Matthijs Maris

There were three painter brothers named Maris in nineteenth-century Holland, and each took a different road. Jacob painted town views, Willem painted sunlit meadows with cattle, and Matthijs, the middle one, painted things that were never quite there.

He began inside the Hague School, the group of Dutch painters known for grey skies and sober realism, then drifted away from it. Imagination mattered to him more than the visible world, and his canvases filled with vague contours, brides and children and half-seen buildings, all dissolved in a soft grey light that looks more like memory than observation. Buyers found them strange.

Matthijs left the Netherlands and never went back. He settled at last in London, living quietly and eccentrically, kept afloat by his art dealer Van Wisselingh, who bought his work and looked after him. He died there in 1917, the same year as his brother Jacob, still turning out the pale, half-dreamed figures he had painted for decades.