How Romantic painters in the 19th century fueled the wanderlust to exotic places

Somewhere near Rome, an ox cart bumps over the overgrown rocks of a natural bridge. The setting sun bathes the Roman hilly landscape behind it in an orange glow. Stick the hashtags #Goldenhour and #Wanderlust on it and the connection between this nineteenth-century painting by Pierre Louis Dubourcq and the social media posts of contemporary travel influencers is quickly made. The Dordrechts museum aims with the exhibition wanderlust to a wide audience and attracts the places in a universal context through the landscape paintings of the 19th century painters who love to travel. Who is not attracted to the romance of the hills, the mountains, the sea and the vineyards?

Just as travel programs or travel vloggers can give you the feeling of going on holiday without actually leaving, the Dordrechts Museum also tries to stimulate curiosity about the unknown. The exhibition is centered on what are called ‘Dutch painters’ for simplicity’s sake, who went to work abroad in the nineteenth century for various reasons. The emphasis is on the adventure that the mainly wealthy men took on and the development that the artists went through before they returned home ‘completed’.

However, the very first painting you encounter in the exhibition shows that the artists were regularly so impressed that they did not return at all. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1808, Abraham Teerlink arrived in Italy via Paris in Italy, where he married the Tuscan painter Anna Muschi twenty-eight years later and produced in the same year View of Florence from S. Miniato (1836). In 1857 he died in Rome after half a life in Italy. Arnhemmer Antonie Sminck Pitloo also painted the beautiful first La Grotta di Posillipo (1826) before dying in Naples eleven years later.

Rhine and Meuse

wanderlust however, is not limited to Italy migrants. This destination was common, among other things, because of the Grand Tour tradition in which promising artists were sent there to learn from the old masters. The fact that much more was undertaken is clearly reflected in the many travel destinations into which the exhibition is divided. For example, painters went on their own to artist colonies in France to find inspiration in each other and nature (such as Willem Roelofs and Jacob Maris) or to Prague to frame the urban landscape (Jacob Abels). Still others stayed closer to home and found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the Rhine or Maas (Barend Cornelis Koekkoek). A few crossed the ocean to also depict the American landscape (Alexander Wüst).

Suriname and the Dutch East Indies are also discussed as travel destinations, although it is clear that the trustees struggled with this. After all, there is quite a balance of power in the game between settler and colonies. The exhibition tries to solve this by also presenting artists from the relevant areas themselves. The result is a strange contrast. While the romantic note predominates in the paintings made in other countries, botanical studies by Elisabeth Johanna Koning are shown under the Suriname umbrella, for example. In the Dutch East Indies, the two life-size portraits of the Javanese painter Raden Saleh Sarief, made by the German painter Johann Karl Bähr, are particularly striking. The two paintings of volcanic eruptions by the Javanese painter himself also disappear a bit. You wonder what the trustees here wanted.

Romantic bubble

There is also plenty of explanation. For almost every painting, at least ten lines explain how the painter came to the work and which journey had been made for it. They do not shy away from bursting the romantic bubble by pointing out, for example, how Alexander Wüst very consciously cultivated his image as a seasoned traveller. Or how August Legras saw himself as someone who preferred reality to imagination, yet carefully left out the European influence in his paintings of the Algerian and Tunisian landscape, in order to maintain an undisturbed fantasy.

wanderlust manages to convey the wanderlust of the artists and seduce the visitor both in image and accompanying text. The set-up of the exhibition means that on a relatively modest surface you will encounter an enormous number of different journeys and characters. Special are the fierce paintings of the Norwegian coast by Betzy Akersloot-Berg, who is best known in the Netherlands for her paintings of the Vlieland mudflats, usually on display in Tromp’s Huys in Oost-Vlieland. The threatening skies and lapping waves form a nice contrast with the sunny idylls from southern Europe.