Scheveningen, The Hague (painting) by Bert Hooijer

About "Scheveningen, The Hague (painting)"

by Bert Hooijer

About the artwork

Historiography does not provide a definitive answer as to the age of Scheveningen. Naming research would have shown, as with other Dutch places ending in the suffix '-ingen', that its origins lie in the 10th or 11th century. The name in question appears for the first time in a grave register drawn up in part around 1284. It refers to an area described as a 'terra de Sceveninghe' (land of Scheveningen). It has been claimed that a family with the name Scheven - which owned a castle near Haarlem and settled in the area of Leiderdorp in the 14th century - had something to do with the village or with the name Scheveningen, but there is no evidence for this. Sometimes mentioned, but never substantiated, foreign influences are not demonstrable either. History suggests that Scheveningen's origins must have been purely Dutch. Within the 'terra de Sceveninghe' mentioned above, there was in all likelihood an older residential nucleus; one can think of an agricultural community, a hamlet, located a few kilometres further inland from the coast. Knowledge about that time is rather limited; however, the social geographer Dr J.K. de Cock has written something about this in an article entitled Scheveningen-Binnen and Scheveningen aan Zee, which can serve as substantiation. De Cock also returns to this older 'Sceveninghe' in a contribution in the reference work De bodem van 's-Gravenhage by E.F.J. de Mulder. In his view, the old hamlet - thought to date from the 12th or 13th century - disappeared under the sand as a result of prolonged sand drifts.