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The artistic talent of the impressionist Cor Noltee, born in The Hague, became visible at an early age. He attended the academy in The Hague, where he was taught by Willem de Zwart, among others. His main teacher and personal mentor would be Henk van Leeuwen, whose influence is clearly visible in Noltee's work. He was fickle and quickly felt out of place somewhere and liked to go to other places that interested him more. He moved frequently with his family and this also had an effect on the painter's creativity.
He preferred painting landscapes and city and river views in a robust, confident style. From The Hague, Noltee regularly traveled around the country as a painter, but he did not paint much in The Hague itself. In Rotterdam – perhaps following Breitner – he was particularly fascinated by the tug carts with figures on Rotterdam's Maaskaden. For that reason Noltee was called the 'Dordtse Breitner'. In 1933, Noltee and his family spent six months in Mierlo in Brabant, where he came into contact with the painting community around Heeze. He also worked in South Limburg, Amsterdam, Paris and Bruges. Noltee had already built up a reputation and was a member of the Dordrecht Teekengenootschap Pictura.
From 1937 onwards, Noltee settled permanently in Dordrecht, where he seemed to be making a new start with his work. He is fascinated by the picturesque city with its watery environment. In Dordrecht there was a group of impressionists who were captivated by the atmospheric condition and character of the city. Noltee was no longer interested in painting tug carts, he focused on depicting the atmosphere, the decay, the construction activities of the city of Dordrecht and the water landscape in the area. His colour becomes dreamier and grayer and his work 'suggests space and atmosphere'. Noltee became the painter par excellence of the Dordrecht landscape and the Biesbosch. Despite the fact that he presented himself outwardly as an opponent of innovations in art, around the 1960s he increasingly felt the need to innovate and break away from impressionism. In the years that followed he 'secluded himself' in the Biesbosch, where he developed his own expressionism. His previously colourful and sunny palette turned into a palette of grays and browns.
In 1941, Noltee received his first major exhibition in Pictura Dordrecht. The titles of the more than 70 works that hang there express his feelings of melancholy. 'Showery weather, drizzling rain, thaw, demolition, disappearing Dordt, autumn, gray day, windy day, etc.' As a non-Dorden resident, Noltee found a natural connection with the painters of the Dordt School. During the remainder of the war years, Noltee only exhibited at Pictura's members exhibitions
In his introduction to his book 'Cor Noltee, broadly seen', Bert Jintes quotes the reviewer Anthony Bosman who characterized Noltee as follows in an article from 1953: 'Noltee was a painter as one imagined a painter to be: a bohemian, who stood outside the bourgeois society, a man with allure, who expressed his opinion and lived his life with indifference to tongues and the consequences.
