Studio: international art (55.1912)

The Van Randwijk Collection—II

rhythm, and tone, and more precisely in regard to
that grey tone which in the first strenuous years of
The Hague men brought upon them the nickname
of “the grey school.”

Corot’s Landscape: Eveningis a beautiful painting
of the master’s best period. The tone is so very
immanent that every bit of colour seems as if
painted on grey silk. This precious, shimmering
quality pervades the soft blue sky, the fragrant
“matt” green of the birch-trees and the wood on
the right, the blue-grey of the water and the brown
hides of the white-browed cows. It is the twilight
hour that is here depicted, and this accounts for
the subtle feeling of homewardness which helps to
give it its lyric unity. Daubigny’s Ba?iks of the
Oise repeats Corot’s tone, but here the green is
more graduated, more sonorous, the thinly clouded
sky is more agitated, the air is perceptibly warm,
while the water is painted in the delicate grey of a
Van Goyen.

The qualities which we find in Corot are met with
abundantly in the landscape painting of The Hague
school, but this is true merely in an absolute
sense and in none of the leaders of the school is
it to be traced back to him. If the early training
of these masters did not furnish incontrovertible
evidence of this assertion, the intrinsic evidence
is all-sufficing. The mood or “Stimmung” of a
Corot has its source in the poetic feeling of
the painter brought to bear on the raw material
of nature; it is his poetic energy which enables
him to distil from nature that fragrance by
which its lyric charm is conveyed to us. The
“Stimmung” of The Hague landscape is (with the
possible exception of Mauve and his circle) pre-
eminently peculiar to itself, an intrinsic property of
the earthly elements, perceived but not imported
from without—it is the poetry immanent in
nature. The rhythmical contrast has a similar
origin. In Corot the movement is blithe, un-
restrained, dreamy; there it is measured, almost
solemn, restrained by the sedate character of the
fertile pastureland, of the heavy plodding animals
and the voluminous language of space.

The point of chief importance is the grey tone.
This had already been the unfulfilled aim of a
young painter who died at an early age in 1865,
and was the son of the painter who first discovered
the Oosterbeek forest for art. In the summer of
i860 this young painter in one of his letters said :
“To get the sentiment of grey, even in the strongest
green, is tremendously difficult, and whoever attains
it is a happy mortal.” That was written some
months before he came to know the Frenchmen

in whom—to use his own words—he found his
heart’s desire fulfilled. His utterance served
almost as a guiding maxim to The Hague tone-
seekers. When Jacob Maris, somewhere between
1868 and 1870, found the way which brought
him to the grey tone, he had not yet become ac-
quainted with Corot, but certainly was familiar
with Van Goyen, who had something significant to
say on this matter. And a work by Jacob’s nine-
teen year old brother Willem, dated 1863, shows
unmistakably the origin and peculiarity of his tone,
which had its source in the moisture-laden atmo-
sphere of Holland. The old master inspiration
and its application to the atmospheric conditions of
the country completely account for it. That which
with Corot was more in the nature of a charming
poetical conceit is here a strictly natural sequence.

Millet, here as always a subject apart, is repre-
sented in the Van Randwijk collection by an oil
painting, Gh-l carrying Pails, and a drawing of a
Shepherdess. The drawing in both is characterised
by much earnestness and poetic feeling. The
girl’s headband is red, her jacket yellowish brown,
the apron blue; in the shadows of white blouse
and left sleeve there is an agreeable play of violet
undertones. The technique is throughout pon-
derous, and in the earthy treatment of the flesh
distinctly unpleasant, but how exceedingly effective
is the rhythmical portrayal of weary, silent toil as
reflected in the rugged face, the half-opened mouth,
the downcast eyes, and the rigid arms with their
burdens ! In the drawing of the shepherdess we
have an eloquent revelation of that unity which the
artist perceived to exist between the bounteous
earth and its human guardians. The drawing may
be compared with a water-colour by Israels in the
same collection—that of a woman with a child in
her arms, looking seawards intently watching a
sailing-vessel approaching the shore; the com-
parison will suggest a variety of questions as to just
what those intrinsic traits are which have led to
Israels being called, as he still is, “ the Millet of
modern Dutch art.”

With such a selection of works as we have
here briefly reviewed, the collection of Mr. van
Randwijk fulfils a twofold purpose—it presents in
dignified form some of the best achievements of
modern Dutch art, not inferior to those of the past,
and it affords so many opportunities of studying the
question of its relation to the work of the Barbizon
men, the solution of the question being that within
each school every real accord has its origin in the
identity of the old master source from which both
drew their inspiration. M. E.

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