Dutch artist – my daily art display

Anton Pieck

Anton Pieck

When one thinks of artists, one looks to the greats such as Veronese or Goya or Turner and some are maybe somewhat “sniffy” when graphic artists and illustrators are lumped together with such luminaries. My artist today was reviled by serious art lovers for his artwork being petty kitsch. Still, friend and foe had to admit that he was an accomplished draftsman with a highly unique, instantly recognizable and barely imitated style. However, whether you love or hate his work my featured artist today is one of the great illustrators of his time and whose works have brought unbridled happiness to many. For those who have never seen any of his works, let me introduce you to the Dutch graphic artist Anton Pieck.

Anton Pieck aged 1 year-old, on the left, next to his twin brother Henri Pieck

Anton Franciscus Pieck and his twin brother, Henri, were born in the Dutch town of Den Helder on April 19th, 1895. He was the son of Henri Christiaan Pieck, who was a machinist in the Royal Dutch Navy, so he was often away from home for lengths of time. His wife was Stofffelina Petronella Neijts who gave birth to their first child, Coenraad, in 1891 but who died when he was just one year old. Anton’s twin brother Henri Christiaan became a Dutch architect, painter and graphic artist but who would lead a different, more exciting and dangerous life than his brother Anton. As an adult Henri became active within the Dutch Communist Party, and was recruited as a spy for Soviet Russia. Henri’s artistic interests differed from those of Anton as his main love was modern art, whereas Anton loved old-fashioned illustrations and paintings . When the twins were six years old, they took drawing lessons from J. B. Mulders, who ran after-school art classes at their school. He recognized the talent of the twins and taught them the basics of perspective and proportion, and these lessons quickly bore fruit. When he was ten, Anton won a prize at an exhibition for his still life watercolour depicting a brown pot on an old stove, and in recognition, among other things, he received five tubes of watercolour paints. More awards followed during his teenage years.

River Spaarne and the Bakenesser Tower by Anton Pieck

In 1906, after Anton’s father retired, the family moved to live in The Hague. Anton and his brother, after finishing secondary school, enrolled on a drawing course in the evenings at the Royal Academy of Art. They later received training at the drawing institute Bik and Vaandrager. When the brothers were aged fourteen, they obtained the first stage of their teaching certificate and 3 years later they completed their teaching certificates and were able to call themselves drawing teachers. Anton went to teach at his old school, Bik and Vaandrager. Henri Pieck was considered the better artist of the twins and is allowed to go to the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. This was a personal blow to Anton who never came to terms with the fact that his twin brother was looked upon as the more skillful artist. One could almost say that Henri was looked upon as an artist whereas Anton was looked upon as a drawing teacher!

During the First World War the Netherlands remained neutral, but still many young Dutchmen were mobilized so as to be on standby in case their country became embroiled in the fighting. Anton Pieck was one of those men and became a sergeant, however he spent most of his spare time sketching for his fellow recruits. A somewhat damning psychological army report on him in 1915 described Pieck as:

“…someone who looks more at the past than the future and will therefore never amount to anything…”

Not considered as “fighting material” and unlikely to be used for military duties, Pieck was sent back to The Hague, where he gave drawing lessons to other soldiers. This was pure heaven for Anton as for four evenings a week he would oversee two-hour sketching lessons. Pieck was then able to spend all his time doing what he loved best.

A boat on the River Amstel near Ouderkerk with the house “Wester Amstel” by Anton Pieck

When Anton graduated from the Bik en Vaandrager Institute, they offered him the position as an art teacher which he accepted and held the position until 1920. He then applied and was accepted as an art teacher at the newly established Kennemer Lyceum, a high school in the Haarlem suburb of Overeen. He would continue to work there until his retirement in 1960 at the age of 65. Throughout those years teaching students, he always made time for his own work.

Hofje van Loo with communal water pump by Anton Piecke. The Hofje (Courtyard) van Loo is a hofje on the Barrevoetstraat 7 in Haarlem

Teaching art was not his great love and he was never quite satisfied with his job and he couldn’t wait for his daily teaching duties to end so that he could dash home and continue drawing and painting. However, being employed as a teacher gave him financial stability and this in turn gave him the comfort of only choosing commissions which pleased him, rather than being forced to work on work he disliked. Whilst employed at the school as a teacher, Anton would also illustrate diplomas, bulletins, ex-libris bookplates, birth cards and other administrative documents for his school.

The River Spaarne with the Waag building designed by Lieven de Key at the end of the 16th century by Anton Pieck

In the 1920’s Anton Pieck published his first drawings. It was also around this time that Anton forged a close friendship with the Flemish novelist Felix Timmermans and it is said that Timmermans’ jovial attitude rubbed off on Pieck whom he advised to “lighten up” and be more spontaneous and follow his own spirit.

A recent edition of Felix Timmerman’s book.

For the 10th edition of Timmerman’s very successful book, Pallieter, published in 1921, Timmermans asked Pieck to provide the illustrations to go side-by-side with the text. Through correspondence, Timmermans indicated what he wanted to see on the illustrations. The book was described as an ‘ode to life’ written after a moral and physical crisis. Pallieter was warmly received as an antidote to the misery of World War I in occupied Belgium. For Pieck, this was just a start of his book illustration journey as he went on to illustrate about 350 books.

In 1921 Pieck illustrated Felix Timmermans’ book Pallieter by the Flemish author Felix Timmermans. As the book was set in Flanders Pieck decided to visit there to soak up the atmosphere in the various towns. Above is an ink illustration from one of the chapters, A beautiful winter day in which the main character, Pallieter, goes out on a clear winter day and hears organ music. He heads towards the sound, but only sees two children playing with mud.

Anton Pieck’s way of announcing the birth of son Max Pieck sent to all the staff of the Kennemer Lyceum in 1928

In 1917, Anton Pieck met Jo van Poelvoorde, the sister of fellow soldier Hendrik van Poelvoorde. Jo was a teacher at the Royal Dutch Weaving School. Her first impressions of Anton were that he was friendly, but also taciturn and absent. Gradually he opened up more and became more talkative. Anton and Jo entered into a relationship and twenty-seven-year-old Anton Pieck married twenty-nine-year-old Josephina Johanna Lambertina (Jo) van Poelvoorde, on March 8th 1922 at The Hague. After the marriage the couple moved to Overveen. From their marriage three children were born, Elsa, Anneke and Max.

Harpenden Engeland by Anton Pieck

Throughout his life, Anton was an enthusiastic traveller and visited England, France, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Poland and Morocco during which he built up a collection of sketches. He was a great lover of quaint buildings and had no interest in modern architecture. For him, it was a joy to study nature as well as picturesque cities and villages. He was so in love with Belgium and England that he termed them “his second mother countries” as their towns had not been “ruined” by modernisation as had happened in his homeland The Netherlands.

The ruins of Brederode in Santpoort by Anton Pieck (c.1950)

Anton Pieck was a twentieth century man as he only lived his first five years in the nineteenth century. Having said that, Pieck loved to look back with pleasure on what he considered to be a more appealing century – the nineteenth century.

The Warmoesstraat, Amsterdam by Anton Pieck

He had fallen in love with the Dickensian era and had completed many paintings, drawings, etchings and engravings depicting Dickensian scenes. He depicted gentlemen in high hats or ladies adorned in crinoline, people taking coach rides, watching a magic lantern show or listening to barrel organs or chamber concerts. All such scenes gave him great pleasure and they all contributed to his artistic ideal. Anton Pieck was adamant that when it came to commissions, he would only accept those which allowed him to illustrate novels or short stories set in bygone days.

Greeting card of Winchester by Anton Pieck

What Pieck liked to depict were things which looked old or dilapidated. Buildings and their interiors which were crooked and looked ramshackle and run-down. For Anton, nothing was to look new or be built completely straight. Anton’s first visit to England appears to have been around 1937 when, on a voyage by ship to North Africa, he had managed to come ashore in Southampton and was able to made sketches of some of the old commercial buildings and to visit the city of Winchester where he sketched some of the old Tudor buildings and historic inns, one of which was turned into a greetings card.

Besides prints and greeting cards, calendars were produced each year with a selection of Anton Pieck’s drawings.

He would also produce a number of ex libris bookplates, a book owner’s identification label that was usually pasted to the inside front cover of a book. Above is one he created for his son, Max.

Anton Pieck’s vision for De Efteling

Anton Pieck’s work over the years and his popularity with the Dutch people was probably in the minds of the mayor of Loon op Zand, R.J. van der Heijden and filmmaker Peter Reijnders who had envisioned the building of a fantasy-themed amusement park, De Efteling, in Kaatsheuvel in the Dutch province of North Brabant in 1951, named after a 16th-century farm named Ersteling. The men approached Anton Pieck to design the theme park but he initially refused but later changed his mind on the proviso that only original materials are used for building the houses, such as coloured roof tiles and old stones. Anton then set about designing het Sprookjesbos, the fairy tale forest.

Anton Pieck at Efteling

Initially, the Fairy Tale Forest was designed and based upon ten different fairy tales, all of which were brought to life using original drawings by Pieck. Added to Pieck’s designs were mechanics, lighting and sound effects designed by the Dutch filmmaker Peter Reijnders. The life-sized dioramas, shown together in an atmospheric forest, were a incredible success and in 1952, the first full year, Efteling was open, it had 240,000 visitors and since 1978, the park has grown in size and is now become one of the most popular theme parks in the world.

Frau Holle at Efteling

Pieck designed all the houses, buildings and the special animatronic inhabitants who were inhabitants of the fairy tale forest, such as Little Red Riding Hood at her grandma’s house, Sleeping Beauty’s castle, Frau Holle’s well and Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house. Frau Holle, also known as Mother Hulda, is a German fairy tale character from the 1812 book, The Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales (Grimms’ Fairy Tales).

Frau Holle by Anton Pieck

Frau Holle is often depicted shaking out bed linen over an outside balcony then it begins to snow. It is still a common expression in Hesse and Southern parts of the Netherlands and beyond to say “Hulda is making her bed” when it begins to snow. Like many other tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, the story of Frau Holle was also a moral tale explaining that hard work is rewarded and laziness is punished.

Anton Pieck Museum

Anton Pieck retired from teaching in 1960. He was made a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau. Pieck died on November 24th 1987 at the age of 92. Three years before his death the Anton Pieck Museum House for Anton Pieck was opened in Hattem, a municipality and a town in the eastern Netherlands.

Anton Pieck loved nature, the past and Dutch cityscapes. Sadly, during the course of the 20th century, large swathes of that old Netherlands he loved disappeared due to bombing during the war, the renovation and rejuvenation of the city centers from the 1960’s and the construction of the complicated road network. As a result, Anton became sad and depressed at what he witnessed during his latter years, saying in 1985:

“… Yes, I have known this country very well. What is still there now, I see as a mess of the past. That makes me sad, yes…”

Whatever you may think about the artistic style of Anton Pieck, one has to feel warmed by the depictions and undergo a desire to be back in olden days when life may have been simpler, or was it ?

The Life of Man by Jan Steen

My Daily Art Display today is about two paintings and the reason I am looking at two is because the second one, which is a copy of the first by a different artist, is almost identical but not quite and it does show up certain details much clearer, which are harder to see on the original work by Jan Steen. Sounds interesting? – Well then, read on !

Jan Havicksz Steen was born in Leiden around 1626. He was the eldest son of the brewer and former grain merchant, Havick Jansz Steen and his wife, Elisabeth Capiteyn, the daughter of a city clerk. Steen was brought up in a well-to-do Catholic family home. His forefathers and parents had run the tavern, The Red Halbert, for two generations. Jan Steen, like his contemporary Rembrandt, went to the Latin School and later became a student in the Department of Letters at Leiden University. Art historians question whether he actually studied at the university as he never attained a degree. It is thought that he may have enrolled at the university to take advantage of the privileges bestowed on students, such as exemption from serving in the civic gurad and not having to pay the municipal excise tax on beer and wine ! His artistic education was overseen by the German painter, Nicolaes Knupfer, a specialist in history paintings and produced works based on stories from the Bible, from Greek and Roman history and from mythology. He was to have a great influence on Jan Steen. Two other painters who had some bearing on Steen’s future artistic career were the brothers Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade, both of who lived in nearby Utrecht

In March 1648, at the age of twenty-two, Jan Steen and Gabriel Metsu, a fellow artist, founded the painters’ Guild of St Luke at Leiden. It was shortly after that time that, Jan Steen went to The Hague where he met and became assistant to Jan van Goyen, the prolific landscape artist. Within a short space of time Steen left his lodgings and moved into van Goyen’s home. In October 1648 Jan Steen married van Goyen’s daughter Margriet and the couple went on to have six children, their first child, a son Thadeus was born in 1651. Van Goyen and Steen worked together for a further five years until 1654 at which time Steen and his family moved to Delft and to supplement his income from his art, he rented a brewery for 400 guilders a month, known as De Slang (The Serpent), also sometimes known as De Roskam (The Curry Comb) which was on the Oude Delft canal, but the enterprise met with little success.

The year 1654 was to be a momentous and a tragic year for Delft and its inhabitants. This was the year in which The Delft Explosion occurred on October 12th, when a gunpowder store exploded, destroying much of the city. Over a hundred people were killed and thousands wounded. Thirty tons of gunpowder had been stockpiled in a former Clarissen Convent in the Doelenkwartier district of the city. On that morning the keeper of the magazine, which stored the explosives, opened up the store and an enormous explosion followed. The death toll could have been much worse but fortunately many of the people of Delft had gone to a market at the nearby town of Schieden. One of the casualties of the explosion was the artist Carl Fabritius, many of whose paintings were also destroyed in the explosion and fire. After this disaster and the fall-out from the First Anglo-Dutch War, the art market in the city almost collapsed and sales of Steen’s works fell sharply. Once again Jan Steen moved his family.

Jan Steen, following his departure from Delft in 1657, moved around the country, living for a time in Warmond, a small village north of Leiden and in 1660 moved to Haarlem where the next year Steen became a member of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke. In May 1669 his wife died and the following year his father died. Jan Steen inherited the family house in Leiden (his mother had died a year earlier) and he moved his family back home. He returned to Leiden in 1672 when again he opened a tavern. The year 1672 in Holland was known as the rampjaar (“disaster year”). In that year, the Republic of the Seven United Provinces was after the outbreak of the Franco-Dutch War and the Third Anglo-Dutch War attacked by both England, France, and the invading armies very quickly defeated the Dutch States Army and conquered a large part of the Republic. Steen’s unsuccessful brewery business and the fall in his art sales led him into debt which was further exacerbated by his heavy drinking.

In April 1673 he re-married. His second wife was Maria Dircksdr van Egmont, the widow of a Leiden bookseller, who soon after gave birth and the forty-seven year old artist became a father yet again. Jan van Steen died penniless in 1679, aged fifty-three. After his death, his wife had to sell most of their possessions and her husband’s paintings to pay off his many debts. Maria died eight years later.

My Daily Art Display’s featured painting by Jan Steen is entitled The Life of Man which he completed around 1665. In the painting before us we glimpse into the busy bar of a tavern full of people of various ages with one thing in common – they are all there to enjoy themselves. They create their own enjoyment through making music, singing and playing tric-trac, the popular dice game of that time. In the centre of the painting we see a young woman, dressed in blue and white, seated, turning away from an older man who is offering her an oyster. We can see by the smile on her face that maybe her initial rebuff of his gift may soon be reversed. Behind the pair we can see a hunchbacked lute player, who looks on and seems happy to ridicule the mismatched pair.

To the right of the picture we see a young woman and another lute player sitting together at a table. This relationship seems to be prospering, if the sultry look she is giving the musician is anything to go by. It would appear that the owners of the tavern are use to preparing and selling large quantities of oysters, a supposed aphrodisiac, to their clientele.

As I have said many times before I like paintings where a lot of things are going on as every time I look at one of these paintings I notice something different. Cast your eyes around the tavern scene and see what you can discover. To the left we can see an old man eating an oyster and on his knee he has a small child who is wriggling from his grasp trying to grab the tail of a parrot. In the central foreground we see a small girl cradling a small dog in her apron and by the table on the right and sitting on the floor is a small boy who is trying to teach a kitten to stand on its hind legs. It is interesting to focus on the small boy in the right foreground, with the blue coat and red hat, who holds a basket of bread rolls under his arm. Jan Steen has painted this figure with his back to us and has used this technique in other paintings and what it does is to get us to look at where the boy is looking and thus the artist gets the viewer to focus his or her eye into the depths of the picture.

Across the top of the painting we have what looks like a raised curtain and what Steen wants us to accept that we are not just looking at any old tavern but in some ways we are looking at a stage and the curtain is a theatre curtain raised to show the cast of players. In Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It, there is the famous line:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

As the painting is by a Dutch artist maybe we should look at the Dutch saying by Joost van den Vondel:

“De wereld is een schouwtoneel
Elk speelt zijn rol en krijgt zijn deel.“

Which translated roughly means:

“ The world‘s a stage
Each plays his role and gets his share”

And so maybe Jan Steen wants us to look at this scene as more than just people in a tavern but as “the world stage “and the people we see in the tavern are just players.

alternative — The Life of Man by Reinier Craeyvanger (c.1840)

And so I come to my second painting which is also entitled The Life of Man but the artist is Reiner Craeyvanger. It is obviously a copy of Jan Steen’s work but I am showing it for two reasons. Firstly, when I was researching the painting by Jan Steen I kept reading about “a boy lying in the loft above, blowing bubbles”. I searched Jan Steen’s painting for hours looking for the boy and couldn’t find him and convinced myself that the picture I had was a cropped version of the original. However when I saw Craeyvanger’s copy I immediately saw the boy and when I looked back at Steen’s painting I could just make out a fuzzy image of the boy. See if you can find him.

boy on balcony — Boy on balcony blowing bubbles

The boy is laying there blowing bubbles and next to him is a skull. From this we must believe that both are symbolic and the message is, that like a bubble which will suddenly burst, our life may suddenly come to an end and we die and of course the addition of a skull which we often see in Vanitas painting symbolises that death is always around the corner. Although it is not very clear in the attached pictures the painting on the rear wall has a gallows in it and that again is harking back to life and death.

There are two other interesting things in the painting. Firstly we see broken egg shells scattered on the floor which could be symbolically interpreted as the frailty of life itself, and secondly, look at the right background and the old woman staring into a tankard. She is a kannekijker, which literally translated means a “pot looker” or “someone who looks into a pot”. This gesture was a well-known literary and artistic convention of the time that signified the habitual drinker or drunkard. I am sure there is more symbolism incorporated in this painting, such as why has Steen depicted a pot with a spoon and a hat in the foreground? How are we to interpret these objects or maybe there is nothing to interpret!

However I will leave you with a question. Although Craeyvanger has carefully copied Jan Steen’s painting, what is the main difference between his work and that of Jan Steen’s painting? I am not talking about colours, tones or technique. It is more obvious than that, something is missing from the later painting, but what ?