Jacob Maris
1837–1899 · Kingdom of the Netherlands · Hague School
The story
Stand in front of a Jacob Maris and most of the canvas is sky. Grey, moving, piled with cloud over a low horizon of canals, windmills and wet dunes near The Hague, where he was born in 1837. He trained first as a painter of figures and interiors, and spent the years from 1865 to 1871 in Paris, coming home to the Netherlands only when the Franco-Prussian War broke out.
Back home he turned away from figures for good and gave himself to the flat coastal landscape. With his brothers Willem and Matthijs he became one of the central names of the Hague School, the circle of Dutch painters who worked in muted greys and soft weather in the last decades of the 19th century. A young Vincent van Gogh, still finding his way, spoke with real admiration of Maris's brushwork and his handling of light.
He died in 1899 in Karlsbad, the Bohemian spa town, at 61. His canal views and beach scenes hang today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the city where he first learned to paint.
