Lot 250: ALEXANDER HUGO BAKKER KORFF DUTCH, 1824-1882 LA ROMANCE

signed and dated 69 l.l. ; titled and dated on a label on the reverse

oil on panel

A label on the reverse in the artist´s handwriting reads: Le soussigné déclare que ce tableau représentant " la Romance " est peint par lui. Leiden le 28 Avril 1869, A.H. Bakker Korff. With the artist´s seal.
PROVENANCE

Jonkheer Alfred Boreel, The Hague
EXHIBITED

London, Corporation of London, Guildhall, Examples of the Dutch School, 1903
CATALOGUE NOTE

If one person has successfully managed to infuse his work with a sense of humor and irony, it has to be Alexander Hugo Bakker Korff. Born in a Lutheran intellectual milieu in 1824, it was not clear from the outset that he would become a painter. He started his training at the studio of Cornelis Kruseman and studied at the art academies of The Hague and Antwerp.

In 1856 he settled in Leiden. His first paintings were biblical and mythological representations, but in the mid-fifties he started to paint the small pictures of bourgeois interiors that established his reputation. The subjects are invariably ladies in old-fashioned attire; the sitters were his mother and his three elder sisters, Adriana Henriette (1834-?), Aletta Maria (1812-1888) and Ida Frederika (1816-1880).

Bakker Korff was one of the first painters to make use of photographs for his figures. This becomes evident in the cut-off piano on the right. Furthermore, like Laurens Alma-Tadema and David Bles he owned a large collection of antiques from which he could select the lavish furbishing of the scenes. Therefore, some details became familiar in his work. The gold-glazed tea service on the table and the 18th century-style portrait of a gentleman in a blue coat in the background of this painting for example, are recurrent items in his oeuvre.

The current lot is a beautiful example of his intimate, polished style. Everything, from the porcelain tea service to the shiny fabric of his sister's taffeta skirt, has been drawn with meticulous attention to detail and texture. It is no wonder his contemporary, the painter Gerard Bilders, nicknamed him the Dutch Meissonier. (A.G. Bilders, Brieven en dagboek, 1864). Bakker Korff's sophisticated technique and small sizes were indeed somewhat similar in style to the highly finished historical genre scenes done by Jean-Louis Meissonier (1815-1891). Like him, he was the master of the detail - and with that, the master of Dutch interior painting.

28 by 38 cm.