Suze Robertson was innovative in her raw depiction of spinners, twigs and farm workers ★★★★☆

Suze Robertson, Church in Katwijk (circa 1908-1912), oil on canvas, 89 x 77 cm.Sculpture Collection Centraal Museum Utrecht, purchase 1943.

First the news: Suze Robertson (1855-1922), the once famous modernist, used photos. They served as an aid in painting her cityscapes. Robertson used them to come up with a good composition. For example, in such a photo she would fold away a part of the sky when it seemed too high to her. This was discovered during the research for the Robertson exhibition in Museum Panorama Mesdag. The find is delicately explained.

They have a thing for Robertson there in the Hofstad. Nine years ago, in the winter of 2013/14, the museum also devoted an exhibition to the painter from The Hague. I especially remember the stripped-down character of that presentation. The Robertsons then hung there without significant chronology or explanation, as if it were an art fair or sales exhibition. The current exhibition, which was made in collaboration with Robertson expert Kees van der Geer, is much better. She shows Robertson’s work in the context of her time and life, and aims for reparation. Robertson, it is called, was a ‘radical innovator’ and should be recognized as such.

Suze Robertson, 'Corner of the studio' (c. 1898-1903), watercolor on paper, ca. 65x45 cm.  Image Private collection

Suze Robertson, ‘Corner of the studio’ (c. 1898-1903), watercolor on paper, ca. 65×45 cm.Image Private collection

Robertson was certainly innovative if peintre du peuple, painter of the people – a role that until then had mainly been filled by men. She focused on a specific part of the population: the feminine. It was the spinners, twigs, farmers, and other women working in deplorable conditions that Robertson painted. She sought them out in their meager, North Brabant accommodations, as Vincent van Gogh had done a few years before.

She seemed to have her preferences: the older or more experienced, the more suitable. Robertson saw beauty in decay or was at least attracted to it – when she painted buildings, as she did in Noordwijk, she often chose buildings that were ripe for demolition.

You can also see the decline in Pieternella Verhoeven, a crooked, 80-year-old farmer from Dongen. The Amsterdam painter August Allebé discovered her, after which other artists knocked on her door. In Robertson’s portrait, the toothless woman sits on a past-day chair, a set of playing cards in hand. She looks at us suspiciously from under an old-fashioned Dongense cap. The painting has a high nibble-nibble-nibbler content, although that may be conditioning on my part. It vaguely resembles the work of Jozef Israëls, but more hasty, rougher.

Suze Robertson, Pietje – Girl Reading (circa 1898), oil on panel, 42 x 32 cm.  Image Private collection

Suze Robertson, Pietje – Girl Reading (circa 1898), oil on panel, 42 x 32 cm.Image Private collection

When Robertson settled down with the spinsters in Heeze fifteen years later, roughness was her trademark. Genre pieces from that time, such as Branch Breaker, potato peelings, Woman at the reel wheel and Milk for the cat are darker, more glowing and richer in contrast than her earlier work and that of her contemporaries. Woodcuts of oil paint, it seems. The figures on it also appear to be made of wood, with their dented heads and eye sockets dark as those of skulls. I find these paintings hard to love, and even harder to serve. They are as unattractive as they are original. They are impactful. They show a highly simplified version of the world; one that lasts in all its thickly applied grubbyness. It was that simplifying (and colorful), I think, that attracted aspiring painters like Piet Mondrian and Charley Toorop to Robertson. It’s why she’s being rehabilitated now, but not why I appreciate her.

I like her more for her works that were already considered traditional in her day: the skillful charcoal portraits of model Adolphe Boutard; the finely painted watercolors of a corner of her studio; the tender portraits of her neighbours, both called Petronella. It is here, more than in the expressive, that you can see just how much Robertson had as a painter. The curators of the exhibition, eager to put Robertson on the back burner as a pioneer, seem to overlook this a bit. Who knows , Robertson did that himself .

Daily work/ potato peelings (ca. 1905), oil on canvas, 103x87 cm.  Sculpture Groninger Museum

Daily work/ potato peelings (ca. 1905), oil on canvas, 103×87 cm.Sculpture Groninger Museum

No flower still lifes

Like many other ambitious female painters in the 19th century, Suze Robertson faced many headwinds. She responded with intransigence. When her male students at the Rotterdam Academy tried to ban her from the nude model class by means of an open letter in the newspaper, she did not give in. And when she and her peers were denied access to the reading room of the artists’ society, she made sure that that room remained accessible for one part of the day. She also found little support in her marriage. Robertson’s husband, the church painter Bishop, a man who produced so slowly that he should have been called Stoffel the Tortoise; didn’t like the fact that his wife went to Brabant unaccompanied. It didn’t stop her from going. That’s where she found her subjects. The genres that were considered suitable for women at the time, such as flower still lifes, gave Robertson a dead end. She wasn’t much of a sweetheart. Even her “girly faces” are never sweet.

Suze Robertson: Committed. quirky. Modern

Visual arts

★★★★ ren

Museum Panorama Mesdag, The Hague, until: 05/3/23

Kees van der Geer, Annemiek van Stokkom and Suzanne Veldink, Sue Roberston, Scriptum Art Books, 200 pages, €29.95.

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