Windmills, wooden clogs and tulip mania — that’s what Americans considered quintessentially Dutch at the end of the nineteenth century.
That’s how they liked the Dutch. Beauty is ‑alas ‑ in the eye of the beholder, and of course it had everything to do with America’s own nostalgia, embedded as the country was in his own rapid industrialisation.
With over seventy paintings the exhibition Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland ‑ that travelled from Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah (GA) to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati (OH) and the Grand Rapids Art Museum (MI) and currently halts in Laren, Holland ‑ examines the work of forty-three American painters drawn to Holland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Remote villages
Artists as William Merrit Chase, John Singer Sargent, George Hitchcock and Gari Melchers ended up in small, remote villages as Laren, Katwijk and Volendam.
There they drew influence from contemporary Dutch artists of the Hague School and from their predecessors of the 17th century, namely Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Vermeer, the masters of the Dutch Golden Age.
Protestant and romantic
Along with the beauty of the land, these painters were drawn to Dutch Protestant values. Many brought with them the ideals of the American Progressive Movement (1890-1920) of which work, family and women's suffrage were pivotal.
These values are reflected in paintings that depict the toils of Dutch labor, and quite often women at work. These women harvest flax, weed the pavement and make lace.
There's a touch of the romantic in these artists. The Dutch peasant tending the field is a nostalgic reminder of the American farmer. Far removed from the industrial revolution and its dehumanizing effects, these paintings reflect a detachment from contemporary life. These artists paint the real Dutch countryside ánd their “Dutch Utopia”, sentimental and idealized.
What you see is what you get: reality and imagination.
Article in the yearbook
In 2000, The Low Countries published article on "Holland Mania" in the United States, focusing on Dutch influences on American politics, cultural institutions, social customs and language.
You can find it here.
Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914. From 17 September 2010 till 17 January 2011 in Singer Laren Museum (Laren, North Holland).
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