A morning at the beach

About this artwork.

Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831 - 1915) was a painter, watercolorist, etcher and lithographer from Groningen. His teachers were C.B. Buijs and J.H. Egenberger, head teacher at Academy Minerva Groningen. Mesdag showed an interest in drawing and painting at an early age, but only decided to make a definitive life as a painter in 1866 at the age of 35. He qualified in painting in Brussels and discovered his specialism on the German island of Norderney: the sea. The sea, the skies and the atmosphere would become the basis for his artistic work. In 1869 he moved to The Hague, on the Laan van Meerdervoort, where the Mesdag museum can be found, and often rented an office in Scheveningen on the Scheveningen boulevard to be close to the sea. One of his favorite subjects to paint was the traditional fishing fleet in Scheveningen. When, to everyone's surprise, he earned the gold medal in 1870 with a large seascape at a major art exhibition in Paris, the Paris Salon, his reputation was immediately established in the Netherlands.

In A morning at the beach Mesdag painted so-called 'bomschuiten', the successor to the previous version. These were sailing vessels that were used, among other things, by the sea fishermen of the North Sea coast because of the flat bottom. The ships have just arrived and the sails will be lowered immediately. Villages by the sea such as Scheveningen, Katwijk, Noordwijk and Zandvoort had no harbor and the wide fishing boats 'stranded', as it were, with their catch intentionally on the sand strip in front of the dunes.

He depicted the fishermen's wives in traditional Scheveningen clothing. They patiently wait for the fresh flat and round fish to be unloaded and sorted by the crew. After that, everything is sold and shipped under supervision, per auction, and then resold to the consumer.

In 1880 the painting was bought by the municipality for 600 guilders because of an exhibition of paintings held by the Pictura society.

Many may know the name Mesdag because of the H.W. Mesdagstraat in the ‘Painters district’. Hendrik Willem Mesdag lived from 1856 to 1861 on the Vismarkt in Groningen, in one of the first stone houses in this part of the city and what is now known as Stadscafé Pronk.

Facts & Figures.

• Artist(s)
  Hendrik Willem Mesdag

• Year of creation
  1880

• Dimensions (in cm)
  68x98

• Collection
  Town Hall Collection

• Technic
  Oil paint on canvas