Oil painting, 'Sea Piece: A Threatening Sky', Hermanus Koekkoek, 1844

A seascape with two boats in the sunlight under an ominous cloudy sky, a long stripe of land followed the horizon line on the left while a piece of land appears in the immediate foreground on the right.

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, 1868
Ref : Parkinson, Ronald, Catalogue of British Oil Paintings 1820-1860. Victoria & Albert Museum, HMSO, London, 1990. p.xix.

'Chauncy Hare Townshend (1798-1868) was born into a wealthy family, only son of Henry Hare Townsend of Busbridge Hall, Godalming, Surrey. Educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge (BA 1821). Succeeded to the family estates 1827, when he added 'h' to the Townsend name. He had taken holy orders, but while he always referred to himself as 'Rev.' on the title pages of his books, he never practised his vocation... . Very much a dilettante in the eighteenth-century sense, he moved in the highest social and literary circles; a great friend of Charles Dickens (he was the dedicatee of Great Expectations) with whom he shared a fascination of mesmerism... Bulwer Lytton described his life's 'Beau-deal of happiness' as 'elegant rest, travel, lots of money - and he is always ill and melancholy'. Of the many watercolours and British and continental oil paintings he bequeathed to the V&A, the majority are landscapes. He is the first identifiable British collector of early photographs apart from the Prince Consort, particularly landscape photography, and also collected gems and geological specimens.

Historical significance: This painting is a good example of H. Koekkoek's seascapes, a genre in which he soon specialised following thus his father's career. This picture bears all the essential characteristics of Koekkoek's art with a wide cloudy sky and a low horizon line, a cool palette enlivened by golden hues while a piece of land in the immediate foreground recalls that the artist painted after nature, on the edge of the Dutch coast. This trend was common to the 19th-century Dutch artists who based their work on a more direct observation of nature.
In doing so, Koekkoek also goes back to the great tradition of Dutch marines that developed extensively during the 17th century which such artists as Ludolph Bakhuisen (1630-1708) and Jan van de Cappelle (ca. 1624-1679), whose compositions clearly influenced him. His work is however much more precise and highly detailed than contemporary landscapes painters who experimented, on the contrary, in a freer, less detailed manner, later epitomised by the Impressionists.
Koekkoek structured his picture on the succession of patches of light and shade. The sailing boat recognisable as a kaag, also often depicted during the 17th century, and the small row-boat are placed in the sunlight whereas the rest of the composition is immersed in the shadow. The same process is applied in the depiction of the sky which is structured between areas of light and shade. The long stripe of land in the distant background may be a view of the famous Zuiderzee, a shallow inlet of the North Sea in the northwest of the Netherlands.
Hermanus Koekkoek was particularly interested in the pictorial renderings of the light in open air and alternated scenes in good and bad weather (see 1565-1869).
Hermanus' pictures were very appreciated during his lifetime, especially by the English audience who often brought back some from their 'Grand Tour' journey. A number of his paintings are therefore in private and public collections including the museums of Glasgow and Sheffield.

Nineteenth-century Dutch history of art is marked by the development of the Hague School which gave a new orientation to painting in the Netherlands and made the transition from Romanticism to Realism. Romanticism never really appealed Dutch painters with the exception of Ary Scheffer who however made his career in France. The great tradition of the Golden Age was still vivid in the first half of the century but also constituted a real burden for the new generation of Dutch painters. On the one hand, many painters of the beginning of the century still painted landscapes and genre painting in the style of the great masters of the 17th century excluding from the pictures any symbolic meaning that used to constitute an essential characteristic of the Golden Age; on the other hand, a new direct approach to nature favoured the development of a new manner in Dutch art. Such artists as Andreas Schelfhout, Bartholomeus Johannes van Hove (1790-1880) and his son, Hubertus van Hove (1819-1865), B.C. Koekkoek and his brother Hermanus are usually considered as important forerunners of the Hague School. However it was also the intervention of the Barbizon school that revived the landscape painting and gave new life to a tradition that had been stagnating. The birth of the Hague School in the 1870s was instigated by a certain loss of colour and an increasing sketchiness that puzzled at first contemporary art critics who then nicknamed this new movement as the 'grey school'. Hendrik Mesdag, Anton Mauve, Jozef Israëls and Jacob Maris were the nucleus of the Hague School. In the two final decades of the century, when The Hague school was then well established, a new movement began under the impulse of Vincent Van Gogh and a number of other painters born around 1860 who formed the Dutch post-Impressionism. The Hague School was then followed by an Amsterdam school. Its characteristics have been defined purely in antithesis to those of the Hague school as a preference for townscape, colour and movement - as opposed to the landscapes, grey palette and static tranquillity of the Hague school. 19th-century Dutch paintings entered English and American collections, before the rest of Europe and the Netherlands themselves. In England, the most extensive collection of Dutch and Barbizon schools pictures were those of James Staats Forbes (1823-1904) who had around 3200 pictures, Alexander Young (700 works) and the third more important collector was Sir John Charles Frederic Sigismund Day (1826-1908).

For more info on collecting the Dutch pictures see Charles Dumas, 'Art dealers and collectors' in The Hague School: Dutch Masters of the 19th Century, exh. cat. The Hague, Paris, London, 1983, pp. 125-136.

Hermanus Koekkoek (1815-1882) was the brother of the famous landscape painter Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803-1862) and the son of the painter Jan Hermanus Koekkoek (1775-1851). He was born in Middleburg and studied under his father. He moved to Amsterdam in 1832 and exhibited there in the Koninklijke Academy. He travelled widely in Holland and worked in the towns of Durgerdam in 1832, Nieuwes-Amstel in 1873 and again in Amsterdam in 1882.

This painting is a typical example of Hermanus Koekkoek who specialised in marine paintings like his father. Probably painted after nature, Hermanus focused here his attention on the pictorial rendering of light through a subtle play of light and shade. The whole composition was executed in a cool palette with silvery touches in the sky and sea, enlivened by the golden sunbeam on the boats. His production was particularly appreciated by the English audience and is still well represented in the English private and public collections.

1558-1869