Eduard Karsen

Eduard Karsen grew up inside painting. His father, Kaspar Karsen, was a successful Romantic landscape painter, and Eduard trained for years at his side before enrolling at the Rijksakademie, the art academy in Amsterdam. There he fell in with a remarkable circle of young artists and writers, among them Jan Toorop, Willem Witsen and Jan Veth, who in 1880 helped found the artists' society Sint Lucas and moved in the same world as the Tachtigers, the writers of the Eighties who were remaking Dutch literature at that moment.

What Karsen drew out of all this was quiet and a little melancholy. He painted old Amsterdam and small Dutch villages, often an empty street or a lone farmhouse with a single figure in it, at the hour when the light is failing. He worked slowly, from memory and mood as much as from the motif, while the real city around him was being torn up and rebuilt by industry. He lived his whole life in Amsterdam and died there in 1941, at 81.