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Collection Connection
Going Dutch: American and Dutch Painters around 1900
Lynne D. Ambrosini, Chief Curator
Fig. 1: Walter MacEwen (American, 1858–1943), Returning from Work, about 1885, oil on canvas. Collection of George
Haigh, Cambridge, Massachusetts
When American artists visited Holland,
what contemporary Dutch art were
they looking at? Many of the American
painters featured in the exhibition
Dutch Utopia: American Artists in
Holland, 1880–1914, admired and
collected the works of living artists
of the so-called Hague School in the
Netherlands.
The Hague School refers to a group
of late 19th-century Dutch artists who
sought to revive the straightforward,
everyday subjects and landscapes of
their Dutch 17th-century forebears.
However, the Hague School painters
worked outdoors, observing nature
and its moods acutely, in the manner
of progressive French painters of the
time. The Taft’s permanent collection
includes 11 paintings by the Hague
School artists. Putting Hague School
paintings side-by-side with works from
Dutch Utopia shows how the Dutch
artists influenced their slightly younger
American colleagues.
For those familiar with the Taft
collection, Walter MacEwen’s
Returning from Work (fig. 1), an
American painting in Dutch Utopia,
calls to mind Dutch artist Anton
Mauve’s Changing Pasture (fig. 2).
The two paintings share similar
compositions. Diagonal paths lead
into wide-spreading, flat, sandy Dutch
pastures, where both artists depicted
centrally placed clusters of figures or
sheep from behind. Both paintings
appeared strikingly realistic in their
time because of this rear view. Most
earlier images tended to orient figures
and animals facing the audience,
like actors playing from a stage.
(It’s amusing to note, however, that
pictures of animals’ hindquarters
exasperated art dealers, who found
they brought lower prices than frontal
images—and still do!) The seeming
artlessness of both Mauve’s and
MacEwen’s unselfconscious subjects
suggests a you-are-there immediacy.
MacEwen also learned lessons from
Hague School artists about how to
render light and weather convincingly.
He followed the older Dutch painters
in making studies of figures and
Fig. 2: Anton Mauve (Dutch, 1838–1888), Changing Pasture, about 1887, oil on canvas. Taft Museum of Art
collection
connection
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terrains outdoors, sketching on the
spot in pencil, pastels, watercolors,
or oils. Like Mauve, he successfully
evoked the atmosphere of damp,
cloudy skies by means of broadly
brushed layers of whites and grays
and convincingly mimicked light
reflecting on the earth by carrying
his light tones down into the lower
zones of the picture. Again like
Mauve, MacEwen applied paint in a
creamy consistency with pronounced
brushstrokes in the foreground areas
to convey uneven dirt surfaces and
vegetation.
We can also compare Dutch and
American scenes of daily life set
in humble interiors. The younger
American artist Gari Melchers would
have been familiar with Hague
School interiors such as Jozef Israëls’s
Sewing School in Katwijk (fig. 3)
when conceiving his later picture
The Pilots (fig. 4). Both artists drew
inspiration from 17th-century Dutch
genre pictures, but the Hague School
artists had already
demonstrated
how such images
could be updated
by finding
comparable
contemporary
scenes to portray.
While Israëls
depicted a
group of girls
being instructed
in sewing in a
modest house
in the fishing
village of
Katwijk, Melchers Fig. 3: Jozef Israëls (Dutch, 1824–1911), Sewing School at Katwijk, 1881, oil on canvas. Taft
selected fishermen Museum of Art
Common to both pictures, as well, is
gathered in a simple tavern in
the sense of psychological realism that
Egmond aan Zee. As in the Israëls
results from these painstaking efforts.
picture, Melchers let outdoor light
Whether frowning in concentration
stream in from a window and devoted
or drifting inward in boredom, each
himself to sensitively modeling each
figure seems self-willed, with a rich
figure as it was defined by that single
inner life. As with the Mauve and
light source. Both artists created highly
MacEwen pictures examined earlier,
individualized faces and expressions.
this naturalism derives also from
the figures’ complete disregard of
the viewer. Melchers learned from
the Dutch artists that arranging the
composition and poses so that his
models neither faced nor glanced
toward the viewer creates a powerful
illusion of real life. One art critic
reviewing Melchers’s painting found
it so convincing that he commented,
“You sniff the seaside in it.”
In these multi-figured, richly detailed
images, the American artists
followed in the footsteps of the older
generation of Hague School painters
with whom they shared a deep
sympathy for the lives of ordinary
people and a commitment to painting
what they could observe.
Fig. 4: Gari Melchers (American, 1860–1932), The Pilots, 1887–88, oil on canvas. Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington