NEW YORK, NY.- There are some proverbs that often ring true. ‘Timing is everything’ is a good one followed by ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ Many times, people refer to both when reflecting on their own or someone else’s career. Artists are, of course, no different in this respect. Certain events change the course of an artist’s careers and often turn tragedy into triumph. Alexander Hugo Bakker-Korff is no different. Living in a different time or a different moment, we might have never had these little gems of works that he generated.

Alexander Hugo Bakker-Korff (1824-1882) was a Dutch painter known for his landscape and genre scenes. He was born in The Hague, Netherlands, and later moved to Leiden. Bakker-Korff was associated with The Hague School, a group of Dutch painters who focused on realistic and atmospheric depictions of landscapes and rural life in the 19th century. He was an excellent draughtsman, at this point much indebted to the works of Alfred Rethel and John Flaxman. His oil paintings were devoted to biblical and historical subjects, of which Death Bed of Frederick Henry (Paleis Het Loo, Nationaal Museum, Apeldoorn) is a representative example.

However, in a terrible twist of fate, but not incredibly unusual for artists of this time, his eyesight began to fail him. Around 1849 he practically quit painting. He only exhibited one picture from 1849-1859. For ten years he, as far as we know, barely generated any work. However, we could guess that something turned his world around and made him believe he could paint again because he started painting again around 1859. This ‘thing’ must have been technology! The 19th century was a hot bed for invention and around 1850 the albumin print, a type of photograph, was invented.

The use of albumin prints and photography in the mid-19th century was a groundbreaking technological and artistic development that had a profound impact on the visual arts, society, and documentation of the era, but for Bakker-Korff it couldn’t have come at a better time. The albumin print is known for its sharp detail and tonal range, which offers an artist a chance to capture every detail of a scene, frozen in time. For an artist who was half blind, the idea that they could take time, using a magnifying glass or other tools to paint the details they could no longer see was a miracle. It must have seemed like a ‘timing is everything’ moment for him. These albumin prints and photography marked a major shift in the world of art and transformed the way an artist like Bakker-Korff was able to create.

It may have taken some time to acquire the technology or acclimate to the technique but, Bakker-Korff embraced it completely. He seemed to discover the albumin print and moved to small-scale genre scenes, often of his sisters dressed in 18th century garb. Besides painting these smaller scale works with the most minute of details, he often gave them an opaque layer to resemble the albumin print, by doing away with brush strokes as much as possible. These little gems became known as Korffjes (little Korffs) and Bakker-Korff became a celebrated bourgeois painter of the time. Would he have gone this direction had his eyesight not started to fail him? Maybe he would have stuck with large scale historical or religious scenes and slowly faded out of fashion. We will never know; however, everything happens for a reason, right?

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