Hague School By the 19th century, the Netherlands were far behind the up-to-date art tendencies and schools. Possibly the best known Dutch painter in the first half of the 19th century,
Johan Barthold Jongkind, after getting an art education in the country, moved over to France and spend most of his life in Paris. At the same time, Dutch art responded to the realistic tendencies which were developing in France about the same time. The
Hague School were around at the start of the nineteenth century. They included
Jozef Israëls.
Jacob Maris captured the many contrasting aspects of the Dutch landscape, from its deepest shadows to its brightest highlights, and from its hazy atmosphere to its clear, crisp air. "No painter," says M. Philippe Zilcken, "has so well expressed the ethereal effects, bathed in air and light through floating silvery mist, in which painters delight, and the characteristic remote horizons blurred by haze; or again, the grey yet luminous weather of Holland."
Amsterdam Impressionism was current during the middle of the nineteenth century at about the same time as
French Impressionism. The painters put their impressions onto canvas with rapid, visible strokes of the brush. They focused on depicting the everyday life of the city. Late nineteenth-century Amsterdam was a bustling centre of art and literature. Famous painters among the Amsterdam Impressionists include
George Hendrik Breitner,
Willem de Zwart,
Isaac Israëls,
Simon Duiker and
Jan Toorop. George Hendrik Breitner introduced a realism to the Netherlands that created shock waves similar to that of
Courbet and
Manet's in France. He was the painter of city views par excellence: wooden foundation piles by the harbour, demolition work and construction sites in the old centre, horse trams on the Dam, or canals in the rain. By the turn of the century, Breitner was a famous painter in the Netherlands, as demonstrated by a highly successful retrospective exhibition at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam (1901). When the streets of Amsterdam are grey and rainy, people of Amsterdam whisper grimly "Echt Breitnerweer" (Typical Breitnerweather).
Vincent van Gogh Vincent van Gogh (30 March 185329 July 1890) was a
post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died aged 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still. Following his first exhibitions in the late 1880s, van Gogh's fame grew steadily among colleagues, art critics, dealers and collectors. After his death, memorial exhibitions were mounted in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. In the early 20th century, there were retrospectives in Paris (1901 and 1905) and Amsterdam (
Stedelijk Museum, 1905), and important group exhibitions in Cologne (
Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler, 1912), New York (
Armory Show, 1913) and Berlin (1914). These had a noticeable impact on later generations of artists. By the mid-20th century, van Gogh was seen as one of the greatest and most recognizable painters in history. In 2007, a group of Dutch historians compiled the "
Canon of the Netherlands" to be taught in schools and included van Gogh as one of the fifty topics of the canon, alongside other national icons such as
Rembrandt and
De Stijl. Together with those of
Pablo Picasso, Van Gogh's works are among the world's
most expensive paintings ever sold, as estimated from auctions and private sales. Those sold for over $100 million (today's equivalent) include
Portrait of Dr. Gachet,
Portrait of Joseph Roulin and
Irises.
A Wheatfield with Cypresses was sold in 1993 for $57 million, a spectacularly high price at the time, while his
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear was sold privately in the late 1990s for an estimated $80 to $90 million. ==Twentieth century==