Barend Cornelis Koekkoek

By the 1840s a Dutch landscape painter working just across the German border was selling his woods and river valleys to the King of Prussia, the King of the Netherlands, and the Russian tsar. His name was Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, and in his own lifetime critics called him the Prince of Landscape Painting.

He came from a whole dynasty of painters, his father a painter of ships, but he gave himself to the land: hilly, wooded country, usually cut by a river winding toward a bright horizon, with a storm gathering or the sun sitting low. He settled in the small town of Cleves, just inside Germany, and built a house grand enough to hold a drawing academy, training students who carried his manner across the region.

Koekkoek set down his ideas in 1841 in a book of advice for landscape painters, and died in Cleves in 1862. The house he built there, with its painted ceilings and top-lit studio, is now a museum given over entirely to his work.