'Liberation day', 1945
Pencil and water-colour, 25 x 20 cm,
Signed: below right 'c noltee'
Bernardus Cornelis (Cor) Noltee (1903-1967)
Besides admiration for his oil paintings, we have much appreciation for the watercolours and drawings by Cor Noltee. How touching, for example, is this work, that shows the liberation
festivities in Dordrecht on May 5, 1945. On the left you see a dancing and singing crowd with party hats under cheerfully waving flags and on the right are a skinny man, woman and
child in tatty clothes, who apparently suffered so much under the violence of war, that they have great difficulty to join the festivities. The painter puts that extremes aptly and
artlessly on paper, so this particular piece of history gets an intense load.
Noltee leaves an extensive oeuvre of landscapes, river scenes, still lifes, cityscapes, portraits and genre scenes. In particular, he has become known for his with lots of browns
and black worked out canvases, on which toiling people and horses can be seen. He paints in a naturalistic-impressionistic style, and his admiration for the artist
GH Breitner (1857-1923) is evident.
Already at the age of 12, the talented Cor Noltee is admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown of The Hague. Among his teachers is Willem de Zwart (1862-1931).
After his studies he travels through the Netherlands, Belgium and France, while painting. He keeps roaming, but the last thirty years of his life Dordrecht is his 'home'.
In the monograph by Drs L. F. Jintes from1999 can be read how contemporaries describe him. On the one hand they find him a good draftsman and painter, a fascinating conversationalist,
a nice bohemian and not a bad billiards player, on the other hand a lonely, serious man, who continues to search for innovation in his art until his death.
That's toil and sweat, as become clear by a letter to his wife in 1961: "The life and art is a terrible event, and the worst is that eternal tension and disappointment (...).
My mind says that things should be different, but my feeling is the boss and decides what I make (...) '. Noltee is a painter of integrity, 'devoid of commercial concessions,
in spite of his miserable material situation'.
