Scheveningen Fisherwoman

This drawing of a fisherwoman documents a community in Scheveningen, on the Dutch coast of the North Sea, that appeared, well into the twentieth century, as if untouched by the industrialization and modernization that had already transformed much of the rest of the Netherlands. Van den Berg carefully described the figures's traditional garb in colored chalks. As in his monumental portrait of a fisherman from the same year, also in The Met's collection (2024.486), the artist blends nostalgia and realism. While Van den Berg renders the figures and boats in the background in an emphatically historicizing manner that recalls the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, as well as that of Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, he employs a very different handling of the chalk for the primary subjects of the drawings, capturing in a seemingly unvarnished, yet heroizing, mode their weathered faces and resilient expressions.