Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century. Gerharda Hermina Marius

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

       Table of Contents

       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