White poppies on a cloudy day and a seascape to swim in

Impressionism with a capital letter was a French affair. Around 1870, a group of Parisian painters, including Monet, Degas, Pissarro and Sisley, began working in the open air – a relatively new activity, made possible by the invention of the paint tube – and recording their impressions quickly, on the spot. The young painters focused on what photography could not handle at the time: movement, color and short-lived light situations. They did this in efficiently planted brushstrokes, which strongly appealed to the viewer’s willingness to complete the visual puzzle. Many viewers thought that the paintings looked unfinished. About the group’s first exhibition in 1874, the critic Louis Leroy wrote an irony-filled report in which he called the painters impressionists. For Monet and his painter friends, that term became a nickname.

But in the decades around 1900, lowercase Impressionism also existed outside France. Not as a sharply defined movement, but as a new approach to painting. Young landscape painters everywhere set out to capture light and air in individual strokes. Under the title Fresh Wind: Impressionism of the North the Singer Museum in Laren now shows 86 more or less impressionist paintings from the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. Painters of the Hague and Amsterdam Schools and luminists such as Jan Toorop and Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig, all represented in the museum’s own collection, have been joined by related German and Danish contemporaries from the Landesmuseum in Hannover and the Museum Kunst der Westküste in Alkersum, on the island of Föhr. The exhibition can be seen in those two German museums later this year.

White poppies on a cloudy day

Anyone who feels like whining can say: the Dutch side of the story would have been better told if loans from the Rijksmuseum and the Kunstmuseum in The Hague had also been added to the exhibition, and the Danish side if there had also been a Danish museum in the collaboration was involved. But it is better to be benevolent. It’s nice that there are now paintings in the middle of the Netherlands by Lovis Corinth, Max Slevogt, Peder Krøyer and Laurits Andersen Ring, for which you would otherwise have to go all the way to Hannover or the German far north. And this new context allows you to see Singer’s permanent collection with different eyes.

The compilers have created beautiful ensembles that immediately make you realize: yes, these painters were working on the same things in different places. It is also clear at a glance that these places were further north than the working area of ​​the French Impressionists. The cumulus clouds are thicker and the light is cooler, more silver than gold. On a heavily cloudy day in 1881, Karl Hagemeister’s white poppies cling like fragile cabbage whites to plants with leaves that reflect the gray of the sky. In the last room there are two standing paintings of bare trees along a snow-covered path: on the left by the Dutchman Anton Mauve, on the right by the German Albert Gottschalk. They painted two different types of winter light, but neither of them gets warm.

In a room with work that northern painters made in more southern regions, it appears that some of them even took their northern light with them on holiday. The Dane Peder Mønsted mixed so much gray into the sky above Algiers that you experience the sunlight on the cacti in the foreground as strongly filtered. Laurits Ring painted the same fresh air above a landscape near Pompeii as he does at home above his Danish views. But when Isaac Israels depicts a woman with a hat in the sun on a Paris balcony in 1904, Caillebotte and Monet are not far away. And Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig also becomes a southerner for a moment when he points out two swelteringly warm Algerian landscapes together in 1905. Hart Nibbrig even seems to have returned to the Netherlands somewhat southerly: ten years later he created a Mediterranean-looking beach scene from the North Sea coast near Zoutelande with light blue water, a sun-bleached beach and dunes like mountains.

The most beautiful painting

The thematic design of the exhibition – in addition to winter, travel and the beach, there are rooms dedicated to light, garden, city and country – makes it clear that Impressionism was not only a matter of painting style, but also of choice of subject. And whatever the topic, there are almost always people involved. With the Impressionists you rarely see the large empty space with which their romantic predecessors rubbed our smallness into it. City is about city dwellers, country about rural people and beach about beach goers. People walk, play, spend time with animals or hang the laundry to dry.

But the most beautiful painting in the exhibition is unpopulated, except for three small distant boats. It is a seascape that does not hang near the beach section, but immediately upon entering the first room. Laurits Tuxen painted the sea on a chilly June day on Skagen in 1908, as the title reads. Water and clouds to the horizon. The clouds alternately illuminate and shade the water. Tuxen is a true impressionist here, who has managed to evoke shape, color, distance and movement in something as elusive as seawater. It is a painting to pause in front of for a long time and then, when the attendant is not looking, to swim away into. Past the first wave, past the second, all the way to the whitecaps that glow in the sun. Those two symmetrically laid toothpaste stripes make it a truly captivating composition. They distinguish Tuxen’s painting from all other painted seascapes, not only in this exhibition but also in art history.

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