Painters also have to earn money, but sometimes it became too much for Jacob Maris: ‘Damn, another city with white clouds!’

“Anyone who works for honor or money is not an artist,” said the painter Eduard Karsen (1860-1941). The true artist creates work out of inner necessity and in complete freedom that no one asked for: at the end of the nineteenth century this was the predominant idea among artists such as De Tachtigers. They were anti-bourgeois outsiders, seers if you like, gods in the depths of their minds. But in the meantime, many of them also had a shop. Being an artist was a profession and most artists had to make a living from what they made. In practice, their lofty ideals often clashed with socio-economic reality.

Karsen’s bold statement can be read on a wall in the exhibition Art for a living in the Dordrecht Museum. There, paintings, drawings and prints are used to explain how Dutch art related to the market in the second half of the nineteenth century. After 1850, the art market flourished: the number of art dealers and artists’ associations in our country increased, grand exhibitions were held following the example of the French Salons and lively art criticism emerged.

Sweet

The curators of the exhibition have borrowed some work from other museums and from private collections, but mainly drawn from the Dordrechts Museum’s own collection, which was partly formed in the nineteenth century. Many of the works on display had not been on display for years, because the makers or subjects are no longer considered important today. Paintings for which a fortune was paid around 1880 sometimes seem sappy and sentimental to us in 2024. Flower still lifes in candy store colors, for example, or the children playing on the beach of Jozef Israëls devotees. The herds of sheep on the heath of Anton Mauve and his many less gifted followers: something like that.

Or take the painter Henriëtte Ronner-Knip (1821-1909). She could really paint cats, but she did almost nothing else and in her pursuit of marketability she always made the animals just a little too cute. A century and a half before Tiktok and Instagram, Ronner already knew: with kittens that do something funny or clumsy you can score with a large audience. She based the price of a painting on the number of kittens depicted.

A century and a half before Tiktok and Instagram, Ronner already knew: with kittens that do something funny you can score with a large audience

A section on the Laren School brings together salon pieces of dim interiors with simple peasant families, cribs, coal stoves and boiled potatoes. These scenes were produced in abundance at the end of the nineteenth century, for both the Dutch and American markets, by Jozef Israëls and Albert Neuhuys, but also by deservedly forgotten artists such as Jacob Kever and Bernard de Hoog. And yet, if you get over your prejudices and look more closely, Neuhuys’ The first lesson a finely balanced image, in which the postures of the mother explaining something to her daughter with a needle and thread and the interested girl leaning forward are both accurately characterized. And The dinner hour by Roland Larij (1855-1932) from Dordrecht, the interior rooms are beautifully backlit. The way the steam from a hot lunch curls past a barely defined farmer’s head is captured with visible pleasure.

So you can understand the objections to this kind of work – it sold well and there is too much of it – but it is also interesting to compare the different painters and note: commercial art can be good or bad, and everything between them. Actually just like non-commercial art.

Piet Mondriaan

Except this real one potboilers – success songs that the artist kept repeating to keep the stove burning – other forms of lucrative art are also highlighted in Dordrecht. A series of etched cityscapes by Willem Witsen reminds us that many artists made prints because they were printed in limited editions and were therefore cheaper and more marketable. There is also a chapter with commissioned portraits of Jan Veth and Thérèse Schwartze, among others. And a wall with oil sketches by Willem Roelofs, the first landscape painter to trade his preliminary studies. These are all ways to earn a living through art. And the same applies to series of etchings, commissioned portraits and plein air landscapes: you can do it pleasing and pretend to be honest or you can remain honest and safeguard the artistic quality.

In the meantime, this is really a subject where you would like to read the background stories at home in a catalog. Much was written about art in the nineteenth century, by critics in newspapers and by the artists themselves in letters and diaries, so there are interesting, direct sources available. But because Art for a living had to be organized in a short time to compensate for the cancellation of another exhibition, there was no opportunity to produce a book. We will have to make do with the snippets of nice text on the walls, such as the unforgiving quote from Eduard Karsen. Or a letter fragment from a young Piet Mondriaan, who writes: “I am now working on some paintings that I can sell; It is annoying to have to do this because it has to be to the liking of the people, but it is pecuniae causa [omwille van het geld].”

Above four silvery Dutch cityscapes by Jacob Maris is his sobering sigh: “Damn, another city with white clouds!”

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