Meijer de Haan, the Hidden Master

A Childhood in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam
Meijer de Haan was born on 15 April 1852, in the heart of the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. He came from a wealthy background, as his maternal grandfather was a rich fabric merchant who owned several residential buildings. Little is known about Meijer's childhood, other than that he grew up as part of a large family: he had two brothers and one sister, all younger than him (an older brother died in 1854), and his parents shared a home with his maternal aunt and his uncle who, themselves, had seven children. Between 1867 and 1872, Meijer de Haan took lessons from P. F. Greive, a minor artist who specialised in picturesque fishing scenes. A few works from this period have come down to us, such as Still life with Lobster and Lemon dated 1872.
The preliminary medical examination for military service gives us a good physical description of the young man in 1871. He was blond, with blue eyes and suffered from "a slight disability". This was certainly his humpback, probably the result of tuberculosis that affected him throughout his life. As he was only 4 feet 11 (1m49) tall, he escaped his military obligations "because of his short stature". Meijer de Haan was therefore able to devote himself to his artistic career, not an easy choice, as, at that time, it was still difficult for Jews to integrate. Thus, he was one of the very few Jews in Amsterdam who wanted to become an artist-painter, but no doubt his action was made easier by his family's financial success.

Student years
In 1874, Meijer de Haan was accepted at the National Academy of Fine Art and admitted to the drawing class. As he was taken ill, he only stayed there for a few months, but then carried on working. His paintings still revealed the influence of an education in Greive's studio. De Haan remained isolated from the artistic innovations of the time.
During the 1870s, the De Haan family was affected by a number of major changes. Samuel, Meyer's oldest brother, opened a bakery in 1872. Mietje, their mother, died in 1875, and in 1877 Meijer moved in with Samuel and appeared to take an active part in developing the family bread factory, which assured him a good income.
However, he did not abandon painting; on the contrary, he belonged to the eminent artists' society Arti et Amiticiae, of which Greive was both an active member and an administrator. It was through this society that De Haan exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1879 and 1880, and participated regularly in the Triennal for living masters organised in his town.

TheUriël AcostaControversy
For eight years between 1880 and 1888, Meijer de Haan worked on an enormous painting that he intended to be his magnum opus. Beset by doubts for a long time, reworking his painting numerous times, he finally presented his Uriël Acosta at a retrospective that he organised in 1888, with his pupils Isaacson and Hartz, at the Panorama in Amsterdam.
The painting was about Uriël Acosta, a Jew condemned by the rabbis for his ideas on the immortality of the soul and who committed suicide in 1640 in Amsterdam. By opting for a large history painting, De Haan was keeping to the spirit of the time as Holland, then, was seeking a national consciousness. The painting, in which Acosta can be seen facing his judges, is now lost, but it is known to us through a reproduction that appeared in a brochure, and through its description in a number of newspapers.
In the press, reactions were mixed, but the Nieuwe Gids review was notable for its violent criticism. This was the journal of the "Tachtigers", a group of young Dutch artists who were admirers of the Impressionists, and who initiated a literary and artistic revival in the 1880s. Uriël Acosta was presented in it as a weak painting, lacking in soul, "abominable", "a hotchpotch of references to Rembrandt and Munkaczy".
In the Jewish press, the exhibition passed without comment, which might be considered as an implicit criticism. We do not know if Meyer de Haan's departure for France in 1888 was provoked mainly by the destructive criticism in Nieuwe Gids, or whether he also found himself the subject of disapproval within the Jewish community. The fact remains that, on 30 August, his name was taken off the population register of Amsterdam.

His Stay in Paris
Accompanied to Paris by Isaacson, De Haan first stayed with his compatriot Theo van Gogh, in rue Lepic. Was he, before his arrival, already au fait with the Impressionist movement and the other avant-garde movements that were enlivening the French capital? We have no way of knowing. But very quickly, his artistic style underwent a radical change, clearly revealing the painter's own creative inclinations as well as the profound influence of Paul Gauguin, whom he had met through Theo.
The serious, dark narrative and anecdotal works painted by De Haan in the Netherlands are startlingly different from the works of his French period, with their bright, contrasting colours.
Theo kept his brother Vincent informed about the activities of De Haan and Isaacson. In a letter, Vincent van Gogh, gave this advice: " If they are really painters trying to make progress in virgin fields, boldly recommend the South of France to them. [...] I see more and more that those in the North rely on their ability with the brush, and the so-called "picturesque," rather than on the desire to express something by colour itself ".
In the end, "the school" that De Haan joined was not in the Midi, but in Brittany, with the group that gathered informally around Gauguin from 1886. In April 1889, De Haan decided to leave for Pont-Aven, where Gauguin joined him shortly afterwards.

Brittany
The early days in Brittany proved to be particularly difficult for Meijer de Haan. His letters convey a dark mood. He suffered because of the bad weather, and was unable to work. He certainly had no financial problems, but his original way of life and background were in complete contradiction with his new situation, bringing him to an impasse. Motivated no doubt by the exhibition at the Café Volpini of the Symbolist and Synthetist painters, De Haan returned briefly to Paris in June. He was amazed to discover around a hundred works by Gauguin, Bernard and Schuffenecker, and to see how boldly they dealt with colour and form. It was with a new enthusiasm that he returned to Brittany, having made up his mind to learn from Gauguin what he called "Impressionism".
There then followed the most productive period of De Haan's stay in France. When Gauguin could no longer tolerate the atmosphere in Pont-Aven, a small picturesque village invaded by painters, the two men moved to Le Pouldu, a desolate hamlet on the coast.

Le Pouldu
There were few distractions in Le Pouldu, and De Haan devoted himself entirely to his work. For a while he supported Gauguin financially in return for painting "lessons". De Haan gradually makes progress. He took an interest in the formal qualities of colour, and in the representation of light, in order to move beyond his early narrative works with their dark tones. He made many sketches in order to find subjects and develop a style.
In October 1889, he moved with Gauguin into a small inn run by Marie Henry. During this stay the young woman and the Dutch painter had an affair.
The studies of fruit and vegetables made by De Haan reveal how he had assimilated Gauguin's ideas. He started to find his direction, mastered the technique of modelling with colour, and enlivened the backgrounds by introducing blues, mauves and pinks. His paintings were often dominated by strong diagonals.

Probably around the middle of November, the two men began to redecorate the dining room at the inn. The walls were gradually covered with works of art. De Haan notably painted a Maternity, in which Marie Henry can be seen sitting, breast-feeding her daughter, Marie-Léa. This was the situation that existed when the painters Sérusier and Filiger joined them for a while.
Other artists visited Le Pouldu like Maxime Maufra, Jan Verkadeen and André Gide, further testimony of the atmosphere that reigned in that small inn. Thus, we read in the letters of the painter Paul-Emile Colin: "I can picture this communal room [...] A ceiling by Gauguin, decorated with a motif: geese. The doors were also painted. A large painting in shades of blue depicted Marie la Bretonne and her child [...] Gauguin would take his guitar, Filiger his mandolin, and we would go down and sit on the beach among the rocks". There are several portraits of De Haan dating from the time at Le Pouldu painted, drawn or sculpted by Gauguin. These show the Dutch painter to be obsessed by spirituality, preoccupied by his desire to learn, and almost satanic in his physical appearance.

Departure from Le Pouldu
At the end of summer 1890, the subsidies from the Netherlands dried up and De Haan's financial situation became more difficult. Gauguin wrote: "His family has absolutely no understanding of why he has not remained not in their midst [...] they think they might pressure him into returning by withholding his allowance". He then hoped that De Haan would choose to free himself completely from his family and accompany him to an exotic destination.
But in October De Haan suddenly left Le Pouldu. Just before his departure, he had written an optimistic and moving letter to Theo van Gogh, one of the very few documents that reveal how he perceived his work and its development: "When I look back, when I think of that sombre, stifling environment where I hung about in my youth – of that niggardly and narrow-minded artistic circle, I feel overjoyed today thanks to my liberal ideas, to a young and vigorous present and great confidence in the future". However, the future would be bleak.
When he went away, he left all his belongings behind at the inn, possibly because his absence was intended to be short. But De Haan would never come back to Brittany; he would never see Marie Henry again. She was, at that point, pregnant by him; it is possible he never knew.

The Last Years
Little is known about De Haan's life in the months following his departure from Le Pouldu, other than that he was profoundly affected by the death of Theo van Gogh in January 1891, and that he was still in Paris on 23 March 1891 when Gauguin's farewell banquet was held at the Café Voltaire. We must then wait until 18 February 1893 to trace him once more amongst the population of the commune of Hattem, in the Netherlands. Beset by ill health, the painter spent his last months "in suffering and sickness", as he himself wrote to Jo, Theo van Gogh's widow. Furthermore, one of his acquaintances wrote: "he was already very ill, and did not think he had much longer to live". He died on 23 October 1895, aged only 43.
At the time of his death, he was still registered in the municipal rolls of Hattem, although two photographs dating from 1897 show that his family had preserved his studio in Amsterdam. It was not until that year that the studio furniture and some pictures were put up for sale.
Negotiations to give De Haan's major work, Uriël Acosta, to the Rijksmuseum were not successful, and today all trace of this painting has been lost. The few paintings that were sold went for a derisory price, and those that remained in the family were dispersed after the Second World War. The only remaining works were those Meijer de Haan had left behind when he moved from Le Pouldu. All these paintings were kept by Marie Henry, and finally shared between her elder daughter, Léa, and Ida, Meijer de Haan's daughter born in the summer of 1891.
In the early 1950s, Ida unsuccessfully tried to persuade the museum in Amsterdam to take her father's work. Meijer de Haan's French heritage was finally sold in 1959 at the Drouot salerooms, and dispersed throughout various French museums and private collections.