An old man is writing. In his left hand he holds a cigarette. His jacket is brown, his temples gray.
Do we want to go back to the year 1898, when this portrait was made?
I do not think so. It was a rigid world, where homosexuality was a scandal, women had to get married, and sex ended in disgrace or babies, or both. But also a world in which people showed themselves without make-up, with a seriousness and dignity that now seems a bit confusing. You don’t see faces like that in public anymore.
If you want to form an image of it, you have to go to it Dordrecht Museum. To our eyes, nowadays, ‘attractive’ may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think of the atmosphere in which you are immersed in Dordrecht. It’s all a bit brown, and serious. How heavy.
Take the portrait of Allard Pierson. mentions about him Wikipedia little more than that he was a theologian and art scholar, the first professor of art history in Amsterdam. In his time he was a living monument, whose name ended up on the facade of the Oudheidkundig Museum on Rokin in Amsterdam.
Names stick on facades, faces are time-bound, and that also applies to people who consider themselves averse to fashion. Of all the portraits in the exhibition, Pierson is perhaps the one furthest from our world. That heavy head framed by the father of all sideburns. The Scholar Writes, and Smokes. When this portrait was created, Pierson was 58 years old. Just a little younger than Jort Kelder, to give an idea, viewed with the eye of today. It is the young men in Veth’s portraits who have held up remarkably well. Albert Verwey, Maurits van der Valk, they still do well on the posters. Forever young.
But on closer inspection, that quietly writing and smoking early old man fits so nicely into the time capsule that the Dordrechts Museum has made that you can also look at him with a softer look. The artist himself wrote: ‘Philosophy. Wide. Calm. Imperturbable. Vast-just’, below the drawing with which he prepared himself for this portrait. And while walking through the exhibition you can also view it that way, through the eye of Jan Veth. Just like all those other people from that other time.
Dordrecht Museum: ‘The eye of Jan Veth. Painter and critic around 1900’. Until September 3, 2023.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 11, 2023