bert feringa                                         painter

Last sunday I went to the Mesdag Collection in The Hague. It is a small museum with a permanent exhibition of an extraordinary  collection of 19th century paintings, mostly French but also Dutch. The Museum is named after the well known Dutch marine painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915), who founded the museum in 1887 to house his own art collection.  The museum is built in the garden next to his house. Strolling through the building one can breath the 19th century atmosphere all over the place. Mesdag was a member of a merchant family and started his professional life as a banker.  At the age of 35 he quit his job and started a painting career.  The painter Alma Tadema advised him and introduced him to Willem Roelofs, a Dutch landscape painter, who became his teacher during the years he lived in Brussels. After he moved to the Hague- near the fishing village Scheveningen- he specialized in marine painting. He soon became one of the leading painters of the Hague School with international fame and played a dominant role in  cultural life of  the Hague. He earned fame with his 114,5 meters long  Panorama of Scheveningen for which a special museum was built near Scheveningen. Mesdag was also a passionate  art collector. Together with his wife Sientje van Houten- who was also a painter- he built up an impressive art collection which he housed in his own museum. In 1903 he granted the museum and the collection to the Dutch State.