Willem van den Berg - Volendam fishermen

Year:   1949
Technique:   Lithograph, signed in the plate.
Stands:   Reasonable, the work has a small damage at the top left, see photos.
Circulation:   unknown
Size:   31 x 31.5 cm.
List:   43.5 x 44.5 cm. Aluminum frame in matching color framed in a double passe partout. There is a small crack in the glass at the top right in the corner.

Special feature:   This is a publication of the Association for the Promotion of Visual Arts.   This association (Arte et Amicitia) was founded in 1846 and has existed throughout the nineteenth century until the present day.    Arte et Amicitia consisted of a closed group of art connoisseurs, art collectors and painters. Their goal was the promotion of the fine arts (and friendship). See photo back of the passe partout with text.

Arti et Amicitiae joined the Dutch Chamber of Culture in 1941. By order of the occupying forces, fifteen Jewish members were expelled: Marianne Franken, Maria Boas-Zélander, Charlotte Boom-Pothuis, Moos Cohen, Max van Dam, Salomon Garf, Hendrika van Gelder, Felix Hess, Jaap Kaas, Baruch Lopes de Leao Laguna, Martin Monnickendam, Marinus van Raalte, Mommie Schwarz, David Schulman and Jo Spier. Only Kaas, Schulman and Spier survived the war; Boom and Monnickendam died in Amsterdam, the others perished in the concentration camps. In September 2022, Arti et Amicitiae organised an exhibition about its wartime past: You will understand that ... The choices of Arti et Amicitiae in and after WWII. During the opening of the exhibition, Arti chairman Jeroen Werner apologized on behalf of the association for the exclusion of Jewish members during the Second World War.

Willem Hendrik van den Berg

Van den Berg received his first drawing lessons from his father, Andries van den Berg (1852-1944). He then studied at the Hague Academy and obtained his MO certificate in 1904. An important moment in his life was the meeting in 1912 with Willem van Konijnenburg , who would have a great influence on him. Van Konijnenburg was a charismatic personality with outspoken views on art, which strongly appealed to Van den Berg.

Partly because he occasionally worked on commissions from Van Konijnenburg, Van den Berg's way of painting gradually evolved from a loose Hague School-like approach to a more elaborate, stylised way of designing, which in his figure paintings sometimes tends slightly towards the caricatural.

In 1938 Van den Berg was appointed professor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, of which institute he also became director in 1940. He managed to steer the academy through the Second World War without too many problems. He retired in 1953.
Van den Berg was a versatile artist who, besides figure pieces – mostly scenes from farm and fishing life, but also occasionally Biblical scenes – and many portraits, also painted animal scenes, landscapes, town and village views and still lifes. He also regularly produced graphics in various techniques and illustrated several books.

He was also an indefatigable draughtsman who always had a sketchbook at the ready and was constantly busy recording motifs from his immediate surroundings. He made an enormous number of sketches of all possible subjects, including a large number of informal portraits of colleagues and scenes from the artist's life. He drew many of these during meetings in Arti et Amicitiae and Pulchri Studio, of which he was a member from 1910 and 1921 respectively.

Willem van den Berg died in 1970, at the age of 84.