Tag: netherlands

Gerard van Honthorst

Gerard van Honthorst, “Saint Sebastian”, circa 1623, Oil on Canvas, 101 x 117 cm, The National Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Born in November of 1592 in Utrecht, an important trade center of the Northern Netherlands, Gerard van Honthorst was a Dutch Golden Age painter who was known for his artificially lit scenes. In his early career in Rome, he had great success painting in a style influenced by the work of Caravaggio. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Honthorst became a prominent portrait and allegorical painter. 

The son of a decorative painter, Gerard van Honthorst initially trained under his father and finished his education under painter and printmaker Abraham Bloemaert, a painter of historical subjects and an early advocate of the emerging Baroque style. Bloemaert was an important teacher who would train most of the Utrecht painters who were influenced by Caravaggio’s style. Upon completion of his education, Honthorst traveled to Rome where he lodged at the palace of Vincenzo Giustiniani, an aristocratic banker and art collector whose collected paintings and sculptures totaled over fifteen-hundred pieces. 

Honthorst was influenced by the contemporary artists in Giustiniani’s collection, particularly those works by Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi and the Carracci family of artists. The technique used by these artists to depict light in their canvases strongly impressed the young artist. While lodged at Giustiniani’s palace, Honthorst painted his 1617 oil on canvas “Christ Before the High Priest”, a work in which lighting plays a particular importance. The scene of Jesus questioned by the priest Calaphas takes place at night with the only source of light being a candle in the center of the table. Jesus and Calphas are illuminated by that candle; all the secondary figures in the room are shrouded in darkness.

Gerard van Honthorst acquired an important patron in Rome, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a member of the Borghese family and also the patron of Caravaggio and  Gian Lonrenzo Bernini. Through the Cardinal, Honthorst received important commissions at Monte Compatri and Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. He also received work from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de’ Medici. In 1620, Honthorst returned to Utrecht and through his new work increased his reputation in the Dutch Republic and abroad. 

In 1623, the year of his marriage, Honthorst became president of Utrecht’s Guild of Saint Luke, a city guild of painters and other artists in early Europe. His reputation was such that the English envoy at the Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, recommended his work to Lord Dorchester and the Earl of Arundel, courtier to King James I and King Charles I. Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, the sister of Charles I, commissioned Honthorst as portrait painter and as drawing-master for her children. He was invited to England in 1628 where he painted several portraits, a vast allegorical scene featuring Charles and his queen as Apollo and Diana, and an intimate group portrait “The Four Eldest Children of the King of Bohemia”. 

Upon his return to Utrecht in 1652, Gerard van Honthorst, still retained by Charles I, painted a 1631 group portrait of the king and queen of Bohemia and all their children. He also painted scenes from “The Odeyssey” for Lord Dorchester, historical scenes in 1635 for Christian IV of Denmark, and a portrait of Countess Leonora during her visit to the Hague. Honthorst opened a second studio in the Hague where he painted portraits of the members of the court, employed a large number of assistants to make replicas of royal portraits, and taught students, each paying one hundred guilders a year.   

A prolific artist, Gerard van Honthorst passed away in April of 1656. Many of his paintings, cultivated in the style of Caravaggio, involved tavern scenes with musicians, gamblers and people dining. He was very skilled in the art of  chiaroscuro, the strong use of contrasts between light and dark to affect the whole composition.

In November of 2013, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC purchased Honthorst’s 1623 “The Concert” from a private collection in France. The painting went on display for the first time in two-hundred and eighteen years at a special installation in the National Gallery’s West Building in November of 2013. It is now on permanent display in the museum’s Dutch and Flemish galleries. 

Notes: Gerard van Honthorst was one of the first artists to portray Saint Sebastian as a half-length figure, slumped forward in a seated position. The pose was subsequently adopted by other followers of Caravaggio in Utrecht, including Hendrik te Brugghen and Jan van Bijlert in the mid-1620s. The painting “Saint Sebastian” was most likely painted shortly after Honthorst’s return to Utrecht from Rome in 1620.

Top Insert Image: Pieter de Jode II, “Gerrit (Gerard) van Honthorst”, Engraving, From Cornelis de Bie’s “Her Golden Cabinet”, Publisher Joannes Meyseens, Antwerp, 1661

Second Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “Saint Peter Penitent”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 110.2 x 97.4 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “Old Woman Examing a Coin”, 1623, Oil on Canvas, 75 x 60 cm, The Kremer Collection, Amsterdam

Bottom Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “The Denial of St. Peter”, 1622, Oil on Canvas, 111 x 149 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Erik de Jong

 

Erik de Jong, “Owl (Eule)”, Date Unknown, Oil on Panel

Born in 1958, Erik de Jong finished his studies at the Minerva Academie in Groningen, Netherlands. In 1984 he decided to move to Amsterdam. De Jong had his first solo exhibition in Galerie Mokum. which has been a critical site for the exhibition of Dutch Realist painting.

De Jong has a preference for the theme of the human set in a landscape or in an interior. The people that he depicts are mostly men that are lost in thought or that are stilled in motion. In de Jong’s paintings, a distance is created between the spectator and the imaged figures in his paintings. This provides a moment of rest; but still there is a feeling of tension. The question arises as to whether there has already been an action performed or does that action still have to come.

Reality has always been the starting point of Erik de Jong’s paintings; but the border between reality and what is suggested is very thin. This is something that can be clearly seen in most of his recent paintings. Usually there are several hidden layers in the work of De Jong, requiring that the viewer look beyond the archetype images he has learned.

Anton Rooskens

Anton Rooskens, “Nachtvogels (Night Birds)”, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Anton Rooskens attended the Technical School in Venlo, southeastern Netherlands, in the years 1924-1934. He moved to Amsterdam in 1935. As a painter Rooskens was an autodidact. In the 1930s he painted mainly landscapes, influenced by the paintings of van Gogh.

In 1945 Rooskens visited the exhibition “Kunst in Vrijheid (Art in Freedom)” in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was at the “Art in Freedom” exhibition that Rooskens first saw African sculptures. The simplified shapes and figures  inspired his work visibly in the years after the war. He was also influenced by  the early avant-garde Cubist art movement.

Since 1946 Anton Rooskens frequently had contact with the painters Appel, Corneille and Brands; later, in 1948 he met the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys. This group of artists founded “The Experimental Group” which later became part of the CoBrA movement, a short-lived but highly influential artist collective in Paris. Its approximately thirty members became known for their vigorously spontaneous, rebellious style of painting, using loose, gestural marks and strong colors.

Rooskens created his own language of magical signs in black, yellow, ocher, blue and red. He painted compositions where masks and shields are tangled in coloured surfaces and lines. The imaginary creatures that remind us of the CoBrA movement became important in Rooskens’ paintings until his death in 1976.

Hendrick Goltzius

Hendrick Goltzius, “Four Studies of Hands”

Hendrick Goitzius was a German-born Dutch printmaker, draftsman and painter. He was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, noted for his sophisticated technique. He arrived in Haarlem at age nineteen. Two years later, he set up a workshop. He left Haarlem only once to visit Germany and Italy in 1590 to 1591, bringing home a more classical, naturalistic art that shifted Dutch artists away from the eccentric Mannerist style. His panoramic, open-air drawings of Holland’s scenery, among the earliest Dutch landscapes, paved the way for younger artists like Rembrandt van Rijn.

Famous for his printmaking, Goltzius worked in secret and never showed an unfinished work. By 1600 he had abandoned the burin for the brush. His eyesight was failing due to years of painstaking work with engraving tools, and, like his contemporaries, he believed painting to be superior to printmaking. He died in 1617, never achieving the same quality on panel as he had on paper.

Wallerant Vailant

Wallerant Vailant, “Self Portrait with Turban”, 1655-60, Oil on Canvas, 74 x 59.5 cm, Private Collection

The Dutch painter and printmaker Wallerant Vaillant is best known for his engravings, especially his numerous mezzotints, a technique he did much to develop. His painted oeuvre is rarer, largely consisting of portraits, and including a number of self-portraits in which the artist presents himself clothed in a variety of picturesque costumes – for example in Orientalist mode, as seen here.

It is significant that the painter never represents himself exercising his art – that is, with palette and paintbrushes. In this respect, he was clearly inspired by the numerous self-portraits of Rembrandt in which the great Dutchman created sartorially-varied likenesses, accentuating expression and social status more than his own entirely true profession. These have the appearance of exercises, almost a series of repertory characters, within the greatly prized genre of portraiture.

In Amsterdam, Vaillant would have had ample opportunity to witness Rembrandt’s genius, since he was obliged for religious motives to seek exile early in his career in the capital of the Dutch kingdom, where he lived –with the exception of some extended trips abroad – until his death.

Creating this portrait through an oculus that offsets the bust enables the painter to play with optical space, an expedient he used on other occasions.  In this case, the highly refined, painstaking technique used in describing the face, treating transparency in an exceptionally realistic manner, heightens the photographic appearance of the work. Conversely, the reflections on the rich brocade of the turban, no doubt a product of the Compagnie des Indes, are depicted with a free, more generously loaded brush. It is striking how a master known for his manière noire was such a talented colourist.

Wim Heleens

Wim Heleens, “Unexpected” Oil on Canvas, 2009

The work of Wim Heldens occupies an individual place in the contemporary art scene of the Netherlands. Understanding that the re-emergence of realist art as a counter movement to modernism was opening-up new perspectives, and realising that his main interest was the human condition and life as it unfolded around him, he quickly discovered that his talents could best develop in the portrait genre and the context of ordinary life, thereby picking-up an old Dutch tradition. But although much of his technique is traditional, the imagery is contemporary, and it is in this combination of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ that Heldens found his originality.

Matthijs Roling

Six Paintings by Matthijs Roling

Matthijs Nicolaas Roling is a Dutch painter, active as graphic designer, wall painter, painter, draftsman, lithographer, pen artist, etcher, and academy lecturer. He is considered a kindred spirit of the 3rd generation of the Dutch Group of Figurative Abstraction. Röling is described as the “figurehead of contemporary figurative painting in the Netherlands.

Röling was educated at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague from 1960 to 1963, and at the Rijksacademiein Amsterdam in 1963-1964. His first museum exhibition took place in 1965 in the Drents Museum in Assen. In 1972 he became a lecturer at the Academy Minerva in Groningen, where he educated Peter Pander, Douwe Elias and Jan van der Kool. He also lectured at the Classical Academy for fine art in Groningen.

Jim Taihuttu’s “Wolf”

Director Jim Taihuttu’s “Wolf”, 2013, starring Marwan Kenzari

WOLF is a crime thriller that offers a look inside the world of a new generation of hard criminals that is increasingly present in the big cities of Europe. In the grey desolation of an anonymous ghetto young kick boxer Majid (Marwan Kenzari) quickly makes a career for himself inside and outside of the ring, thanks to his iron fists. As his star rises, the two worlds of the ring and organized crime collide as he becomes deeper entangled in his own ambition.

Written and directed by Jim Taihuttu, it is good film, though based on a story line that has been done before, with a particularly tense feel to it. The film is a no sympathy criminal character study of a man’s self-destruction. It was filmed in black and white in the Netherlands by the Dutch production company Habbekrats. A good film to seek out, particularly if you enjoyed watching Nicolas Refn’s three “Pusher” films or Audiard’s “Un Prophete”.

More information and trailers are at http://wolfdefilm.nl

Paul Sixta, “Cristian”

 

Paul Sixta, “Cristian”

Paul Sixta (Netherlands, 1979) graduated in 2003 from the Audio-Visual department at St. Joost Breda. Sixta works as a filmmaker and photographer. His films and video-installations were shown on festivals and museums worldwide and won several prizes. Sixta often collaborates with other artists and his work ranges from visual anthropology to performance videos. Sixta’s work deals with sensitive subjects, emphasizes the story telling, and delicately explores relationships.

Image reblogged with thanks to the artist’s site: www.paulsixta.com

Crispijn de Passe the Elder

Crispijn de Passe the Elder, “Apollo, Sol”

Crispijn van de Passe the Elder was a Dutch publisher and engraver and founder of a dynasty of engravers comparable to the Wierix family and the Sadelers, though mostly at a more mundane commercial level. Most of their engravings were portraits, book title-pages, and the like, with relatively few grander narrative subjects. As with the other dynasties, their style is very similar, and hard to tell apart in the absence of a signature or date, or evidence of location. Many of the family could produce their own designs, and have left drawings.

Rob Van Hoek

Oil Paintings by Rob Van Hoek

Rob Van Hoek is a Dutch artist inspired by nature, in particular cultivated landscapes which reveal patterns, lines, rhythm and planes. A cultivated landscape is composed of manmade elements; mown fields, green fallow, a line of trees. All of these create a harmonious image. To capture these patterns and lines, an important part of Rob Van Hoek’s technique is to scratch, draw and rub into wet oil paint.