Matthijs Maris 1839-1917

Born in The Hague on 17 August 1839, Matthijs Maris was one of the three celebrated Maris brothers, alongside Jacob and Willem, who rank among the leading figures of nineteenth-century Dutch painting.

He began his training under Isaac Cornelis Elink Sterk in 1851 and subsequently attended the Drawing Academy in The Hague from 1852 to 1855. With the support of a scholarship awarded by Queen Sophie of the Netherlands, he continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he worked under Nicaise de Keyser.

Together with his brother Jacob, Maris later stayed in Oosterbeek, an important centre of Dutch Naturalist landscape painting. In 1860, he travelled along the Rhine and through Switzerland and France, during which time his discovery of the German Romanticism of Moritz von Schwind and Wilhelm von Kaulbach left a lasting impression on his imagination.

After settling in Paris in 1869, he lived through the siege of the capital during the Franco-Prussian War and volunteered to serve in the National Guard, an experience that further deepened his melancholy and solitary temperament. Following Jacob’s departure in 1871, Maris endured years of severe poverty, reluctantly producing works for the art market that he himself described as potboilers.

His fierce independence and refusal to compromise earned him the admiration of his fellow artists. Vincent van Gogh, who visited him in Montmartre to seek his advice, regarded Maris as one of the greatest painters of his time.

At the invitation of the Scottish art dealer Daniel Cottier, Maris moved to London in 1877. There, he initially designed cartoons for stained glass, ceramics and decorative objects before devoting himself to an increasingly introspective and visionary form of painting.

Influenced by English Pre-Raphaelitism, he gradually abandoned the Naturalism of the Hague School and developed a poetic visual language of ethereal female figures and fairytale landscapes. His compositions are suffused with misty greys, browns and whites, achieved through subtle glazes and an exceptionally delicate dry-painting technique.

Living in increasing isolation and supported until the end of his life by the art dealer E. J. van Wisselingh, Maris produced relatively few works. These nevertheless possess an extraordinary artistic intensity that established him as one of the great forerunners of European Symbolism.