Scheveningen had no harbor until 1904. The village's fishing boats, flat-bottomed pinks, had no need of one either. When they returned from sea, the men simply hauled the wooden hulls onto the beach, the anchors lodged in the wet sand, and the women waited with baskets for the catch. This coast without a quay became the pictorial world of Hendrik Willem Mesdag, the Dutch marine painter of the Hague School. That he, of all people, became the painter of this coast was the result of a most unlikely career path, for he came to art from the world of ledgers.
Mesdag was born in Groningen on 23 February 1831; his father Klaas ran the banking and securities firm Mesdag en Zonen there, and his son worked in the business for sixteen years, among stocks and balance sheets. In 1856 he married Sientje van Houten, the daughter of a Groningen timber merchant. When her father died in 1864, the inheritance made the couple financially independent. Two years later, at the age of thirty-five, Mesdag left banking and went to Brussels to study under the painter Willem Roelofs. In the summer of 1868, on the North Sea island of Norderney, he discovered his life's subject: the sea. In 1869 the family moved to The Hague, close to the coast. A year later, in 1870, the still largely unknown artist sent two paintings to the Paris Salon and won the gold medal with a scene of North Sea breakers. In 1871 the couple's only son died at the age of eight; Sientje then began painting as well.
His paintings remained faithful to this terrain. In “Fishing Pinks in Breaking Waves, c.1875-85” - as the catalogue title calls the Scheveningen pinks - the fleet crowds into the shallows with tall masts and fluttering pennants, anchors and ropes lie on the sand, and to the left a group of women examines baskets full of fish. In “Return of the Fishing Fleet”, two heavy boats ride in the gleaming evening surf, waders go out to meet them, and gulls hover amid rose-lit clouds. The wooden panel “Lighthouse in Breaking Waves” reveals the sea's harsher side; a dark tower stands alone in the gray-brown storm light, while white spray lashes its timberwork. The Rijksmuseum's 1874 portrait of a general proves that the same man could also paint portraits, but Mesdag's name belonged to the sea.
One measurement makes the scale of this painting tangible: the original, held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is a horizontal composition measuring 181 centimeters wide and 90 centimeters high, nearly two meters of rolling surf. These are the same dimensions listed for the motif in the Meisterdrucke catalogue, and they reveal Mesdag's ambition better than any adjective - he quite literally gave the sea room. His largest format, however, was still to come.
In 1880 a Belgian panorama company commissioned him to create a circular view of Scheveningen. Mesdag climbed the Seinpost dune, then the highest dune in Scheveningen, recorded the preliminary sketch on a glass cylinder, and then, together with his wife Sientje and his colleagues Théophile de Bock, George Hendrik Breitner, and Bernard Blommers, spent four months painting a work 14.6 meters high and 114.5 meters in circumference, the largest painting in the Netherlands. It opened on 1 August 1881; a few weeks later Vincent van Gogh stood inside it and wrote to his brother, roughly translated, that it was a work deserving the utmost respect and that its only fault was that it had no fault. When the operating company went bankrupt in 1886, Mesdag bought his own gigantic painting and covered its continuing losses out of his own pocket. As early as 1887 he established a museum beside his home for the art collection he and Sientje had been building since 1866; in 1903 he donated the house, museum, and collection to the Dutch state. Sientje died in 1909; he outlived her by six years and died in The Hague on 10 July 1915. The evening scene “Sunset at Scheveningen: A Fleet of Fishing Vessels at Anchor” from 1894 dates from his later years. The boats lie scattered across a calm sea, the low sun breaks through a bank of clouds, the water carries a golden path of light, and the day's work is done. One might see in it the image of a career that put to sea late and came quietly to anchor.
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.jpg "Sunset at Scheveningen: A Fleet of Fishing Vessels at Anchor by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Lighthouse in Breaking Waves by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Return of the Fishing Fleet by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Sunset, c.1887 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Fishing Pinks in Breaking Waves, c.1875-85 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Calm Sea by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Sunset at Scheveningen: A Fleet of Fishing Vessels at Anchor, 1894 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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_Echtgenote_van_Menno_David_Graaf_van_Limburg_-_(MeisterDrucke-1391682).jpg "Maria Hermina Heemskerk (1827-1908). Wife of Menno David Graaf van Limburg Stirum by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
_Echtgenote_van_Menno_David_Graaf_van_Limburg_-_(MeisterDrucke-1391682).jpg)
.jpg "Evening by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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_Adjudant_des_konings_luitenant-ge_-_(MeisterDrucke-1391298).jpg "Menno David Graaf van Limburg Stirum, Adjutant to the King, Lieutenant General by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Marine by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Bluff-Bowed Scheveningen Boats at Anchor by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Fishermen Emptying a Sloop on the Beach by Johannes Martinus Vrolijk")
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.jpg "Fishing Boats on the Breakers by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Sunset with Shrimp Fishermen by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Stormy Weather on the Coast of Scheveningen by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Marine Scene by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Marine Scene by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Ships at Anchor, Scheveningen by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Ships at Sea by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Ships at Anchor by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Fishing Boats on the Beach by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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.jpg "Fishing Pinks in Breaking Waves by Hendrik Willem Mesdag")
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