Dutch art movements: An Overview from 1850 to 1940
Anyone looking to understand Dutch art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will soon encounter a variety of artistic movements and -isms. But what do these terms actually mean, and how do they relate to one another? This overview traces the development of modern Dutch art from Romanticism to the New Objectivity. Along the way, we look at historical events, important artists and individual works to understand how artistic styles, subjects and ways of seeing changed over time.
This is not intended as a comprehensive history of Dutch art. Rather, it offers a clear starting point for anyone who wants to understand modern Dutch art from around 1850 to 1940. The various movements did not exist in isolation. Artists responded to one another and to the social and historical circumstances in which they lived. They adopted ideas, gave them their own interpretation and then searched for new possibilities. There is no universal agreement on when modern art truly began. In this overview, Romanticism is taken as the starting point because it marks a clear shift in the way artists looked at the world, nature and the individual.
Romanticism
The Industrial Revolution began in England around 1760 and brought profound changes to both society and the environment in which people lived. The invention and application of the steam engine played a crucial role in this industrialisation, making large-scale mechanisation and production possible. From around 1780 onwards, the number of factories increased rapidly, cities expanded and working and living conditions deteriorated for large sections of the working population. Railways were built to transport goods, particularly coal, and later people, more efficiently. In 1825, England opened its first railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway. In 1839, the Netherlands followed with its first railway, connecting Amsterdam and Haarlem and replacing the traditional towpath canal route. Distances became shorter in relative terms, and the world seemed to grow smaller.
Romanticism emerged partly as a response to these profound changes brought about by industrialisation. In opposition to the new industrialised world, there was a longing for nature, the original and the untouched, in which human beings were once again part of something larger than themselves. Romanticism thus became a cultural response to the modernisation of society. This criticism of industrialisation and mass production continued throughout the nineteenth century. In the Arts and Crafts movement, the English artist and designer William Morris looked back to traditional craftsmanship and the Middle Ages as an alternative to mechanised mass production. In the Netherlands, industrialisation began to take hold during the first half of the nineteenth century, but did not fully develop until around 1860.
In response to the rapidly changing industrialised world, Romantic artists turned towards the overwhelming power of nature. The human figure is small and insignificant when set against the grandeur of the landscape. This is quite literally visible in the proportions: tiny figures disappear among towering trees, expansive rivers and broad landscapes. Winter scenes with small groups of skaters and landscapes dominated by majestic trees were particularly popular subjects. Romanticism offered a kind of escape into another, idealised world, in which nature, tranquillity and beauty provided an alternative to a rapidly changing society.
Andreas Schelfhout, B.C. Koekkoek and Charles Leickert were important Dutch representatives of this tradition. Their landscapes combine considerable technical skill with a keen interest in light, atmosphere and the character of nature. But as the nineteenth century progressed, artists also began to look differently at their immediate surroundings. Idealised nature gradually gave way to a more direct observation of the Dutch landscape and everyday life.
The Hague School
From around 1860 onwards, artists such as Jozef Israëls, Anton Mauve, Jacob Maris, Willem Roelofs and Hendrik Willem Mesdag developed a style of painting in which romantic sentiment gave way to a greater emphasis on light, air and atmosphere. At the same time, Naturalism was gaining influence across Europe, with its emphasis on depicting everyday life directly and without idealisation.
The Hague School was sometimes referred to as the “Grey School” because of its frequent use of muted grey and brown tones and its sober subject matter. The artists painted the hard-working lives of labourers, fishermen in Katwijk and the Dutch countryside, using an increasingly loose and spontaneous brushwork without idealising reality. The Hague School thus became an important precursor to Dutch Impressionism. Grey skies, mist, rain and the changing Dutch light became subjects in their own right. This fascination with the fleeting nature of light and atmosphere would be taken even further by the next generation of artists.
Impressionism
By the 1880s, this development continued into Impressionism. Attention shifted increasingly towards the immediate experience of a particular moment. Light, colour and movement became more important, while modern urban life entered the repertoire of artistic subjects. One of the forerunners of the movement was the Dutch-born Johan Barthold Jongkind, who was based in France. In the 1850s and 1860s, he worked around Paris with loose brushstrokes, effects of light and fleeting atmospheric impressions. In doing so, he moved away from the smooth, meticulously finished style of academic painting.
George Hendrik Breitner was one of the most important representatives of Impressionism in the Netherlands and is associated with the Amsterdam School. His paintings and drawings of Amsterdam capture a city in constant motion: trams, domestic servants and passers-by appear against wet streets and rain-soaked surroundings.The rise of photography also changed the way artists looked at reality. While a photograph could capture reality literally, painters felt freer to emphasise the fleeting, personal and atmospheric qualities of a moment. This influence is clearly visible in the work of George Hendrik Breitner: he frequently took photographs himself and used them as the basis for his modern compositions. He was particularly fond of horses, which appear frequently throughout his work.
Isaac Israëls likewise focused on modern life, from the streets of Amsterdam, theatres and nightlife to Scheveningen beach and contemporary fashion. Israëls was particularly interested in the fashionable and lively side of urban life, while Breitner tended to focus more on the rougher and more dynamic character of the city.
Another early Impressionist was the Frisian artist Siebe Johannes ten Cate. After his early years in Antwerp and Brussels and travels through Scandinavia and London, he settled in Paris, the city where Impressionism emerged in 1874. Here he developed his own visual language, in which both urban life and nature played an important role. His paintings and pastels have something of a long-exposure photograph: movement and fleeting moments are not frozen in place, but seem to continue moving through the image.
De Amsterdamse Joffers
The modern urban life of Amsterdam, so important to Breitner and Isaac Israëls, also formed the backdrop for a group of female artists known as the Amsterdam Joffers. These were women from affluent families who met at the Rijksakademie of Fine Art in Amsterdam towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Among the best-known Joffers were Lizzy Ansingh, Coba Ritsema, Betsy Westendorp-Osieck, Marie van Regteren Altena, Coba Surie and Jo Bauer-Stumpff. Their subjects were often domestic and intimate: interiors, still lifes, flowers and portraits. Lizzy Ansingh also became particularly known for her paintings of dolls. Their work often displays a loose, Impressionist brushstroke.
Post-Impressionism
Not every artist, however, found innovation in an increasingly direct representation of reality. Vincent van Gogh occupies a special position. He transformed visible reality according to his own emotions, increasingly abandoning naturalistic colour. Contrasting, vibrant colours and a powerful, visible brushstroke intensified the personal expression of his work. In this way, Van Gogh became an important precursor to Expressionism. Because his most important works were created outside the Netherlands, he is mentioned only briefly here in this overview of Dutch art movements.
Van Gogh was one of the four great pioneers of Post-Impressionism, alongside Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat. Each took Impressionism in a different direction. Cézanne explored the underlying structure of reality and became an important precursor to Cubism. Gauguin sought simplified forms and expressive colour, exerting a major influence on Symbolism. Van Gogh developed an intensely personal style in which colour, form and brushwork were increasingly used to express emotion, making him an important precursor to Expressionism.
Seurat developed Neo-Impressionism, applying unmixed colours in small, separate dots placed next to one another. Seen up close, the individual dots remain visible; from a distance, the colours blend optically to create vibrant patterns. This systematic approach to colour and painting technique is often referred to as Divisionism or Pointillism.
The principle of optical colour mixing can still be recognised in modern display technology. Television screens and LED displays, for example, build colours from tiny points of red, green and blue light, the three primary colours of the RGB colour model. By combining these colours at different intensities, millions of different colours can be produced.
Symbolism
At the same time, an entirely different and almost opposite response to visible reality emerged: Symbolism. Symbolist artists were less interested in directly representing the visible world and more interested in creating a visual language for ideas, dreams and the subconscious. The Netherlands produced relatively few outspoken Symbolists, but Jan Toorop occupies an important international position within the movement.
Toorop began as a representative of the Hague School, but soon moved away from that tradition. Inspired by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, he worked in a Pointillist style between 1888 and 1891. From around 1890 onwards, his work gradually shifted towards Symbolism. As a member of the Belgian avant-garde group Les XX, he developed a distinctive visual language of elegant lines, stylised figures and symbolic imagery. Later, his work took on an increasingly Catholic and religious character.
A particularly fascinating and now almost forgotten Symbolist was the enigmatic diplomat Carel de Nerée tot Babberich. He exhibited very little during his lifetime and suffered from ill health, which meant that he spent much of his life in health resorts. He died young, leaving behind bizarre and sometimes obscure drawings in which women, sexuality, gender and fantasy play an important role. His highly refined and sometimes unsettling linework recalls artists such as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt.
Jan Mankes also occupies a special position. His quiet animals, still lifes and landscapes move between realism and symbolism. His seemingly simple compositions do more than record reality. They attempt to capture something of the “soul of things”. For Mankes, beauty could be found precisely in simplicity.
Where Symbolism turned towards the invisible and the inner world, the “new art” sought a new visual language for the visible world. Around 1900, the graceful new art, the Dutch interpretation of Art Nouveau, began to take shape. The style is characterised by organic lines, stylised forms and inspiration from nature, the animal world and, in the work of artists such as Jan Toorop, the Dutch East Indies.
Fine art and applied art became increasingly intertwined. Toorop once again played an important role. His famous poster for the Delft Oil Factory, known as the “Salad Oil Style”, is one of the most recognisable examples. Theo van Hoytema and Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof likewise demonstrate how painting, graphic art, illustration and decorative art increasingly converged.
Luminism
During the second half of the 1900s, artists working within Impressionism became increasingly interested in the effects of colour and light. Luminism became an important Dutch variant of this development. Artists sought a more intense and luminous style in which light was isolated as a subject in its own right and became an independent element of the composition.
Leo Gestel and Jan Sluijters were among its most important innovators. In his early work, Gestel experimented with Luminism and later became strongly influenced by Cubism and Expressionism, continually searching for new possibilities in colour, form and perspective.
Jan Sluijters took this development a step further. His style became so distinctive and personal that he was soon regarded as one of the founders of a new direction in Dutch painting. Early in his career, he worked with vivid, expressive colours and was clearly influenced by Fauvism. Nature, nightlife and women played an important role in his work.
As he grew older, he increasingly turned to subjects closer to home. He became a sought-after portrait painter and focused largely on his immediate surroundings, with his second wife Greet van Cooten and their children appearing repeatedly in his work. Sluijters remained recognisable for his powerful use of colour and characteristic brushwork. It is precisely this combination of a modern visual language with everyday, personal subjects that makes his work appealing to such a broad audience.
Expressionism
The desire to break further away from traditional visual language grew during the first decades of the twentieth century. The search for innovation became increasingly radical. Influenced by international developments, Expressionism emerged, in which personal experience took precedence over an objective representation of reality. Form and colour became freer and could deliberately be distorted or intensified. Sluijters and Gestel once again played an important role.
The Bergen School emerged around 1915 in the Dutch town of Bergen and is regarded as a Dutch variant of Expressionism. Artists such as Leo Gestel, Else Berg, Matthieu Wiegman and Gerrit Willem van Blaaderen sought a simplified and powerful way of representing reality. Characteristic features include dark, often earthy colours, strong contours, simplified forms and a pronounced emphasis on the structure of the picture plane. The influence of French Cubism is clearly visible, while the expressive approach to painting connects the movement with German Expressionism. Landscapes, still lifes and figures are common subjects. The visible world is simplified without becoming entirely abstract.
In Groningen, the artists' group De Ploeg was founded in 1918. It went on to develop modern Expressionist painting in the north of the Netherlands. Important members included Jan Wiegers, Jan Altink, Alida Pott and Hendrik Werkman. Their work is characterised by powerful colours, a free brushstroke and an expressive approach to form and composition. They sought to interpret the landscape and everyday life of Groningen in highly personal ways. Frauenkirch by Jan Wiegers is a good example. Influenced by German Expressionism, particularly Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wiegers painted the view from Kirchner's house in Davos.
De Stijl and Abstract Art
This increasingly liberated approach to form created room for a further simplification of visible reality. Influenced by Cubism, forms were reduced to geometric structures and traditional perspective was abandoned. At the same time, attention shifted away from representing reality towards the exploration of form, rhythm, proportion and colour. In the Netherlands, this development ultimately led to the international movement known as De Stijl, with Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg as its central figures.
Mondrian's development illustrates this search particularly well. Around 1908, he began moving away from the tradition of the Hague School and increasingly experimented with colour, light and form. Through Luminism, Symbolism, Cubism and various transitional phases, he eventually arrived at complete abstraction, which he reached around 1917.
His stays in London and later New York were highly influential. His search for harmony and order ultimately led to compositions made up of horizontal and vertical lines, rectangular planes and the primary colours red, yellow and blue, supplemented by black, white and grey.
Piet Mondrian's Victory Boogie Woogie in the Kunstmuseum in The Hague is regarded as the modern Night Watch of Dutch art history. The painting evokes the street grid of New York, translated into a rhythmic pattern of colour and line. It was never completed. The small pieces of tape that Mondrian used to shift and adjust the composition are still visible on the canvas.
The New Objectivity
After this increasingly radical abstraction, the interwar period saw a counter-movement that once again sought greater certainty in visible, figurative reality. The upheaval following the First World War strengthened the desire for order, clarity and stability. In the 1920s and 1930s, this was expressed in part through the New Objectivity.
Artists sought a clear and objective way of looking, with precise forms, defined contours and a certain degree of detachment. Perspective was also used deliberately: high and low viewpoints, dramatic foreshortening and unusual cropping gave reality a new, matter-of-fact appearance. Reality became recognisable and figurative once again, but stripped of much of the personal and emotional expression associated with earlier modern movements.
Nola Hatterman occupies a distinctive position within Dutch art of this period, with powerful portraits of Surinamese people and figure paintings in which human and social identity take centre stage. Charley Toorop, Dick Ket, Johan van Hell, Chris Beekman, Pyke Koch, Jan Wittenberg, Anneke van der Feer and Raoul Hynckes each developed their own interpretations of this sober, often highly realistic visual language.
The New Objectivity was closely related to Magic Realism, in which recognisable reality likewise remained central but was infused with a mysterious, sometimes unsettling atmosphere. Carel Willink developed a highly distinctive visual language within this tradition, with meticulously painted figures, landscapes and architecture. His still, enigmatic scenes give everyday reality an unreal and sometimes uncanny quality.
Dutch art movements: No Closed Chapters
When these developments are considered together, it becomes clear that the art of this period cannot be divided into a series of isolated chapters. Most of the -isms emerged as responses to one another and to their historical context. The development of Dutch art was shaped by a constant exchange between different movements.
Romanticism continued to influence the Hague School. Impressionism informed Luminism. Symbolism and the new art became intertwined, while the experiments of Cubist artists ultimately contributed to the development of abstract art. Dutch artists were also in constant contact with developments in France, Belgium, Germany and elsewhere.
The art of around 1900 therefore does not follow a straight line from tradition to modernism. It is better understood as a constantly shifting network of influences, reactions and experiments. Internationally, this period saw an extraordinary variety of movements, from French Fauvism and Italian Futurism to Russian Constructivism and Suprematism. Dadaism and Surrealism also emerged, while Orientalism played an important role in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international art.
This overview does not claim to be exhaustive. Instead, it follows the main line of development within Dutch art and offers an introduction to the movements that were significant in the Netherlands. It is precisely this diversity that makes the period from 1850 to 1950 so rich for collectors. Alongside established names such as Van Gogh, Mondrian, Toorop and Israëls, there is a broad group of artists who occupy an important place in Dutch art history but are harder to fit into one of the familiar major movements.
Some artists therefore seem to fall between the cracks, even though their work can be remarkably modern. A movement provides a useful framework, allowing artists and developments to be grouped and understood more easily. Yet many of these categories were only established retrospectively.
The reality of art history is, after all, much harder to fit into neat boxes.
Bob Scholte Fine Art specialises in Dutch and European art from 1880 to 1950. Drawing on a strong art-historical background, the gallery brings together both established and lesser-known artists. We add new works every week, selected for their distinctive story, subject, visual language or rarity. View the current collection.
