Of One Heart

Kruseman dated this canvas 1830, five years after he came home from Rome, and it still looks Italian. A young man plays a guitar, two girls in folk costume sit hand in hand beside him, and one of them holds a tambourine in her lap. They are on a terrace high above a mountain landscape. The Dutch title, Een van zin, means of one mind, and the museum links the joined hands to Concord, the figure of harmony in Cesare Ripa's Italian handbook of allegories. In Piety, painted seven years earlier, the old people were still Dutch in manner. Here nothing of Dutch realism is left, and all three figures are idealised Italian types. The museum bought the canvas in 1830, the year the southern provinces of the kingdom rose in revolt and began to break away as Belgium.