The English _cognoscenti_ of the modern type have now for some time
recognised that in Dutch Art there is more than one great period that
has to be reckoned with--that the great Seventeenth Century does not
exhaust the achievements of this people. It may not be quite true to
say of Dutch painting, as of French sculpture, that the traditions
have been invariably preserved, and that there has been little break
in the school; for the last century in Holland was a barren one--just
as barren there as in France and England it was brilliant. The revival
has been for later generations, and of those who did most to accomplish
it some are yet living, in an old age not so very advanced, and others
are lately dead. A history of this revival would be a great and worthy
subject: it may yet, one hopes, be undertaken by some one writer
qualified to treat it. Such a writer could not possibly be a person
who had lived wholly within its influence. He would have to bring
with him something better and wiser than the ungoverned admirations
of the modern studio. A knowledge of the Past must be his. Meanwhile,
we receive, and experience a certain satisfaction in receiving,
even that fragmentary contribution to the subject which is made in
the volume called _Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century_. Max
Rooses--the keeper of the Musée Plantin-Moretus at Antwerp--furnishes
a general introduction, which is readable and fairly comprehensive,
if not particularly critical. And many writers, whose collaboration
is of necessity destructive of unity of idea, but whose individual
opportunities of personal knowledge give the book something it might
yet have lacked had it been written by one serious and capable critic,
contribute biographical notes, authentic and amiable. The painters have
been caressed, not analysed. That is exactly what the least instructed
and least studious portion of the public is supposed to like, in the
‘text’ of its big Christmas picture-books--which, of course, is why
that text is written so seldom by the serious professional writers who,
if they chose to do it at all, could do it best.
Only a dozen painters are represented in Mr. Max Rooses’ volume, and
the selection of this dozen is extremely arbitrary, or would be if
it were not, as we understand, the intention of the publishers to
follow up the present with at least one other volume. Two women figure
amongst the twelve. Miss Jacoba van der Sande Backhuysen, the aged
flower-painter, who died three years ago, and then was seventy-one,
deserved probably to be included. She is included. Some of her work is
of freedom and vigour, if some also tends to be precise and impersonal.
You cannot find in every generation or in every land a Fantin-Latour
or a Francis James; and the flowers of Jacoba van der Sande Backhuysen
are generally welcome. But the introduction of Henriette Ronner, a
popular and quite delightful lady, with the narrow speciality of
painting cats, was surely scarcely merited. As for the men, the choice
is hardly less arbitrary. Israels, of course, is in his place, with his
grey record of the homely and the sad; and, though Alma-Tadema is a
naturalised Englishman, it is not surprising that the Dutch should be
reluctant to forget what at least was his origin. But if Alma-Tadema
is to be included, why is Van Haanen--a Dutchman still, probably, and
the truest and subtlest of all living painters of Venetian life and
character--why is Van Haanen to be left out? We receive gladly what
is given us of Bisschop, Weissenbruch, and Gabriel. But the omission
of such gifted Dutchmen as Mauve and Mesdag and Artz and Mathieu
Maris--even in a first volume--is memorable. Further, the omission of
the great name of Jacob Maris--certainly one of the most potent of all
contemporary masters--would be fatal to any pretensions that the volume
might make to completeness, or, if the phrase may be accorded us, to
even a temporary finality. But if it becomes the duty of any qualified
observer to note important omissions, compelling further instalments
of the history, it must be satisfactory to him to chronicle such
inclusions as those we have already cited as welcome and reasonable,
and it is nothing less than a pleasure to find, not only contained, but
placed in the forefront of the volume, the name and work of Johannes
Bosboom. To Bosboom, and his right of place there, we will devote our
remaining comments, and partly because the large English public is
still strangely deficient in the appreciation of his work.
Johannes Bosboom was born at the Hague in 1817. He died in 1891,
aged seventy-four, and in the artistic world of Holland he had by
that time long enjoyed complete and cordial recognition; to painters
and to the best critics--above all, perhaps, to that rich painter,
M. Mesdag, collector as well as artist--belong the majority of the
best of his works. The art of Bosboom is displayed to some extent in
oil pictures, but more finely, on the whole, in the great series of
his water-colours. He is a painter essentially of the succession of
Rembrandt--a master of the arrangement of light and shade--holding his
own honourably in the presentation of landscape, but known chiefly,
and known on the whole most to his advantage, as a painter of church
interiors. His earlier work is in method drier and smaller than his
later. The maturity of his genius finds him as broad as Cotman or
Dewint. He has the restfulness and dignity of these men when they
are at their best. He has not Cotman’s gift of colour, and in those
very church interiors to which Cotman would have given a colourist’s
charm--as his kindred work in the possession of Mr. James Reeve and
the late Mr. J. J. Colman assures us--Bosboom’s preoccupation is with
tone, and with sense of space; though, of course, in his colour he
is never inharmonious. Each is great in his own way, and the one is
almost as profoundly poetic as the other, though Bosboom, if anything,
excels Cotman in the restful picturesqueness of his vision. With him,
invariably, as in the great artist we have mentioned by the side of
him, the detail is nothing but a part of the whole. It is never
aggressive; it is never importunate; it is even for the most part
effaced. Bosboom, dealing with church interiors, is not, like Sir Wyke
Bayliss, a painter of great scenes as well as of great architecture.
For him the pageant has no attraction, and in the painting of a
ceremonial or a service, such as the ‘Taking the Sacrament in Utrecht
Cathedral,’ he is not really at his best. He is best when his church
is quiet, and all its spaciousness ‘tells.’ See, for instance,
the admirable ‘Church at Trier’--immense, velvety, solemn--and,
likewise, the not less masterly water-colour, the ‘St. Joris Church at
Amersfoort.’ An architectural draughtsman, in the technical or narrow
sense, he is never, from beginning to end--a fact that is partly due
to the broader and more poetic bent of his genius, and partly, too,
no doubt, to his observation having been chiefly exercised and his
imagination chiefly stirred by interiors quaint rather than elegant,
massive and large rather than exquisite in detail, picturesque rather
than perfect. The book of Mr. Max Rooses’ editing, will, in England,
have not been without its service, if it, or even our own comments on
it, should secure wider attention to the work of a master as eminently
human and sympathetic as he is austere and sterling. But, for the
fuller comprehension of Bosboom here, in England, there should be
gathered together in a single place a fair array of his work; and we
commend to the enlightened _dilettanti_ of the Burlington Fine Arts
Club this appropriate and honourable enterprise.
(_Literature_, 3rd December 1898.)