Station: [8] Room 5 – Dutch artist friends

We have already met some of Barend Cornelis Koekkoek's friends, and others join us in this room, the family's former dining room. 
Willem Bodeman was a friend of him from his days in Hilversum. He remained close to him throughout his life. He is represented with a southern landscape above the graphic cabinet and a dune landscape between the windows. 
The art brothers not only visited Koekkoek in Kleve, but many landscape painters also traditionally travelled to Italy. The sunny country is reflected in the warmer colours.

The mountain lake with an Italian quote from Petrarch about the beauty of nature next to the rear window is by Pierre Louis Dubourcq, who travelled to Italy with Bodeman in the middle of the century. Cornelis Lieste, whom we already know, painted one of the waterfalls near Chiavenna, not far from Lake Como in Italy.

The painting on the head wall on the left is by two painters: Pieter Gerard van Os and Jacob Theodor Abels. It shows a landscape from the Dutch Gooiland. The two lived here together with Koekkoek in the 1820ies in Hilversum, one of the first artists' colonies on Dutch soil.

On the wall at the head of the room on the right hangs a Lower Rhine landscape in the cooler colours of our region: the painting is by the so-called ‘Dordrechter Koekkoek', Willem de Klerk. It shows the small village of Beek near Nijmegen illuminated by the sun. The charming landscape with a view over the Rhine valley attracted many Dutch landscape painters in the first half of the century, including the young Barend Cornelis.

To the left of the wall display cases, another painting by Cornelis Lieste can be seen: a heathland landscape from the Dutch Veluwe in backlight – a characteristic artistic device of the painter. He also painted the atmospheric evening Swiss mountain landscape with the moon. Cornelis Lieste is one of the few Dutch artists who also painted high mountains. 

In the two wall display cases, we see several lithographs based on drawings by Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, annual gifts from the Kleve Art Association, founded in 1843.

A compilation of the biographies of painters associated with Kleve can be found on our website.