Approximately two and a half months after the historic Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists closed in 1910, Henri relinquished control of the financially troubled Henri School of Art and went to Europe, where he spent six weeks in Haarlem before proceeding to Madrid. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Haarlem and the quaint villages around it on the North Sea were frequented by Dutch painters associated with the Hague school, other European artists, and many American painters. Henri had been to the area twice before on a brief visit in 1895 and in the summer of 1907, when he taught a class for the New York School of Art.
Volendam is a fishing hamlet on the coast of the Zuider Zee 11 miles north of Amsterdam. It became a popular haunt for European and American painters, especially after 1874, when Henry Harvard published a travel book on the region in which he recommended the town to artists because of the colorful traditional costumes worn by the inhabitants. A later British travel guide noted: "Volendam is the manufactory of most of those Dutch pictorial scenes known the world over," and recommended its "quaint alleys, its magenta-clothed fishermen, its gaily dressed girls in striped shirts and winged caps." In a letter to John Sloan dated July 29, 1910, Henri reported: “Now at Volendam ‘picture place’ regular ‘charmingly interesting artists resort’ but the sky is here anyway and we are getting some sea Zuider Zeee [sic] air and better food, don’t know how long we will stay.”
Volendam Street Scene, one of approximately 60 canvases Henri painted during his third visit to Holland, documents rustic Dutch village life. Henri and his modernist contemporaries were attracted to the town for its combination of ancient traditions and picturesque views, the same qualities that two decades earlier had led Paul Gauguin (French, 1848 - 1903) and his circle to Pont Aven, in Brittany, France. In Volendam Street Scene, a woman crosses the road in the center foreground, while a group of villagers go about their daily business on the right. Despite the abbreviated forms, their distinctive hats and clogs are recognizable. The painting is related to earlier pictures Henri had painted during his student years in France, such as the Brittany scene Quay at Concarneau (1899, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln).
This rapidly executed sketch exemplifies Henri’s aesthetic goal of capturing instantaneousness and spontaneous visual experiences. Bennard Perlman noted how it possesses the immediacy of a pochade, or rapidly executed oil sketch: "Thinly painted, the yellow ochre of the foreground becomes at once the ground and a woman's skirt as brushstrokes suggest the feeling of movement among the figures and the swaying of the boat's masts along the quay." The bright tonality of the painting brings to mind a description of the Dutch landscape by Henri’s former teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, George Hitchcock: "The north wind brings with it, summer and winter, a sky of purest turquoise; with at times a soft sun throwing over everything a yellow saffroned light, softening the lines of cast-shadows and harmonizing every object remote or at hand."
Robert Torchia
August 17, 2018
