100th anniversary of the Taco Mesdag collection
7 september 2003 - 4 januari 2004
Taco and Geesje Mesdag donated their work and their art collection to the Groningen Museum, form the focus of two exhibitions. The excellent collection of watercolours from this generous gift were displayed in the Print Gallery of the Groninger Museum from 7 September 2003 to 4 January 2004. In addition, an overview of the oeuvre of both artists was presented in the Fraeylemaborg in Slochteren from 5 October to 31 December 2003.
The landscape was the central theme of their painting: Taco preferred the heath landscape in the Province of Drenthe, while Geesje also devoted attention to polder landscapes.
There is an old neighbourhood in Groningen where the streets are named after painters of Groningen origin, such as Jozef Israëls and H.W. Mesdag, but there is also a street called after a man who made a great contribution to the public art collection in Groningen: the Taco Mesdagstraat.
Taco Mesdag was born into a Groningen banking family in 1829. He was a great art lover and, just like his renowned brother, H.W., he also took up painting. In 1882, he married the twenty-years-younger Geesje van Calcar, who had also been educated as a painter. They went to live in The Hague. The Hague School of painting had arisen around his brother H.W. Mesdag, Jozef Israëls, and the brothers Maris. In conjunction with his wife, Taco Mesdag accumulated a large collection of modern art by the Hague School of painters.
The Mesdag family did not forget its roots and was closely involved with the newly established Groningen Museum that had opened in 1894. After the death of her husband in 1902, the widow Mesdag-van Calcar donated a collection consisting of more than 40 paintings and 47 watercolours by Hague School artists to the Groningen Museum. She even laid out two exhibition rooms to display these works – the Taco Mesdagzalen.
At a stroke, the Groninger Museum had the basis for an art collection with erstwhile contemporary masters such as Jozef Israëls, Jacob Maris, Willem Maris, Anton Mauve, Paul Gabriel, Johannes Weissenbruch, and many others, including Italian and French artists such as Pio Joris, N. Cipriano, M. Poirsson, and A. Pecquereau. The Mesdag-van Calcar collection formed the basis on which the Groninger Museum could develop into a major museum of art in the course of the 20th century.
The Taco Mesdagzalen were laid out with the idea that this would be a permanent arrangement. During the life of the widow, who died in 1936, the exhibition rooms remained largely unaltered, but in the 1950s, the work gradually disappeared quietly into the repository. However, many of the works are regularly taken out for presentation of the Museum’s own collection or are lent out for exhibitions elsewhere. The Mesdag collection remains an important element of the Hague School collection of the Groninger Museum.
Picture:
Bernardus Blommers, Children of the Sea, 1865-1905
