Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915)

Evening scene with bomschuiten off the coast and figures on the beach, signed 'HW Mesdag' (lower right), oil on panel, 37,5x30 cm, Exhibited:-Laren, Singer Memorial Foundation, ‘Keuze uit de collectie B. de Geus van den Heuvel’, 9 April-30 May 1966, no. 104 (label attached to the frame).Provenance:-With The French Galleries, London/Edinburgh/Glasgow/Dundee (label attached to the reverse).-Collection Mr B. de Geus van den Heuvel, A label on the back illustrates that the painting was in the collection of the famous French Gallery in London, where works were on display by the most important English and French artists of the time. The French Gallery represented, among others, the famous painter Lourens Alma Tadema, later to be known as Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, who was a cousin of Mesdag and who arranged for Mesdag to be apprenticed to Willem Roelofs. 'You will never become a Meisonnier, maybe a Courbet', Alma Tadema is supposed to have said to Mesdag at the beginning of his career as a painter.1 In a way, Alma Tadema was right; Mesdag did not become a classical fine painter and his work has more in common with that of the realist Courbet. But what he definitely will not have expected, was that a few decades later the name Mesdag would be virtually synonymous with Dutch seascape painting and that this is still the case today, more than a century later.Source:Johan Poort, Hendrik Willem Mesdag 1831 - 1915, Wassenaar 1989, p.21