Van der Velden.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 579, 8 October 1932, Page 8

Van der Velden.

Treasures in Art

The McDougall Gallery and Its Pictures. hi. JN THE HISTORY OF ART in Christchurch there is no more picturesque character and no more exotic genius than the eccentric Dutchman, Van der Velden, who is represented by four pictures in the McDougall Gallery. The greatest of the four, “ The Dutch Funeral,” preceded him to New Zealand. It was bought in England by the Van Asch family, whose descriptions of New Zealand life apparently influenced the artist himself to try his luck in the Antipodes. His bohemianism, carried to a country so far from the home of his art, made him a sort of anecdotal figure. Here between draughts of gin and dreams of riches to be won from the “ wool kings,” in whose artistic appreciation he had a simple faith, he started picture after picture and left them for long periods unfinished. Then the news that the price of wool was up would encourage him to complete one or two for the homesteads they never graced. Some of his sketches found their way into Christchurch homes as payment for money borrowed, and occasional unfinished pictures of his still drift through salerooms like spasmodic illuminations of genius, spent before the craftsman had fixed them on canvas. But even the generation acquainted with the tippling, theatrical little Dutchman recognised in his pictures the intensity of emotional experience interpreted with the force of creative power. There is all the stamp of dramatic realit}', for instance, in the faces of the mourners in “ The Dutch Funeral ” and the nhvsieal exhaustion of

one of the women emphasises with powerful sympathy the stark tragedy of the black bier. The rest of the group show that mute stolidness that marks acquaintance with grief. Even the landscape is desolate. The snow-covered roofs of the hxiddled village are leaden under a leaden sky. Nature is as cold as death and the whole picture is fraught with a deep feeling of calamity. But in “ The Funeral Barge ” Van der Velden has treated the same theme more gently. In the misty air over the swamp lands the figures are softened with a tender sympathy. The grass has a springtime greenness. The poppies bloom. Van der Velden was indeed a representative of Rembrandt in New Zealand. The influence of the Old Master which had slumbered for two centuries in Holland, underwent a great revival before Van der Velden left the Old World, and it had already been forcibly expressed in the work of Josef Israels, a Dutch Jew. “ Interior ” is strikingly reminiscent of this artist’s work in the way the light through the two small windows pierces, or rather, dispels the gloom. There is a homely reality in the grouping of the old woman with her broom and the man warming his hands in front of the fire, but the precision in the drawing and the lighting of the room suggest that this was no studio piece, but a corner from the very life of the artist. It is his “ Fisherman’s Head,” however, which entitles Van der Velden to the name “ the Rembrandt of New Zealand.” He uses the master’s method of light on a face half hidden in a mass of shade to bring out the deep humanity and forceful character of the portrait with a skill that is the gift of genius. —B.E.S.