised an indirect influence upon his contemporaries. For instance, we find in Pieneman's Battle of Waterloo a cast of features which seems related to those which Hodges portrayed. On the other hand, this may be simply the English type; for Pieneman painted portraits for this picture in England. Perhaps J. A. Kruseman, Cornelis Kruseman's kinsman and pupil, preserved more of Hodges' characteristics than any one else.

England, the land of the poets, was at that time rejoicing in a school of painting which, although mainly based upon the old Dutchmen and Italians, had recently, under Reynolds and Gainsborough, developed into a purely English school. Followed the passionate figure of the poet-painter William Blake, who stood at the entrance to a new century in which Constable and Turner wrought their artistic revolution. Germany had found in Beethoven the loftiest expression of her period of musical creation, an expression which was so brilliantly to influence the whole of the musical and also of the pictorial life of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Germany was celebrating the heyday of her civilization in the little States where, amid this general budding of great minds, Goethe introduced the experimental novel into literature, Novalis wrote his Hymns to Night and Heine, a little later, proclaimed the eternity of romance, while in the art of painting, overshadowed by the theories of Winckelmann, she was able to point to his disciple Anton Rafaël Mengs and the fortunately more independent Chodowiecki. In Spain, the country where great painters appear like meteors, Goya had opened a new era. In France, weary of the carnage that had marked her Revolution, David, the man of iron ability, after glorifying the Republic under Robespierre, called into being, on the ruins of the eighteenth century, an imperial art which came to maturity under Napoleon and became the foundation of a school of painting that kept France at the head of the artistic world for well-nigh a century.

To us, who had lost our liberty, our independence, our strength and who possessed so very little in the domain of art, the beginning of the nineteenth century brought nothing but humiliation upon humiliation. Our national existence appeared to be wiped out. We were without power of action or, consequently, of reaction. True, the seventeenth century had borne fruit in such superabundance that two successive centuries have not sufficed to make us realize it fully. The soil had exhausted itself in producing the miraculous figure of Rembrandt, the epitome of all latent, conscious and unconscious forces, of all the instincts of a people, of the gospel of a nation rejuvenated by its newly-acquired liberty; of Rembrandt, in whom for us the seventeenth century is personified and incarnate. And a long period of rest was needed before the soil would once more become fertile and produce an artist, a dreamer whose genius should fall like a ray of light into a scientific age.

The History-painters

CHAPTER II

The History-painters

It would be impossible to write the history of Dutch painting in the nineteenth century without naming Jan Willem Pieneman as its founder, even though it were only because he was the valued master of Jozef Israëls. This opinion may be regarded as hackneyed and antiquated; and it may be argued that Pieneman and Kruseman and their like did more harm than good to Dutch art, inasmuch as they led it into strange paths. But, apart from the fact that this extraneous tendency was the prevailing one in every country, Pieneman may be credited with having, by the strength of his personality, raised painting to the position of an independent art, able to produce a more powerful school than could ever hope to arise from the continual copying of seventeenth-century master-pieces.

Mrs. Ziesenis-Wattier - J. W. Pieneman (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Pieneman was born at Abcoude in 1770 and destined for a commercial career, for which, however, he was disinclined. He therefore resolved to enter a factory of painted hangings, intending at the same time to learn something of the painter's trade. In the evenings, he drew from the antique and the nude at the Amsterdam Academy, which appears to have been very deficiently equipped, so much so that, according to Van Eynden and Van der Willigen, Pieneman's chief instructor was his own genius. To provide for his maintenance, he began to give lessons at an early date and had to accept commissions to colour prints. In 1805, he was appointed drawing-master to the School of Artillery and Engineering, then still at Amersfoort, and, although he had, in the meantime, won prizes and painted portraits and landscapes, he continued to fill the post until 1816, when King William I. gave him the directorship of the royal collection at the Hague. Four years later, he was appointed the first president of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

Neither his landscapes nor his portraits brought Pieneman the fame which was soon to resound beyond the frontiers of our country. His first success was his Heroism of the Prince of Orange at Quatre-Bras, a large picture, twenty feet by thirteen, painted by order of the government for presentation to the prince. Before reaching its final destination in the palace at Soestdijk, it was exhibited in Amsterdam, Brussels and Ghent and, according to Immerzeel, was praised for its broad and powerful style, its accurate drawing and its fidelity to nature.

The Battle of Waterloo - J. W. Pieneman (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

This was followed by The Battle of Waterloo, the sketch for which is in the Duke of Wellington's possession. The picture, which is twenty-seven feet wide by eighteen high, represents the moment at which the Prince of Orange is being carried, wounded, from the battle-field. The chief figures are painted with attention to details and the wounded prince is thrown into much less prominence than the figure of Wellington himself, who stands like an equestrian statue in the centre of the picture, which serves as an apotheosis of the British field-marshal. Pieneman paid three several visits to London to paint portraits for this historical piece: during one of these, 1819 to 1821, he was the guest of the Duke of Wellington and, in addition to the necessary studies, painted a number of portraits of the leading nobility. In order to produce his large picture, for which he had no commission, he built a studio outside Amsterdam, beyond the Leiden Gate. Here he was visited by King William I., who bought the painting for forty thousand guilders for presentation to the Prince of Orange. It was exhibited in Ghent, Brussels and London and altogether earned about one hundred thousand guilders for the artist.

Portrait of an old Lady - J. W. Pieneman (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Pieneman painted many portraits in Holland as well as in England and in these his artistic temperament is most strongly displayed. One might say of him that he had little of the refined classicism which is to be met with in neighbouring countries; that he possessed more temperament than education, more common sense than intuition and that he was entirely devoid of the pictorial sense which was never lacking in the seventeenth century. But that he possessed a real artist's temperament is proved by his often rough, but always forcible portraits; and, although far from being a quick draughtsman, he had a good idea of the construction of a head, which enabled him to turn out his portraits rapidly enough. He died in 1854.

Mrs. Leembruggen - J. W. Pieneman (The property of Mr. J. Leembruggen, Amsterdam)

The Battle of Waterloo shows none of those passions, of that hatred born of impotence, which urged the Allies forward on that summer's day. The figures of the Duke of Wellington and the other persons in the foreground are good portraits; but neither their attitude nor their action conveys the impression that a fierce and critical contest is taking place. Nor has Pieneman's drawing the suppleness necessary to express a great moment. And yet he possessed what the born artist who, with scanty means, conquers for himself a place in a barren period must needs possess: he had energy and influenced his times. Jozef Israëls has said of him that he was a genius who grew up in an inartistic age; and it was not his fault if the times in which he lived prevented him from developing himself In a society in a state of transformation, where, on the one hand, men, proud of their recovered nationality, asked for topical pictures representing the heroic deeds of the day, while, on the other hand, a pious tendency held sway and called for religious or kindred subjects strictly confined to the limits of the middle-class virtues, there was no opportunity for the exaltation of painting pure and simple and l' Art pour l' art for once became a misplaced maxim.

And then think of the makeshifts with which Pieneman had to content himself. Burdened by an early marriage, he painted his Quatre-Bras in a small upper-part in the Nes, where he had to roll up one half of his enormous canvas, crammed with life-size equestrian figures, in order to paint the other half He must have possessed a certain strength of will, a remarkable power of representation, to complete a work of this kind in circumstances such as these. And yet, though he was honoured in his time and distinguished by his sovereign, though he was socially esteemed and lived in "a stately house on a canal," though one may say of him that he was a great man in a slack time, he will never occupy a place in the ranks of our great painters nor even stand among our "little masters." His chief services to art were rendered as director of the Amsterdam Academy. Israëls describes him as an excellent drawing-master, thoroughly acquainted with the mathematics of the nude and unrivalled in the suggestion of an outline with a bit of chalk or charcoal. And it is certain that, as the master of Jozef Israëls, who drew for seven years under his guidance and never speaks of him other than with respect and esteem, he deserves an honourable place in the memory of us all.

Nicolaas Pieneman, his son and pupil, was born at Amersfoort in 1810, died in 1860 and enjoyed - chiefly at the Hague, where he lived - an even greater favour than his father, thanks to his many portraits of the royal family. It is a pure delight to hear Jozef Israëls reply, when asked how the younger Pieneman painted:

"Klaas Pieneman was a courtier; at an exhibition, he used to walk arm in arm with William the Third!"

He had neither his father's temperament nor vigour and, possibly by way of a reaction against the latter's frequent want of polish, he painted in a soapy and feeble style, especially his royal portraits, which are smooth and insipid and devoid of all life. On the other hand, he must not be judged entirely by his royal portraits: the portrait of his father in the Rijksmuseum and a Head of a Man in the Municipal Museum of Amsterdam are better, although in these too he misses the naturalness that distinguished his father. And, if he had not that charming Portrait of a Child in the Fodor Museum standing to his credit, there would be little say about him but that he was greatly liked and lived in a fine house in the Hague. This portrait, however, places him in a different category and we will gladly forgive him his smooth official portraits for the sake of the great feeling in this little picture.

The Surrender of Diepo Negoro - N. Pieneman (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

His contemporaries judged differently. Kramm writes:

"It is a pleasure to me to be able to write a page in the history of art which greatly increases the fame of the Dutch school of painting of our own times. It concerns the brilliant talent of that celebrated painter, Nicolaas Pieneman, who has achieved an European reputation with his many famous master-pieces."

He mentions a whole array of royal presents, of gold snuff-boxes richly adorned with brilliants and enamels, and enumerates an endless series of portraits of King William II., of the Crown-prince, afterwards William III., of the latter's sons the Princes William and Alexander, of Princess Sophie, of the suites of the King and the Crown-prince. Nicolaas Pieneman was the first painter to receive the Order of the Netherlands Lion; and it must be added that he was honoured not only in his own country, but also - or was it his royal models? - in Paris, for, at the International Exhibition of 1855, he was given the Legion of Honour for his life-size portrait of William III., in naval uniform, and of his royal father.

Portrait of a Child - N. Pieneman (Fodor Museum, Amsterdam)

Jean Augustin Daiwaille was born at Cologne in 1789 and, as a child, accompanied his parents to Holland, where he was educated for a painter by Adriaan de Lelie. Although his little genre-pieces met with considerable favour in their time, he was valued by his contemporaries mostly as a painter of portraits distinguished for their breadth of execution and their resemblance to the originals. He became director of the Amsterdam Academy of Plastic Arts and resigned his appointment in order to accompany an agent of the Dutch Trading Company to Brazil. Upon maturer consideration, he abandoned this plan and founded a lithographic establishment. Later, he settled at Rotterdam, where he occupied himself with portrait-painting until his death in 1850.

There is a certain want of definiteness about this short biography by Immerzeel and it is repeated in the account of Daiwaille's pupil, Cornelis Kruseman, who is said to have learnt his broad brushwork from Hodges, whereas Daiwaille, who was never satisfied with his work and never succeeded in finishing it, is supposed to have taught him only how not to paint. However, it often happens that later generations pass a different judgment; and many will discover finer qualities in the hesitations of this painter and pastellist than in the work of his over-praised pupil. Daiwaille's Portrait of Himself in the Rijksmuseum confirms the first impression: it shows us the melancholy face of one whose nature was his own worst enemy. The modernity of the analysis is astonishing in the pale-blue eyes; and the whole face is painted with a sincerity which none but a sensitive character would offer. The Portrait of Himself at Boymans' Museum is a more pleasant picture; and the same museum contains his very dainty Portrait of a Woman, in pastel. His best portrait, however, is that of H. van Demmeltraadt.

H. van Demmeltraadt - J. A. Daiwaille (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Although Cornelis Kruseman dates back to the end of the eighteenth century (he was born in 1797 and died in 1854), he can hardly be considered a man of Jan Pieneman's generation. Not that the elder Kruseman helped Dutch painting forward: on the contrary, while Pieneman preserved, if not the artistic culture, at least the simplicity of the eighteenth century, Kruseman, endowed with less temperament, a greater desire for refinement and less vigour, displayed a hankering after more pronounced forms and, in the absence of a natural gift of colour, employed hard tones for his biblical or Italian subjects and, in general, turned the art of painting into an uncouth classicism.

Meanwhile, it appears that Kruseman showed a decided aptitude for painting at a very early age; anyway, in 1819, he made a great success at an exhibition at the Hague with a picture representing a blind beggar, lighted by a paper lantern, whose appearance had always impressed him as he went down the Spui of an evening. People thought that they had found a Dou, a Schalcken Redivivus; and he received many orders for candle-light effects, all of which he refused, because it was not his object in life to imitate candle-light and he took no pleasure in such things. He strove to express the loftier matters in human nature and he felt offended that it had not been recognized at once that he had painted this picture only because of the venerable head of the beggar. He aimed further than the Dutch genre-painters, whose manner he considered insignificant and undignified. This was the time when David was decking out his heroes in the form and garb of antiquity; it was also the time when Italy was regarded as the land of promise, as the cradle of art and when Raphael's smooth outlines were held to possess a distinction by comparison with which Rembrandt was often considered vulgar: an opinion shared by some of the younger literary men until as late as 1880.

Christ with Martha and Mary - Cornelis Kruseman (The property of Mrs. Labouchère, Zeist)

In 1821, Kruseman went viâ Paris to Italy, stayed three years in Rome and came back confirmed in his predilections. He began by painting biblical subjects and Roman peasants, the latter supplying him with the classical models which he had sought in vain in his own country. Nevertheless, he sacrificed himself in his turn to the national enthusiasm which had made the elder Pieneman the history-painter of Quatre-Bras and Waterloo and which drove Kruseman to paint a later episode: H. R. H. the Prince of Orange at the moment when his horse was wounded at Bauterzen, 12 August 1831, a picture which, like Pieneman's, may be looked upon as a sort of continuation of the doelen- or corporation-pieces. But this interlude had no influence upon the remainder of his work. The culture which he had acquired during his stay in Paris and his Italian journey had gradually alienated him from his own nationality. A long stay in Italy has never proved other than detrimental to any of our painters. It simply meant that they returned home seeing things from a point of view quite at variance with our national feeling. Ecclesiastical art brought into a Protestant country by a Protestant Dutchman must needs become theatrical. And in technique also Kruseman was doomed to fall short; for, though his ideas were formed upon the Italian masters of the Renascence and upon Raphael in particular, he lacked the feeling and the technical knowledge necessary to emulate the peculiar qualities of those masters. All that we can say, therefore, is that Kruseman knew how, at a given moment, to give to a certain public exactly what it demanded, namely, an ideal conception of biblical figures, devoid of sensual charm or passion. And the result was that, although theologians wrote in indignant terms to protest that this great man was indulging in anachronism in his biblical subjects and in spite of virulent criticism, he enjoyed a fame so universal as to exceed that ever known by Jozef Israëls, Jacob Maris, or even by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, who was so much more easily understood outside his own painting-room than either of the others.