Jan Hendrik Scheltema
Jan Hendrik Scheltema (23 August 1861, in The Hague – 9 December 1941, in Brisbane),[1] was a Dutch and later Australian painter who had a prolific, often strenuous, and arguably impressive career in Australia considering he was a non-British migrant artist without an international reputation on arrival.
Three 'pieces' of the very youthful Scheltema have survived and were recently sent to Australia: his huge 'Knife Whetting Machine' made as an eight- or nine-year old with his handwritten explanation of how it worked, his 'Atlas of All Parts of the Earth' at the age of about thirteen years.
Bertelman coached him to become a plein-air artist, which included him building his own compact collapsible field easel/portable painting equipment set.
His best known portraits there 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,[7] 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), spouse of the latter and mother of their 13 children.
Soon after arrival in Australia in 1888 he decided that portrait painting could not provide him with a living in Melbourne and successfully specialized in rural landscapes with foreground livestock being the focus rather than embellishment.
In Australia his work was soon displayed in the same exhibitions as artists like Charles Conder, Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin.
[10] The wealthy Rolando had similarly been assisted earlier by George A. J. Webb (1861 – 1949), his brother in law, later a portraitist and landscape painter in Melbourne and Adelaide.
Paintings from this trip were exhibited on his return at his studio in the Cromwell Buildings on Bourke St, opposite the General Post Office.
The exhibition was opened by Sir John Madden, the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, addressing about 50 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.
In December 2018 a total of 18 works by J. H. Scheltema, previously not known to exist by the art world but held by his family, were discovered in the legacy of the recently deceased widow of the artist's great nephew Dr C. A. W. Jeekel and came to Australia.
Most are now part of the collection of the Gippsland Art Gallery, in the town of Sale, Victoria, which displayed them and others in the first Scheltema-only exhibition since 1911, held from 21 March to 9 August 2020, but prematurely closed for the Covid virus, under the title "The Lost Impressionist".
The landscape shown below, painted at Alphington, near Melbourne, Scheltema had sent home explaining that such old eucalypts that had survived the ring-barking, the fires and the clearing are 'monuments' from before white settlement.
His paintings were not just pleasant pictures, but tended to tell a story in well captured typical Australian bush settings, sometimes with fog, haze, dust or other atmospheric effects.
Although he had been educated in Europe he immediately developed a sharp eye for the colors and textures of the Australian landscape, as he did not only paint outdoors all over rural Victoria, but studied individual tree and shrub species up close.
Called 'Going to Camp', it shows 12 oxen pulling a cart with a load of wool bales in front of a great sunset also lighting the back of the moving bullock train from reflection of the sun in the stream behind the animals, like a 'double contre-jour'.
[21] Although there are many contemporary indicators that art critics studied his work closely, some appear not to have acquainted themselves with the painter himself, as he was a fairly private person avoiding crowds.
For instance, in Table Talk, the Melbourne weekly from 1885 to 1939 (9 January 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".
[22] Fairly soon after his death, the combination of so many of his works in the community, mainly in Victoria, and his retirement to far away Queensland gave rise to the peculiar rumor, reported in the press, that he never existed: his signature "J. H. Scheltema" would have been a pseudonym of another artist.
[23] Also, some puzzling texts appeared in the second half on the 20th century in Australian art reference works then considered reliable and hence from writers who use these routinely as gospel, e.g. suggesting without evidence, and erroneously, that Scheltema painted mainly in monochrome and was said to be colourblind.
