Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen

The Artist Painting a Cow in a Meadow Landscape. Oil on panel, 1850. Rijksmuseum Hendrik (Hendrikus) van de Sande Bakhuyzen (2 January 1795 – 12 December 1860) was a Dutch landscape painter and art teacher. He was a prominent contributor to the Romantic period in Dutch art and his students and children founded the art movement known as the Hague School. Like his contemporaries Edward Williams, Jacob Maris, and Jozef Israëls, he was part of a family of prominent painters, including son Julius van de Sande Bakhuyzen, daughter Gerardina Jacoba van de Sande Bakhuyzen, and nephew Alexander Hieronymus Bakhuyzen.

Personal life He was born under the name Hendrikus Bakhuyzen in the Hague in 1795, and director of the Leiden Observatory. His son Ernest-Frederich van de Sande Bakhuyzen was also an astronomer at the Leiden Observatory.

Career

Hendrik v.d.S. Bakhuyzen learned drawing and painting first from Jan Willem Pieneman and his pupil J. Heymans and then later from at the Hague Academy, recently endowed by Willem I. His fellow students included Andreas Schelfhout and Bart van Hove, each of them significant for the development of the Hague School.

He was successful while still quite young, with his painting Gelders landschap acquired by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1818. In 1821 he received a medal of honor from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts at an exhibit in Brussels, followed in 1822 by a medal and 300 guilder prize from the Society of Encouragement of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In the same year he became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in Amsterdam and a board member of the Art Academy in The Hague. He was later elected Director of the Hague Academy.

He traveled to paint in Belgium in 1824 and in Germany in 1834. In 1840 he became one of the early members of the Arti et Amicitiae artists society in Amsterdam. In 1841 he traveled along the Rhine river in Germany with his pupil Willem Roelofs. Some of these pupils, notably became pupils of Hendrikus' son Julius upon his death. Even after his death, Hendrik's work continued to be displayed prominently in the family studio where his artist son and daughter painted. His works often emphasized animals on the landscape, driven in part by their commercial success. His son Julius later relayed the story of one of Hendrik's paintings of a landscape near Oosterbeek that featured what was to his father an ordinary brown horse but which so caught the fancy of his customer's neighbors in Philadelphia that Hendrik received at least ten orders for similar pictures with that particular horse, as if the horse itself were somehow special.

His work is displayed in the Rijksmuseum, the British National Trust, Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Museum Fodor, Museum of Fine Arts Bern, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, among others.

Influence Hendrik v.d.S. Bakhuyzen was profoundly influential in 19th Century Dutch art, both through his own landscapes and through his students. His students helped to establish the Dutch art movement the Hague School.

Influence on The Hague School

The Hague School of artists sought to transition from the romantic realism of the preceding generation to a new style that emphasized mood and movement. For instance, Gerard Bilders wrote to Johannes Kneppelhout that "It is not my aim and object to paint a cow for the cow's sake or a tree for the tree's, but by means of the whole to reproduce an impression which nature sometimes gives." Hendrik taught Vincent van Gogh's mother Anna Carbentus van Gogh to paint, and Vincent van Gogh felt that there was clear thematic convergence among his work and that of the van de Sande Bakhuyzen's. In his 23 December 1889 letter to his mother from the San Remy-de-Provence asylum he wrote:

In his letters, Vincent van Gogh notes that the sketches he observed by Pieter ter Meulen in 1881 were much better than when he had observed Ter Meulen "struggling and swotting" in Bakhuyzen's studio.

Family recognition In 1996 the Bakhuyzen family was entered in the Nederland's Patriciaat or Blue Book, recognizing families who have been leading members of society for 150 years and six generations.

Prominent students Willem Roelofs, a founder of the Hague School, studied with v.d.S. Bakhuyzen starting 1839. Julius van de Sande Bakhuyzen, a founder of the Hague School Gerardina Jacoba van de Sande Bakhuyzen

Hubertus van Hove Jacob Jan van der Maaten Jan Willem van Borselen Anna Corbentus van Gogh

Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch

Marie Bilders-van Bosse Alexander Hieronymus Bakhuyzen