The Second Golden Age of Dutch Painting

From the foreword by David Bagnall, Executive Director, Lightner Museum:

Don Robbins’ The Second Golden Age of Dutch Painting represents two decades of focused collecting. Driven by inquiry, admiration, and love, Robbins’ remarkable collection of the Hague School painters reveals the dominant concerns and influences of this masterful group of artists. The exquisitely realized paintings depict rural landscapes, waterways, marshes, and dunes in the environs of The Hague; scenes punctuated with sailboats, windmills, and canals; and traditional ways of life maintained in Dutch communities. The paintings presented in this book demonstrate the artists’ experimentation with new painterly methods, their deep appreciation for the natural world, and their commitment to depicting the joys and challenges of life in nineteenth-century Holland across a spectrum of social classes.

Immersed in the tradition of their seventeenth-century predecessors, the Hague School artists perpetuated atmospheric chiaroscuro effects applied to scenes of everyday life, while loosening their technique in step with the developing international movements, including the French Barbizon School. Deeply researched and beautifully illustrated, The Second Golden Age of Dutch Painting conveys the undeniable impact of the Hague School in Dutch painting, laying the foundations of modernism in the Netherlands, upon which the legacies of Vincent Van Gogh and Piet Mondrian were built.