Clouds and Light

Impressionism in Holland features more than a hundred paintings by thirty-nine artists. Most are little known in Germany, since their work has not been collected by German museums.

The exhibition also sheds light on why windmills appear so often in Dutch art, and extends its view even into the modern period. Vincent van Gogh wasn’t the only artist in the Netherlands to be inspired, though in his own unique way, by the innovations of Impressionism. The new movement also shaped the work of another of the most famous artists in the world: the Amersfoort native Piet Mondrian.

The new developments in Dutch painting begin under the open sky. In the forest of Oosterbeek near Arnhem, a new artists’ colony has formed—just as in the French forest of Fontainebleau near Barbizon, where Camille Corot and many others are rediscovering nature. Later, the Oosterbeek artists will be joined by painters of the so-called Hague School such as Willem Roelofs and Jacob Maris. For the time being, they remain in the Netherlands.

He’s right: the new open-air painting—plein air in French—no longer focuses on idealized compositions in which the landscape serves as a backdrop for mythical or biblical subjects. Instead, artists want to show what is really there: light and shadow, trees and streams, plants and animals.

Human figures are almost irrelevant in this Dutch exploration of open-air painting, which also influences later artists of the Hague School. From the 1840s onward, Johannes Bilders is joined in Oosterbeek by a throng of other artists including Willem Roelofs, Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël, Anton Mauve, and the Maris brothers Jacob, Matthijs, and Willem. In 1866, art collector Hendrik Willem Mesdag and his wife Sientje Mesdag-van Houten also arrive and begin training as artists.

The Dutch forest landscape will flourish again in Van Gogh’s work of the 1880s and that of Jan Sluijters and Mondrian in the twentieth century. During the heyday of the Hague School, however, the focus shifts—to the broad expanse of the flat Dutch landscape. 

The mysterious darkness and the bluish, almost blackish green of the forest disappear from the paintings of the Hague School.

The artists of the Hague School capture the silvery-gray light of their northern homeland, creating a very different effect than the brilliant color of the French Impressionists. Among contemporaries, the Hague School is also known as the “Gray School” and is celebrated for its “poetry of gray.”

This picture, too, is a perfect example of why such artists were known as the “Gray School.” It also demonstrates why the Dutch painting of these years can be described as Impressionist: the scene is bathed in silvery light. The water and sand serve as a mirror, reflecting the silhouette of the ship and the gray of the sky, intensifying their luminosity. 

Some artists of the Hague School focus on images of the simple life. Jozef Israëls, a friend and role model of the German Impressionist Max Liebermann, sets his sights on the harsh existence of fishermen and farmers.

In his dogged pursuit of real life—an approach especially valued by Liebermann—Israëls sparks a new trend: he is the first to paint the moorlands of Laren, a village easily accessible by train from Amsterdam. Soon Laren, like Oosterbeek before it, becomes an artists’ colony and attracts painters like Anton Mauve, who moves there in 1885 to depict the life of the farmers.

Not surprisingly, the artists of Holland—a great nation of seafarers and fishermen—also paint impressive beach scenes, above all in the coastal town of Scheveningen near The Hague. Here, too, the dominant elements are the sky, the peaceful atmosphere, and the color gray.

Perhaps too modern? The jury of the 1873 Salon in Paris rejects his painting Cityscape Rotterdam: Canal à Rotterdam. Deeply offended, Jongkind resolves to never exhibit again—and so refuses the invitation to participate in the now-famous exhibition of 1874 in Paris that marks the birth of the Impressionist movement ...

An elegant woman walks directly past the viewer; we almost feel as if we could catch a whiff of her perfume. Glimpsing her delicate, veiled face, we see the massive city blocks of Amsterdam behind her; only an angular patch of pale gray sky is visible above. George Hendrik Breitner’s The Singel Bridge at the Paleisstraat in Amsterdam shows the life of the big city at close range. The picture has such a sense of immediacy that in 1896, a perplexed critic observed: “The placement of the figure—even if divided by the frame, with only half the body visible—is certainly intentional”; yet “the execution harms the intention.”

The gray light of the Hague School now yields to the artificial illumination of the big city. An 1899 description by the writer and painter Jacobus van Looy conveys an almost expressionistic mood: “He saw great red lights, balloons carried on sticks, rocking to and fro like colored moons; they resembled bloody disks of fire in the dark waters of the canals.”

The Amsterdam Impressionists celebrate the energy of urban life in all its facets. Under their brush, the city is transformed from a backdrop into the primary motif, especially in the work of two artists who began painting in Amsterdam in 1886–87: Breitner and Isaac Israëls, the son of Jozef Israëls. They become the pioneers of urban Impressionism, the first avant-garde movement in Dutch painting.

The rapidly painted, spontaneous quality of Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig’s portrait of his fiancée also characterizes the café scene At Scheveningen by Anton Mauve. 

Two middle-class women in the center of the picture gaze out toward the sea. The waiter, holding a tray with a white cloth over his arm, looks the other direction, toward his guests: a social reality, spontaneously sketched in oil. We can see the artist’s reworkings and the unfinished, sketch-like character of the image.

The poorer classes wear dark clothing and labor in the garden. The more well-heeled personages, generally dressed in light colors, immerse themselves in the sophisticated aesthetic of the brilliantly colored flowers—just like the painter.

Although Impressionism varies widely in different countries, paintings of flowers and women in white dresses often look quite similar, regardless of the painter’s nationality. Everywhere in Europe, the next aesthetic phase is beginning to emerge ... Why should artists keep painting flower gardens when they can dissolve the entire world into a bouquet of Pointillist colors?
 

By 1892, Toorop has already moved on from this way of seeing and painting—but the artists he inspired, like Hendricus Petrus Bremmer, are just getting started.

The emancipation of color reaches a high point in Mondrian’s Mill at Domburg, where he transports the quintessential Dutch windmill into the twentieth century in abstracted form. Paintings like this one cause a stir: critics are not prepared for such an excess of visual freedom. Another mill picture by Mondrian prompts the accusation that his outlandish colors are due to mental illness—a charge that is rejected as complete nonsense by the Israël Querido, who comes to Mondrian’s defense.

Important players in the emancipation of color in Dutch painting are the stylistically versatile Toorop and, of course, Van Gogh. A woman collector gushes: “Vincent lives in color, he drinks color and exhausts all the possibilities of his ideal to its utmost consequences.” Toorop sets the process in motion, but from 1906 on is Jan Sluijters who advances the unleashing of color in the Netherlands. Between 1904 and 1906, Sluijters spends time in Paris, where he absorbs new artistic currents.

And so begins the explosion of twentieth-century styles. Now, only a few decades or even just a few years after the forest painters of Oosterbeek, the Hague School, and the Amsterdam Impressionists, everything they had achieved seems almost sentimental. Maris’s dictum “I’m not painting cows, but the effects of light”—unprecedented in the mid-nineteenth century—has now run its course; instead, avant-garde art throughout all of Europe seems to follow the pronouncement of the great Russian modernist Kasimir Malevich: 

Cubism creates multiple views of the object by dissecting it into geometric perspectives. Expressionism intensifies the world into all-embracing assertions of feeling. Abstraction reduces everything to nonrepresentational colors, forms, and elements of meaning. And all at the same time! Like a flood, the styles alternate, intersect, and influence one another.

By 1914, Mondrian is no longer satisfied with Expressionism. He goes in search of new solutions—and finds them. On the eve of World War I, he writes in a letter:

But they did not come out of nowhere: within them are distant echoes of the gray brushstrokes of the Hague School, the brilliant, experimental color of urban Impressionism, and the bold, revolutionary spirit of Pointillism and Luminism.