Dutch Utopia: Paintings by Antimodern American Artists of the Nineteenth Century

The Smithsonian Institution

Dutch Utopia: Paintings by Antimodern American Artists of the Nineteenth CenturyAuthor(s): Annette StottSource: Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), pp. 46-61Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108978 .

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Dutch Utopia

Paintings by Antimodern American Artists of the Nineteenth Century

Annette Stott

Gari Melchers, In Holland (detail), 1887. Oil on canvas, 109 x 77314 in. Belmont, The Gari Melchers Memorial Gallery, Falmouth, Virginia, Mary Washington College

Antimodern sentiments form a re- current theme in the fabric of late- nineteenth-century American art and life.' For many people the dark side of modern life-slums, crime, riots, noise, and poverty- overshadowed its benefits. Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Back- ward, numerous experimental utopian communities, and the Arts and Crafts movement are just a few manifestations of the wide- spread unease caused by rapid in- dustrialization and urbanization. In a similar vein, antimodern feelings inspired a group of American painters to create mythic Dutch utopias on canvas. Artists including George Hitchcock, Gari Melchers, George Boughton, Edward Pen- field, and Hopkinson Smith de- plored the aesthetic desolation of modern American machinery, the coldness of man-made materials, the noise and speed of city life, the lack of visual variety in a cosmopolitan world, and an array of moral regressions from the disin- tegration of the family to the impersonality of corporate and government institutions. Rejecting the American scene, they sought a pictorial model in preindustrial rural societies still surviving in remote Holland. These Dutch communities, recalling as they did seventeenth-century golden age paintings of an affluent, democratic, Dutch republic, were an especially appropriate vehicle to carry the artists' message to an American audience.

Between 1880 and 1900 Amer- ican painters established art colonies in six Dutch communities: Dordrecht, Rijsoord, Egmond, Laren, Katwijk, and Volendam.2 All but Dordrecht were small rural towns that depended on fishing or agriculture and lacked modern improvements of any kind. All looked as if they could have come to life from Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, and indeed three-Egmond, Katwijk, and the medieval city of Dordrecht-were well known to the nineteenth century through such paintings. In effect, they were blessed from the start with Old Master approval. . In addition, the similarity in ap-

pearance between these nineteenth-century Dutch towns and their seventeenth-century artistic predecessors allowed American artists to allude to their own country's colonial Dutch heritage, which ranged from the Dutch founding of New York and New Jersey to the Pilgrims' twelve-year sojourn in the Netherlands. Many historians credited this heritage with forming America's basic character.3 Antimodern artists implied through their Dutch-inspired paintings that Holland had preserved the moral tenor and cultural richness of that seventeenth- century heritage by resisting a too- rapid modernization, while the United States had raced into the Industrial Revolution and now stood on the brink of altering for- ever the very character on which

47 Smithsonian Studies in American Art



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1 William E. Norton, A Moment's Rest, ca. 1880-1916. Oil on canvas, 48/2 x 647/8 in. National Museum of American Art, Gift of Dr. Morris F. Wiener

she was founded. In order to convey a sense of

premodern utopia, these artists had to manipulate the facts. Hitch- cock's statement, "When even the grand canal of Venice is cursed by an iron bridge it would be unnat- ural if 'bent-wood' furniture and imitation tile wall-paper were not seen among real tiled walls," ac- knowledges the presence in Hol- land of the same modern elements he condemned in the United States.4 Nevertheless, he maintained that Holland was less tainted by the technological era than any other place on earth. By concentrating on the premodern and ignoring what they preferred not to see, these American artists created a mythic view of Holland that their compatriots soon accepted as reality.

America's Dutch art colonies served not as experiments in utopian living but as centers from which the artists could dispense their pictorial prescriptions for the diseases of American technology and urbanization. William Henry Howe's tranquil landscapes, John

Vanderpoel's family scenes, Hitch- cock's colorful costume pieces, and William Norton's representa- tions of age-old fishing techniques were meant to create a more re- laxed state of mind in the industrialists who bought them and to remind hurried American exhi- bition-goers of the virtues associated with community participation, agrarian pursuits, and tradition. The moral content of the pictures represented a consciously created antidote to the specific ills these artists associated with American technology.

One of the values most commonly promoted in nineteenth- century American views of Hol- land is that of a leisurely pace of life. Late-nineteenth-century Amer- ican society valued leisure time highly, and the upper classes put on a great show of indulging in it, as Thorstein Veblen pointed out in his classic study, The Theory of the Leisure Class. But frequent com- plaints about the frenetic pace of life, enforced by punching time clocks, following train schedules, and a host of new business prac-

48 Spring 1989



tices, reveal that under society's calm exterior Americans were racing against time. Doctors attrib- uted the rapid spread of the nervous condition neurasthenia to the out-of-control tempo of modern American life.5 Ironically, artists looked to Europe's lower working classes to capture what they saw as true leisure-a re- laxed lifestyle that constituted a productive and healthy part of everyday life.

In A Moment's Rest William Edward Norton stressed the tranquillity and naturally slow pace of the Dutch peasant (fig. 1). Three fishermen, who have pulled their boat across the sand to the sea by means of harnessed teams, now stop for a moment to smoke and talk and to let the horses rest. Birds sail soundlessly through. an empty sky above the calm sea and peaceful figures. Norton divided the pictorial space into horizontal planes that echo the painting's horizontal format and reinforce the restful stillness of a timeless scene.

As many foreign observers noted, the laborious process of pulling ships into the sea and the costume and character of the Dutch fisherman seemed not to have changed in several hundred years. Even the boats, with their broad-beamed keels and flat bot- toms, recalled those found in seventeenth-century marine paintings, suggesting again that Holland retained the virtues of that golden era in her history. The illustrator Edward Penfield noted with pleasure that a Dutch boatman fol- lowed no schedule but his own inclination: "How delightfully Dutch! Everyone has time to talk and smoke, and no one is ever in a hurry." George Henry Boughton concurred: "There are trains in waiting for all sorts of places, but there is no hurry."6 Norton's A Moment's Rest reminds the hur-

ried American viewer of the premodern attitude toward time.

The need for a note of calm and rest in modern urban Ameri- can life also inspired many depic- tions of slowly turning windmills against the cloud-scudded Dutch sky, of which George Hitchcock's In Windmill Land is a characteris- tic example (fig. 2). Typically, the inclusion of a meandering stream or old-fashioned wind-powered mill and the deliberate exclusion of Dutch trains, factories, or gas- powered mills ensured the peaceful calm of such scenes.

Like A Moment's Rest, In Wind- mill Land possesses a stillness of sound as well as of time. Both works represent the antithesis of the hustle and bustle that had in- vaded America's towns. The noise of factory machines, the clamor of increased traffic, and the constant babble of crowds that Penfield dis- paraged as "the ceaseless din and nerve-racking elements of a big city" are left behind in these quiet views of Holland. William Elliot Griffis, an American minister and historian traveling in Holland at the turn of the century, wrote that the Dutch landscape "in general induces a spirit of quiet restfulness so grateful to the overwrought American."7 He recognized that paintings like Hitchcock's could bring the beneficent influence of a slower, quieter way of life into the parlors of American homes.

American artists also emphasized the rural environment in their Dutch utopian landscapes. In Evening at Laren William Henry Howe depicts a number of cows lying in a field beneath a full moon, staring placidly at the viewer (fig. 3). The muted blue and gray tones of dusk reinforce the tranquil mood of the picture. Rural bovine subjects such as this became extremely popular in America in the nineteenth century as city populations continued to




2 George Hitchcock, In Windmill Land, ca. 1895. Oil on canvas, 44 x 3514 in. Baker/Pisano Collection

expand and rural populations de- clined. Many Americans feared that the increasing urban population would have a deleterious effect on the nation's physical and spiritual well-being.8 Nineteenth-century writers often depicted the city as the source of society's worst ills: crime, strikes, nervous fatigue, boredom, and disease. Conversely, Americans traditionally supported the idea that the countryside provided a healthy environment which fostered honesty, hard work, physical health, and. spiritual faith. As the urban problem increased, rural resorts, health spas, and rest cure homes arose to give

city dwellers a chance to recuper- ate from modern life by staying briefly in the country. This phe- nomenon occurred throughout Europe as well as America, and health resorts developed in both Egmond and Katwijk. It was this rejuvenating environment that artists there captured in paint and sent home to the United States.

Henry Bisbing, Matilda Browne, Ogden Wood, Carleton Wiggins, William Howe, and other Amer- ican artists who specialized in painting cattle worked in the Netherlands producing idyllic pastoral scenes for the American public. In their paintings the cow,

50 Spring 1989



3 William Henry Howe, Evening at Laren, 1890. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. The Union League Club of Chicago

traditionally seen as a slow-

moving, mild-mannered creature whose milk and cheese provided nourishment for society, symbol- ized the beneficial attributes of rural life, and Holland's old-fashioned windmills and picturesque canals afforded the ideal backdrop for therapeutic scenes of lowing cattle. One American reviewer, commenting on Dutch subjects, captured the essence of the antimodern artists' message:

They told us how much better it would be to live quietly and

peacefully than to rack brain and

body with a mile-a-minute pace. Though we might entertain no serious intention of taking to a cot-

tage and courting rural bliss, it was no harm to contemplate the

advantages of such a course.9

Americans were not to re- nounce the great benefits of in-

dustry, technology, and urbanization, but neither were they to

forget the values established during America's preindustrial childhood. Paintings produced by Americans in Holland for Ameri- cans in the United States were a

means of reintroducing the advantages of rural bliss. By relaxing in an armchair to contemplate pictures like Evening at Laren, In Windmill Land or A Moments Rest, the American viewer could escape momentarily from the modern pressures of city and business. By attaining temporary tranquillity he regained one of the benefits of rural, premodern life.

Antimodern artists also ad- dressed the lack of visual variety in the modern cosmopolitan environment. Although the homo- geneity introduced by mass pro- duction, increased world travel, and improved communications possessed many advantages, con- temporary correspondence and

publications indicate that many people, especially artists, missed the variety of experience and the national identification formerly of- fered by individuated cultures. In such diverse societies people clung to their colorful traditional costume, dances, architecture, and ceremonies, while the progressive life of modern cities seemed to dictate a single norm for fashion, cuisine, and architecture. George




4 George Hitchcock, In Brabant, 1895. Oil on canvas, 301/2 x 24/2 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Steve Martin

H. Boughton often condemned modern life's boring uniformity:

As an introduction to a romantic mediaeval town a modern railway station is about the most illusion-dispersing form possible. One should enter over an ancient bridge or under the arch of an old water-gate; anything is better than giving up the same form of ticket to be snipped by a station- master in the same dress that one finds everywhere; and then to go up an arid cindery road, past the toad-stool growth of pot-houses and restaurants that crop up round every railway station!l0

In his paintings and drawings Boughton sought to delight his compatriots with the special qualities that made Holland unique. Many other American artists in the Netherlands at the turn of the century achieved similar results by concentrating visually on two distinctive manifestations of Dutch character: costume and architecture.

In canvases that virtually catalog the complexities of Dutch habili- ment, costume painters such as George Hitchcock recorded a variety of native dresses. In Brabant portrays a woman, standing close to the picture plane against a background of flower fields,

52 Spring 1989



5 Francis Hopkinson Smith, Behind the Groote Kirk, Dordrecht, ca. 1880s. Watercolor over charcoal on paperboard, 275/8 x 205/8 in. The Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. F. Edwin Buchanaan

wearing an elaborate lace and silver headdress and a coral choker (fig. 4). The artist's choice of bright, pure colors enhances the painting's decorative quality and gay mood.

Hitchcock disliked modern fashion's suppression of local tra- ditions and admired the Dutch for preserving an independent form of dress in nearly every village." In Brabant is supposed to illus- trate the exotic headdress worn in the province of Brabant, and although there is some question whether the costume ever really existed as Hitchcock painted it, his

work certainly offers a view of fashion far removed from that in which the Parisian mode set all urban standards.

Like the costume painters, American artists who specialized in cityscapes and town views of the Netherlands generally preferred visually unique subjects. Francis Hopkinson Smith spent many summers in Dordrecht producing pastel and watercolor paintings such as Behind the Groote Kirk, Dordrecht (fig. 5), in which the tall houses overhanging the canal, the medieval aspect of the narrow streets, and the quiet,




,~ 4_

6 After George Hitchcock, Fermieres Hollandaises, 1889. Published in the Figaro-Salon

tree-lined waterways reveal the ancient visage of the city. He in- cluded Dordrecht Cathedral's twelfth-century tower, rising ma- jestically above the rain-washed city, to identify the specific locale. These Dutch canal houses dated from the period of American colo- nization and, as Penfield, Edwards, and Boughton pointed out in their writings, were the models on which Henry Hudson's followers based New York's earliest build- ings. Because those colonial build- ings had all disappeared by the mid nineteenth century, these paintings served as reminders of the ethnic and environmental variety of which the United States was first composed. Dordrecht presents the ancient Dutch city as a badge of cultural individuality and distinctiveness-qualities rap- idly disappearing from America under the uniformity of modern international architecture.

George Hitchcock's Fernieres Hollandaises reflects the antimodern artists' espousal of community effort and hand labor (fig. 6). Two young Egmond women

sort and tie tulips into bunches to be sold door to door by a flower

girl. The old tiled wall, porcelain plates, and copper and pewter utensils attest to the artist's love of what he termed the "integrity of natural wood," and the "opales- cent lustre" of old Delft, all

"speaking of a time when honest labor was no disgrace and time not too short in which to do things well and beautifully." Like most adherents of the Arts and Crafts movement, Hitchcock de-

plored the impersonality of modern goods and institutions. The factory methods, artificial materials, and mass-produced prod- ucts so prevalent in American culture caused him to declare:

It is this which makes the ordinary American interior so absolutely unpaintable, and excuses the ex- patriation of those who seek, from a picturesque standpoint, the sym- pathetic evidences of man in his objects of daily use and toil.

Hitchcock described the hand- made utensil in complimentary terms as "that which is imbued

54 Spring 1989



7 Gari Melchers, In Holland, 1887. Oil on canvas, 109 x 773/4 in. Belmont, The Gari Melchers Memorial Gallery, Falmouth, Virginia, Mary Washington College

with a man's spirit and is not turned out at lightning speed by a soulless machine, whose product neither fits man's hand nor adorns his life." Knowing a human being had fashioned something for one's use, in Hitchcock's opinion, gave the object moral and pictorial value.12

In painting peasants at their daily labors surrounded by hand- made tools that had often been used through several generations, Hitchcock and his close friend, Gari Melchers, visually affirmed

the importance of the human presence in creating useful implements. Both the objects them- selves and the communal activities of an agricultural society served as symbols of the premodern personalized approach to life. Melchers's large salon painting In Holland evokes Hitchcock's words (fig. 7):

... in retaining the methods (the Dutch farmer) has also retained the tools of the craft, and many of the accompaniments of an early




and idyllic period of agriculture, before the advent of the violent vermilion mowing machines, vicious looking hay machines, steam churns, and a host of hideous in- artistic monsters.l3

Although they lived perma- nently in Europe, both men made certain that their paintings were seen regularly in American exhibi- tions. Most of their pictures were purchased by American patrons, including railroad-car manufac- turer Charles Freer, Chicago in- dustrialist Potter Palmer, and Buf- falo businessman John Albright. The taste for premodern subjects suggests an ambivalence toward progress on the part of the industrialists, who could not help but be aware that their business pursuits were destroying the culture that such scenes celebrated. Nos- talgia for a disappearing way of life, although certainly weaker than that powerful, motivating force greed, was nevertheless strong enough to inspire them to collect pictorial mementoes. While one could wish for an explicit statement from the artists, it seems apparent that they, for their part, hoped the paintings would have an improving effect on the Ameri- cans who saw and purchased them.

To ensure the popularity of their paintings at home American artists working in Holland usually chose to paint within the accepted style of academic realism. Neither artists nor their audience trusted fauvist or cubist innovations any more than they accepted the new subjects inspired by the city and the machine. Most of the artists had trained in Paris or Munich where they developed a fixed pre- ference for descriptive painting and for peasant genre and rural landscape subjects. Many were in- fluenced by the Hague School artists, whose work referred back to

traditional seventeenth-century Dutch painting. By the first decade of the twentieth century many American artists in Holland had adopted aspects of an impres- sionist palette and technique. This is apparent, for example, in Hitch- cock's In Brabant. But by then Impressionism had entered the mainstream of popular art and had become a viable style for the transmission of traditional values. By clinging to these conservative artistic vocabularies American artists retained the most appropriate vehicle for conveying their antimodern message.

The affirmation of premodern values in American Dutch paintings expressed through landscape, costumes, customs, materials, and artistic styles was a response to a

perceived loss of basic human values in modern American life. Many felt that the moral climate of American society at the turn of the

century was deteriorating. Hitch- cock's application of qualifying ad-

jectives like honest and trustworthy to implements of the premodern age, and derogatory adjectives like soulless and vicious to machines, indicates his indictment of the moral tenor of the technological world. Traditional values such as

honesty, hard work, family soli-

darity, and religious faith are reit- erated in many of the peasant pictures American artists created in

Europe. American premodern artists of-

fered family unity as one solution to technological America's moral dilemma. Marcia Oakes Wood- bury's watercolor triptych Moeder en Dochter: Het Geheele Leven

represents, according to the title, the wholesome life of a family working together (fig. 8). Wood- bury portrays two generations, mother and daughter, on the wings. In the central panel the two women spin and card wool-skills that had been passed from mother

56 Spring 1989



8 Marcia Oakes Woodbury, Moeder en Dochter: Het Geheele Leven (The Whole Life), 1894. Watercolor on paper, 261/2 x 12 in. (left and right), 2612 x 24Y2 in. (center). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Charles H. Woodbury

to daughter for generations in Laren, their small rural village in North Holland.14 Painted in warm dark tones, the picture stresses the communal family atmosphere of peasant life. In America similar work was performed by hundreds of young women operating power looms in textile factories, many of whom lived in boardinghouses. The unfavorable contrast of the modern factory life with the wholesome life of the rural family is implicit in Woodbury's subject. Even her choice of a triptych format suggests the elevation of the peasant workers, like donors on the wings of a Renaissance altar- piece, to a place of special grace in God's sight. In addition, Wood- bury painted a rosary around the neck of the peasant mother, signi- fying her spiritual faith.

Antimodern artists frequently emphasized the traditional roles of the sexes as well as the importance to society of a unified family. These roles are the primary message of Joseph Raphael's The

Town Crier and His Family (fig. 9). Gathered in a close ring around their father, the town crier's children grin happily, each clutching a favorite toy or pet. Their mother is just visible in the back of the room near the hearth, alluding to her role at the heart of the home. Similarly, Chicago painter John H. Vanderpoel, commenting on a work in progress, noted his intention to show that in the traditional Dutch family the man was the breadwinner and the woman supported the family by preparing the food, minding the children, and serving her hus- band.15 Paintings such as these ad- dressed concerns over the disinte- gration of the family in America at a time when the divorce rate was rising and, as the women's movement gained momentum, traditional gender roles were losing their sharp definition. The town crier's proud pose and the radiant faces of his progeny celebrate the virtues of old-fashioned family life.

Although nineteenth-century




9 Joseph Raphael, The Towncrier and His Family, ca. 1909. Oil on canvas, 78 x 645/8 in. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Hon. Raphael Weill

American society stressed the de- sirability of creature comforts and steadily raised the national stan- dard of living, Americans continued to admire the poor family whose shared hardships seemed to produce a harmonious atmosphere of mutual love and joy. In quest of a preindustrial utopia, artists ignored the economic hardships premodern peoples suffered. William Griffis commented on a painting of a poor Dutch peasant family by Milwaukee artist Amy Cross:

The artist has represented with truth and pathos the home of struggling but unquerulous poverty. No lack of this world's goods

seems able to chill the spirits or check the flow of happy feeling in the sunny little maid. 6

Gari Melchers's Vespers, one of his many paintings of the Dutch peasant community attending church, also embodies some of the moral precepts most admired by American recorders of premodern society (fig. 10). Melchers depicts an old man and a young girl to represent two stages of life. By placing the figures next to one another with their heads close together, he reveals the parallel between the child's faith and the adult peasant's childlike inno- cence. The serious, devout expres- sion of the man's upturned face as

58 Spring 1989



10 Gari Melchers, Vespers, 1888. Oil on canvas, 38 x 28 in. The Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of the Witenagemote Club

he lifts his eyes toward heaven, the clasped hands in his lap, and the girl's quiet reflection as she studies her prayer book all com- bine to indicate the intensity of their devotion. Hitchcock and Melchers also frequently depicted Dutch working-class women as

holy Madonnas, and in two of his

paintings Melchers transformed a roomful of Dutch peasants into a Last Supper composition. Under- lying all these interpretations was the commonly held belief that the

peasant was spiritually closer to God than the more highly civi- lized city dweller, whose faith had been corrupted by the pursuit of mammon.17

While spirituality is Melchers's primary theme in Vespers, he also suggests the virtues of hard work and honesty. The man's weathered features and work-worn hands indicate his occupation as a farmer or a seaman. The peasant costumes of both figures also suggest their

place among the rural working class. Both the Netherlands and the United States subscribed to a Protestant work ethic that valued hard physical labor-especially hand labor-as a redeeming quality in man.18 A majority of Boughton's illustrations of Dutch peasants show them pumping and carrying water, washing windows, weeding streets, gathering cab- bages, or performing other physical tasks. Americans saw the peasant's hard work and closeness to the earth as positive qualities and admired the peasant's life as one of uninterrupted contact with na- ture and, by way of God's natural

creation, with God himself. American viewers of such

scenes would have understood the laboring peasant as an embodi- ment of the virtue of honesty. The adjective honest was applied to Dutch peasants by so many Ameri- cans that it virtually became a prefix to the phrase Dutch peasant. Even when denouncing the stu- pidity of Dutchmen who wanted to modernize their towns, Boughton felt compelled to ac- knowledge their honesty.'9 An artist could assume that the viewer would recognize this moral value in his picture because it was part of the iconography of the Dutch peasant subject. In each of these paintings hard work, the unity of the family, and spiritual well-being are linked inextricably. All are values that the artists saw disappearing in the technological mo- rass of modern American life, and all are reaffirmed through their paintings.

By depicting premodern subjects in traditional academic styles, antimodern American artists at- tempted to elevate falling moral standards and counteract specific failures of their own era. As is evi- dent from viewers' comments, these paintings often succeeded as didactic statements of the good things to be preserved from an otherwise antiquated and nearly extinct way of life. Although antimodern American artists worked in England, Germany, and France, for the artists discussed here, the Netherlands provided the best re- maining model of an ideal democratic premodern life.

Notes

I am grateful to the Boston University art

history faculty for generous support of my research while I was a graduate student, and particularly to Patricia Hills for her

continuing encouragement and excellent advice. A Fulbright grant allowed me to carry out research at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The




Hague where J. H. Kraan kindly shared his expertise and interest in this study. I also wish to thank William Truettner for his careful reading of the manuscript.

1 The term antimodern can be mis-

leading because of the negative con- notations it conjures. Here I use it in its positive sense to express a popular mode of thought that served as a

gentle brake to the headlong rush of

progress. Antimodernism did not try to halt the world's advancement, but

only to preserve some of the good things from the past. Even the most ar- dent industrialists usually harbored some antimodern sentiments and, con-

versely, most antimodern artists depended on the conveniences of modern life. For example, when Edwin Austin Abbey became ill in Mid-

dleburg, Zeeland, he rushed back to London's modern medical facilities, admitting that the "prospect of an ill- ness in that back town, picturesque though it be, was not alluring." Quoted in George Boughton, "Artist Strolls in Holland, Part 4," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 66 (April 1883): 705.

For a general discussion of antimodernism in America see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimod- ernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981) and Rod- erick Nash, Wilderness and the Amer- ican Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1978). Although the title of Michael Jacobs's The Good and

Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1985) suggests a discussion of antimodernism in art, the author avoids all but the most cursory remarks on the subject.

2 Laren actually began as the summer

colony of the Hague School artists but was soon overrun by Americans, while Dordrecht, Katwijk, and Volendam were always international. Only at Rijsoord and Egmond were the colonies both founded and dominated by Americans.

3 America's Dutch heritage is central to an understanding of antimodern Dutch-subject paintings and deserves separate consideration. I have discussed it in "Holland, Cradle of Amer- ican Civilization," a paper presented at the Seventy-sixth Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, Houston, Texas, February 1988; and in my Ph.D. dissertation, "American Painters Who

Worked in the Netherlands, 1880- 1914" (Boston University, 1986).

4 George Hitchcock, "The Picturesque Quality of Holland: Interiors and Bric- a-Brac," Scribner's Magazine 5 (February 1889): 163.

5 The first and most thorough examination of neurasthenia was

published in two volumes by Dr.

George Miller Beard: A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: W. Wood & Co., 1880) and American Nervous- ness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1881).

6 Edward Penfield, Holland Sketches (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), p. 48. George Boughton, "Artist Strolls in Holland, Part 1," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 66 (January 1883): 166.

7 Penfield, Holland Sketches, p. 147; and William Elliot Griffis, The American in Holland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1907), pp. 198-99.

8 The most thorough discussion of

nineteenth-century attitudes toward the city may be found in Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in

European and American Thought, 1820-1940 (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1985). Other useful sources include: Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1978), which contains an excellent discussion of various

attempts to establish rural, premodern values in the new urban society; John Giffen Thompson, Urbanization, Its

Effects on Government and Society (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1927); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden:

Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and Maury Klein and

Harvey Kantor, Prisoners of Progress: American Industrial Cities 1850-1920 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976). Robert L. Herbert, "City vs. Country: The Rural Image in French Painting from Millet to Gauguin," Artforum 8 (February 1970): 44-55, offers insights about rural versus industrial imagery in European art.

9 Quoted in "Notes on the Art Exhibit of Holland," Brush and Pencil 15 (February 1905): 133-34.

10 George Boughton, "Artist Strolls in Holland, Part 5," Harper's New

60 Spring 1989



Monthly Magazine 69 (August 1884): 339.

11 George Hitchcock, "The Picturesque Quality of Holland: Figures and Costumes," Scribner's Magazine 10 (November 1891): 624. Hitchcock rejected modern dress and its uniformity because it had lost the ability to reveal anything about the wearer's origin, profession, status, religion, or character. By retiring to Holland he could paint costumes that revealed such information.

12 Hitchcock, "Interiors and Bric-a-Brac," p. 166, 167-68.

13 Ibid., p. 163.

14 Carol Zemel discussed the image of the peasant weaver that was so popular at the end of the century in her article "The 'Spook' in the Machine: Van Gogh's Pictures of Weavers in Brabant," Art Bulletin 67 (March 1985): 123-37.

15 John H. Vanderpoel, letter to

Alexander Shilling, 12 August 1889, in the collection of the John H. Vanderpoel Art Association, Chicago, Illinois.

16 Griffis, The American in Holland, p. 195.

17 Frank Buckley discusses the peasant's spirituality and related ideas in "Trends in American Primitivism" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1939).

18 For excellent discussions of the work ethic and physical labor's role as an antidote to what Americans viewed as their increasingly "soft," enfeebling culture, see Lears, No Place of Grace and Daniel T. Rogers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

19 George Boughton, "Artist Strolls in Holland, Part 7," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 69 (October 1884): 706.




Documents

Dutch Utopia: Paintings by Antimodern American Artists of the Nineteenth Century