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The Hague School from the Rijksmuseum at Neue Pinakothek Museum

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Saturday, 25 October 2008 04:50

At the Swimming Pool by German Max Liebermann 1875-1878 - Oil on canvas 

Munich, Germany  - The Neue Pinakothek in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam is holding an exhibition on the paintings and works on by artists of the Hague School. The painting culture of the Hague School is one that was celebrated already by the German Realists associated with Max Liebermann. As successor to the School of Barbizon and together with the Glasgow School of Painting it must be considered among the most important innovators of the Dutch genre in the second half of the 19th century.

As well as its artistic brilliance, it was, above all, the School’s understanding of Dutch landscape itself that soon established the international acclaim of artists associated with Gerard Bilders, Jozef Israëls, Jacob Maris, Anton Mauve and Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch. The viewer found concentrated in their pictures essential features of what was typically Dutch. Against the background of this particular authenticity the exhibition examines the way the painters of the Hague School took to depict their homeland and to what extent their depiction corresponded to the actual appearance of the country in the second half of the 19th century.

Centrepiece of the exhibition is the Hague School artists’ view of a landscape which from around 1875 onwards had to give way to increasing urbanisation and industrialisation. Jozef Israëls (Dutch, 1824–1911) Expectation Oil on canvas 71 1/2 x 54 in. With its display of not only paintings and water colours but also old photographs the cultural-historical perspective of the exhibition traces the invention of a landscape and portrait that is still regarded as typically Dutch.

The selection of historical photographs from the collection of the Rijksmuseum documents by way of contrast the topographical development of the Netherlands in the late 19th century. Here the viewer finds juxtaposed to the images of the Picturalists, who employ the tools of classic landscape painting, a series of photographs by engineers, which reveal the profound changes to the infrastructure. This juxtaposition illustrates clearly the extent to which the construction of waterways and railways transformed the flat polder landscape into a high relief of bridges, steam-powered pump stations and locks.

Yet this immense change was barely captured in the images of the Hague School. Aesthetics and a sense of nature formed a symbiosis that created an identity far beyond the realms of art. However, in the dual perspective of painting and photography the seemingly timeless landscape of the Hague School painters proves to be a fiction of both the past and present.

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