Design and Art Australia Online

painter and art teacher, was born in The Hague, Netherlands. Two portraits by a Dutch lithographer of this name are known, General G.C. van Geen, Commander-in-Chief at the Belgian Insurrection 1830 and Prince Albert of Prussia (c.1830). After working in Leyden, Utrecht, and possibly England, van den Houten migrated to Victoria with his large family in 1853, aged fifty-two. He had married twice. He and his first wife had five children and there were eight from the second marriage. Two children died in infancy, the rest accompanied their parents to Australia. Van den Houten worked on the goldfields with little success until 1855 then the Board of Education appointed him a teacher of elementary drawing at suburban schools in Melbourne on an annual salary of £300. He later taught at Scotch College, Melbourne; Gladstone Eyre and C. Douglas Richardson were among his pupils. He was naturalised on 26 March 1857.

Scene in Lincolnshire , his first Victorian exhibit, was shown with the Fine Arts Society in August 1853. The next year 'van den Honten’ showed Virgin and Child , a painting 'on glass, in a new style’, at the Melbourne Exhibition. In March 1861 he gave an interview to the Prahran Advertiser (reprinted Bendigo Advertiser 8 March 1861) about his new painting on the Burke and Wills expedition, The Exploring Party Coming Upon an Encampment of Natives , and the picture was exhibited at the 'Melbourne Ladies Benevolent Society Exhibition of Art Treasures’ in May. A large oil painting on this topic auctioned at Sotheby’s in November 1998 (lot 91, purchased NLA) is dated 1878, but the cataloguer (C. Bruce) convincingly argued that it is actually the 1861 painting, possibly reworked the year before he died in an unsuccessful attempt to find a buyer. His executors were still trying to sell his Burke and Wills paintings 27 years after he died (NGV minute book, 29 March 1906: cited Bonyhady).

His oil paintings shown in the 1861 Victorian Exhibition inspired some sarcasm from the Examiner 's reviewer ( James Neild ), who wrote:

Mr Vanden Houten’s style, though peculiar, and possibly original, is not on that account commendable. His pictures, as was shrewdly remarked by a gentleman looking at his Landscape near the Fern-Tree Gully , have very much the appearance of Berlin wool work… You see a cluster of trees but you are by no means clear if they are growing out of the earth, or are being let down from the heavens.

As for Result of a Day’s Sport , 'it is as deficient in composition as a chess-board, which indeed it somewhat resembles in its geometrical alternation of dark and light’.

By 1866 'Henry Houten’ was listed in the Melbourne Directory as a drawing master of Prahran. The four oil paintings he showed at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, from Gardiner Street, South Yarra, included Burke, Wills and King at Cooper’s Creek , Scene in the Dandenong Ranges and Waterfall at Riddell’s Creek ; also a watercolour, Rose of Denmark (probably a portrait of the Princess of Wales). His 152 × 91 cm transparency in honour of the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to Melbourne in November 1867 was painted on glass at George Carnaby’s premises in Collins Street, presumably on the shop windows, and depicted an anchor surmounted by a crown and flanked by oak leaves. In 1869 van den Houten had four oil landscapes in the Melbourne Public Library Exhibition, three oils (including Sportsman’s Return ) at the Ballarat Mechanics Institute, and two oils and two watercolours at the Geelong Mechanics Institute. Titles included Mitchell’s Falls, Sunset , Landscape with Falls and The Hanging Rock, Victoria . The Disappointment of Burke and Wills was also shown at Bendigo in that year.

Like other Melbourne artists, van den Houten applied for the position of Director of the National Gallery Schools in 1870 ( von Gu érard was appointed). That year he was made a founding councillor of the Victorian Academy of Arts and exhibited ten oils in its inaugural exhibition. According to the Argus , they were 'forcibly painted’ and marked by 'honest solid work… but he appears to us somewhat too fond of impasto '. When shown with the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1873, Winter Storm at Yering and Sunset at Mount Macedon (both oils) were admired for their atmospheric effects ('a bleak wind’ and 'a ruddy glow of parting sunshine’ respectively). Photographs of his bush paintings were issued to Victorian Art Union subscribers in 1873-5, while his view of Mount Macedon, drawn expressly to be photographed by Johnstone , O’Shannessy & Co. in 1875 as one of that year’s Art Union prizes, was judged excellent: 'a light, warm, and sketchy drawing of a road very sparsely timbered on either side, with the Mount Macedon range in the distance’.

Hanging Rocks at Woodend ('a capital interpretation’) and Sunset on the You Yangs Ranges ('a little gem’) were shown with the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1875, while an oil painting of Corio Bay was awarded a silver medal by the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1876. The Old Bridge at Eltham (Deutscher Fine Art 1980, Christies’ Melbourne 29 April 1997) and Batman’s First Meeting with Buckley and the Blacks in 1836 (1878, o/c, LT), among other works, were shown posthumously with the VAA in 1879, the latter being sent on to the Sydney International Exhibition with his On the Road to Wood’s Point .

Van den Houten regularly exhibited in Sydney as well as Melbourne. His many works in local and intercolonial exhibitions included five oil paintings at the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1873, sixteen in 1877, and two for sale (at £18 each) at the 1873 Agricultural Society of New South Wales Exhibition. When he showed five oil paintings non-competitively at the 1875 Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition held in preparation for the Philadelphia Centennial, including Melbourne in 1837 , he was tactlessly (but accurately) labelled in the introduction to the catalogue 'a prolific paysagiste ... whose performances are most unequal’. Melbourne in 1837 was exhibited posthumously at the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition. Van den Houten died on 17 February 1879 'after a long and painful illness’ and was buried in the St Kilda Cemetery. Louis Buvelot and William Ford were among the mourners at his funeral.

His widow also appears to have been an artist, painting subjects indistinguishable from those by her husband (some may have been copies). C. van den Houten was listed as an artist in 1872; C.A. van den Houten exhibited with the Victorian Academy in 1875 from the same address as H.L.; and an original watercolour by C.A., Melbourne from the Friendly Societies’ Grounds , was for sale at 3 guineas in the 1876 exhibition of the New South Wales Academy of Art. In 1886 Mrs van den Houten of 11 Henry Street, Windsor (Victoria) – H.L.'s final address {not according to McCulloch Artists of the Australian Goldrush , p.180, who says he died in his home in Oxford Street, St Kilda, citing Age 20 February 1879: studio?} – had three oil paintings in the London Colonial and Indian Exhibition: Scene at Macedon, 'In the Bush’ ; Scene at Fernshaw, 'Camping for the Night’ and Australian Bush Scene, Black Hills at Kyneton .

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989