Hendrik Willem Mesdag Dutch, 1831-1915

Hendrik Willem Mesdag, born in a wealthy Groningen family of bankers, worked in his father’s business till the age of thirty-five. After an inheritance of his wife, Sientje van Houten, had rendered him independent, he abandoned his secure position at his father’s bank and followed his artistic ambitions. During a four years stay in Brussels he served his apprenticeship with the famous landscapist Willem Roelofs and grew familiar with the art of the Barbizon School, sharing their fascination for working in the open air (en plein air).

After a stay on the German island Norderney in 1868, Mesdag got fascinated by the sea. Compared to the highly finished, minutely detailed seascapes of the Romantic School, Mesdag’s brutal realism pointed in a completely new direction. His unbiased depiction of the sea, straight from nature, was a radically new phenomenon and shocked the art world. Mesdag’s vigorous brushwork and ‘real’ seas were invariably seen as proof that his paintings possessed ‘truth’ and ‘immediacy’. No wonder his work received wide critical acclaim.

After he left Brussels, Mesdag went to The Hague. He rented a room in the nearby fishing village Scheveningen, which enabled him to be as close as possible to his main source of inspiration: the sea. From day to day he went sketching on the sands of Scheveningen and studied the sea in all its aspects, from quiet serenity to wild fury. He found great inspiration in the activities of the fishermen, anchoring their ships or bringing in the catch. These subjects gained him international recognition and would soon become one of the best selling Dutch artists of his day.

The present lot, painted on an unusually large oak panel, depicts the anchoring of the fishing boats on Scheveningen beach. On the foreground we see fishermen wading in the sea, anchoring the flat-bottomed fishing boat to the beach. As a consequence of the fact that Scheveningen did not possess a harbour in Mesdag’s time, all the fishing boats were drawn on the beach by horses. The painters of the Hague School, Mesdag in particular, favoured this subject matter and depicted it with a grandeur and truthfulness that remains unsurpassed in Dutch painting.