The story
Hendrik Willem Mesdag came to painting late, after a career in banking, and made his name with vast seascapes of the North Sea coast at Scheveningen. He and his wife Sientje, a painter too, spent the money on other people's pictures, and in 1887 they built a gallery beside their house on the Laan van Meerdervoort in The Hague to hold what they had bought.
What they bought was France. They assembled the largest collection of Barbizon painting outside France, the quiet landscapes of Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau and Charles-François Daubigny, hung alongside the Dutch Hague School to which the couple themselves belonged. In 1903 they gave the whole museum, house pictures and all, to the Dutch state, which kept it intact. The rooms still carry their crowded 19th-century hang, frames close together on deep-toned walls, the way the Mesdags lived with the work.
