bert feringa                                         painter

The Mesdag collection was largely put together during the last quarter of the 19th century, when  impressionism was at his peak. But Mesdag ignored the impressionists and selected with his personal preferences related to his own development as a painter. He admired the painters of the Barbizon School like Charles Daubigny, Rousseau, Charles  Jacque,  Jules Dupre, Corot and Millet. All  are represented in his collection, which is the largest Barbizon collection outside France. Mesdag had a special taste for studies and loosely painted, sketchy  paintings. He was not much interested in very polished finished works.  As an artist he had good relations with other painters and succeeded to acquire many early works and studies. Painters of the the Hague school are also very well represented in the Mesdag collection ( Roelofs, Gabriel, Mauve, Maris and Weissenbruch).  The collection contains also some beautiful works of Gustave Courbet (a fruit still life, a nude and an early (self)portrait). Young Vincent van Gogh admired the painters of Barbizon and saw many Barbizon works of the Mesdag collection during  his stay in the Hague. During his trip to Drenthe,  a painting of Dupre from the Mesdag Collection (Evening, see above) was a source of inspiration for some of his own paintings of the huts in Drenthe. But some years later Vincent chose his own path quite different from the generation of Mesdag. In later years van Gogh criticized Mesdag for ignoring the impressionist painters in his collection. Mesdag never bought one of  van Gogh's paintings. Van Gogh's work simply did not fit his personal taste.