Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch was a Dutch painter of the Hague School. He is noted especially for his watercolours.
Background
Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch was born on June 19, 1824 in The Hague, Netherlands. The second son of Johannes Weissenbruch and Johanna Hendrika Zaag.
He came from an artistic family. His father Johannes, a chef and restaurateur, painted in his free time and collected art on a small scale. Among Johannes' collection were works by Andreas Schelfhout and Bartholomeus van Hove. Johan's cousin Jan (1822-1880) was a well-known painter of townscapes. Another cousin Frederik Hendrik (1828-1887) was a lithographer, while his younger brother Frederik Johan, his uncle Daniel and his nephew Isaac (1826-1912) were all engravers.
Education
At the age of 16, Weissenbruch received drawing lessons from Johannes Low. In 1843, he took evening classes taught by Bartholomeus van Hove at the Hague Academy of Art.
Career
At the beginning of his career, 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 staged his first exhibition in 1847. In 1849, the Teylers Museum in Haarlem acquired one of his panoramic landscapes. However, that early success did not last very long. In spite of the prestige he had earned among his colleagues, he did not achieve public acknowledgement until the late 1880s. During this intermediate period, Weissenbruch went from being a characteristic painter of Dutch Romanticism to one of the best representatives of the Hague School. As a result, he produced such watercolor landscapes as "Windy day", "Dune", and "Dutch polder landscape" among others.
In 1900, at the age of seventy, he took a trip to Barbizon where he painted his famous forest scene "Forest View near Barbizon".
Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch died on March 24, 1903 in The Hague, Netherlands.
Views
Quotations:
"The sky in a painting, that is what is most important! Sky and light are the great magicians. The sky determines what the painting is. Painters can never pay too much attention to the sky. We live from light and sunshine, and go with or palette through the dry periods."
Personality
Weissenbruch enjoyed working outdoors in the countryside.