Existing comment:
Beekhuis Foundation Gallery
Between about 1850 and 1920, Dutch artists were some of the most prized by American and European collectors. American artists and patrons traveled to the Netherlands and hosted Dutch painters on their visits to the United States. Like the art of the 19th-century Central Europe seen in the gallery nearby, Dutch painting of the period is currently being rediscovered in exhibitions and collections in Europe and the United States.
This gallery explores two movements in 19th-century Dutch painting, Romanticism and the Hague School> In contrast to Romanticism in other European countries, which concentrated on emotional drama and transcendent nature, the Dutch movement focused on the artistic heritage of the Golden Age and national character. Artists even specialized in still life, landscape, or scenes of daily life as had their 17th-century predecessors, and reexamined peasant life which preserved ancient traditions. The emotions and natural beauty they sought to convey were contemplative.
In the 1850s, a group of Dutch artists began to look towards the land in a different way. Like their friends and colleagues who worked near the village of Barbizon southeast of Paris, they focused newly on land itself presented in an unpretentious way. Especially interested in the effects of the soft Dutch light, they developed an expressive brushwork that could capture trees, grass, clouds and waves in modulated tones of brown, grey and green. Scattered throughout the country in the 1860s, the 1870 the group moved to the political capital and became known as the Hague School. A second generation of artists brought the group into the twentieth century, when many enjoyed royal patronage. |