George Hendrik Breitner

In the winter of 1882, two young painters walked the poorest streets of The Hague together, sketchbooks in hand, looking for servant girls, labourers and ordinary passers-by to draw. One was Vincent van Gogh. The other was George Hendrik Breitner, and though the two never much cared for each other's work, both were after the same thing, the unposed life of the modern city.

Breitner found his real subject when he moved to Amsterdam in 1886. He painted the city as it actually looked in rain and grey light, its canals, building sites, horse-drawn trams and working people, in a loose, dark, atmospheric manner that made him the leading Amsterdam Impressionist. He is also known for a series of a young model wrapped in a Japanese kimono, then the height of fashion.

What almost no one knew in his lifetime was that he worked with a camera. Breitner took thousands of photographs of Amsterdam streets as raw material for his paintings, catching movement and weather before he turned to the canvas. That vast body of photographs stayed private and was only rediscovered decades after his death in 1923.