Johannes Josephus Aarts

Johannes Josephus Aarts spent his life cutting and biting images into metal and wood rather than chasing colour on canvas. Born in The Hague in 1871, he trained at its Royal Academy of Art and, barely into his twenties, began teaching graphic art there in 1893.

For his first years the subjects came from the land and the labour around him: farmhands, dyke workers, the people who kept the low country from flooding. He worked mainly in engraving, the slow craft of scoring lines directly into a copper plate, before taking up etching and lithography as well. Later his cast widened to tramps, beggars and the disabled, the people polite society preferred not to see.

In 1911 he left The Hague for Amsterdam to become professor at the Royal Academy there, succeeding the printmaker Pieter Dupont. Through the 1920s his work turned strange and dark, filling with apocalyptic, visionary scenes far from the working fields where he had begun. He also wrote about art for the Hague newspaper Het Vaderland, and kept teaching until his death in 1934.