The Dordrechts museum shows what beautiful 19th-century artists saw when they went on a journey ★★★★☆

wanderlust, an exhibition in the Dordrechts Museum about 19th-century Dutch artists on the move, is a strong exhibition with a not so strong counterpart. The pendant, actually a stand-alone exhibition, is about wanderlust among contemporary makers, and is so different in tone and commitment from the main exhibition that it actually deserves a separate discussion. I direct him to the box below, go, away. Well, those 19th-century…

You can imagine why these men (and a single woman) went out. It was the pre-internet age, wasn’t it, pre-photography and pre-abundantly illustrated catalogues: those who wanted to see new things, artistic or otherwise, were forced to travel for miles. Artists traveled to experience famous antiquities with their own eyes, as well as to marvel at impressive landscapes, vistas that often served as material for paintings yet to be made. They also traveled to see the world as new again: in other words: to feel alert as you only do in foreign terrain. Although there were also those who traveled for money or to impress their fiancée, such as the painter Antoine Payen who traveled to Indonesia.

Indonesia is just one of the destinations here. wanderlust also shows representations of such widely differing countries as Italy, Norway, Suriname and the United States. That’s a lot of places to illuminate in one exhibition hall, and sometimes the curators have to cram. The Alps and the Scottish Highlands are swept together here in five paintings, and at such moments the exhibition feels like one such Europe-in-seven-days journey, albeit a beautiful one.

The compilers, guest curators Jenny Reynaerts and Maaike Rikhof, have assembled a truckload of strong paintings, including many on loan from the Rijksmuseum. From the first canvas, a panoramic view of Florence at sunrise, to the loosely painted impressions from the Maghreb with which the exhibition concludes, the standard remains unabated. This includes a lot of work by unknown or semi-famous makers, such as the painter Alexander Wüst (present here with a great night piece) or the botanical artist Gerrit Schouten (born and raised in Suriname, and strictly speaking not traveling, unless it from the cradle to the grave). It makes you realize how unknown the art of the early 19th century still is. No matter how badly she is typified by the standard term ‘romantic’, although some clichés turn out to be true.

The obsession with ‘the wonderful effects of the light of the setting sun’, as the Southern Netherlandish painter Pierre Louis Dubourcq called it, for example. Judging by the paintings by Knip, Teerlink or this Dubourcq, you get the impression that at that time there was no other part of the day than that when the gold of the day touched the blue of the night. a case life imitates art, of course. People went in search of nature for what they had seen on the wall before, but they looked carefully and imitated it well.

At Baden-Baden said Dubourcq left the nurturing light for what it was, and painted a sunlit cornfield under clouds as heavy as the belly of a pregnant bitch. A funeral procession crosses the field. It is one of those scenes that stimulates not only the sight, but also the sensory memory, the auditory part. That senses the muffled roar that makes the heart muscle contract: a thunderstorm approaching. The approaching storm increases the awe for the landscape, an awe that may have fueled Dubourcq’s wanderlust. Because where there is a horizon, there is a need to travel there – rain or shine, it doesn’t matter.