The Funeral on Marken

The island of Marken, where artist Petrus van der Velden settled for about two years from 1871, lies some twenty kilometres from Amsterdam and is now joined to the mainland by a causeway. In March 2020, just two weeks before the global COVID-19 lockdown, Jan Schild visited the Gallery. Schild’s visit – and his ongoing generosity in sharing his research and insights – initiated a correspondence that encouraged new investigation into this and other works by van der Velden.

Among the discoveries prompted by this exchange were early reviews of the painting’s 1875 unveiling. One account of the summer exhibition at The Hague described van der Velden’s “truly brilliant debut with the large painting A Burial on the Island of Marken, to which the committee, in our opinion, with every right, assigned a place of honour. The scene is deeply sombre. It is winter on the island of Marken. Nature has donned her shroud.”¹ It further described:

Two men, [who,] followed by a group of villagers, push a sledge upon which, beneath the pall, rests the mortal remains of a lamented dead person. Such is the subject, the idea of which is expressed with such unity and simplicity that one is almost involuntarily carried along with that procession of grieving relatives, and a feeling of isolation and loneliness irresistibly takes hold of you.

The writer found the figures “full of action, thanks to the care bestowed on each of them and the tasteful and pleasing grouping, which gives the whole a very good effect.”

A further review appeared in an Amsterdam newspaper nine days later, noting that van der Velden, “who formerly painted water scenes,” was making “his debut as a figure painter.” Describing the stark contrast between “the black figures of the funeral procession and the expansive snowfield,” the critic concluded: “The artist must have witnessed such an event there in reality in order to render it, so movingly felt, with such tragedy.”²

When the painting was exhibited again in Brussels later that year under the title Un enterrement à l’île de Marken (Hollande), it emerged within the tonal world of the newly-named Hague School, referred to by some as the “Grey School” for its attraction to what one painter described as “the poetry of grey”.³ Five years later, the canvas arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand.

I found myself speaking in front of the work in October 2025, celebrating the regilding of its monumental frame by conservator Anne-Sophie Ninino, supported by the Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation.⁴ With many months of work newly completed, it was placed on display during a brief gap between exhibitions. Along with many appreciative others, I began seeing the work afresh, freed from my previous reflexive response to the frame’s unsatisfactory glossy gold surface. Its quieter glow also gently restored the work’s strengths and subtleties.

For a start, the formal composition appeared even more markedly radical: a stark division of grey, black and white in broad tonal bands. At its centre is a bold axial arrangement, almost a double subtraction: a black-cloaked coffin on a sled, followed by a trailing procession of mourners – grieving family and community united in endurance as they head across the frozen ground. The more subdued gilding now also drew the eye to hints of colour in the sky, suggesting a momentary lifting of cloud. Shadows beneath the black-garbed procession echo this illumination, briefly lighting the expanse of hard, snow-covered earth.

The figures themselves invited individual rereading and scrutiny. Explicating a work whose popularity I had never fully understood, I found myself now pointing out – and being impressed by – van der Velden’s careful orchestration of detail and narrative. Small observations accumulate into something larger: snow-dusted shoes, noses reddened with cold, children holding adults’ hands, an older woman being supported, her grief central to the scene and rendered with sympathy and restraint. The artist’s attentiveness to human experience – and evident connection to the community he depicted – gives the painting much of its enduring power.

A newspaper report from shortly after van der Velden’s arrival in Christchurch in 1890 recorded his reacquaintance with this work – brought here a decade earlier by his friend Gerrit van Asch, also originally from Rotterdam and founder of the Sumner Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (now named Van Asch College and Kelston School for the Deaf). The artist and his family were then living in tents on the van Asch property, and the large painting was said to depict a fisherman’s funeral.

Many visitors to the Sumner Institute have seen a large and very striking painting there, the subject of which is a fisherman’s funeral in the island of Marken – a curious old-world spot – in the Zuyder Zee. It is winter time, and there is deep snow on the ground. The coffin is being pushed along on a sledge, and the mournful procession of fisher-folk from the hamlet are walking in the rear. A quaint-looking old Dutch church is seen in the background, and the winter atmosphere and the look in the sky which tells of more snow to come, are very finely caught.⁵

So the question I later sent Jan Schild was a deceptively simple one. Whose funeral was it? Van der Velden evidently arrived on Marken in the summer of 1871 and spent about two years there.⁶ There was, however, a considerable delay before Burial in the Winter on the Island of Marken made its debut at The Hague in 1875.⁷ A closely related, much smaller version, apparently completed by 1872, indicates an earlier origin for the scene.⁸ Looser in handling and clearly preparatory in character, it includes additional figures later altered or omitted, while its light snowfall and exposed grasses suggest an early phase of winter.⁹ If this is accepted as based on an actual event, the death likely occurred only months after the artist’s arrival on Marken.

Schild’s reply to the question of whose funeral it may have depicted came sooner than anticipated and opened the possibility of a different kind of reading of the work. Consulting Marken’s burial records, he reported: “In 1871, twenty-nine people died. In the months when there could be snow – January and February – only a child of three months died, and one child was born dead.” These were both before van der Velden’s arrival on Marken. However, “In December 1871, three people died: a man of forty-one years, whose wife would have followed the coffin; a child of six months (I think in those days there was no ceremonial burial); and a woman, but there is no man (widower) behind the coffin.”¹⁰

The records supplied the following entries:

Cornelis Kaars – died 06-12-1871 – 41 years
Cornelis Bootsman – died 09-12-1871 – 6 months
 Lobbetje de Wit – died 23-12-1871 – 58 years

On this basis, Schild believes the deceased to be Cornelis Kaars, who is listed on his death certificate as “van beroep visscher” (by profession fisherman).¹¹ This conclusion is consistent with both the 1890 Christchurch newspaper description and the 1872 dating of the preparatory painting. Issued on 8 December 1871 and signed by fellow fisherman Klaas Kaars, aged 45, the document gives no cause of death but confirms that Cornelis Kaars died two days earlier at 9.30pm at house number 76 in the Kerkbuurt, the church neighbourhood of Marken. It also records that he was the son of Cornelis Kaars, fisherman, and Sijtje Nooitgedagt, both deceased.

Schild’s research further revealed that tragedy had already marked Kaars’s life: his first wife, Wolmet Zeeman, died in 1866, and over the preceding years two of their three children had died in infancy. His second wife, Jannetje Kaars, had experienced widowhood before their marriage in 1867; her first husband, Jan Teerhuis, had drowned in a storm on the Zuiderzee four years earlier, leaving her with five children, one of whom died in 1870. Cornelis and Jannetje were also raising three more of their own; many children were caught up in this ongoing chain of loss. With the tragedy of 1871, as Jan Schild aptly notes, “It is hard to imagine how much grief Jannetje Kaars had to go through.” And more was to come.

The widow, walking directly behind the coffin and supported on either side, was heavily pregnant at the time of her husband’s funeral. Eight days later she gave birth to their son, Jan, who survived for less than a month. After Cornelis’s death, she was responsible for seven surviving children between the ages of two and seventeen. Knowledge of this surely fell within van der Velden’s close acquaintance with the community, giving impetus to a work essentially about grief, loss and burden-sharing. The artist entered this society as an empathetic observer and guest.

Van der Velden was an extraordinarily attentive artist, and the many preparatory sketches and figure studies connected with the painting, including a surviving large drawing of one of the younger women supporting the widow, reveal it as the result of prolonged observation and development of his theme. Burial in the Winter on the Island of Marken was clearly shaped by close involvement with a vulnerable community in which hardship, grief and mutual care were inseparable from everyday life. That may partly explain why it has continued to resonate with Ōtautahi Christchurch and, more recently, Marken audiences.