Andreas Schelfhout, A dune landscape with Haarlem in the distance, 1847. Oil on panel. Collection Simonis & Buunk, Ede. 

HAARLEM.- This summer De Hallen Haarlem is staging a major exhibition about the sky in Dutch art since 1850. The museum will be showing a wide range of interpretations of the sky: from late Romantic artists like Schelfhout, by way of Impressionists like Weissenbruch and Mesdag, to contemporary artists like John Körmeling and Guido van der Werve. Some 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs and films show how inspiring the sky was and still is as a subject for artists. 

Colossal cloud formations, double rainbows, romantic, moonlit nights and flaming orange sunsets. The sky has been a magnificent subject for artists for centuries. The ‘inventor’ of the sky in painting was the seventeenth-century Haarlem-born artist Jacob van Ruisdael. He was the first to allow the legendary Netherlandish cloudy skies to dominate his landscapes. After artists in the Romantic Movement had shown a marked preference for storm clouds, sunsets and flashes of lightning, Impressionists like Weissenbruch and Mesdag went on to accentuate space and atmosphere. These nineteenth-century artists based their work on studies done en plein air: a selection of these will also be on show in the exhibition. Post-Impressionists like Jan Sluijters and Leo Gestel sought new styles and forms. Landscapes by cloud-lover Jan Voerman are unique, while Carel Willink also painted entirely individual, dramatic skies. Later in the twentieth century Cobra artists and other Expressionists – Corneille, Eugène Brands, Constant and Gerrit Benner – also concentrated on the sky. More recently, artists like Marinus Boezem, JCJ Vanderheyden, Guido van der Werve and Anne de Vries take the sky as the point of departure for work with a conceptual basis.

The exhibition is not chronological. It is arranged thematically by such subjects as ‘cloudy skies’, ‘rainbows’ and ‘moonlit nights’, so that works of art from entirely different periods and movements can engage in dialogue with one another. 

The most recent work in the exhibition is a photographic piece by Berndnaut Smilde. He created a fleeting artificial cloud in the Vleeshal, one of De Hallen Haarlem’s galleries, and captured it in a photograph especially for SKY!

SKY! in Dutch Art since 1850 is the eighth exhibition in the De Hallen Haarlem Summer Series focusing on modern art. As usual it is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue. The publication costs €15 in the Frans Hals Museum and De Hallen Haarlem shops. The exhibition is one of three in a series that includes A Portrait of Holland, about the Dutch landscape, and To the Sea. SKY! has been made possible through the generous support of Dr Marijnus Johannes van Toorn & Louise Scholten Stichting.

The Frans Hals Museum is showing a number of seventeenth-century paintings with the sky as the subject till 28 September 2014.

Leo Gestel. Autumn, 1909. Oil on canvas. Kranenburgh, Bergen N.H.

Charles Leickert, Dutch river landscape at sunset, c. 1849 . Oil on panel. Collection Simonis & Buunk, Ede

Jan Sluijters, October sun, Laren, 1910. Oil on canvas. Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. Photo: Thijs Quispel

Carel Willink, View of a city, 1944. Oil on canvas. Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen.

Jan Wiegers. Landscape with rainbow at Davos, 1947. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: Arend Velsink

John Körmeling. Hole in the cloud, 1989. Polystyrene, iron. Collection Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA). Courtesy M HKA Antwerpen 

Guido van der Werve. Nummer negen, The day I didn't turn with the world, 2007. HD video on minimac, 9 min. Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam.

Berndnaut Smilde. Nimbus De Hallen, 2014. C-type print on dibond. Photography: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk