Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914

Written by Mary Flanagan Thursday, October 21 2010

Gari Melchers, In Holland

LAREN, Netherlands – Holland is an idyllic country where sturdy women wearing lace bonnets and wooden shoes carry out their daily chores in the shadow of a windmill. American artists, summering in rural Dutch villages during the three decades prior to World War I, sold this image to the American public, which was nostalgic for a way of life that ended with the industrial revolution.

A collection of 67 paintings made in the Netherlands by 37 American men and women during the period 1880-1914 is now on show in the Singer Laren Museum. A perfect venue for this exhibition, the museum is housed in the former villa of the American artist William Henry Singer Jr. (1868-1943) in the Dutch hamlet of Laren, about 20 miles east of Amsterdam. This international exhibition, entitled Dutch Utopia, was organized by the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga., in association with the Singer Laren Museum.

In Holland, the painting chosen for the poster to advertise this exhibition is huge: The two blond maidens – one toting blue milk pails, the other a potato rake – are life-size. The artist, Gari Melchers (1860-1932), was an American who lived most of his life in Europe, often painting in the Dutch seaside village of Egmond, where he started an art colony with fellow American George Hitchcock (1850-1913). Married to his former art student Corinne Mackall from Savannah, Melchers also served for 10 years as a European purchasing agent (fine arts adviser) for the Telfair Museum – explaining that museum’s Dutch connection and the initial interest of its chief curator, Holly Koons McCullough, in mounting this exhibition.

Marcia Oakes Woodbury Mother and Daughter: The Whole of Life

A surprisingly large number of the Dutch Utopian artists were women and their take on the hard-working Dutch usually differed slightly from that of their male compatriots. Maine-born Marcia Oakes Woodbury (1865-1913) painted frequently in sheep-filled Laren. Her watercolor Mother and Daughter:The Whole of Life depicts two women from the village in a triptych, a format more commonly used for altarpieces. On the right panel, the mother holds rosary beads. On the left, the daughter holds a book, most likely the Bible. In the middle panel, they spin and card wool in a bare room, lit by one small window. Spinning, day-in and day-out, was a grueling economic necessity for these peasant women, and it took its toll. “Woodbury's concern for the women of Laren, who were condemned to a life of spinning, is expressed in this exceptional work,” notes Emke Raassen-Kruimel, curator at the Singer Laren Museum.

For a woman from America’s wealthy middle class in the late 19th century, the study of art was an acceptable alternative to the nursing or teaching professions. Courses at an art school in Europe, such as the Académie Julian in Paris, were an integral part of her education. When these art schools closed for summer holidays, Holland’s various English-speaking art colonies were a suitable destination for groups of American women art students. “Holland offered women easy and safe access via the clean and efficient railway service, a familiar Protestant social order, and a widespread facility with the English language,” explains Kim Sajet, CEO and president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and another key instigator for this exhibition.

James Jebusa Shannon, George Hitchcock

“Perhaps even more women than men came to study at the American art colony in Egmond,” says Annette Stott, author of the book Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture and editor of the catalog which accompanies this exhibition. One attraction of the Egmond School was its handsome and party-loving director George Hitchcock. A portrait by James Jebusa Shannon (1862-1923) of Hitchcock painting in a field of poppies in Egmond is on exhibition and confirms his good looks. Called a “swell” by some of his female students, Hitchcock ended up leaving his wife, Henrietta, for the 22- year-old British artist Cecil Jay (1884-1930) when he was 53.

Not all the women students at the Egmond School were young. Detroit artist Letta Crapo Smith (1862-1921) was 40 years old when she painted The First Birthday there. Under Hitchcock's eye, Smith painted this large canvas outdoors using a local Egmond laundress and her child as models. Seated under the trees on a sunny day, the woman pauses from her knitting to watch her child play with a new doll, a moment that perhaps would not have been chosen by a male painter.

Letta Crapo Smith, The First Birthday

About 10 miles south of Rotterdam, the rustic village of Rijsoord became the site of another American artists’ colony, primarily because the parents of artist and professor John Vanderpoel (1857-1911) had once lived there before they emigrated to America. Rijsoord eventually became the permanent home to New Jersey native Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley (1860-1958). Encouraged to study art by her two aunts, Hawley started attending art school at the age of 19 in New York City, where she came in contact with many European artists, including the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. At the age of 32, she broke off her engagement to a mysterious Englishman in Bermuda and traveled to Europe to further her art studies. In Paris, her studio was on the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, and her neighbor was the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). During the summer months, Hawley regularly traveled to Holland, where she was introduced into the American artists’ colony at Rijsoord. The local farmer Bastiaan de Koning, however, took her fancy. Eight years his senior, Hawley married De Koning when she was 41. Three years later she had a daughter and eventually six grandchildren. Her family rooted in Rijsoord, Hawley continued traveling to exhibitions in Paris and New York until she died at the age of 97.

Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley, Two Women near the River Waal

In 2005, art historian and museum curator Alexandra Gaba-van Dongen published the book Dreaming of Rijsoord on the life and works of her great-grandmother Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley to accompany a retrospective exhibition and new website (www.wdhawley.org) on Hawley’s art. Two of Hawley's paintings are on show in Dutch Utopia. Like Melchers’ painting in the exhibition poster, Two Women near the River Waal shows two Dutch maidens in their traditional lace bonnets and wooden shoes, with a yoke and two pails. The subtle difference between the two paintings: Hawley's women are resting and noticeably more robust.

Dutch Utopia is an interesting glimpse at how American artists envisioned Holland at the turn of the century. This exhibition has already run in the United States at the Telfair Museum of Art (Georgia), Taft Museum of Art (Ohio), and Grand Rapids Art Museum (Michigan). The Singer Laren Museum (the Netherlands) is the last stop for this exhibition, where it will run until January 16, 2011.

Exhibition catalogs in English are available from the University of Georgia Press ( www.ugapress.org) and in Dutch from the Singer Laren Museum (www.singerlaren.nl).

Mary Flanagan was born in Fairfield, Conn., and has a degree in archeology from the University of Arizona. She has been working as a journalist, editor, and translator in Amsterdam, Holland, for the past 20 years. Most recently she has translated two historical novels by Dutch author Ivo Knottnerus, The Life of the Renaissance Painter Paolo Veronese and Saint Helena's Pilgrimage from Rome to Jerusalem, which have just been published as e-books via Amazon.com.