Willem Roelofs

Willem Roelofs kept two careers going at once, and took both seriously. He was a landscape painter, one of the men who prepared the ground for the Hague School, the group of moody, grey-skied Dutch painters of the later 19th century. He was also a working entomologist who specialised in beetles.

Born in Rotterdam in 1822, Roelofs settled for years in Brussels, close to the Barbizon painters of France who worked outdoors from the real countryside rather than from the studio. His own canvases carry that stamp: wide wet Dutch polders, cattle by still water, and above them the huge shifting clouds he loved to paint. In 1847 he helped found Pulchri Studio in The Hague, which became the beating heart of the Hague School.

His pupils included Hendrik Willem Mesdag, who went on to become one of that school's masters. Meanwhile Roelofs was building beetle collections and scientific contacts, and in 1855 he founded the Belgian entomological society in Brussels, later serving as its president. Beetles he was the first to describe still carry his name in the scientific record.