Het raadsel van de Nederlandse Romantiek

In the Netherlands, the use of Romanticism as a general designation for the first half of the nineteenth century presents a specific problem. The Dutch Romantics had explicit ideas about internationalism, and they rejected it in unambiguous terms. The painter Cornelis Kruseman (1797-1857) and the poet David Jacob van Lennep (1774-1853) are taken as examples of this 'riddle of Dutch Romanticism'. Like all Romanticisms, Dutch Romanticism wanted to be a national movement. But as soon as it tried to be national, it had to deny most of the elements that characterized it as Romanticism.