August Allebé

If you know the Amsterdam painters of the 1880s and 1890s, George Hendrik Breitner with his rainy city streets, Isaac Israels, Willem Witsen, then you already know August Allebe, even if you have never seen one of his own pictures. He was the teacher behind them.

Allebe was born in Amsterdam in 1838 and first made his name as a painter of quiet, finely finished genre scenes and portraits. His lasting mark, though, came from teaching. In 1870 he began teaching at the Rijksakademie, the state art academy in Amsterdam, and from 1880 he ran it as director. Generations of students passed through his studio. The records list well over a hundred, and many kept writing to him and returning for his advice long after they had left.

What he encouraged was a looser, more modern way of seeing, and the movement that grew up around his pupils became known as Amsterdam Impressionism, or simply the School of Allebe. It was the city's answer to the older, softer Hague School painters who worked out in the dunes and meadows. Allebe himself painted less and less as the teaching took over. He died in Amsterdam in 1927, at 89, and was buried at Zorgvlied, the cemetery just south of the city where much of its art world came to rest.