Artist and portraitist Jan Veth is a household name in our art history. The Dordrechts Museum shows how masterly and penetrating his portraits, paintings and drawings still are.
When you see the stunningly realistic portraits of Jan Veth in the Dordrechts Museum, you would think that he was working from photographs. But all those sharp lines that built up a face, a figure and a personality came from his handwriting, from his pen, pencil or brush.
Artist, art critic, writer and art historian Jan Veth (1864-1925) did not need photos. He mastered the drawing and painting technique so well that he became the most important Dutch portrait artist.
It may sound a bit boring, an exhibition about a draftsman-painter from around 1900, with mostly portraits, a single cityscape and furthermore letters, handwritten texts and photos in showcases in a museum atmosphere that fits seamlessly with the atmosphere and style of that time. It’s like walking around a hundred years ago. But then it turns out that the way in which Jan Veth drew and painted people grabs your attention and doesn’t let go.
Whoever is depicted, you see real personalities. It’s the decorative, the emphasis on the line, and then the great portraits of his friends, the Tachtigers. Such as by Lodewijk van Deyssel, by the writer-physician Arnold Aletrino with his cat on his lap or the sublime, human portrait by the Groningen painter Jozef Israels.
The striking thing about this is that Jan Veth belonged to the circles that moved in the field of the avant-garde, while he himself remained an ‘old-fashioned’ draftsman and painter.
The difference with the tradition of portrait painting is that he immortalized his models when they were working, and depicted them so realistically that every pimple, wrinkle, bump or blemish is accurately depicted. Anyone who wanted to have a portrait made by him hesitated. He was regarded as ‘a ruthless realist’, while he was hardly more realistic than his great example Rembrandt.
Jan Veth portrayed his clients with great empathy and searched for their character while working. He said about this: ‘I want to express the settled, the permanent in a person.’ He succeeded wonderfully.
The way Jan Veth made portraits, we no longer do that. That has been. But we couldn’t even do it anymore. This is classic mastery, but without the rigidity that is often associated with it. When you stand in front of his refined portraits in the museum, what strikes you most is how captivating they are, how they still come to life. They are all masterpieces. However, it can hardly be more intrusive. You can recognize a Jan Veth out of thousands.
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Jan Veth in Dordrecht
The eye of Jan Veth, painter and critic around 1900 , Dordrecht Museum, Dordrecht. Open: Tue-Sun 11am-5pm. Until September 3.