Willem Witsen

Willem Witsen was born in 1860 into one of Amsterdam's old ruling families, wealth that let him paint exactly as he pleased and quietly support friends who could not. He trained at the city's Rijksacademie and founded the Dutch Etching Club, but his real circle was the Tachtigers, the Movement of Eighty, young writers and artists who in the 1880s declared that art existed for its own sake and shook up Dutch cultural life.

A stay in London around 1890 introduced him to the work of the American painter Whistler, and it changed him. He came home and began painting Amsterdam in low, muted tones, quiet canals and quays under grey light, the city emptied of bustle and held very still. He was also a serious photographer, and his portraits of the writers and artists around him, among them the French poet Paul Verlaine on a visit, are some of the closest records we have of that generation's faces. His own house on the Oosterpark became a gathering place for that circle.