Grand Rapids Art Museum
May 21 – August 15, 2010

Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 is organized by the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, in association with the Singer Laren Museum, the Netherlands. This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation, with major additional support provided by the Telfair Academy Guild and the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Local support for this exhibition has been provided by
J.C. Huizenga

Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 examines the work of forty-three American painters drawn to Holland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These artists established colonies in six communities in the Netherlands: Dordrecht, Egmond, Katwijk, Laren, Rijsoord, and Volendam. With the exception of Dordrecht, all were small, pre-industrial villages.

Inspired by their pastoral surroundings as well as the great tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch art and the work of the contemporary Hague School, these American artists created visions of Dutch society inspired by a nostalgic yearning for a pre-modern way of life. The exhibition includes works by Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, and John Singer Sargent, along with painters admired in their own time but less well known today. These artists were among hundreds of Americans who traveled to the Netherlands between 1880 and 1914 to paint and to study.

George HItchcock (American, 1850–1913)
Early Spring in Holland(detail), c.1887-1905
Oil on canvas
Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia