Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch

His father Johannes, a chef and restaurateur, painted in his free time and collected art on a small scale.

During the day Weissenbruch worked in Van Hove's studio, together with Johannes Bosboom and Salomon Verveer, helping to make pieces of scenery for the Royal Theatre.

Weissenbruch's early work showed the strong influence of the romantic painter Andreas Schelfhout.

His magnificent, cloudy skies show his admiration for the seventeenth-century artist Jacob van Ruisdael, whose work he saw at an early age in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

In 1849, two years after Weissenbruch staged his first exhibition, the Teylers Museum in Haarlem acquired one of his panoramic landscapes.

During this intermediate period, Weissenbruch went from being a characteristic painter of Dutch Romanticism to one of the best representatives of the Hague School.

His lively dune landscapes led to a series of atmospheric impressions of the Dutch polders, in which the artist paid special attention to his representation of the cloudy skies with its light and shadows and the dynamics of the permante winds.

The Canadian Edward B. Greenshields published The Subjective View of Landscape Painting, with Special Reference to J.H.

Weissenbruch from Works of Him in Canada in 1904, followed by the remarkable Landscape Painting and Modern Dutch Artists, published in New York in 1906.

The journey to Barbizon must have been a kind of pilgrimage for him, since it was in this area that French painters, in around 1830, had first begun to paint in the open air on a large scale.