People From The Hague

"Damned! Another 'town under white clouds'.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"When I am tired of long, straight roof lines, why should I not introduce a cupola, especially where the cloud formation requires its support?. .Why should I not build my own towns to suit myself?"

"..and sometimes pausing between our talks we looked at some few canvases that were waiting for the Master's hand with the open sketchbook in front of it.. ..for example a year or two a very large ducks- painting was waiting there that did not want to be finished', (Harms Tiepen quotes a witness who visited the studio of the older Willem Maris)"

"Thijs knew everything by himself, he was a genius. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"When I'm sitting in front of my easel again.. .I'm going to make things that no one would have expected of me. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"James Maris also was always honoured in the 'Boulevard' [so they called the 'little place' of art-dealer Goupil, near the Cafe Richelieu at Boulevard Montmartre], and although he went back to the Hague soon after the close of the war [1871], his relations with the Goupils continued until his death, greatly fostered by the courageous manager of the branch house in Holland, Mr. . From this time onwards the story of the life of James Maris is the experience of every successful artist who has found his metier and reached his market. Under the farseeing guidance of Mr. Tersteeg, James [= Jacob, in Dutch] Maris had little further anxiety even in the rearing and educacating of his numerous family."

"This is already the third time today that I meet you (Where? asked Willem Maris.). Today I walked with a friend on the migratory route and then I looked up at the sky and then I said: there you have Willem Maris. When we arrived in the city, I looked at the sky again and then I said: there you have Willem Maris again. And now I see you here for the third time. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Also about J.H. Weissenbruch I can't keep silent - in spite of the fact they have been banished his works to the upper [exhibition] room. It may be true that one wishes them to be a little more worked-through, and somewhat less crude in hue, but he is exceeding many others [at the exhibition] concerning the broadness and power of the effect and the expression of the oppositions between the light in the air and the deep hues of the landscape.."

"Of course I should be very happy to sell a drawing but I am happier still when a real artist like Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch says about an unsalable??? study or drawing: 'That is true to nature, I could work from that myself.'"

"I am here the doctor [in his studio], bringing his morning visit. I feel them all [his watercolors] the pulse. One I say: Wait, I'll make you an ointment, so you will refresh completely. The other I say: Friend, you need air, and even more the light."

"It were mainly three or four [paintings] which kept him specifically busy [in the 1890's]. They were in progress for years already and he always spent hours and hours working on them - in which he wholly and truly disappeared into his work, persistently trying to perfect it in construction or composition and to saturate it with the life itself, of his soul - never satisfied with any result he achieved. Most of the time 'The Westmacott children' [and] 'The child with the Butterflies' were on his easel, and never they stayed the same with a next visit. They both had an expression that only he could give them. Sometimes, he acknowledged, he spent too many days working on one single work, with the inevitable danger of weakening his sensitivity by a lack of variety. Often it was sad to see that he could not leave them as they were.."

"As far as 'Melancholy' concerned, or as he liked to call it 'Evaporated Dreams', on that painting he worked most times during the last years of his life, when his eyes got less and less reliable. When he died the painting stood on his easel. Often he spoke about it with bitterness, as if it should express the nature of his own life. With his almost lost drawing [using no lines] and his subdued color, it sometimes seemed to me the saddest possible emblem of all the unhappiness of his fate."

"..This master, one of the seers of the century, and a recluse resident in one of the most populous districts in London, has painted almost always his own ideas as compositions, and has practically avoided the obvious amongst his surroundings.. ..the subjects of Matthew Maris have been crystallisations of his dreams. Blown on the canvas, as it were, with practically no trace of the machinery of paint visible to distract, all the pictures of this mystic artist have soared to a height above the more material arrangements in his brothers' work [= Jacob Maris.] He has sought and found his inspiration from the least tangible of his surroundings, or from his heaven-born gift of exquisite dreams such as never materialise except to the seer whose life is hardly of this world at all."

"The exception is Matthew [= Matthijs, in Dutch] Maris.. .It is perfectly impossible to be certain of anything produced by this remarkable artist. One day a figure, next day a head, another time a windmill landscape, and again a town or village."

"Take, as example, the early picture of the artist, the 'Souvenir of Amsterdam', [painted in 1871,].. .This measures only 18 ins. by 13 ins.. .Yet it is no exaggeration to say that this small canvas contains the essential features of the great Dutch city with its good half million inhabitants. The tall houses, the canals, the 'ophaalbruggen [drawbridges]' towering over everything - as the bridge always does, and must do, in a land under the level of the sea - the distant buildings and shipping. Everything.. ..that the commercial Capital of Holland says to the visitor is concentrated on these few square inches.. .I wanted to discuss this picture with Mr. Maris, for its goldenbrown colour went straight to my heart from the moment I first saw it, now many [30] years ago, but the artist would have none of it. 'Only a pot-boiler, made to coin a little necessary money, and one of my suicides..' [he said]"

"I now have permission, so long as Mauve is ill or too busy with his large painting, to go to Weissenbruch if I need to know something, and W. told me that in no way should I be worried about the change in M.'s mood. I also asked W. what he thought of my pen drawings. Those are your best, he said. And I told him that Tersteeg [director of art-seller Goupil, branche The Hague] had criticized them. Take no notice of it, he said, when Mauve said there was a painter in you, Tersteeg said no, and Mauve took your side against Tersteeg, and I was there, and if it happens again, I too will take your side, now that I've seen your work.. .I consider it a great privilege to visit such clever people as W. once in a while, especially when they take the trouble - as W. did this morning, for instance - to take a drawing they're working on but haven't finished yet and to explain how they set about doing it. That's what I need."

"That splendid, head, in which everything is said that can be said; color, line, tone, expression; the slightly advanced head, with the soft, almost human eyes, I never enter my studio in the morning without my eye falling upon this creature and wishing it 'Good Morning'."

"Weissenbruch to Vincent van Gogh: ..now that I have seen your work, I will take sides for you. They call me 'the sword without mercy', and I am - and I would not have said anything like that to Anton Mauve about you if I had not found any good in your sketches."

"He is the painter of the border land between the seen and the unseen world."

"..Besides of all things I hated and detested was painting. They told me I had a talent for it, and was a clever chap and could make as much money as I liked. Money always the principal thing and so it happens that I got forced into it. Being considered a very clever talented chap, after the war or siege of Paris [1870-71], a young fellow of the name of Vincent van Gogh [not painting yet, but still art-seller at Goupil in Paris] came around asking me for advice.. .The law of the pocket: 'full' signifies 'rich'; empty 'poor', all the world over the same; black, brown, yellow or white skinned. Heathen, barbarians, Mahommetans; pocket full, 'power' - empty, 'helpless'."

"Some time ago I saw a painting by Thijs Maris that reminded me of it. An old Dutch town with rows of brownish red houses with step-gables and tall flights of steps, grey roofs, and white or yellow doors, window-frames and cornices; canals with ships and a large white drawbridge, a barge with a man at the tiller going under it.. .Some distance away a stone bridge over the canal, with people and a cart with white horses crossing it. And everywhere movement, a porter with his wheelbarrow, a man leaning against the railing, gazing into the water, women in black with white caps.. .A greyish white sky over everything..."

"I recollect after the war in '71 [in Paris, where he stayed then and was fighting against the German] there were some debts to pay of course: what had I to do? I said to Wisselingh [Dutch art-dealer] who was with Goupil, 'tell them that I'll take them back later on.' I've never been able to do so, for one Van Gogh [probably Vincent, then art-seller at Goupil], his partner, gave me 200 francs, someone bought it for 350, and sold it in America for 700 pounds. He had asked Wisselingh how long it had taken me to do [make] it; he said a week, so I was the chap for him; no wonder he was always talking making fortune, fancy 100 pounds per day, make some more or this sort: do it only for a year. So I had to commit suicides upon suicides [he means, making salable paintings]: what did it matter to him or anyone else ? Someone said once to me: 'You must have somebody fool enough to say, here is money for you, and go your own way': that is the very thing one may not do. There is always someone telling you how to set about, and then come the schools telling you that it is not allowed to be one's self, but that one has to be a Roman or Greek, or imitate what they have performed.."

"Matthijs started with the left eye, which - since he painted the portrait à trois quarts - is about the center of the bud. The [left] eye finished, he started to paint around it the details of forehead, nose, the right eye, the mouth, etc.. ..until he finally enclosed all of these with the contour of the head and the light-brown background. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Besides (and I now quote the artist's own words) I never put a bullet in my gun, but only pretended, to do so!"

"My brother Jaap was born as a painter, which means he really enjoyed it. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"[I saw] landscapes, more color-visions than reality; ruins of castles ghostly shining through the mist, cobblestones, gently blown on the canvas.."

"I liked the room [his new place in London, c. 1906] the moment I saw it, so here I am set up as a swell.. .Don't you take this to be a trap set up for the unwary, you know you're always touching a sore spot when you talk painting, and drag my suicides before the public, the right name for potboilers, one has to give up all aim for any good intention, and do the technical skill and cleverness to please those with halfpennies and farthings in their pocket, to be favoured to live.. .I just got a letter from somebody, saying: but with potboiling one can make money, money always considered to be the principal. I told him he was greatly mistaken, when a little honesty remains, one can scarcely ask anything for them."

"He has shown me aspects of silence and light as others never showed me before. (translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Thijs, Thijs, you came to a people [of Paris], when they were doing well, now you must help them, when they are in distress. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"..he is never guilty of sentimentality in paint. He early learned the importance of judicious elimination in the interest of power, and persistently put this principle into practice. His characteristic canvases show a stretch of sand, with the sea beyond and the sky above, and possibly but a single sail in the distance; or an expanse of green meadow, with' a tree or two or a windmill to break monotony; or a sedge-lined canal, with a lighter or two as the only suggestions of human interest. In a word, absolute simplicity of composition, without an unnecessary detail to break the impression he wishes to convey is an essential feature of his best canvases."

"Last year I asked too much of my strength. I can't go on like this. it was not possible for me, I had to step back, I didn't make anything but stones [about his paintings?] ... They wanted to see beautiful paintings but I still couldn't make them, one illusion disappears for the other. I have made Cold reality, and I have made Truth. Is there a truth, also the cold reality is a truth. What exists between them was [only] baroque convention. I threw away everything in the stove.. .I am messing up my time with them; what is nothing more than material is no art to me; I could not bring it out.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"The Holland School [very probably the Hague School ] is doing well. There are here two watercolors from J.H. Weissenbruch which I find exceptional beautiful.. .One of the Weissenbruch's is a mill along a canal, blue sky with a small cloud, behind which the sun is hiding. The other one is a canal with boats in the evening, in the moonlight. It is an artist of great class, but Tersteeg [Herman Gijsbert Tersteeg, later director at Goupil's in The Hague] says he is unsaleable. (translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Just at the time I got your letter Mr. Angus sent me the 'Scotsman' [magazine]. You say some critics have thought it fair to make it the basis of a personal attack, and it is very critic-like. Critic means knife, means dissection, means wisdom, means perfection. Art is stupid, art-less. That is a hard job for the critic to understand. I like your book because it is 'stupid', like Japanese; which means done for the love of it in itself; not for gain or success. You don't go to criticise a Japanese drawing and say it is out of shape, out of drawing, no perspective nor anatomy. This is only for the critic to show his knowledge by killing the things; those stupid fellows do harm, like Whistler says, with their learnings. They must have schools and applications of knowledge. Thackeray calls them scavengers - scavengers are at least necessary, those fellows are for no good.."

"Thijs knew everything by himself, he was a genius. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

".. And among them all [artist of the Hague School ] Weissenbruch holds a prominent place; for who depicts as well as he the effect of the sun struggling through stormy clouds, or who appreciates better the value of light and shade? Who under stands the variation in the very atmosphere, the many varieties of sunrise and sunset, and above all things, the sweet, suffused twilight? Who so skillful as he in giving a fresh construction to a well-worn subject, in finding ever new inspirations? Who remains so young and so enthusiastic? Who, indeed, but Weissenbruch, whose pictures fill us with delight and create an impression on our minds that is not easily forgotten."

"Weissenbruch to Anton Mauve: He [ Vincent van Gogh ] is drawing damn well, I could paint after his studies."

"When it is storming and raining, thundering and lightning I am in my element; nature must be seen in action. Then outside, I put on my jacket, put my feet in clogs, put on a hat and start on a march. When the showers settle down, with charcoal or black chalk [I] make a scribble, to keep a firm grip on what one sees. When working out, hue and color come smoothly back into the memory."

"My good Lord and friend Sala, - [I] enjoyed the blissful pleasure enjoyed by your friendship.. .When I reached the city [The Hague] again yesterday, I have taken the fishes out of the basket more than 12 times, to show them.. .That day, friend Sala, belongs among the most pleasant of my life, all moments have kept me alive until now, always sitting [fishing] in the boat, swaying with the bobbers in the field of view.."

"I was a healthy, strong, cheerful boy, and like to take great walks in and around The Hague.. .I sometimes got a blow from Nature. And if I got such a blow later, I could draw and paint what I saw. I recorded it in a few scribbles."

"Light and air, that's art! I can never give enough light in my paintings, especially in the skies. The air in a painting, that is really a thing! It is the main thing! Air and light are the great magicians. It is the sky which prescribes the painting. Painters never look enough at the sky. We must get it from above. (translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"I remember I stood stunned as a boy, in front of the paintings of the old [Dutch] masters in our museums, how they let speak Nature to you. If I have learned to see nature by someone, it was by our old masters. But most by Nature itself. (translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)"

"Some of his [Nuijen's] works reveal a flight of imagination that aspires above the patriotic [Dutch] uniformity towards a more impressive style."

"Nuijen, a pupil of Schelfhout.. ..was in turn reviving his master. Schelfhout had fallen back into a certain deadly, pale, green color by 1830, and Nuyen, who the sun of rising Romanticism from France had shone in his eyes, was one of the first in our country [The Netherlands] to take a look there.. .In 1833 this became a reason for Schelfhout to make a trip to Paris.. ..with this consequence that Schelfhout's talent of the moment got a new elan.. .Not only that he spread his wings more freely, but also his subjects were transferred to another area. [the wide Dutch landscape and many winter-views]. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"Around 1836 I left the studio of my master and obtained my own studio in the parental home.. .The [[w:Romanticism|romantic [Dutch] movement]] under the leadership of the highly-gifted [Wijnand] Nuijen [c. 1830] also attracted me to follow. And in spite of the fact that in this way people lost their color and embellishment and often degenerating into chic, later on, a more sensible search arose for enlivening of coloration, heightening effect and strengthening the relief. (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"Better send in one good picture than a lot of poor ones, but then that good one must be so good that it almost walks out of the frame and becomes a portion of nature itself."

"The death of the unforgettable Nuyen has moved me deeply, Jan. Now the hope for young painting art [in The Netherlands] lies on You. Surely you are, after Nuyen, the only one who can fulfill this task. (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"[ Nuijen, a pupil of Schelfhout].. ..was in turn reviving his master. Schelfhout had fallen back into a certain deadly, pale, green color by 1830, and Nuyen, who the sun of rising Romanticism from France had shone in his eyes, was one of the first in our country [The Netherlands] to take a look there.. .In 1833 this became a reason for Schelfhout to make a trip to Paris.. ..with this consequence that Schelfhout's talent of the moment got a new elan.. .Not only that he spread his wings more freely, but also his subjects were transferred to another area. [the wide Dutch landscape and many winter-views]. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"Only the way Schelfhout represents winter, in the white garment and with the motley crowd of skaters, we find something tempting about it. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"Do you like to see what can be transformed from a flat, elementary rural scene - bearing the stamp of nature, the mark of truth - into something most beautiful and graceful? Look at the works of our great [painter] Schelfhout. There you will find represented plain nature at the most elegant, but moreover with a faithfulness and truth, which only Schelfhout can represent. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)"

"..and since we are now living in the Summer-time, I don't have a trick to imagine me Winter so strongly that I would be able to paint one [a winter-landscape].. ..and you must have patience until next winter. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)"