HENRI BENEDICTUS SALAMAN VAN RAALTE
Born 11th February 1881 London, Middlesex, England
Died 4th November 1929 South Australia
ART GALLERY CURATOR, ART TEACHER, ETCHER
This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, (MUP), 1990
Henri Benedictus Salaman Van Raalte, etcher, was born at Lambeth, London, son of Dutch-born Joel Van Raalte, merchant, and his English wife Frances Elizabeth, née Cable. Educated at the City of London School, St John's Wood Art Schools and the Royal Academy of Arts schools, he became an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Henri migrated with his brother to Western Australia in 1910 and on 6th July 1912 at the Claremont registrar's office married Katherine Lyell Symers.
As a timber-getter he enjoyed 'bush art-wandering': in his eyes the tuart trees (Eucalyptus gomphocephala) symbolized the grandeur of his adopted landscape and few of his Australian etchings treated the human figure as central. His first major gum tree etching, 'The Monarch' (1918), shown at the Royal Academy in 1920, realized a record price in Australia (£45) and his work was praised by (Sir) Lionel Lindsay in Art in Australia (1918); much of it had an imaginative, disturbed quality.
THE MONARCH, KALGAN RIVER, W.A.
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
In 1914 Van Raalte had settled in Perth where, he claimed, 'Art was dead'. He worked in a department store before teaching at several schools; his private classes grew into the Perth School of Art by 1920. In 1916, when Perth's citizens had given him a printing press, his art appeared in the Westralia Gift Book. He held a successful, one-man exhibition in 1919.
Sending work to the Melbourne dealer W.H. Gill, he remarked: 'Some of the stuff is good, some isn't. I like it all because I did it. I regret I didn't do it all better!' It sold well. In 1920 and 1924 there were exhibitions of his work at Preece's Gallery, Adelaide. Van Raalte was a founder (1920) of the Australian Painter-Etchers and Graphic Art Society. Considered a pioneer of Australian etching, he also specialized in aquatint and drypoint: his distinctive transmission of mood was more expressionistic than that of his peers, although his prolific output sometimes degenerated to mere scene-recording.
Following Gustave Barnes's death, in 1922 Van Raalte went to Adelaide to become the curator at the Art Gallery of South Australia. His manner was volatile and outspoken, but the Advertiser also found him 'unaffected, courteous and a capital raconteur'. The gallery's crypt was 'a hopeless confusion', with valuable canvases in the cleaners lavatory. Additional space, conservatorial and curatorial facilities, and extra staff were needed. The collection of works, Van Raalte said drily, made the gallery 'a pleasant backwater'. He developed and cataloged the large print collection. A council-member of the South Australian Society of Arts, he was president of its offshoot, the Sketch Club, which he helped to found. He soon resigned from both the Society of Arts and the Painter-Etchers in protest against mediocrity and 'the shackles imposed … by amateurs'. In 1924 the United Arts Club was formed in Adelaide, with Van Raalte as president; it ran a highly successful Artists Week which exhibited the work of interstate and local artists.
He had strong support among the art fraternity, but next year Van Raalte's problems with some members of the gallery's board intensified. During his absence, the chairman Sir William Sowden overrode his decision not to hang certain inferior works. In January 1926 Van Raalte resigned and issued a press statement calling the board 'a company of ignoramuses'. In March Sowden also resigned.
The etcher retired with his wife, three sons and his press to a rented cottage at Second Valley, on the coast, where he produced some of his finest work. Alcohol became his demon. Despite his acceptance by the local community, to whom the dapper artist was a familiar figure in his old T-model Ford, Van Raalte's melancholy was exacerbated by financial stress. On 4th November 1929, in his wife's absence, he sent two of his sons for the doctor, then shot himself in the head. He died an hour later and was buried in the nearby Bullaparinga cemetery.
In December a memorial exhibition of his work was held in Adelaide. Van Raalte had influenced the development of print-making in Australia during the inter-war years in what was a world-wide revival and he had been one of the first to produce color etchings. His work is in most State galleries, the National Gallery of Australia, the British Museum and in many private collections.
ART IN AUSTRALIA
No. 5 - 1918
THE ETCHINGS OF HENRI VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
The little world of Australian etchers was stirred recently by the news that a Dutch etcher of repute had settled in West Australia. Gradually some work came east, and during the last year the work of Van Raalte has grown more familiar to the art public of Sydney and Melbourne.
The Sydney Gallery has acquired three of his works, and he showed with the Society of Artists this year, when the interest in his work was quickened by his attack upon Australian subject matter. But the etcher is only half a Dutchman. He was born in England in 1881, his mother coming of an old Suffolk family, to which the late Tom Browne was related, and his father from the village of Raalte near the Zuyder Zee.
His art interest was awakened at school by the clever drawings of S.H. Sime, whose happy admixture of line and tone fascinated the future etcher, though it was not until many years afterwards, when he had penetrated the mystery of the bitten line, that he was able to apply in etching the qualities which had been his first admiration. His first essays were in the manner of Phil May and Holbein, whom he imitated after the way of youth. With Herbert Dicksee R.E., his first master, he had his first glimpse of the craft of etching, but for Dicksee’s method, that painful accumulation of meaningless lines which accounted for so many frontispieces of the “Art Journal”, he had wisely no use, and his first attempts were covertly made.
“According to my master", he writes, I was too much a beginner to start etching, so I did it secretly. My first etching was of a wild cat. I used pure nitric acid and soft beeswax for a ground. I bit the plate so deeply that the wax came off in lumps and as I did not know how to get a big dark space I did a lot of surface biting and made an unprintable, unrecognizable mess”. Not a very promising start, but most etchers can tell a similar story, when they come to speak of their “first plate”. But he rapidly improved under the able guidance of Monk, and at the age of 20 was made an Associate of the Royal Etchers, and had exhibited at the Royal Academy. In the following year (1902) he was represented in the “Studio” extra number and hung on the line at the Academy, where his work won the praise of Sir Seymour Haden, which must have proved a splendid spur to the young etcher’s ambition.
Though an Englishman by birth and education, Van Raalte has often turned to the land of his father for inspiration and subject matter. It is not to be forgotten that it was Haden who restored to popular estimation the virtues of Rembrandt’s untrammeled line, and that English etchers of the first rank have ever kept in mind and in the forefront of technique, the great traditions established by the mighty Dutchman. This affiliation of the Dutch and English spirit is happily evident in Van Raalte’s work, though I suspect that he was led to portray little Dutch maids and the fishermen of the ample trousers much in the spirit that actuated Phil May — for the sake of their inherent picturesqueness.
In his fine etching of “The Boat Builders Shed, Rye", Van Raalte has dealt most successfully with a subject dear to the heart of the English etcher. The sure and sympathetic drawing, the division of interest between the shadowy timbers and the simplified foreground, mark this for a sterling work, crowned as it is with such convincing reticence. The little window and the open doorway, the broken lights between the roof beams, possess that mysterious charm which draws the eye to that little space of sky which Millet considered an essential of all landscape, and of which he wrote, “however small it may be, it should suggest the possibility of indefinite extension”.
This was reproduced in the special number of “The Studio” with a fine dry-point entitled the “Philosopher”, in which the artist has visualized with rare insight some aged Galileo or Columbus meditating by chart and globe the possibility of undiscovered lands. The figure of the old man is admirably placed and the model has been lost in the unconscious attitude of thought. The fine old face suggests the dignity resident in the portraits of Holbein.
Since his arrival in Australia Van Raalte has changed his manner. His line has become looser and more suggestive. His finest Australian plate is undoubtedly “The Monarch”. In this vision of a great eucalypt the lighting is arbitrary — a sullen flash in time of tempest; but the tree is an unmistakable gum. Its chiaroscuro suggests one of those Rembrandt gleams so brilliantly set in the phrase of Huysman which came into my mind as I contemplated it: “I see again that gush of light in the night, the trails of golden powder in the shadow, the suns that set beneath tenebrous arches”.
Henri Van Raalte is an accomplished artist, and it may be that the chance illness which landed him in the West will be the means of stirring some art movement in the one Australian state that has stayed too long void of all plastic expression.
LIONEL LINDSAY
WINDMILL, DER HAAG
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
THREE WILLOWS
Etching by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
THE MONARCH, KALGAN RIVER, W.A.
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
A DUTCH STORY
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
COOL WATER
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
THE WATER'S EDGE
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
THE GUST
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
MORNING FIRE
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
THE MADONNA OF THE POOL
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
DAWN ON THE VALLEY ROAD
Dry-point by H. VAN RAALTE, A.R.E.
Monday 7th September 1936 The West Australian (Perth, WA) - Page 16
CAMERA ART
A FINE DISPLAY
All who were acquainted with the late Henri Benedictus van Raalte found that among the most outstanding of his many admirable qualities was his unswerving fidelity to the highest principles of artistic practice.
Again and again I have heard Henri Benedictus van Raalte say to his students (who worshiped him both as man and artist), that nothing he could teach them would be of any avail in making them genuine craftsmen until they learnt the first and most important lesson that truth of perception is what counts in art and that until the faculty of accurate observation is developed, no work, however it may appeal to the popular taste, is any thing but a sham and a delusion.
HENRI VAN RAALTE
Indeed, in his fiercely truthful moods, Henri Benedictus van Raalte would say just what he thought of "that empty and ugly thing called popularity" and would ask "Will any man suppose it is worth the gaining?" Quoting Stevenson, he would remind us that the artist works "entirely upon honor" and that the public knows little or nothing of those merits in whose quest he spends his main endeavors. "Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of artistic temperament easily acquires - these they can recognize and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in Balzac's vigorous words), he must "toil like a miner buried in a landslip", for which, day after day, he recasts and revises and rejects - the gross mass of the public must be for ever blind. Under the shadow of this cold thought, the artist must preserve from day to day. his constancy to the ideal".
No better memorial to our great West Australian etcher could have been devised than an organization dedicated to the principles which he laid down and which he himself so consistently observed, as is testified by all his work which remains to us. Such an organization exists in the Van Raalte Club, which has done a great deal to prove to us if any proof were needed - that photography is entitled to a high and honorable place among the graphic arts. The club members are imbued with a determination to achieve beauty only by legitimate means and to avoid all that smudgy out-of-focus "artiness" by which second-rate photographers, instead of developing the individual technique of their own craft, have often made the grave error of imitating other and fundamentally different media of expression.
An exhibition of recent work by members of the Van Raalte Club, which will be officially opened by Mr G. Pitt Morison in the Newspaper House art gallery at 3pm this afternoon, is without doubt one of the finest displays of its kind yet seen in Perth. The level of craftsmanship is high and in many instances the attainment of artistic and technical perfection has clearly been the photographers main objective. But this is not to suggest that other qualities are lacking, for in the remarkably comprehensive range of subjects depicted many interests other than the purely aesthetic have been catered for and the general result is a most absorbing and inspiring reflection of the life and scenery of the State. "The mission of art" Henri Benedictus van Raalte was wont to emphasize, "is not to copy Nature, but to express it" and these pictures make one realize to what a notable extent photography (despite what is often said to the contrary), may penetrate below externals and present not only the obvious details of a scene, but the very atmosphere.
STIMULUS TO APPRECIATION
Present-day art criticism in Australia is all to often a mere conglomeration of vituperative epithets; therefore it may occasion some surprise that in an endeavor to give a just estimate of this exhibition, one can find nothing but good to say of it. In more senses than one it is a liberal education, this vivid pictorial commentary on phases of our daily activities and on our varied and beautiful landscapes and seascapes. These camera studies make us aware, with a sudden emotion, of the glory of our great national heritage; they make it possible for us to gaze, with something of the photographers own discernment, upon scenes with which, in some cases, we may have been long familiar, but which now take upon them a new splendor and a new significance.
The work of these artists is established and built on truth and not the least part of their achievement, one feels, is that it interprets us to ourselves and gives us a glimmering of what prompts and lies at the bottom of our thoughts when we are stirred, somewhat vaguely, by love of country. The Van Raalte Club artists produce work which calls us, with an all-persuasive voice, to the higher and nobler patriotism which consists in an understanding of what our land itself really is and what our affection for it really means.
"The sun is God", said the dying Turner and the merit of many of the pictures in the Newspaper House exhibition resides not only in their skillful composition, but also in the fervor of their orisons to the sun-god. Balanced and harmonious arrangement and evidence of a sure instinct for the decorative, are by no means lacking, but what is even more satisfying is the brilliant treatment of light and shade, the presentation of Nature's own ingenious chiaroscuro - her gleams and glooms and all the mysterious loveliness of her intricate patterning and subtle gradations of tones and half-tones. Excellent in this respect are the pictures by Mr A. Knapp, that experienced and talented artist whose work for many years past has won high praise in salons all over the world. It is, of course, to his initiative and imagination in the judicious use of the screen in printing methods that the club members owe a large part of their success, as they willingly and gladly acknowledge. In all the best of the 114 exhibits in the display, the fine grain and other qualities of texture show how great a part the screen has taken in the attainment of these excellent results.
The exhibitors are A. Knapp, H.S. Lucraft, E.A. Coleman, E. Cohen, F. Roper, T. Phillips, J.A. Jeffery. A. Badock. J.H. Hallam, D. Vincent, J. Dent, L.E. Pearce, V. Pearce, A. Kniep, R.C.S. Steele and R. Scott. Next in order of merit after Mr Knapp's work comes that of Dr. Lucraft, but while those two artists undoubtedly lead the van, the rest of the exhibitors come very close on their heels, with pictures whose diverse beauty will be a revelation to many people. The exhibition will be open daily until next Saturday, between the hours of 10am and 6pm.