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" "For me Ruisdael is the true man of poetry, the real poet. There is a world of sad, serious and beautiful thoughts in his paintings. They possess a soul and a voice that sounds deep, sad and dignified. They tell melancholic stories, speak of gloomy things and are witnesses of a sad spirit. I see him wander, turned in on himself, his heart opened to the beauties of nature, in accordance with his mood, on the banks of that dark gray stream that rustles and splashes along the reeds. And those skies!.. .In the skies one is completely free, untied, all of himself.. ..what a genius he is! He is my ideal and almost something perfect. When it storms and rains, and heavy, black clouds fly back and forth, the trees whiz and now and then a strange light breaks through the air, and falls down here and there on the landscape, and there is a heavy voice, a grand mood in nature; that is what he paints; that is what he [Ruysdael] is imaging.
Albertus Gerardus "Gerard" Bilders (9 December 1838 – 8 March 1865), son of painter Johannes Warnardus Bilders, was a Dutch landscape-painter who foreshadowed with his typical 'warm grey' the tonal painting style of the Hague School painters. He was frequently painting in plein air with Anton Mauve, and Willem Maris around the village Oosterbeek.
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version in original Dutch / citaat van Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands: Om het sentiment van het grijze, zelfs in het krachtigste groen, te houden is verbazend moeylijk, en die het uitvindt is een gelukkig sterveling.
version in original Dutch / citaat van Gerard Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands: ..Nu is er maar één ding, dat hinderlijk is en waar niemand iets aan veranderen kan, het is, dat de dagen zoo schrikkelijk kort zijn door het donkere weder. Voor aanleggen[?] en schetsen gaat het nog, maar fijne toonen en tinten te begluren en weder te geven zou nu eene onmogelijkheid zijn. Vooral op het Museum is het somtijds bijzonder duister.
I have seen pictures [on the Salon of Brussel, 1860], of which I had never dreamed and in which I found all that my heart desires, all that I nearly always miss in the Dutch painters. Troyon, Courbet, Diaz, Dupré [all painters of the School of Barbizon, Robert Fleury have made a great impression on me. I am a good Frenchman, therefore; but, as Simon van den Berg says, it is just because I am a good Frenchman that I am a good Dutchman, since the great Frenchmen of today and the great Dutchmen of the past have much in common. Unity, restfulness, earnestness and, above all, an inexplicable intimacy with nature are what struck me most in these pictures. There were certainly also a few good Dutch pieces, but, generally speaking, when you place them next to the great Parisians, they lack that mellowness, that quality which, so to speak, resembles the deep tones of an organ. And yet this luxurious manner came originally from Holland, from our steaming, fat-coloured Holland! They were courageous pictures; there was a heart and a soul in them.