Gari Melchers: Working in Holland

"The Sisters" by Gari Melchers

"By 1884 Gari Melchers had completed his formal art education and needed to make pivotal choices concerning the future course of his career. He decided, as did many others of his generation who received their artistic training in Europe, that it would be more fruitful to remain abroad than to return to his native land. Thus, he could avail himself of the cultural, social, and financial advantages that Europe then seemed to provide. Although Melchers had been and would remain for many years a member of the Parisian art community, he also felt the need to set up a studio in a location far removed from this cultural mecca in order to paint the rustic subject matter favored by himself and many leading artists of the day.

His good friend from the Académie Julian, George Hitchcock, had settled in Egmonds three years before, and may very well have persuaded Melchers to join him there. Egmond aan Zee, Egmond aan den Hoef, and Egmond Binnen were at this time isolated enclaves of archaic rusticity. The people still adhered to age-old social and religious customs, sustaining their lives through dairying, fishing, and animal husbandry. This provided Melchers, Hitchcock, and another American artist, Walter MacEwen, with the subject matter of a rural and undeveloped society.

For a number of years Melchers and Hitchcock would jointly occupy a fieldstone-and-brick studio perched atop a dune on the shores of the North Sea. Melchers produced some of his best-known and finest works in this studio, and its interior also served as the setting for several of his paintings. He also painted outdoors recording the landscape, architecture, women of the town working or resting, and farmers laboring in the fields. He depicted the local citizenry decked out in their Sunday best at worship in the small church at Egmond Binnen and in the Castle Chapel, a Dutch Reformed church which still stands.  Melchers' artistic production of the next twenty years is in large part a visual record of this rural community of Dutch peasantry.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Gari Melchers: His Life and Art" by Joseph G. Dreiss.)