ACCORDING to a grateful and admiring Monet, his “true master” was the little-known Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind. As an aspiring artist, Monet had for many years studied harbours and beach scenes alongside Jongkind in northern France. And the younger man’s gratitude knew no limits.
“It’s to him that I owe the definitive education of my eye,” Monet declared, remembering how much Jongkind had encouraged him to experiment and develop an audacious vision. Monet even went so far as to insist, near the end of his long life, that Jongkind “is at the origin of what one called Impressionism”.
So is our neglect of Jongkind monstrously unfair? The Musée d’Orsay in Paris clearly thinks so, offering as their major summer show a Jongkind retrospective. The paintings, watercolours and drawings are a consistent source of delight, proving how bold he could be in opening up a radically fresh way of defining the dynamism of light, sea and sky.
The very first exhibit demonstrates just how resolute Jongkind could be. He sketches himself out in the open, a bearded rebel armed with a sunhat, walking stick and portfolio at the ready. The year is 1850, and Jongkind had already spent several years in Paris where he met fellow artists and writers as stimulating as Baudelaire and Courbet. Having trained initially to be a solicitor’s clerk in his native Holland, Jongkind suddenly abandoned the law and studied art at The Hague instead.
Before his momentous move to Paris he had painted sensitive yet dutiful winter scenes which looked back to 17th-century masters as familiar as Ruysdael. But by the 1850s he had turned away from tradition and forged his own direct, immediate vision. It involved going out of the studio and, in the summer, journeying to the sea. Here, making highly spontaneous studies outdoors, a new kind of marine painting was developed.
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Jongkind’s view of the cliffs at Etretat, where an isolated rock juts upwards so dramatically against a simplified expanse of yellow sky, would have excited Monet’s interest. Here was a direct, refreshing and wholly uncluttered way of renegotiating the artist’s relationship with the natural world. Monet called Jongkind “a brave man”, and his courage can certainly be felt in a large, spectacular sunset view at Saint-Valery-en-Caux. Fisherfolk gathered in the foreground find themselves pitched against the startling immensity of a vehement, mesmeric sun. This elemental orange disc hovers ominously above a placid sea where the masts of sailing vessels seem dwarfed and threatened by its boiling vastness.
Here, as early as 1852, Jongkind appears on the edge of a prophetically abstract vision. He was at his most revolutionary when confronted either by the ebbing of light or the full ascendancy of the moon. Three years later we find him indulging in thick, broken paint in his nocturnal view of Overschie. An enormous yellow moon hangs like a portent behind the church’s silhouetted spire. Shadowy barge workers look transfixed by the lunar brilliance, in sky and water reflections. Night brought out the wildest and most expressive side of Jongkind’s imagination. Working at Rotterdam in 1873, he saw the moon as an apocalyptic eruption in a sky uneasily alive with agitated clouds above sailing ships moored in the canal.
No wonder this turbulent painting was rejected, soon after its completion, by the Paris Salon. Jongkind’s conspicuously rough mark-making looks forward to the restless vigour of his countryman Van Gogh. By this stage in his career, Jongkind was all too familiar with official disapproval. After early success at the Salon, where state purchases of his work were crowned by a medal in 1852, Jongkind found his subsequent submissions turned away.
Like Manet, Whistler, Monet and other innovators, he exhibited instead at the Salon des Refusés. In 1863 Jongkind showed three rejected works there, allying himself with the heretical spirit of the most notorious painting on view: Manet’s much-reviled Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. But the Dutchman never attempted to band together with the Impressionists, who started exhibiting as a group in 1874. He remained a loner, and his unwillingness to become an Impressionist probably prevented him from becoming better known.
Judging by his paintings of Paris, the least-known aspect of his work, he was bent on exploring the city’s unfamiliar quarters. Down at the Port Royal, he highlights a piece of machinery near the water’s edge while laden horses plod beside the river. Apart from a few boys fishing on a boat, it is a quiet and almost desolate scene far removed from the fashionable districts. Jongkind was drawn to the workaday reality of urban life, and devoted one of his largest Parisian pictures to the unprepossessing Pont de l’Estacade — a makeshift wooden bridge resting its stark structure, very oddly, on monumental stone supports. In the far distance, the twin towers of Notre Dame loom against pale clouds. But Jongkind is far more fascinated by the intense manual labour filling the foreground with diverse activities.
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Even when he decided to get nearer Notre Dame, Jongkind reduces it to a cubic mass darkened by the moon beyond. Eventually, in 1854, Jongkind got around to painting Notre Dame by daylight. But he still insisted on treating it as an ominous hulk, oddly anticipating Matisse’s bleak painting of the same cathedral in 1914.
Jongkind never stopped searching, with the alertness of a detective, for signs of destruction in the metropolis. He devoted an outstanding 1868 canvas to the demolition of the Rue des Francs. Like the Cubists over half a century later, Jongkind is intrigued by the pictorial power of words. He makes sure that the black capital letters scrawled on the building’s side, “Fabrique De Cuirs Forts”, play a prominent role in his painting.
Jongkind’s interpretation of the swiftly changing city was impressive enough, in its uncompromising grittiness, to attract the attention of Zola, who visited his studio in 1872 and wrote an enthusiastic article about Jongkind’s unsettling vision of Paris.
Jongkind’s final decade was uneventful. But the lack of a finale should not blind us, ever again, to the virtues of Jongkind’s finest and most invigorating achievements.