Hendrik Willem Mesdag

Hendrik Willem Mesdag came to painting late, and from an unlikely place: a bank. He was a Groningen banker's son and worked in the family firm, and only after he and his wife Sina inherited a fortune did he give it up, at 35, to move to The Hague and paint the North Sea.

That was 1868, and within two years he had won a gold medal at the Paris Salon for a canvas of breakers. He became a leading figure of the Hague School, the Dutch painters of grey skies, wet sand and fishing boats at Scheveningen, the beach village just outside the city.

His largest work is not a canvas you hang. In 1880 a Belgian company hired him to paint a panorama, a single continuous picture about 14 metres high and 120 around, wrapped in a full circle so that a viewer standing in the middle seems to be on a dune looking out over Scheveningen's beach and sea. He painted it in months with Sina and a team of assistants. When the company went bankrupt in 1886 he bought the painting himself and covered its running losses out of his own pocket for years. It still turns in its purpose-built rotunda in The Hague, the oldest panorama of its kind standing where it was first shown.