International studio (23.1904)

The Art Display of Holland

The art display of Holland
AT THE ST. LOUIS EXPOSITION.
BY CHARLES H. CAFFIN.
Of the exhibitions of pictures made by the
various countries at the St. Louis Exposition, none
is more interesting than that of Holland. It is
so characteristic, homogeneous, and completely
artistic.
With scarcely an exception, these men paint well,
they know their craft; they are practically a unit

they simply reverted to the original stock preserved
in their own galleries, to the motives and methods
by which their forefathers in the seventeenth cen-
tury had established a new school of painting.
Upon this they grafted, quite naturally, the new
ideas toward humanity of the nineteenth century,
and the new technical ideal of substituting open-air
light and atmosphere for the old pictorial delicacy
of chiaroscuro. Hence the revivalists in Hol-
land were not, as elsewhere, revolutionists ; they
carried the public with them; they took rank and
maintained it, even when younger men pressed for-


“ the FIRST SNOW ” by LOUIS W. VAN SOEST
From, the Exhibit of Holland at St. Louis

in selecting their subjects from the human and
natural environment of their own lives. Hence,
an extraordinary suggestion of conviction and con-
scientiousness. They know how to paint and they
paint what they know; and with a love of their art
and surroundings and a confidence in themselves
that is deliberately, perseveringly and thoroughly
assured. For they are heirs of a fine tradition.
After the lapse from artistic independence and into
an affectation for Italy’s decadent art in the eight-
eenth century, the Dutch felt, like the rest of the
world, the influence of Millet and the other Bar-
bizon artists. But they did not have to transplant,
as others did, a new ideal of art from foreign soil;

ward with more advanced notions about Impres-
sionism; for all were substantially working on an
established basis of tradition. Holland, accord-
ingly, is the only country in which the artists have
not been distracted and divided by some form of
secessionism, and artists and laymen have escaped
a mutual misunderstanding. It is therefore not
surprising that their exhibition, besides displaying
so high a standard of craftsmanship, should be
characterized also by such homogeneousness.
Yet the latter does not involve a rigid uniformity.
While all these men are realists in their devotion to
nature study, some are satisfied with realism, con-
tent with a faithful record of natural phenomena,

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