13 Butterflies, 1874. Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 99.1 cm. Glasgow, Glasgow Museums (The Burrell Collection), inv. no. 35.330
14 Grief (Vanished Illusions), c. 1911–17. Oil on canvas, 67.5 × 102.5 cm. Private collection
24
A Strange Flower
but even those who cannot understand his unusual art still feel subconsciously that it is the expression of a high endeavour’.9 Among a group of avantgardistically-inclined young people who readily warmed to eccentric characters, Maris was known as a bohemian, partly on account of his outspoken criticism of the art establishment. He particularly inspired them to set a new course, though they did not take his then nebulous, vague work directly as an example. After 1886, when Van Wisselingh was the only one to display Maris’ work occasionally in the Netherlands, the magazine De Nieuwe Gids, the vehicle of the ‘Tachtigers’ [the literary and artistic movement named after this generation: the Eighties] published extremely favourable reviews by artists like Jan Veth and Willem Witsen. In 1887 Veth already expressed his desire to have a separate exhibition of the art ‘of this great exile’ organized ‘by and for his admirers’.10 Maris had not been submitting work himself to Dutch exhibitions since the end of the 1860s, according to Berckenhoff because ‘art judges’ had refused Maris’ self portrait (cat. no. 14) for an exhibition.11 That characterized the obstreperous behaviour that the painter was capable of displaying – which was confirmed by an insider, Johan Gram, a critic and secretary of the Hague Drawing Academy. In 1875 Gram was to be the first to publish an article on the painter. He appreciated the fact that Maris did not see the artistic profession as a ‘profitable occupation’, but added that his ‘retiring nature and quiet introvert personality’ kept many at a distance.12 It was a picture that Berckenhoff tried to moderate a little in the report on his visit – there was ‘nothing strange’ about him, ‘nothing that was traditionally supposed to characterize misunderstood talents, underestimated geniuses’.13 That image, however, would soon change. Berckenhoff was already surprised that the artist had allowed him to see a glimpse ‘into the history of his suffering and struggle’.14 After Maris, in frustration, the year before had put an end to a ten-year relation with the London art dealer, Daniel Cottier, he embarked on a genuine hatecampaign. It was not only directed at the art establishment, but also at Western society in general. According to Maris, everything and everyone listened to but one voice, that of Money, ‘het Centje’ (the ‘Penny’), which Maris consistently underlined or wrote in capitals. In his letters, he presented himself as a recluse, but particularly as an ‘excommunicate’, someone who, with his artistic ideals, no longer fitted in a system dictated by realism and materialism. After 1910 he openly paraded his ‘vengeance’ on the world: no-one would ever see his work again. People who managed to acquire a painting or drawing via Van Wisselingh had to promise never to exhibit or sell it. In addition, Maris had a deed drawn up based on the copyright act which became operational in 1912 emphasizing that his work was not ‘in general’ suitable for reproduction.15 Although he was not the only one to watch critically over reproductions of his work – James McNeill Whistler, Jozef Israëls and Lawrence Alma-Tadema also kept a close eye on such processes16 – that condition in his case was intended to strengthen his boycott against further circulation and presentation of his work. He was also highly critical of publications and averse to ‘hair-splitting’. Contrary to the artist’s wishes, the out side world kept on praising his ‘faulty’ works, ‘potboilers’ made only for the money, like Souvenir d’Amsterdam (cat. no. 34), The Four Mills (cat. no. 35), and Kitchenmaid (cat. no. 33, FIG. C). Maris apprised the art dealer and critic David Croal Thomson: ‘… you know you’re always touching a sore spot when you talk painting, and drag my suicides before the public, the right name for potboilers, one has to give up all aim for any good intention, and do the technical skill and clever ness to please …’17 He scoffed at the plans of both Pieter Haverkorn van Rijsewijk, director of Museum Boymans, and the art dealer Willem van Meurs to produce a monograph.18 What did it matter whether his parents were born in the year 100 or 1000, or where his mother
During Matthijs Maris’ Memorial Exhibition in London in the autumn of 1917, they were on show together for the first time: Butterflies, painted in Paris in 1874 (FIG. 13) and Grief (Vanished Illusions) (FIG. 14), a painting of almost the same size created some forty years later in London. Side by side they reveal the spectacular transformation that Maris’ art underwent. Admittedly, it was not as rapid as Picasso’s metamorphosis from Boy with Pipe (1905) to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) in two years time, but compared with Maris’ Dutch contempor aries, a style U-turn like that was unique. Butterflies was last displayed in the Netherlands at an exhibition at the art dealer Preyer in 1908 in The Hague. When Maris died in August 1917, Grief was standing on the easel in his home in London, the city where he settled perman ently at the age of thirty-eight. Not that he was working actively on the painting, but it served more as a silent witness to what he had complained of his life long: to pursue a higher goal than realism inevitably led to problems. Not only were ideas hard to translate into something as tangible as paint, an artist also had to make painful concessions in order to survive. Maris therefore advised everyone against the artist’s profession, the young Vincent van Gogh included. He admired Maris’ work greatly and back in 1871 or 1872, while working as an apprentice at the art dealers Goupil in The Hague, asked Maris to teach him. The latter told him he could better hang himself.1 As regards subject matter or execution, neither Butterflies nor Grief has anything in common with the Hague School, the group of paint ers to which his brothers Jacob (1837–1899) and Willem (1844–1910) belonged. On account of a series of early plein-air studies (FIG. 15), but presumably more because of the surname, Maris was incorrectly linked with this school.2 The name Maris was more than established round 1900 and the family connection provided extra glamour. Three talented brothers from one family, all three internationally successful – the Canadian critic and collector Edward Greenshields referred flatteringly to ‘a unique event in the annals of art’.3 The critic Hermine Marius expressed it, with fitting patriotic pride, rather more lyrically: ‘Was it a whim of the Muse when, in a regal gesture, she anointed three heads in one family with her precious oil?’4 In 1893, the year Butterflies was sold for a record sum of almost 20,000 guilders (today around 250,000 euros), the Rotterdam Art Circle devoted an exhibition to the Maris brothers, which was repeated shortly after in The Hague. For the public and critics it was a perfect opportunity to select an order of preference. There were of course no losers, because the Maris ‘brand name’ was too strong by then. That ‘gifted triumvirate’ symbolized the range and vitality of Dutch art in general.5 As the artist Piet de Moor said about the Maris name in his introduction at the Rotterdam exhibition: ‘[it] has been resounding for more than a quarter of a century over the old world and the new, to the glory of our Dutch school of painting.’6 With its unique character, Matthijs’ work appealed most to the imagination in its day. Critics spoke of a ‘strange flower’ and ‘the great visionary’ in Dutch painting.7 The Times observed: ‘He is the Hans Andersen among painters, but no Dutchman before him has ever even tried to be that.’8 His solitary existence in the London metropolis was at least as extraordinary as his work. Provided for by his friend, the art dealer Elbert Jan van Wisselingh, Maris was said to live a bachelor life in a humble, two-room apartment, working on an idiosyncratic oeuvre that became increasingly mystical. He was sur rounded by an aura of secrecy. The journalist Herman Berckenhoff wrote after his visit to the artist in 1888 that a legend had formed around him ‘in which Wahrheit und Dichtung [fact and fiction] were interwoven, and he was attributed with all manner of strange characteristics … For many of his fellow artists he’s in the clouds, 25
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14 Self-portrait
Willem van Meurs is often quoted, that it was not a pure portrait, but a ‘study of an eye in full light’, started in a merry mood in Antwerp, after one of his teachers had explained how the eye works using a horse’s eye and a stereoscope.39 In another letter he wrote, once more referring to Antwerp: ‘I didn’t know what to do, looked into a glass [and] saw an eye with no shadow, and I thought I can give it a go. Portrait has nothing to do with it. At all events it shows I was jolly’, a reference to an article stating that in his youth he was a ‘jolly chap’.40 As was so often the case, his tone was somewhat trivializing; later on he tended to see self-portraits as ‘showing off’. And even if his version of how it came about were correct, it did not detract from the status of self-portrait. After his return to The Hague, he completed the painting, signed and dated it himself, and in 1868 submitted it for the exhibition in Amsterdam under the title Study of a Head. Compared with self-portraits of Anton Mauve or George Breitner made in the 80s in which both are looking confidently and rather haughtily at the viewer, this close-up is quite unusual with its extreme ly tight framing. Haverkorn van Rijsewijk assumed the work had been damaged during its post-1900 ‘peregrinations’ and had perhaps been reduced in size; the many small pockmarks in the painted surface might have resulted from overpainting.41 However, restorers are unsure of the exact cause of the pitting. Bremmer, apart from being an educationalist and a dealer, was also a pointillist. He had no problems with the pockmarks. If anything, in his view they added to the face a ‘corroded parchment-like skin’ and ‘special charm to the colour’. The latter is absurd; the remark might have been intended to dispel any doubts Helene Kröller-Müller might have had about the acquisition. According to the catalogue of the exhibition in Edinburgh in 1886 for which Jacob had submitted this self-portrait, it still had a ‘back ground of plain red’.42 Perhaps the acidic nature of the support caused the colour to fade somewhat over the years, though one cannot rule out the possibility that the reddish colour of Maris’ hair was seen as ‘background’.
1860 Oil on board, mounted on panel, 27 × 18 cm Marked l.r.: M.M. 60 (allegedly on top of a monogram scratched on earlier) Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum, inv. no. 490-10
PROVENANCE Collection Jacob Maris, The Hague (c. 1871–99); Maison Artz, The Hague; dealer C.M. van Gogh, Amsterdam; purchased for fl. 9000 by H. Kröller-Müller, 1910. EXHIBITIONS Amsterdam 1868, no. 345 (as Studiehoofd); Edinburgh 1886 (cat. Henley 1888), no. 175; Amsterdam 1892, no. 87; The Hague 1893, no. 54; London 1899; Rotterdam 1902; Rotterdam 1907, no. 44; London (The French Gallery) 1909, no. 17; London (The French Gallery) 1917, no. 51; Düsseldorf 1928, no. 308; The Hague 1935–36, no. 169; Amsterdam 1936, no. 169; Arnhem 1936, no. 20; The Hague 1974–75, no. 42; Laren 1991, no. 48; Amsterdam 2017. LITERATURE Anonymous 1869; Berckenhoff 1888, pp. 488, 495; Marius 1893, p. 415; Marius 1899, pp. 2–3; P. 1902; Vogelsang 1904 (Onze Kunst), p. 126; Bremmer 1905, no. 65; Anonymous, 29 May 1909; Wedmore 1909; Plasschaert 1911, p. 5; Plasschaert 1917 (De Amsterdammer); Haverkorn van Rijsewijk 1918, pp. 90, 137–38; Arondéus 1939a, pp. 36–37; De Bois 1946, pp. 2–4; Maris 1947, pp. 81–82, 122; De Gruyter 1969, p. 35; exh. cat. The Hague 1974, p. 14; exh. cat. Laren 1991, p. 43; Heijbroek and Wouthuysen 1993, pp. 33–35; Veerman 2013, p. 49. In 1910, when Helene Kröller-Müller managed to acquire this selfportrait for all of 9,000 guilders, its status was unknown. It was not only the sole self-portrait Maris had ever made, but the unconven tional presentation and somewhat haughty attitude tied in seam lessly with the perception many had of him, i.e. a contrary prodigy who had arrogantly turned his back on money and continued to pursue his own course, swimming against the current. The art historian Hermine Marius was the first to publish the self-portrait, in 1899, shortly after Jacob’s death, who had presum ably had it in his possession since 1871. In her view, the artist was already presenting himself here ‘as a personality full of contra dictions, inaccessible to all’.35 The Hague art educator. H. P. Bremmer, on whose advice Helene Kröller-Müller apparently purchased the work, actually forgot, the longer he looked at it, that this was a painting. He entered ‘into a kind of spiritual communion with the sense of life it expressed’.36 He also compared the ‘tremendous pride’ it radiated with portraits by Renaissance masters like Donatello and Pollaiuolo, and, with respect to the demeanour, with Rembrandt’s self-portraits as a young man. The naming of such artists and his elaborate explanation of the qualities were intended to silence ‘sniggering’ criticasters, as he termed them. He was referring primarily to critics of the previous generation. After the self-portrait had been accepted with mixed feelings for an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1868, the Kunstkronijk saw it as proof that ‘undeniable talent can sink into the capricious excesses of unbridled imagination’.37 That venomous judgement was a great blow to Maris, who was quick to take offence. He decided right away not to submit any more work to Dutch exhibitions. The portrait is dated 1860, but it is likely that Maris made a start on it when in Antwerp, if we are to believe his own comments and those of his former classmate, Salomon van Witsen.38 Maris’ explanation to 89
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23 View of Lausanne
In the middle, there is an old timber-framed house accessed by a long bridge with a gateway. That might be based on the Pont du Mont Blanc in Geneva. Behind, in the distance, are roofs of houses, again with smoke spiralling from the chimneys. This time Maris used a notably monochrome palette; as in his watercolour Christening Procession in Lausanne (cat. no. 20), he covered the depiction in a bluegrey haze. He filled the foreground with crisscrossing small lines, resembling scratches in ice, drawn loosely and quickly with a fine brush. The mood he has created somehow places him between two famous predecessors: an out-and-out romantic like Joseph Mallord William Turner, who had termed Lausanne a mirage twenty years earlier,64 and Hercules Segers with his mysterious Mountain Valley with Fenced Fields printed in blue ink dating from round 1625–30 (Rijksmuseum). Maris admired Segers greatly and, according to Fridlander, owned several reproductions after his work. Because View of Lausanne is not signed, Haverkorn van Rijsewijk was of the opinion that it was a sketch or study. Maris did not finish it because his Dutch contemporaries ‘had no taste for such poetry’.65 However, it is too developed for a study, although the writer was right about the painting’s reception. Jan Veth drew the same conclusion when discussing the drawing from Glasgow: ‘… except for his con temporaries Gustave Moreau and Dante Gabriël Rossetti, this highlygifted Dutchman was already creating a personal category of art, which was destined to be understood by very few.’66 One of the few people who did was the Dutchwoman Johanna Goekoop-de Jongh. She earned her art history doctorate in Berlin in 1903, the first woman to do so. Her thesis was titled Holland und die Landschaft [Holland and the Landscape]. In that same period she was able to acquire this piece, unique in Dutch landscape painting.
c. 1862–64 Oil on panel, 29 × 57 cm Not marked The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, inv. no. 1052181 Purchased with the support of the BankGiro Lottery
PROVENANCE Collection Jacob Maris, The Hague, until 1893; dealers E.J. van Wisselingh & Co, Amsterdam (according to label on reverse after 1894, when the firm moved to the Spui); dealer A. Preyer (Holland Art Gallery), Amsterdam, c. 1903; collection Johanna Goekoop-de Jongh, The Hague (mentioned in Haverkorn van Rijsewijk 1912); heirs Goekoop-De Jongh; dealer Douwes Fine Art, Amsterdam, 2014; purchased by the museum. EXHIBITIONS Rotterdam 1893 (not in catalogue); The Hague 2017; Amsterdam 2017. LITERATURE Anonymous, 3 October 1893; Anonymous, 18 May 1903 (Algemeen Handelsblad); Holmes 1907, p. 353 (for fig. b); Haverkorn van Rijsewijk 1912, pp. 55–56; De Gruyter 1969, p. 36 (for fig. b); exh. cat. Paris et al. 1983, p. 219; Van der Ham et al. 2009, pp. 188–89 (for fig. b). After his return to The Hague, Maris created four imaginary views of Lausanne, inspired by his visit to the town and perhaps based on sketches or prints he took home with him. The first and most realistic in the series is a small pen-and-ink drawing dated 1861 (FIG. 23A), previously in the collection of the Canadian collector William C. van Horne. It depicts a view seen from the north over the roofs with their smoking chimneys. In the middle we can recognize the early fifteenth-century Château Saint-Maire, the cathedral, right, and in the background, Lake Geneva with the Savoy mountains. A larger version, owned by the Rijksmuseum (FIG. 23B) may have been done later. There, we see the town more from a distance, with a widened panorama as encountered in the illustrated voyages pittoresques of the day. Maris enlivened the castle with extensions, adding accents in red to the roofs. Here and there, he accentuated the outlines of other roofs and windows with pen and ink. The critic Jan Veth referred to a ‘dreamt’ vision.61 De Gruyter even compared it to Chinese art, possibly on account of the fluid silhouette of the buildings and the hazy, tenuous spaces in between. A third and larger version, currently in Glasgow, was a gift from Maris to a colleague; it is dated 1862 (FIG. 23C). In this version, in mixed media on brownish paper, he set the town even further back in time. Veth spoke of a ‘landscape as a German wood engraver from Holbein’s day would have liked to have made it in the background, but more subtle.62 Braakhuis and Van der Vliet interpreted the choice for gothic more conceptually. In the romantic era, gothic architecture represented the ‘heavenly’ unity of faith, society and Church.63 By placing the cathedral towards the back and combining it with a desolate land scape, Maris imagined himself in a Lost Paradise, a recurrent theme in his oeuvre. In this painted version Maris turned the town into an even more mysterious place; a landscape ‘curious in light, power and magnifi cence’, a critic wrote when it was on display at the Rotterdamsche Kunstkring (Rotterdam Art Circle) in 1893. His brother Jacob owned the painting at the time. Compared with the drawing from Glasgow, the whole scene has been brought forward, making the pair of oxen and, on the left, the dark figure with stick, rather more prominent.
23A View of Lausanne (I), 1861. Washed sepia, 134 × 190 mm. Montreal, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 1945.90; Adaline van Horne Bequest
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68 Barye Swan
Jos de Gruyter’s words, ‘loosely and eddyingly wide’, in a refined palette of warm shades of white with which the muted yellow of the lemon and the pale blue of the little slippers and bows harmo nize attractively. The brown-grey background was left empty. There is scarcely any transition from floor to rear wall, similar to what we also see in many portraits by Whistler and Manet. Portraits from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also frequently depict children holding fruit, but rarely a lemon. That fruit signifies purity and loyalty, the latter especially in religious representations, but it is not known if Maris was aware of that. The same applies for Braakhuis and Van der Vliet’s referral to the song ‘Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn’ [Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom] from Goethe’s Wilhem Meister’s Apprenticeship. There, Mignon sings longingly and intensely of her homeland from which she was kidnapped as a child. The lemon is thought to symbolize that ‘paradise lost’, and thus the child’s ideal state.299 Apart from the attractive colour accent, the size of the lemon perhaps simply served to indicate the child’s dimensions and so his young age. The date of the painting would serve the same purpose. The fact that Maris added a date is unusual, he had not been dating his works for over ten years by then. The idea that Maris ‘couldn’t get it right’ and therefore gave the portrait to his brother and sister-in-law is not very convincing. Perhaps he did not consider it tactful to sell this painting via Van Wisselingh. At all events, as far as we know he made no objections when Jacob entered it that year in a major exhibition of the Maris brothers at the Rotterdam Kunstkring. The catalogue gave its title as The Child, as if it were a personification. When the painting then continued on to the Hague Kunstkring it was decided to mention the name of Swan. The critic A.C. Loffelt extolled the work as an ‘“old master” half erased with pumice stone’ and then reworked with ‘poetic delicacy and feeling for fairy-tale elusiveness’ by a ‘true artist’.
1887 Oil on canvas, 88 × 62.5 cm Marked c.r.: M.M. 87 The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, inv. no. 0331906
PROVENANCE Collection J.M. Swan, London; a gift to Jacob Maris, 1893; purchased for fl. 24,751 at Barbizon House, London, by the museum, 1929. EXHIBITIONS Rotterdam 1893, no. 2 (as Het kind); The Hague 1893, no. 55 (as Kindje van den schilder Swan; submitted J. Maris); London (The French Gallery) 1917, no. 24; London (Barbizon House) 1929, no. 25; The Hague 1935–36, no. 196; The Hague 1939, no. 28; Luxembourg 1948, no. 60; Amsterdam 1948; Amsterdam 1955–56, no. 36; Mönchengladbach 1955; Antwerp 1955; Schiedam 1959; Amsterdam 1963, no. S 79/6; Laren 1969, no. 33; Bonn/Hamburg 1972, no. 49; The Hague 1974–75, no. 110; Glasgow 1990–91, no. 62; Amsterdam 1991, no. 94. LITERATURE V. [J. Veth], 1 October 1893; Loffelt 1893; P.K. 1895; Buschmann 1918b, p. 73; Hammacher 1929; exh. cat. London 1929, no. 25; Van Gelder 1939, p. 51; Anonymous 1940a; De Gruyter 1955, p. 58; Van Gelder 1958, p. 43; exh. cat. The Hague 1974, p. 24; Braakhuis and Van der Vliet 1978–79a, pp. 34–35; Braakhuis and Van der Vliet 1978–79b, p. 159, note 144; Bionda 1990b, p. 184; Bionda 1991, p. 231; Veerman 2013, p. 125. Later, Maris was to say about this portrait of the infant son of the painter and sculptor John Macallan Swan: ‘Barye the boy-baby. No portrait – painted for my own self’.295 He was good friends with the Swans, who lived a few streets away from him. Swan and his wife, Mary Ann Rankin, had two children: John Barye, born in 1886 and named after Swan’s great example, the French sculptor AntoineLouis Barye, and a daughter, Mary Alice, born in 1887, with whom Maris was in touch frequently later. So Barye is about one-and-a-half years old here, and painted in a more or less full length portrait. Maris took the initiative himself to paint the child, as was often his wont. From a letter to his sisterin-law Katrien, who acquired the portrait in 1893, we know that he had not painted the child from life: ‘You once wrote to me if you accidentally have something you can’t do anything with, you must send it to me. I have a little Swan. I painted one there, after the small boy as much as possible. He likes it and didn’t want me to finish it. I thought I could better do those things from memory. So I started another, but in the end I couldn’t get it right and I don’t feel like it anymore. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’296 The earlier version Maris referred to in the letter (FIG. 68A) stayed in the Swan family. In 1903 the painting was on show in an exhibition in London’s Guildhall with the title Portrait Study of a Child (an Essay in Painting and Wax), a description of which one assumes Maris approved. The addition of wax to oil paint was customary and produced a matt surface. After Swan’s death in 1910, Wouter van Randwijk acquired the work, and after him, William Burrell in Glasgow. For the second version, in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, sometimes jokingly called ‘Scared Ivan’, Maris enveloped the child in a lace-finished dress, a christening dress by the looks of it.297 This garment adds something even more entrancing to the portrait, something more in keeping with the cult-like nostalgia for the inno cence of children or childhood in general.298 Maris painted it, to use
68A Barye Swan, c. 1887. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 50.8 cm. Glasgow, Glasgow Museums (The Burrell Collection), inv. no. 35/333
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72 Girl’s Head (Bride)
The work, which the journalist C.K. Elout once retitled from Bride to Listening to Music, possibly at Van Meurs’ suggestion,314 is thought to have produced a musical experience or emotion. The effect can vary, depending on the spectator’s state of mind. In the nineteenth century visual art had already been associated with music, especially in Germany and France (think of Baudelaire’s famous sonnet ‘Corres pondances’, in the volume of poetry Les Fleurs du mal published in 1857). It peaked during Symbolism.315 However, Maris did not go so far with his titles as to allude literally to music, as James McNeill Whistler did with his Arrangements and opus numbers.
c. 1890 Oil on canvas, 57 × 42 cm Marked l.r. (in yellow-brown): M.M. Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, inv. no. A 2275 Gift of the VVHK, Amsterdam
PROVENANCE Purchased from the artist, for fl. 2,024, by E.J. van Wisselingh, 24 September 1890 (as Jeune fille (buste)) and sold for fl. 2,700 to M.C. Lebret, Dordrecht, date unknown; collection Ms Lebret-Giltay, Dordrecht; purchased for fl. 4,000 by the Vereeniging tot het Vormen van een Openbare Verzameling van Hedendaagsche Kunst (VVHK), 18 October 1898; placed in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, November 1898; bequeathed to the museum, 16 June 1949. EXHIBITIONS ? Amsterdam 1892 (as Bruidje); Paris 1921, no. 139; Eindhoven/ Bolsward/Maastricht 1949; Den Helder/Tilburg/Zwolle 1952; Eindhoven 1953; Laren 1961–62; Amsterdam 1964–65; The Hague 1965; Amsterdam 1973; The Hague 1974–75, no. 118; Amsterdam 1978; The Hague 1978, no. 69; Amsterdam 1979, no. 51; Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum) 1991; Venice 1997; Amsterdam 2017. LITERATURE Van der Kellen 1892; Anonymous, 10 November 1898 (as Bruidje); Annual report VVHK 1899, p. 2; Anonymous, 4 January 1912; Anonymous, 5 January 1912 (Het Nieuws van den Dag); Anonymous, 5 January 1912 (NRC); Van Meurs, 8 February 1914; Berckenhoff 1917 (Onze Eeuw), pp. 108–09; De Vries 1917, with fig.; De Mérode 1930; Elout 1936; exh. cat. The Hague 1978, p. 125, no. 69; Van Straaten 1990, p. 44 (note in journal Van Doesburg); Spaanstra-Polak 2004, p. 52; Veldink 2008, p. 50; Veerman 2013, p. 139. Elbert Jan van Wisselingh acquired this painting from Maris in September 1890, as Jeune fille (buste). Later, after it had been purchased for the Stedelijk Museum in 1898, it was soon given the more appropriate name Bride, on account of the veil and flowers in her hair. We see the girl in profile, her body is turned three-quarters towards the viewer. Her left hand rests against the neck of the white garment as she carefully brings her right hand towards her mouth as if she is lisping or singing something in a whisper. Her gaze is directed at something indefinable, with a pale colour. In another work, known only from a photo, she appears younger and would seem to be ‘talking’ to a butterfly.312 Here, in Bride, it is perhaps a flower, as in the painting ‘Choosing’ (FIG. 72A) by the English painter George Frederick Watts on which Maris evidently based this work. Watts made his painting some twenty-five years earlier. The girl – in reality the seventeen-year old Ellen Terry, Watt’s thirty years younger wife – had to choose between opulent camellias, with barely any scent, and sweet-smelling, but soberly contrasting violets (alluding to Watts himself). It was a metaphor that left little to the imagination and which no doubt caused Maris to snigger, if he was aware of it. In 1914 Willem van Meurs came up with an interesting interpretation, based presumably on information from the artist. According to the art dealer, it was not a bride, this girl was much younger and was listening to music, ‘that echoed in the great soul itself, she became one with it. And the emotion affecting us, viewers, was of the most profound musical emotion. We could laugh or cry as we left her’.313
72A George Frederick Watts, Ellen Terry (‘Choosing’), 1864. Oil on strawboard mounted on Gatorfoam, 47.2 × 35.2 cm. London, National Portrait Gallery, inv. no. NPG 5048
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