Studie en een figuur met een pet 1834 - 1903

Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch made this sketch of a figure and a post, likely from graphite on paper. This study brings up a question: what can a quick sketch tell us about the culture and social life of its time? Weissenbruch lived through a time of major social change. Weissenbruch was one of the main figures of the Hague School, a group of artists working in the Netherlands in the second half of the 19th century. They were painting ‘en plein air,’ often of the landscape. It was a reaction against the old, academic ways of painting, when artists painted scenes that were mostly historical or religious. They wanted art to be more real, more in touch with the people. The image shows the way that artists were thinking about how to portray modern life. The historian's job is to contextualize the image in terms of that cultural shift by looking at the artist’s other works, by reading accounts of the art world at the time, and by understanding more about the institutions that supported this new kind of art.