A Romantic View. 19th Century Dutch and Belgian Painting from the Rademakers Collection
Location: 2nd floor, Great Hall
The 70 paintings displayed at the exhibition provide an excellent overview of almost all the 19th century art genres: genre painting, cityscapes, seascapes, portraits and mysterious moonlit landscapes. The exhibition is accompanied by a newspaper in Estonian and English.
“Jef Rademakers’s collection has been created with an admirable sense of style and determination,” says Tiina Abel, the curator of the exhibition. “The collector set the goal of rehabilitating the long-forgotten Belgian and Dutch 19th-century Romanticism, and thus helped to break several stereotypes prevalent in the history of art. His collection has been formed on the tide of current views on art, which is witnessed by its growing popularity.”
The paintings that comprise the Belgian collector Jef Rademakers’s collection have been displayed at the State Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, at the Koekkoek-Haus in Kleve, and elsewhere.
The former TV producer Jef Rademakers’s painting collection contains more than a hundred works of art created by Dutch and Belgian artists in the years 1806–1870. The lion’s share of the paintings, however, are from the period 1840–1855, when the Romantic approach to nature was intertwined with the lifestyle of the post-Napoleonic Biedermeier era, which valued domesticity and family. Rademakers owns outstanding examples from the oeuvre of Basile de Loose, Bart van Hove, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek and the latter’s students: Jacob Abels, Andreas Schelfhout, Petrus van Schendel and others.
Jef Rademakers was born in 1949 near the Dutch and Belgian border to a Catholic family. He graduated from the University of Amsterdam. From the 1960s to the 1980s he produced several programmes for Dutch television, his most popular show being Class Reunion. Then, the turning point in his life came.
“I was 40 years old and had lost most of my illusions about politics, art and love,” says Jef Rademakers. “I decided rather promptly to change my lifestyle, sold my company and moved to Flanders. The ideals that I had lost I rediscovered in the paintings of the Romantic artists. I am a sombre pessimist, even a hypochondriac, and look at life through the eyes of a cynic – life is an illness that you just have to suffer through. Romantic art is one of my survival strategies.”
Rademakers acquired his first noteworthy painting 20 years ago from a respectable English art dealer at the Biennale in Paris. Ever since that purchase, the collector has bought works of art from wherever they show up in the market: the Netherlands and Belgium, naturally, but Great Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy and Austria as well. However, Rademakers has limited his acquisitions to art from around the Netherlands – the area that he knows and understands well due to his origins.
Curator: Tiina Abel
We thank:
Jef Rademakers, Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands in Estonia
