Willem Roelofs
Encyclopedia
Hague School
The Hague School is the name given to a group of artists who lived and worked in The Hague between 1860 and 1890. Their work was heavily influenced by the realist painters of the French Barbizon school. The painters of the Hague school generally made use of relatively sombre colours, which is why...
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Willem Roelofs was born in Amsterdam on 10 March 1822. When he was a young man his family moved to Utrecht, where his father became an enlisted member of the Painters- and Draughtsman Society in Utrecht
Utrecht (city)
Utrecht city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 312,634 on 1 Jan 2011.Utrecht's ancient city centre features...
. In June 1839, they moved to The Hague
The Hague
The Hague is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants , it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam...
so that the young Willem could study in the Academy for Visual Arts in that city and train in the atelier of H. van Sande-Bakhuyzen. In 1847, he was involved in the establishment of the artists society “The Hague Pulchri Studio”. In 1847, he left The Hague rather suddenly and went to live in Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
; he remained there until 1887. From 1866 up to 1869, he trained Hendrik Willem Mesdag
Hendrik Willem Mesdag
Hendrik Willem Mesdag was a Dutch marine painter.He was born in Groningen, the son of the banker Klaas Mesdag and his wife Johanna Wilhelmina van Giffen. Mesdag was encouraged by his father, an amateur painter, to study art...
, who would develop into one of the masters of The Hague school. His other students were Paul Gabriël
Paul Gabriël
Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël was a painter, draftsman, watercolorist, and etcher who belonged to the Hague School....
, French Smissaert, Willem the Famars Testas and Alexander Mollinger. In 1851, he was captivated by Barbizon
Barbizon school
The Barbizon school of painters were part of a movement towards realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870...
in the Fontainebleau
Fontainebleau
Fontainebleau is a commune in the metropolitan area of Paris, France. It is located south-southeast of the centre of Paris. Fontainebleau is a sub-prefecture of the Seine-et-Marne department, and it is the seat of the arrondissement of Fontainebleau...
area of France. He returned there twice, in 1852 and 1855. He helped with the foundation of the Societé Belge Aquarellistes in Brussels in 1856.
His landscapes, especially the early ones with their dominating cloudy skies, demure bodies of water and populated with cattle, are typical for the School of Barbizon.
He unmistakably provided the spiritual impulse for the painters of nature that would later dominate The Hague school. Beside painting, he also occupied himself with entomology
Entomology
Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of arthropodology...
, where he specialised in beetle
Beetle
Coleoptera is an order of insects commonly called beetles. The word "coleoptera" is from the Greek , koleos, "sheath"; and , pteron, "wing", thus "sheathed wing". Coleoptera contains more species than any other order, constituting almost 25% of all known life-forms...
s. He published about them in scientific illustrated magazines and identified them for the museum of natural history in Leiden (the current Naturalis
Naturalis
Naturalis is the national natural history museum of the Netherlands, based in Leiden. It originated from the merger of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie and the Rijksmuseum van Geologie en Mineralogie in 1984. In 1986 it was decided that the museum had to become a public museum and a new...
). In 1855, he founded the Belgian association for entomology, of which he became president in 1878. His extensive collection of Curculionidae
Curculionidae
Curculionidae is the family of the "true" weevils . It was formerly recognized in 1998 as the largest of any animal family, with over 40,000 species described worldwide at that time...
became the basis of the entomological collection of beetles in the Natuurhistorisch Museum in Brussels.
On his advice, Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...
matriculated in autumn 1880 in Brussels.