Ode to Marie Hubrecht | 'So the youngest of the family is finally coming too!'

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Dear Miss Hubrecht,

You do not know me, yet I take the liberty of writing you this letter. For I am planning to write a book about you. On September 15, 2026, it will be one hundred years since you were photographed for the Algemeen Handelsblad at the opening of the building for the Municipal Lyceum for Girls in Amsterdam. You are standing next to the alderman for Education, Mr. Ed. Polak, at the painting you made there. And I know that painting very well, because I worked from 1999 to 2018 in this building, which now houses the Joke Smit College, and I walked past the canvases in the hall every day.

We didn't know anything about these canvases that have the origin of the earth as their subject, except that they were made by one Marie Hubrecht. They actually hung there a bit neglected, and when we went to renovate the building in 2014, we wondered what to do with the canvases. They were dark canvases, also poorly exposed, with lots of cracks and holes. When we decided to have them restored, I became concerned with you and your work.

Well, by now I know a lot more, because I soon found myself in the archives in Leiden where your family occupies 21.5 meters on the archival shelves! The family has illustrious members, such as your father, who was attorney general at the Ministry of the Interior, your brother Ambrose, the famous professor of zoology who still corresponded with Darwin, and of course your sister Bramine who was called the “professor painter” because of her many portraits of professors. I got to know yourself through the many hundreds of letters, the sketchbooks and newspaper clippings. I had secretly hoped for diaries as well, but alas, they are not here. 

You struggled to find a fulfillment in life. Never in your correspondence was there a desire for marriage. Nor was there any insistence on it from the family. When you are around forty you meet a Norwegian in Paris, who becomes your life companion. She dies after a few years, but then you meet Valentine Dannevig in Oslo in 1913 and you stay together until the end of your life. Always at a distance, however, because your house in Doorn remains the base to which you always return. Valentine also comes there regularly. As a second cousin writes about you years later, “Tuttie's (your pet name among family and friends) life was what we would now call feminist in tone and she had many girlfriends.” Beyond the relationships in the personal sphere, you were really part of the first feminist wave and lectured on women's suffrage

You were less talented than Bramine, and you certainly did not have a scientific career, because your schooling was full of gaps. But you were very ambitious - you spoke six languages and studied Hungarian and Latin - and your father warned you: omnibus aliquid, de toto nihil (a little of everything, nothing at all). From home you were certainly instructed to contribute to society. You traveled and saw a great deal and finally managed to merge two of your interests, teaching and painting, into what would become your life's work. 

At almost 60 years of age, you find this mission: to make paintings for the growing youth with education and artistic formation as the goal. In 1924, when you create paintings about the flora and fauna of the whole world for your friend Valantine's school in Oslo, with the most important piece being a painting Paradise with Adam and Eve for the room of the youngest children, they react wildly excited when they find your paintings in their classroom instead of the boring white walls.

You get the hang of it and you want to decorate more classrooms, now for the older children and with more scholarly content. But Valentine no longer gives you a free hand and you look for another place to realize your ideas. You find it in Amsterdam, where the first public lyceum for girls is being built. Within weeks of the first conversation with Alderman Polak, you receive word that the commission is yours. You make the canvases in Doorn, where you have several studios at your disposal, and in Taormina because there you can work in peace and quiet.

And there you are, in April 1925, at the set-up of the Cambrian, the first canvas of the series that covers the time periods from prehistoric times to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Probably the picture below was taken in Taormina because on April 4 you write to Valentine there, “Today I have stretched both canvases of the Cambrian and the Silurian. They are quite large, one almost four square meters and the other six, but still they are the smallest of all”

In the year that follows, you work hard at it. You have the studio in the barn enlarged for the largest work, Jurassic and Cretaceous, and in the summer of 1926 friends keep coming to your house in Doorn to help you get everything ready for the opening. That doesn't quite succeed, because you don't make the Perm and Trias canvases until the fall, but at the opening in September 1926, four canvases are ready, of which the Jurassic/Cretaceous is of course the most striking, with the large long-necked figures.
 

My dear Miss Hubrecht, I show you at the bottom of the letter a few photos of how your paintings look now, beautifully lit with modern museum lights, and conclude with a quote from a paleontologist of today, Jelle Reumer, who devoted a nice article to your work in Trouw in 2017 at the opening of the restored canvases: “There are ammonites and armored fish swimming by, a trilobite scrabbling across the seabed, a dinosaur walking sopping through a primeval swamp. [...] It also shows the state of paleontological knowledge from the interwar period. This has of course improved enormously since then, but that does not diminish the beauty of the canvases. Hat Cambrian, 542 to 488 million years ago, shows the early Earth, on land still barren; the sun rises with a halo while geysers boom high. In the sea, jellyfish , trilobites, sea lilies and a modern red starfish live. In the Silurian, 444 to 416 million years ago , we see the first fishes: a jawless armored fish looks at the viewer from the sea floor with tiny beady eyes while on land volcanoes erupt.”

I know that you were once in contact with Professor Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York who described your work as absolutely unique and even considered inviting you to come there to do something similar, but it never came to pass. You spent those years creating a book entitled Vanished Worlds that was supposed to become a standard work for prehistoric times in education. Unfortunately, due to crisis time and war afterwards, your work itself almost became a vanished world. I hope with my book in 2026 to ensure that you are not forgotten! In any case, there is already a website www.wandschilderingenjokesmitcollege.nl. You can be proud of what you have achieved and you can rightly say, as you once wrote to your brother, “So the youngest of the family is finally getting there too!

With warmest regards,

Dicky van der Zalm

Former rector and teacher of drawing/art appreciation at Joke Smit College