Laren School

also: Larense School · Laren Style

school c. 1870-1935 Netherlands Europe

The Laren School is the name given to the artists' colony that formed around the village of Laren in the Gooi, near Hilversum. Around 1870 the Hague School painter Jozef Israëls discovered the area's unspoiled heathland and farmland; Albert Neuhuys and Anton Mauve followed in 1877 and 1882, and soon Weissenbruch, Roelofs, and the German Max Liebermann were working there. Neuhuys painted peasant cottage interiors as genre scenes while the others took the landscape, and by about 1885 the first colony had exhausted its subject. After 1898 a second generation - Evert Pieters, Bernard de Hoog, Salomon Garf, Franz Deutmann - kept the school alive for four decades, some in the Hague School tradition and some in the new Impressionism, exhibiting through the Gooische Painters Association 'De Tien' (1903). The American collector W. H. Singer's villa, built in 1911, later became the Singer Museum, which still shows the school.

Painting by Evert Pieters
Painting by Evert PietersPublic domain (credit: Evert Pieters) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Sunlit heathland, dune, and farmstead landscapes painted out of doors
  • Peasant genre scenes: cottage interiors, mothers and children, farm work
  • Lightened palette warmed with gold yellow, red, and blue
  • Soft, tonal handling inherited from the Hague School - muted grays, greens, and silvers
  • A romanticized, sympathetic view of rural life in the tough Gooi country
  • Later work loosens into Dutch Impressionism: sketchier brushwork, brighter light

Key figures

  • Jozef Israëls (1824-1911) — Hague School painter who discovered Laren around 1870 and drew the colony there
  • Anton Mauve (1838-1888) — Hague School painter settled in Laren from 1882; painted flocks and fields in silvery light
  • Albert Neuhuys (1844-1914) — First to follow Israëls (1877); concentrated on peasant cottage interiors as genre scenes
  • Evert Pieters (1856-1932) — Second-generation genre painter (A Family Meal) who revived the school after 1898
  • Max Liebermann (1847-1935) — First foreign painter at the Laren School; painted its flax barns and gardens

Example works

  • Flax Barn at Laren — Max Liebermann (1887)
  • The Return of the Flock, Laren — Anton Mauve (1886-1887)
  • A Family Meal — Evert Pieters (c. 1890)

Sources

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