RKD STUDIES

Except for a visit to the Netherlands in 1869, Jan Hendrik Koelman would never leave Rome again.¹ On 20 September 1870, he celebrated the advent of Roma capitale together with his family. From that moment, the house on the Via dell’Olmo became an important meeting place for liberal artists and intellectuals, particularly from the Netherlands and Belgium. One of them was Léon Philippet (1843-1906), who in 1882-1883 would realise an enormous panorama celebrating the siege of Rome in 1849 that Koelman had experienced first-hand. Philippet was assisted by Romolo Koelman, among others [26].²

Until his death in 1887, Jan Hendrik continued to live and work in the large house with studio on Via dell’Olmo [27]. His watercolours with scenes from everyday life remained as popular as ever, and he continued to be a much sought-after portraitist among Roman and foreign clients from the highest circles [28]. Among others, he painted portraits of Princess Marianne of Orange-Nassau (1810-1883), Princess Sophie of Orange-Nassau, Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1824-1897), Princess Marie Amélie von Baden, Duchess Hamilton (1817-1888), and the family of the Roman Prince Marcantonio V Borghese (1814-1886).³

According to references in many travel guides, including those by Murray and Baedeker, Koelman was known as ‘perhaps the most extraordinary copyist in miniature of the work of the old masters’.⁴ This reputation was confirmed by the ‘miniature’ on which Jan Hendrik had worked together with his wife: a large copy on ivory of Raphael’s Transfiguration, reportedly painted for Empress Elisabeth (‘Sisi’) of Austria (1837-1898) [29]. For reasons that remain unclear, this showpiece never left the artists’ studio, with the result that it could still be admired there by visitors years later.⁵

During the final phase of his life, Koelman himself seems to have become some sort of a curiosity to behold. Testimonies about the last phase of his life paint a picture of him as one of the last living witnesses to the Rome of yesteryear [30]. In one of his last letters, written in 1885 to the painter Laurens Lodewijk Kleyn (1826-1909), he writes:

'You saw the artist’s life in Rome in time, Kleyn. That life no longer exists: I and a few others are merely the few relics that remain of it. Rome no longer has anything of the World’s City of Art, and I do not believe it has gained anything from it. We live like Philemon and Baucis, isolated from the world.'⁶

This attitude and Koelman’s classical ideals of beauty made a deep impression on the writer and art critic Carel Vosmaer (1826-1888) when he visited Koelman in his Roman studio in 1878 and again in 1883. Vosmaer felt ‘like a pupil of Socrates’ and called the artist ‘one of the most important people I have ever met’.⁷ When he wrote Koelman’s obituary a few years later, apart from his physical description (‘a head like Garibaldi’), it was particularly striking that he regarded the deceased as ‘the last of the old Dutch painters’ bent in Rome’. He was, according to Vosmaer:

'italianised, but only in his outward life, and yet Dutch through and through, speaking his mother tongue like us; an artist of great talent, of the old school; a philosopher who spoke to you about life and art and antiquity with warm, cordial words, flowing from conviction and deep thought.'⁸

26
Gaston Marchant,
Bust of Romolo Koelman, ca. 1869-1873,
bronze, 42,5 × 32,5 × 25 cm,
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. 3794 A, photo KIK-IRPA, Brussels, cliché a-011913

27
Romolo Koelman,
The artist’s workshop on the Via dell’Olmo in Rome, 1876,
oil on canvas, 89 × 138 cm,
Gallerie Nazionali d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome, inv. no. 1883

28
Johan Hendrik Koelman,
Portrait of a young woman, 1862,
oil on canvas, 135 × 97 cm,
photo Collection RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague