Going Dutch
21 06 09
From LoHud.com:
From Rip Van Winkle to the Roosevelts, America has had a long relationship with its Dutch heritage. That relationship is examined in a brilliant new show at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers that marks the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's exploration of the river and region that now bears his name."Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture" is a terrific art show, with eggplant, emerald and slate-gray galleries offsetting the richness of more than 250 paintings, maps, photographs, posters, drawings and decorative art objects. Text panels in blue and white evoke one of the Netherlands' greatest exports - Delftware pottery.
(...) History suggests our mixed feelings about our Dutch legacy. That ambivalence is suggested by the show's first work, "Henrik Hudson Entering New York Harbor, September 11, 1609," an 1892 oil painting by Edward Moran. Unlike other works on this subject, which give us waving American Indians and smiling Europeans, Moran's painting offers no sentimental perspective. Instead, a lone brave gazes out at Hudson's distant ship, the Half Moon, under a pink and gold sky.
"The American self-image that we revere is more closely tied to the open, entrepreneurial, self-reliant, tolerant, immigrant-driven colony that was New Netherland than to any of the other mythic forebearer colonies from Massachusetts Bay to Jamestown," Michael Botwinick, Hudson River Museum director, writes in the companion book (Fordham University Press). At the same time, Dutch tolerance - particularly when race, slavery and immigration were concerned - was always tempered by commercial interests. If in the early days of New Netherland all people were welcome, it was because the Dutch West India Company, which managed the colony, required all hands on deck. The idea that what you do is who you are would drive New York.
"The Dutch had been forgotten by 1809 so that (Washington Irving) had a blank slate to re-create them," curator Bland says. In "A History of New York From the Beginnings of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty" and in subsequent tales like "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Washington cast a backward glance at the Dutch that was both amused and affectionate. "There's a kind of country-bumpkin quality about Irving's Dutch," Bland says.
Americans came to appreciate this as they celebrated the centennial of American independence in 1876 with a period of Colonial revivalism. These in turn foreshadowed the Holland Mania of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the passion raged for Dutch ideals as well as Delftware, fruit-embellished Kasts (armoires), solidly carved cradles and chairs and refined silverwork. Holland Mania reached a high point with the exuberant Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, a two-week show that had crowds thronging to such gathering spots as flag-festooned Getty Square in Yonkers. Meanwhile, descendants of the Dutch first families - the Van Cortlandts, Philipses, Vanderbilts and Roosevelts - had become as blue-blooded as those whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
Read the entire article here.
