Not everyone seems to be happy. Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad reports today, that on the queen’s birthday, yesterday, 31 January, a royal peacock escaped from the The Hague palace garden.
He went to the nearby Haagse Bos forest. He was caught there later.
Beavers and stag beetles are not the only animals on traffic signs in the Netherlands.
After seeing the stag beetle sign in this blog, photographer Lizia in The Hague sent me a photo she had made in Scheveningen. She made it at the Harstenhoekweg, not so far from Meijendel nature reserve.
The museum building also exhibits “normal size” paintings by the Mesdag couple. The aim of panoramic paintings is to create an illusion of reality. So, in the big panorama, the painting style was a bit more photo-realistic than often in their The Hague School-style usual paintings.
The nineteenth century saw many technical changes, like the rise of photography, and later cinema. The rise of panoramic painting then was a reaction to that. However, most panoramic paintings turned out to be not commercially viable. Panorama Mesdag today is one of few panoramas surviving the late nineteenth century decline; because the makers funded the operating losses from their own pockets.
The panorama depicts Scheveningen, then in 1880 a mainly fishing village west of The Hague. Today, tourism is the main business in Scheveningen. Much has changed; as one can see, comparing the panorama to today’s reality.
The panorama does already depict bathing tourists. Most of Mesdag’s paintings on Scheveningen are on fishing. While the work about Scheveningen by the younger Isaac Israëls is mainly about bathing and other tourism.
This video from the Netherlands is called Summer in The Hague – Isaac Israëls (1865-1934). The part about Israëls starts after about three minutes.
Yesterday, 4 September 2012, I went to an exhibition in The Hague, of works of painter Isaac Israëls.
There are several parallels in the life of this well-known painter with the life of his contemporary, the now even better known painter Vincent van Gogh.
Both, when they started painting, were influenced by the The Hague School. In the 1860s-1880s, this was an innovative movement in Dutch art, influenced by the French Barbizon artists.
Here, we see also a difference between Isaac Israëls and Van Gogh: Israëls had an easier start as an artist. His father, Jozef Israëls, active in the The Hague School movement, was “the most respected Dutch artist of the second half of the nineteenth century”. Van Gogh’s father was not that artistic.
When Isaac was only 16, he sold his first painting, even before it was finished, to The Hague School artist and collector Hendrik Willem Mesdag. Van Gogh sold a painting to a colleague as well. However, that woman painter Anna Boch was not as well off as Mesdag, so presumably she paid a lot less.
And for Van Gogh, very differently from Isaac Israëls, that was the only painting he ever sold during his life. After the deaths of the artists, a lot changed in this.
This drawing by Israëls, “Woman with a headscarf” (I hope that people like Breivik or Wilders will never get to know about the drawing, else they would destroy this art work ) sold for £5,400 in 2011.
Now, some Isaac Israëls paintings sell for about $500.000. A lot; but much less than Van Gogh’s works fetch today, now that not the painter himself, but speculators profit from them.
Similarly to Van Gogh, Isaac Israëls traveled to England and France. And also to the Borinage mining region in Belgium, to get to know the miners’ lives.
These impressionists were also an influence on Van Gogh. Van Gogh is said to have gone further than them, starting “post-impressionism”.
The present Israëls exhibition is at four different museums and at the local archive in The Hague; each part of the exhibition specializes in one side of the artist’s work. I went to one of the five exhibition sites: Panorama Mesdag. The theme there is: Israëls’ depiction of women in his paintings, drawings, and watercolours.
An interesting part of Israëls depicting women is that he made a portrait of Dr Aletta Jacobs, probably the best known early twentieth century Dutch feminist. Unfortunately, that portrait was not at the Panorama Mesdag. Both Israëls and Jacobs were from Jewish families, originally from Groningen province in the north-eastern Netherlands. This may have made for a bond between painter and subject.
Women were a favourite subject for Israëls. The liking was mutual: he was even admitted in actresses’ dressing rooms and fashion houses’ fitting rooms. He also often depicted women on or around beaches, Scheveningen beach in the Hague, or beaches in Italy or elsewhere.
On Sunday 18 December 2011, an hour before sunset, no birds in the trees of the small island in the Hofvijver pond in The Hague city centre in the Netherlands.
In the pond, black-headed gulls, mallards, tufted ducks and common pochards swim.
On a bank, Egyptian geese eating grain.
Then, less than half an hour before sunset, ring-necked parakeet sounds.
Small parakeet groups are flying here from all over the Hague. They form bigger groups. Finally, over a thousand birds. At first, many of them congregate in the big trees of the Lange Vijverberg, north of the Hofvijver. Then, they fly to the island. Where they can sleep without dangerous cats. Before they fall asleep, they make lots of noise.
The Hague – Since 1pm today, Dutch employees of the Moroccan embassy in The Hague and four consulates are demonstrating in front of the parliament building.
They protest, among other causes, because they say they are underpaid. The embassy enjoys immunity, making decisions by a Dutch judge unenforceable.
The staff suffer because of this, said the union. Eg, people who have been ill for a long time are dismissed. Because of this situation, some people are already in debt, the union says.
Morocco: Seven thousand protesters marched through Casablanca on Sunday to press demands for constitutional restrictions on the monarch’s power and an end to corruption: here.
Syria: A rogue state in the back pocket of the Western powers: here.
This video from the Netherlands says about itself:
30 April 2009
Paul & Remy together with 8 other international sand sculptors in association with the WSSA create a 300ton sand castle sculpture on the beach at Scheveningen, the Netherlands.
From 29 April till 27 June this year, there will again be a sand sculpture festival on the beach of Scheveningen, The Hague, The Netherlands.
In another unprecedented, anti-democratic step, the Sri Lankan government will require all students entering universities to undergo instruction in military camps. Higher education ministry secretary Sunil Jayantha Navaratne told the Daily Mirror last week that a program had been discussed, with the support of defence ministry, to give students two weeks of “leadership training”: here.
Though it was a rainy and stormy day, today to The Hague. Why?
From Dutch daily NRC, paper edition, 20 October 2007:
In The Hague, yesterday the new art exhibition place Gemak started, a result of coöperation by the Free Academy and the The Hague Municipal Museum. The first exhibition is about Iraq … [called] Green Zone/Red Zone, showing work of both European and Iraqi artists. Gemak calls itself a ‘center for art, society, and politics‘. …
Iraqi artist Rashad Selim during the past two months was a guest of the Free Academy. He already left his native country in 1983 and has lived in London since …
You can see anger clearly in many of the exhibited works. For instance, there is a series of monumental collages by the British artists’ duo Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillipps, made from pages from tabloids like The Sun and bleeding Arabic newspapers. The artists worked at the images for a long time with hammers and razors until they looked ragged.
Of the Iraqi artist Hana Mal Allah, who left Iraq as one of the last artists, there are three maps of Baghdad. With some imagination, one can still see the river Tigris. However, the rest of the city maps is scorched pitch black. …
Green Zone/Red Zone. Until 31 January [2008] in Gemak, Paviljoensgracht 20, The Hague.
The artists in this exhibition are:
* Marc Bijl (Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 1973). He contributed three big stars in the colours of the Iraqi flag, stained by the occupation in black and bloody colours.
* Peter Kennard (London, 1949) & Cat Picton Phillips (Edinburgh, 1972). One of their big works here is Policy papers from 2007. It shows Gordon Brown and Tony Blair (sitting comfortably, however, with blood stains on Blair) on one half. On the other half, Iraqis watching in horror as another one of their people dies.
* Paul Chan (Hong Kong, 1973; lives in the USA). He has a video, recorded in 2003, just after the invasion, about a female Iraqi Britney Spears fan in her early teens. Is she still alive by now?
* Rashad Selim (Khartoum, Sudan, 1957; lives in London).
* Hana Mal Allah (Thee Qar, Irak, 1958).
* Adel Abidin (Baghdad, 1973; lives in Finland). He had a video of a small Iraqi girl, learning to pronounce “standard vocabulary” words. Words like: genocide; oil; Bush.
* Nedim Kufi (Baghdad, 1962; lives in the Netherlands).
* Wafaa Bilal (Iraq 1966; lives in the USA).
* Open Shutters Project (Iraq / UK). In this exhibition, that project showed photos and statements by Iraqi women about how the war ruined their lives. One of them recalled how just before Bush’s invasion she had predicted at work that occupation would make the lives of Iraqis worse than Palestinians’. Her colleagues, back then, had laughed. ‘Today, all they can do is cry’.
* Independent Film & Television College, Baghdad. This college is still called ‘Baghdad’. However, like so many other Iraqis, they have fled to Damascus in Syria. One of their short documentary films was about refugees: Iraqis who had fled to another part of Iraq, where there used to be a fun fair before the occupation; to live there in tents. And about other Iraqis, planning to flee across the border. As the college itself did in 2006.
Another documentary film by them is about a café in Baghdad, which used to be patronized by many artists and intellectuals, but is closed now. One of the patrons told how, just after the 2003 invasion, he wanted to find out whether the USA was really a country of democracy, as they proclaimed; or a “McCarthyist, oppressive” USA. He proposed plans to democratize Iraq. He continued that Paul Bremer, then the US colonial governor in Iraq, did nothing with those plans, and ruled autocratically.
This exhibition shows so much more clearly than corporate media news how George W. Bush’s war has destroyed and keeps destroying the lives and culture of ordinary people in Iraq.
Many Iraqis in Syria fled during U.S. troop buildup: here.
This drawing by Israëls, “Woman with a 
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