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  • Artists on the Edge: The Rise of Coastal Artists’ Colonies, 1880–1920 by Brian Dudley Barrett
  • Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (bio)
Artists on the Edge: The Rise of Coastal Artists’ Colonies, 1880–1920, by Brian Dudley Barrett; pp. 408. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010, $59.00 paper.

Brian Dudley Barrett’s book introduces readers to artists’ colonies active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century all around the coasts of the North Sea with an empirical zeal and thoroughness to which the book primarily owes its usefulness and significance. Barrett discusses the plein-air art of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Britain with a comprehensive list of names, places, dates, and events, many of which will be entirely new to most readers. Christ-offer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Peder Severin Krłyer, and Constantin Hansen are some of the better known artists that Barrett treats, for instance, but Hans Brendekilde or even Johan Rohde will be new finds for readers unless they specialize in Nordic modernism. Barrett’s book stands on a principle of the democratization of historical data, and this explains its scope: the “traditional discourse,” he explains, “tends to isolate only a few celebrity painters, rather than concentrate on the progressive cooperative nature of the venture, where many contributed something to the creative whole” (13). This book is about that “many” and their “something.”

Barrett is dissatisfied with “many generalisations and erroneous statements” about the term “artists’ colony” and seeks to eradicate its “image” as “that of rather backward-looking idealism, with iconographies focused on fanciful utopian life-styles” (14). While artists in the Dutch coastal town, Katwijk, for instance, “began to document the ever-changing clouds, wave-types, twilight, moonlight, morning mists, showers, etc,” others “wished to portray the tragedies of everyday life common to all maritime communities” (15). Barrett recognizes the difficulties of reducing the perception of escapism in artists’ colonies, however: “It is interesting to note that the artists’ colony at Domburg was within ear-shot of the killing-fields of Flanders but not a single war-painting seems to have resulted, even though they witnessed bedraggled refugees and the walking-wounded crowding into the little resort” (27).

Similar historical lessons abound in this book. Barrett explains that royal connections between Sweden and France enabled “stronger ties” between artists of the [End Page 145] two nations throughout the 1860s. On the other hand, prior to the mid-1860s (before the dispute over Schleswig and Holstein turned violent), the impact of the Düsseldorf school of painting was more evident among Danish painters than their Swedish colleagues. After the Second Schleswig War, however, studying in Paris became popular among both Swedish and Danish artists: Barrett informs his readers that Academy Julian and Léon Bonnat’s studio were the common choices for these artists, where they absorbed “modern pleinairism” in works by “masters such as Courbet, Corot, Millet and Batsien-Lepage” (54).

One of the key issues Barrett discusses in relation to artists’ colonies around the North Sea is this “pleinairism,” which, as Barrett understands, pervaded realism, naturalism, Impressionism, and even the “various branches of Expressionism.” “Painting out of doors,” the author states, “is as much a methodology as an ideology.” By ideology, however, Barrett means simply a collective conviction in the superiority of painting outdoors: “Pleinairism implies a closer proximity to the subject, sharper observation, greater authenticity and a truth to nature, qualities not so apparent in previous styles or other movements in the nineteenth century” (104). Even when Barrett seems to engage with the political aspect of pleinairism more deeply, as in his discussion of Christian Krohg, he contents himself with this: “Between 1879–88 [Krohg] spent five long summers working at Skagen, yet remained politically active back in Oslo, editing the review Impressionisten and writing a notorious novel Albertine, 1886, about prostitution, which was immediately banned” (57). What did Krohg’s politics in Oslo involve? Did Impressionisten show any class consciousness? In what specific way could the ideology of pleinairism be related to the treatment of prostitution in Albertine, which tells the story of an unmarried seamstress who becomes a prostitute after being raped by a policeman? Readers want...

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