Family On The Beach: Representations Of Romantic And Bourgeois Family Values By Realistic Genre Painting Of Nineteenth-Century Scheveningen Beach

Abstract

Around 1800, the desire to go to the beach developed in Europe, and Scheveningen became one of the first beach places. In the same time, poets and painters romanticized the Scheveningen fishing culture and the fishers’moral behavior. A group of nineteenth-century painters rediscovered Scheveningen—also painted in the Golden Age—making it one of the most painted places of the Netherlands. This article looks at a series of images of families and children on the beach. These paintings, in proliferating messages on family happiness and on the romantic image of childhood and family life, link these values with the way of life of the Scheveningen fishing community. In contrasting these values with the negative moral effects of city life and urbanization, they contributed to the romantic image of childhood, one of the main elements in the birth of the Century of the Child.