Modelled and fired. The sculpture is hollow, with three air holes discernible on the reverse.

The woman’s right arm has been reattached with glue. The dog’s front leg has broken off; the hind leg has been restored with plaster.

…; from the dealer Antiekgroothandel Strydhagen (Arnold Wegh), Bemmel, €5,500, to the museum, through the mediation of Diederik van Lawick van Pabst, with the support of the Rijksmuseum Fonds, 2003

Object number: BK-2003-23

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Rijksmuseum Fonds

A young fisher’s wife carries her baby on her arm, with two small puppies sleeping in the fold of her upraised apron. The dogs’ mother can be seen on the woman’s left, furtively watching her young offspring. Two fish wrapped in a carrying cloth dangle from the woman’s right hand; a fishing net hangs over her left shoulder. The terracotta statue is a rare example of a genre scene in Dutch sculpture. On one hand, the statue’s maker, Frans Stracké (1820-1898), appears to have been inspired by the painters of his day – Jozef Israëls, Bernardus Blommers and others – who greatly romanticized the toilsome existence of a fisherman. At the same time, the sculptor expands on the Mediterranean fisher boy, a very popular theme in French nineteenth-century Romantic sculpture. After Rude first presented his Pêcheur Napolitain (Neapolitan Fisher Boy) at the Salon of 1831, the theme was expounded on by various sculptors, including Duret, Fassin and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.¹¹P.K. van Daalen, Nederlandse beeldhouwers in de negentiende eeuw, The Hague 1957, p. 61; P. Fusco and H.W. Janson, The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from Noth-American Collections, exh. cat. Los Angeles (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)/Minneapolis (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)/Detroit (Detriot Institute of Arts)/Indianapolis (Indianapolis Museum of Art) 1980-81, nos. 29, 44; M. Boomkamp, ‘Sleeping Beauty: A Marble Briar Rose by Frans Stracké, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 67 (2019), pp. 142-61, esp. p. 156. Stracké’s statue may very well have been based on Carpeaux’s Frère et soeur (Brother and Sister) from 1871, which also shows a peasant girl holding a child on her arm – her crying baby brother – with a dog at her feet. This sculpture was meant to express the misery wrought by the Franco-Prussian war, given that the patinated plaster from the sculptor’s bequest in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Valenciennes bears the inscription: Après la guerre 1870-1871 (‘After the War’).²²Musée des Beaux-Arts of Valenciennes, inv. no. Val. 1927-71, see A. Hardy and A. Braunwald, Catalogue des peintures et sculptures de Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux à Valenciennes, coll. cat. Valenciennes (Musée des Beaux-Arts), 1978, no. 198 and pl. 52. Measuring 68 cm high, the figure was serially produced in terracotta.

Frans Stracké was born in a German sculptor’s family. His father, the sculptor Ignatius Stracké was a pupil of Christian Daniel Rauch in Berlin. In 1842, Stracké Senior moved with his family to Arnhem, where Frans worked in his father’s studio, which he eventually took over. In 1868, Frans moved to Amsterdam to succeed Louis Royer as a sculpture teacher at the Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten. Stracké can be considered the most important (if not the only) representative of the fisher’s genre in Dutch sculpture as demonstrated by the Two Mothers, but also comparable works such as the marble Neapolitan Fisher Boy from 1869, now preserved at the Gemeentemuseum in Arnhem and the first of its kind in the sculptor’s oeuvre.³³M. Boomkamp, ‘Sleeping Beauty: A Marble Briar Rose by Frans Stracké, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 67 (2019), pp. 142-61, fig. 20. The Two Mothers can be seen as an extension of this theme. Stracké is certain to have developed the model for this work before 1883, as a marble version now in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum dates from that year (likewise 90 cm in height).⁴⁴Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, inv. no. BA 581. The present terracotta demonstrates Stracké’s modelling qualities and his great sense of textural expression, more so than the marble. The sculptor also made a variant in terracotta, in which the same young fisher’s wife appears with a toddler and a dog walking alongside her at her feet.⁵⁵Sale Rotterdam (Vendu Notarishuis), 15 November 2012, no. 5041, acquired by the dealer Theo Daatselaar Antiquairs BV, Zaltbommel (on view at Tefaf Maastricht 2013). Signed on the base F. Stracké. Present whereabouts unknown. Photo in Object File, RMA. In this slightly smaller version (h. 68 cm), the young woman bends over slightly and looks to the side, thus introducing a greater dynamic than that of the terracotta in the Rijksmuseum.

In his 1957 dissertation on nineteenth-century Dutch sculpture, Van Daalen’s estimation of Stracké’s genre scenes was rather negative: ‘The marble salon statues of Sara in the Rijksmuseum, Undine in the Oudheidkamer in Baarn, The Two Mothers (1888) in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam [...] reflect the dubious side of this more technically adept than artistically mature talent.’⁶⁶P.K. van Daalen, Nederlandse beeldhouwers in de negentiende eeuw, The Hague 1957, p. 62. The date assigned to the marble in the Stedelijk Museum – 1888 – appears to be a misprint or misreading made by Van Daalen. Highly coloured by the time in which it was written, this assessment nevertheless overlooks the originality of Stracké’s genre scenes, which were unique in Dutch sculpture.

Frits Scholten, 2026

Jaarverslag Het Rijksmuseum Fonds 2003 (cover ill.); G. van der Ham et al., Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum 1800-1900, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2009, p. 166; Boomkamp in J. Reynaerts (ed.), 1800-1900, coll. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2017, pp. 198-99, 270 (no. 69); M. Boomkamp, ‘Sleeping Beauty: A Marble Briar Rose by Frans Stracké, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 67 (2019), pp. 142-61, 154 and fig. 17

F. Scholten, 2026, 'Frans Stracké, Two Mothers, Baarn, 1893', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20020401