RKD STUDIES

Quirine van der Meer Mohr

‘Nowhere do people spend more money on paintings than in this country’, wrote Adriaan van der Willigen (1766-1841) [1].¹ The Dutch artists‘ biographer, famous for his Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst, sedert de helft der XVIII eeuw (History of national painting since the half of the XVIII century), visited England in 1823.² The enormous amount of high-quality, valuable paintings in British art collections aroused the writer’s admiration, as can be read in his travel journal published a year later, Aanteekeningen op een togtje door een gedeelte van Engeland, in het jaar 1823 (Notes on a trip through part of England, in the year 1823). Van der Willigen remarked that the ‘famous masters’ from the Italian and Dutch schools were highly in demand and that the prices paid for these artworks were astonishing. And according to the author, the artworks continued to rise in value as they got rarer and found their way into private collections. Seeing several masterpieces from his home country that had left for England left him with a sense of regret. However: ‘The sorrow which we felt at having seen several pieces of art from our Fatherland, which erstwhile adorned our own collections, was tempered by national pride, because of the honour which these generally so highly esteemed products of Dutch origin also received here’.³ As if to encourage the artists of his own time, Van der Willigen called upon modern masters to fill this gap: ‘By transporting so many of our Dutch paintings abroad, our present artists, emulating the old, have the opportunity to fill the void; the art admirers being undeterred by excessive prices, which are beyond the reach of most’.⁴ It was a win-win situation, for both artists and collectors in the Netherlands.

Indeed, Dutch art was highly popular in Britain at the turn of the 19th century, when London had developed a flourishing international art market. The Dutch were represented in large numbers at the London auction houses. Between 1780 and 1820, around 40 percent of the works on sale were Dutch or Flemish. Dealers travelled to the Netherlands to purchase their stock or worked with local dealers and mediators.⁵ Over the course of the 18th century numerous Dutch masterpieces had crossed the Channel. It was the fate of works by the Dordrecht painter Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), whose sunlit landscapes fetched record prices, especially after the sale of the famous collection of Johan van der Linden van Slingelandt (1701-1782) in Dordrecht in 1785. As shown in the exhibition In the light of Cuyp. Aelbert Cuyp & Gainsborough – Constable-Turner, held at the Dordrechts Museum in 2021, a complete sell-out of Cuyp’s work took place and by the end of the 19th century all major paintings by the Dort artist had left for Britain.⁶

The popularity of the Dutch old masters in Britain also encouraged modern Dutch artists to cross the North Sea. Instead of answering to the demand for quality paintings at home, as suggested by Van der Willigen, several Dutch artists saw their window of opportunity for a successful career by following the old masters to Britain, benefiting from the high valuation of their Dutch predecessors in this country and presenting themselves as modern equivalents. A significant number of artists travelled to Britain. Some for a brief period, some stayed for years. Others sent over their work from the Netherlands to be exhibited in London or had direct relations with London agents or dealers. In the wake of the old masters, modern artists gained a foothold in England. This essay will focus on the group of Dutch artists who settled in England between 1780 and 1830, when the flourishing London art market reached its heyday. The research concerns artists who stayed in Britain permanently, or at least for several years. By analysing data, from the RKD artists database to auction sales and exhibition catalogues, this article aims to give an impression of this group as a whole, while remarks on some individual artists and autobiographical resources helps to capture the full scope of their activities.⁷ The research sheds new light on Anglo-Dutch artistic relations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which has not been investigated as such so far. It will become evident that the migration of Dutch artists to Britain in this period is largely linked to the high esteem for seventeenth-century Dutch painting in the British art world. Once in Britain, their activities were inseparable from the high-valuation of their national predecessors. However, their artistic output and commercial position suggest forms of artistic exchange and reveal a taste in British collecting at the turn of the 18th century that surpasses historical and geographical boundaries.

Cover image
Pieter Christoffel Wonder
The stairwell of the painter's London home at Great Marlboroughstreet no. 35, dated 1828
Utrecht, Centraal Museum, inv./cat.nr. 19775

1
Wybrand Hendriks
Portrait of Adriaan van der Willigen (1766-1841), dated 1811
Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, inv./cat.nr. I-148