Lot 44 Dα

Hendrik Willem Mesdag was the most “French” of the Dutch landscape painters. The landscape painting of his homeland was his inspiration, but Paris was his destiny. The gold medal that Mesdag was awarded for his marine “Les brisants de la Mer du Nord” at the Paris Salon of 1870 convinced him to devote himself entirely to pictures of the sea. Mesdag, a relative of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, first worked as a bank clerk before becoming a full-time artist. A generous inheritance also allowed him to collect paintings, primarily those of the Barbizon school. He visited Brussels in the 1860s, where the realism of Gustave Courbet influenced him to begin his own search for a more realistic landscape style.

The decision to paint seascapes came alongside a move to The Hague, where Mesdag was able to study the north sea intensively. It became something of an obsession. Mesdag later said, “You have to have the sea in front of you every day, you have to live with it, otherwise there's no point.” It is said that the artist studied the sea every day, again and again, recording his impressions in quick sketches to capture the change of light, the clouds, the waves and all the colours and moods of the ocean.

Comparing his marines from 1884 and 1889 shows how differently the sea presented itself to the artist. In the previous lot (44), sea and sky are bathed in a pale blue tone, with the dark fisherboats seen from close up, reflected in the silvery water. The mood of the latter landscape (lot 45) is entirely different: The sun hangs low in the sky and tints it with yellow, pink and pale green light, whilst the water and the mountains in the distance shimmer in turquoise blue. The colour is so softly applied that the shapes dissolve almost entirely into brushstrokes. Although the colour palettes of the two seascapes could not be more different and opposite, they share the same gentle mood in the depiction of the ocean.