Maria Bilders-van Bosse

In 1880 Marie van Bosse married her teacher, the landscape painter Johannes Warnardus Bilders. She was 43 and he was nearly 70. The witnesses were two of the best-known painters in the country, Johannes Bosboom, a painter of church interiors, and Hendrik Willem Mesdag, the marine painter. The bride was almost the same age as her husband's son Gerard, a gifted landscape painter who had died in 1865 at 26.

She had decided at 18 to become a painter, an unusual choice for a woman of her time. Her father, Pieter Philip van Bosse, was a lawyer who served several terms as Dutch minister of finance. She trained with the landscape painter Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen, took advice from Bosboom, and from 1875 had lessons with Bilders. After the wedding the couple settled in Oosterbeek, a village in the woods near Arnhem, and she painted the forests of Gelderland and the river floodplains around it.

Her pictures sold well, partly because she kept her prices low, and some fellow painters in The Hague protested that she was undercutting them. She won a bronze medal at the Paris World's Fair of 1889. After her husband died in 1890 she moved back to The Hague. She died in 1900 at the spa town of Wiesbaden in Germany, aged 63, and was buried beside him in Oosterbeek.