Jan Hendrik Scheltema

Jan Hendrik Scheltema (23 August 1861, The Hague – 9 December 1941, Brisbane),^[1] was a Dutch and later Australian painter who had an impressive career in Australia considering he was a non-British migrant artist. He was naturalized in 1935.^[2] He signed his work often as J.H.Scheltema, underlined only under the lower case letters, and was also known as John Henry Scheltema.

History

Scheltema had drawing and painting lessons from the painter J. J. Bertelman (1821-1899) of Gouda for at least a year starting in 1879. He then studied during 1880-1882 at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, now known as University of the Arts. Then he went to Antwerp to study with Michel Marie Charles Verlat (25 November 1824 – 23 October 1890) of Antwerp, ^[3] and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp, Belgium.^[4] where Verlat taught. Scheltema won a scholarship from King William III of the Netherlands from 1880 to 1884 of resp. 350, 450, 500, 500 and 300 guilders.^[5] The development of Scheltema’s abilities to paint animals may have been influenced by Verlat, who from 1866 to 1875 had been the docent responsible for animal painting classes at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School.

Both in the Netherlands and in Antwerp, Belgium Scheltema had been a figure painter and portrait painter. His best known portraits are the half body depiction of Johannes van 't Lindenhout (1837-1918), founder of a large educational and employment providing orphanage at Neerbosch, near Nijmegen, Netherlands,^[6] two works of the Rev. Carel Steven Adema van Scheltema (1815-1897), activist in campaigning against alcohol abuse and a portrait of Hendrika Jacoba Stokhuijzen (1816-1872), the spouse of the latter. Her image was painted using a monochrome photograph, some years after her death by accidental drowning. All four of these are held by public museums in the Netherlands and thought to have been painted in the 1880's. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds an etching by him called "sitting woman in an interior" (RT-P-1913-2831). Soon after arrival in Australia in 1888 he decided that portrait painting could not provide him with a living in Melbourne, where the so called 'land boom depression' struck hard, and successfully specialized in rural landscapes with livestock being the focus, yet painted some portraits there too. For example, the collection of the State Library of Victoria includes Scheltema's portrait of the soprano Daisy Muriel Pickering.

Scheltema arrived in Melbourne, Australia 7 July 1888 aboard on the French ship S.S. Oceanien. He joined the Victorian Artists' Society. In Australia he soon exhibited in the same exhibition as artists like Charles Conder, Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin.^[7] For many years he lived at 586 Drummond Street, North Carlton, Victoria and had his first studio in Sydney Terrace in Wellington Parade, Melbourne, where he lived the first year.^[8] From 1889 he had a contractual arrangement with the Florence-educated Italian landscape painter Charles Rolando (1844–1893)with Rolando in the role of employer as his deteriorating health required him to hire expert assistance with his painting and Scheltema needed a steady income.^[9] The wealthy Rolando had similarly been assisted earlier by George Alfred John Webb (1861 – 1949), his brother in law, a portraitist and landscape painter in Melbourne and Adelaide (see the 'Jeekel collation'). Rolando and Scheltema would together prepare for and stage joint auctions. It resulted after a couple of years in the teaching of both Rolando's and Scheltema's students in the same studio, so they could be supervised by just one teacher at the time, freeing up painting time for both of them. They often collaborated on the same painting. Scheltema inserted the staffage, mainly animals, into Rolando's landscapes.^[10] They also exhibited together, such as at the premises of art dealers Gemmell, Tuckett and Co of Collins Street, Melbourne in 1891. They would repeatedly take their students into the Victorian countryside to paint en plein air. Some art sale advertisements later listed works as by 'Scheltema-Rolando'.^[11] After Rolando's death in 1893 Scheltema continued to teach Rolando's students for about a year and would later occasionally collaborate with other painters under different terms. Scheltema travelled and painted overseas again twice. In 1898-1899 he visited his native Holland, and spent time in Italy and Switzerland. Paintings from this trip were exhibited on his return at his studio in the Cromwell Buildings on Bourke St, opposite the General Post Office.^[12] In 1909-1911, he also spent some time in Tunis, France, Switzerland, Scotland, England and the Netherlands. Upon his return from the second voyage, he presented a one artist exhibition from 1 to 24 September 1911 with 88 of his paintings in Tuckett Chambers, 359 Collins Street, Melbourne, including many works painted on his travels. The exhibition was opened by Sir John Madden, the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, addressing about 40 guests. Its 4 page catalogue entitled "J.H.Scheltema's Exhibition of English, Scottish and Australian Paintings", showing descriptions/titles and prices, can be sighted in the National Library of Australia today. The press covered the 1911 exhibition well.^[13]

Of the hundreds of paintings by Scheltema still sold at auction from time to time, the smaller pieces fetch in the range A$2000–15000. His Morley's Track, Fernshaw, 100x150cm, was reported in the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, 2006 p.579 to have sold in Melbourne for A$120,000. His "Early Morning Start, Gippsland" was purchased in 2018 by the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale, Victoria, Australia for A$36.000.

Recognition

Scheltema gained a reputation as a masterly painter of pastoral scenes, particularly as a specialist of foreground livestock in the landscape, the genre developed by Paulus Potter and Claude Lorrain in 17th century Europe and his skills were often publicly acknowledged in Australian newspapers. His treatment of livestock was not limited to making them a focal landscape element in the painting, but he often showed them in action, indeed up close, such as drinking, running, breaking away being chased, being shorn or fed, showing what they were watching, thereby depicting their interaction with humans as well as the landscape. He produced several equine works with the movement of full gallop. His paintings were not just pleasant pictures, but tended to tell a story, set in a well captured Australian bush setting. Though he had been educated in Europe he developed a sharp eye for the colours of the Australian landscape, as he did not only paint outdoors all over rural Victoria, but studied individual tree and shrub species up close. He would explain the rural life in paintings that others of the period, such as Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson, had explained in writing indeed poetry. In 1895 one of his paintings, Driving in the Cows was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria.^[10] Since then all Australian State Galleries and the National Gallery of Australia would own at least one of his paintings, as do the larger regional galleries in Victoria, such as those at Ballarat, Benalla and Bendigo. The latter gallery (then called Sandhurst Art Gallery) was the first public gallery to have a work of Scheltema in its collection, inside two years from his arrival in 1888, called 'going to camp' a great sunset with a 'contre-jour' foreground of 12 oxen pulling a cart with a load of wool bales. His exceptional chiaroscuro work "The Sundowners", showing men at night lit on just one side by a fire in the bush, shows he could paint an almost physically felt suggestion of different temperatures in different parts of the painting. In the chapter about the contribution of the Dutch to pre-war Australia in the 1927 book "Non-Britishers in Australia" by J. Ling, just two names of Dutch immigrants are mentioned: Guillaume Delprat, the general manager of BHP, and Jan Hendrik Scheltema. His became a familiar name around Melbourne and in the Australian art world. He was at one stage compared favorably with Louis Buvelot.^[10] He was so well known that some of his former students would advertise their work with the message that they had been taught by him. Although there are many contemporary indicators that art critics studied his work closely, they appear not to have closely acquainted themselves with the foreign master painter himself. For instance, in Table Talk, the Melbourne weekly from 1885 to 1939 (Jan 9, 1891. p 8), a ‘masterful cattle piece’ is elaborately praised and described in detail, but the painter is three times referred to as ‘Herr J.H.Scheltema’. Its writer must have been assumed he was German, perhaps from his Dutch accent. A decade later an Adelaide art writer would still introduce him as a 'Belgian artist'.^[14] His shyness or some social impediment could have been the cause. The repeatedly returning popularity of his work at auctions may even have annoyed some writers so as to write condescendingly about the man and erroneously suggesting he mainly painted in monochrome.

Family

J.H.Scheltema was the youngest son of Lieutenant-Colonel Nicolaas Scheltema (1810-1901) and Anna Maria Scharp (1819-1887) of The Hague, Netherlands, who had seven children, four surviving to adulthood, two girls and two boys. The family moved to Gouda when Jan Hendrik was fifteen years old. Only on 16 February 1917 Scheltema married Edith Bailey Smith (1880-1947) of Melbourne. The full length portrait of his wife (as an Italian fruit vendor, post 1917) now in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, is one of the Australian portraits by him. Their son, Nicholas Herbert was born on 22 June 1918. Edith, a musician, composed and published an Australian patriotic song, Loyalty in 1939.^[15] Nicholas Scheltema purchased the sawmill at Palmwoods, Queensland in 1938,^[16] and his parents moved to the district around the same time, where Scheltema did not paint any more. Many have used that year erroneously as the year of his death, but J.H.Scheltema, his address then at Palmwoods, died at Brisbane General Hospital late in 1941 and his remains were buried at the Toowong Cemetery. Edith died in March 1947 and was also buried there. Nicholas lived for some time in Rabaul, New Guinea; he died in May 1952 and was buried in the Lutwyche Cemetery.

References