Jan Hendrik Scheltema

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Draught Horses Resting

Jan Hendrik Scheltema (23 August 1861, in The Hague – 9 December 1941, in Brisbane),^[1] was a Dutch and later Australian painter who had a prolific, often strenuous, and arguably impressive career in Australia considering he was a non-British migrant artist without an international reputation on arrival in Australia. After working as a portrait painter in the Netherlands, he specialized in Australia as a livestock and landscape painter, making the livestock genre, particularly the foreground cattle genre, popular there. In Australia, he painted mainly in Victoria when living in Melbourne for almost 5 decades, even through its land boom depression of the 1890's and World War I, where he also practiced as a painting and drawing teacher. He successfully lived off only his art and art teaching, at one stage owning a few houses, one of which he kept when retiring to Queensland.

Education[]

Scheltema had drawing and painting lessons from the painter J. J. Bertelman (1821-1899) of Gouda for about a year starting in 1879. He then studied during 1880-1882 at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, now known as University of the Arts. Then he went to Antwerp to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp, Belgium.^[2] where Charles Verlat was the Director. The development of Scheltema's defining ability to paint animals, may have been influenced by Verlat, who from 1866 to 1875 had been the docent responsible for animal painting classes at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School. Scheltema won a scholarship from King William III of the Netherlands from 1880 to 1884 of resp. 350, 450, 500, 500 and 300 guilders.^[3]

Works[]

Portrait of Nicolaas Scheltema

Both in the Netherlands and in Antwerp, Belgium Scheltema had been a figure painter and portrait painter. His best known portraits are the half body depiction of Johannes van 't Lindenhout (1837-1918), founder of a large educational and employment providing orphanage at Neerbosch, near Nijmegen, Netherlands,^[4] two works of the Rev. Carel Steven Adema van Scheltema (1815-1897), activist in campaigning against alcohol abuse and a portrait of Hendrika Jacoba Stokhuijzen (1816-1872), the spouse of the latter. Her image was painted using a monochrome photograph, some years after her death by accidental drowning. All five of these are held by public museums in the Netherlands and thought to have been painted in the 1880s. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds an etching by him called "sitting woman in an interior" (RT-P-1913-2831). Soon after arrival in Australia in 1888 he decided that portrait painting could not provide him with a living in Melbourne and successfully specialized in rural landscapes with foreground livestock being the focus rather than staffage. Showing delicate atmospheric and light effects, and including visible brush strokes, he fits the style of the impressionists. Almost a thousand paintings in this type are known of him. Yet he painted some portraits there too. For example, the collection of the State Library of Victoria includes his portrait of the soprano Daisy Muriel Pickering.

Activities and collaborations[]

Scheltema arrived in Melbourne, Australia 7 July 1888 aboard on the French ship S.S. Oceanien. He joined the Victorian Artists' Society. In Australia his work was soon displayed in the same exhibitions as artists like Charles Conder, Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin.^[5] For some years he lived at 586 Drummond Street, North Carlton, Victoria and had his first studio in Sydney Terrace in Wellington Parade, Melbourne, where he lived the first year.^[6] He did however have some 20 different home addresses during the half century he lived in Australia.

From 1889 he had a contractual arrangement with the Florence-educated Italian landscape painter (1844–1893) with Rolando in the role of employer as Rolando's deteriorating health required him to hire expert assistance with his painting and teaching of his art classes, while Scheltema needed a steady income.^[7] The wealthy Rolando had similarly been assisted earlier by George A. J. Webb (1861 – 1949), his brother in law, later a portraitist and landscape painter in Melbourne and Adelaide. They often collaborated on the same painting. Scheltema inserted the staffage, mainly animals, but also vegetation, into Rolando's landscapes settings.^[8] They also exhibited together, such as at the premises of art dealers Gemmell, Tuckett and Co of Collins Street, Melbourne in 1891.^[9] They would repeatedly take their students into the quite distant Victorian countryside to paint there. Some art sale advertisements later listed works as by 'Scheltema and Rolando'.^[10] Both artists signed those paintings. After Rolando's death in 1893 Scheltema continued to teach Rolando's students together with Webb for Rolando's wife Frances until early 1895. He would later very occasionally collaborate with other painters under different terms. According to his letters he was a friend of landscape and figure painter J. A. Turner(1850–1908), of teacher and painter T.F Levick, the frame maker John Thellon and of school principal and painter Robert Camm. With any of the latter three he would repeatedly go bush to paint, with or without some of his students.

Travels[]

Scheltema traveled and painted in Europe again, twice. In 1898-1899 he visited his native Holland, and visited Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Tunisia. Paintings from this trip were exhibited on his return at his studio in the Cromwell Buildings on Bourke St, opposite the General Post Office.^[11] In 1910, he also spent some time in France, Scotland, England and the Netherlands. Upon his return from this second voyage, he presented a one artist exhibition from 1 to 24 September 1911 with 88 of his paintings in Tuckett Chambers, 359 Collins Street, Melbourne, including many works painted on his last journey. The exhibition was opened by Sir John Madden, the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, addressing about 50 guests. Its 4 page catalogue entitled "J.H.Scheltema's Exhibition of English, Scottish and Australian Paintings", showing descriptions/titles and prices, can be sighted in the National Library of Australia today. The press covered the 1911 exhibition well.^[12] 71 of the 88 paintings were sold at the exhibition where no auction was held.

His works currently[]

Paintings by Scheltema still sell at auction from time to time. In December 2018 a total of 18 works by J.H.Scheltema, previously not known to exist by the art world but held by his family, were discovered in the legacy of the recently deceased widow of the artist's great nephew Dr C.A.W. Jeekel and came to Australia. Most are now part of the collection of the Gippsland Art Gallery, in the town of Sale, Australia, which displayed them and others in the first Scheltema-only exhibition sinds 1911, held from 21 March to 9 August 2020, under the title "The Lost Impressionist". It includes a portrait of his father. The landscape shown below, painted at Alphington, near Melbourne, Scheltema had sent home explaining that the old eucalypts that had survived the ring-barking, the fires and the clearing are 'momuments' from before white settlement.

Recognition[]

Australian Landscape

In art history Scheltema is an 'important artist in Australia'.^[13] He gained a reputation as a masterly painter of pastoral scenes, particularly as a specialist of foreground livestock in the landscape, a genre developed by Paulus Potter in 17th century Holland with Potter's "Young Bull" hanging in the Mauritshuis Museum in Scheltema's birthplace where he lived until the age of 5 and later studied for two years. His skills in that genre were often publicly acknowledged in Australian newspapers. His treatment of livestock was not limited to making them a focal landscape element in the painting, but he often showed them in action, such as drinking, running, breaking away being chased, being shorn or fed, showing what they were watching, depicting their interaction with humans as well as the landscape. He produced several equine works some with the movement of full gallop. His paintings were not just pleasant pictures, but tended to tell a story in well captured typical Australian bush settings, sometimes with fog or haze.

Although he had been educated in Europe he immediately developed a sharp eye for the colours and textures of the Australian landscape, as he did not only paint outdoors all over rural Victoria, but studied individual tree and shrub species up close. Many of his rural works focus on one large gum tree, as a uniting feature. He would explain the rural life in paintings which others of the period, such as Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson, had explained in writing indeed poetry.

In 1895 one of his paintings, Driving in the Cows was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria.^[8] Since then all Australian State Galleries and the National Gallery of Australia would own at least one of his paintings, as do the larger regional galleries in Victoria, such as those at Ballarat, Benalla, Sale, Hamilton and Bendigo. The latter gallery (then called Sandhurst Art Gallery) was the first public gallery to have a work of Scheltema in its collection, inside two years from his arrival in 1888, called 'Going to Camp' a great sunset with a foreground of 12 oxen pulling a cart with a load of wool bales. The Hamilton Gallery keeps five livestock-in-landscape pieces by Scheltema in their collection. His exceptional chiaroscuro work "The Sundowners", showing three men at night lit on just one side by a fire in the bush, shows he could paint an almost physically felt suggestion of different temperatures in different parts of the painting.

In the chapter about the contribution of the Dutch to pre-war Australia in the 1927 book "Non-Britishers in Australia" by J. Ling, just two names of Dutch immigrants are mentioned: Guillaume Delprat, the general manager of BHP, and Jan Hendrik Scheltema. His became a familiar name around Melbourne and in the Australian art world. He has been compared favorably with Louis Buvelot.^[8] another migrant painter. His reputation as a teacher was such that some of his former students would advertise their work or their classes with the message that they had been taught by him. The painter Robert Camm (1847-1933), though considerably older and a former student at the art school of the National Gallery of Victoria for three years, was long one of his students.

Family[]

J.H.Scheltema was the youngest son of Lieutenant-Colonel Nicolaas Scheltema (1810-1901) and his second wife Anna Maria Scharp (1819-1887) of The Hague, Netherlands, who had six children together, four surviving to adulthood, two girls and two boys. The family also lived in Haarlem and Rotterdam and moved to Gouda when Jan Hendrik was fifteen years old. His elder brother Petrus Herman first became an Architect, then Editor and Director of an architectural magazine and then Chief-overseer of palaces in the Hague. He was married to Anna Arendsen Hein. The family names Scheltema, Scharp and Arendsen Hein are listed on the List of Dutch patrician families, but his was not a wealthy branch of such family.^{[citation needed]}

Only on 16 February 1917 Scheltema married a long term friend, Edith Bailey Smith (1876-1947) of Melbourne, after which they lived in Brisbane for almost one year before returning to Melbourne. The full length portrait of Edith (as an Italian fruit vendor), painted about two decades before they married, is now in the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Their son, Nicholas Herbert was born on 22 June 1918. Edith, a musician, composed and published an Australian patriotic song, Loyalty, in 1939.^[14] Scheltema and his wife retired to Queensland in the late 1930's to suppor this son young Nicholas Scheltema in purchasing and operating a sawmill at Palmwoods, Queensland in 1938, for which Edith kept the books.^[15] It was paid off before Scheltema died. Some secondary sources still use 1938 erroneously as the year of his death, but J.H.Scheltema died at Brisbane General Hospital late in 1941 and his remains were buried at the Toowong Cemetery. Edith died in March 1947 and was also buried there. Nicholas lived for some time in Rabaul, New Guinea;^[16] he died in May 1952 and was buried in the Brisbane Lutwyche Cemetery.^[17]

Confusion[]

Although there are many contemporary indicators that art critics studied his work closely, some appear not to have acquainted themselves with the painter himself, as he was a fairly private person avoiding crowds. For instance, in Table Talk, the Melbourne weekly from 1885 to 1939 (9 January 1891. p 8), a ‘masterful cattle piece’ is elaborately praised and described in detail, but the painter is three times referred to as ‘Herr J.H.Scheltema’. Its writer may have been assumed he was German, perhaps from his Dutch accent. A decade later an Adelaide art writer would still introduce him as a 'Belgian artist'.^[18] Fairly soon after his death, the combination of so many of his works in the community, mainly in Victoria, and his retirement to far away Queensland gave rise to the peculiar rumour, reported in the press, that he never existed: his signature "J.H.Scheltema" would have been a pseudonym of another artist.^[19] Also, some puzzling texts appeared in the second half on the 20th century in Australian art reference works then considered reliable and hence from writers who use these routinely as gospel, e.g. suggesting without evidence, and erroneously that Scheltema painted mainly in chromosome and was colorblind. This was first discovered by Scheltema's great-nephew Dr C.A.W Jeekel during his "1980 Australian Expedition" studying millipedes in Eastern Australia, when he also assessed the art literature there.^[20] The error of the alleged affliction was also pointed out in Australia in print in 1993 ^[21] Scheltema was naturalized in 1935.^[22] He signed often his work as J.H.Scheltema, underlined only under the lower case letters, and was also known as John Henry Scheltema.

References[]

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