George Hendrik Breitnerartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsman • printmakerRotterdam 1857-1923 Amsterdam

Breitner was the painter of Amsterdam city life, 'life on the street', which he painted boldly and with a broad brush on canvas. He settled in the capital in 1886 and caused a stir with the astonishing freedoms he allowed himself as a painter. His oeuvre also includes figures, nudes and military subjects, fascinated as he was by horses and their riders. He also etched, but Breitner was especially a great impressionist in his watercolours.

George Hendrik Breitner, born in Rotterdam in 1857, worked in his father's grain business for a few years after school, but showed a talent for drawing at an early age. He started the Drawing Academy in The Hague in 1875 and the following year the Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, where he was expelled in 1880 because of his radical (brusque) behavior. In the period 1880-1881 he collaborated on the well-known Panorama Mesdag in The Hague. Breitner often sketched at the City Riding School in The Hague, and quickly built a name for himself with his horse studies. Mesdag was impressed and approached him to paint horses and also the artillery in his famous Panorama Mesdag in Scheveningen.

After moving from The Hague to Amsterdam in 1886, Breitner attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten for a year. He became a member of the artists' association Arti et Amicitiae and was included in the circle of artists and writers that had formed around the literary magazine De Nieuwe Gids. He is receiving increasing recognition and attention in the press. In 1886, the government purchased the large painting The Yellow Riders, which received very favorable reviews and can still be seen in the Rijksmuseum. Breitner's success also influences his style: he develops a fixed way of painting, characterized by broad and bright strokes, intense color and light contrasts, strong accents and often diagonal compositions. This style corresponds to the character of the artist, whom A. van Schendel jr. describes as 'often fierce and abrupt in his actions, sometimes suddenly stiff and closed, living between fits of passion and despondency and always entirely driven by enthusiasm for his work'. art obsessed.'

Breitner's most important works were created in Amsterdam, in which he would become the great portrayer of the city and Amsterdam life, both day and night. Breitner is fascinated by the fierce life in the city that was in transition. Industry grew and modern traffic began to make its demands: canals were filled in and new residential areas were built. Breitner paints breakthroughs and mainly sees the picturesque in the gray and gray of the wind, snow and rain and the reflection of illuminated shop windows in the water of canals and ponds. He moves into the hustle and bustle of the streets and the teeming traffic of horse-drawn carriages, carts and trams, among hastily shopping passers-by and fairground crowds. Popular motifs are working women, servants and laundry stones. He captures all this in his paintings, which do not show a cheerful city, in a painting touch that becomes more pasty and expressive. Photos are increasingly used as examples. Breitner starts experimenting with cameras when they become more handy and cheaper towards the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, it was forbidden to paint on the streets in Dutch cities and he worked on his cityscapes in his studio based on the photos he took. These photos form a historical document with Breitner's vision of life in Amsterdam at the end of the 19th century. In addition to cityscapes and street scenes, Breitner also paints nudes and still lifes. Around 1893, under the influence of Japanese culture on European art, he made a series of paintings of Japanese girls in floral kimono, for which the Amsterdam Geesje Kwak was the model.

A special relationship would arise between Breitner and Isaac Israëls. From 1886 they shared a studio on Oosterparkstraat and the same group of friends. Even though Breitner is already known as the painter of modern life in Amsterdam, Israëls is still searching and secretly admires Breitner. When Israels sees a painting by Breitner in the window of an art dealer, he writes to a friend: 'I thought I'd quit, you can't paint against such a work'. Shortly before, the tables were turned and Breitner watched with dismay as child prodigy Israels was introduced to the art world by father Jozef at the age of sixteen. A mutual rivalry arises between the two painters who inspired and envied each other for almost their entire careers, competed with each other and did not see each other for ten years. Both are celebrated artists, but are less and less in the same field. While Breitner increasingly seeks peace and quiet and paints bleak images of warehouses and tar distilleries, Israels shifts his territory to Europe and the sun seems to break through on his canvases. With a frivolous touch and a clear palette, he increasingly focuses on the mundane world of the 'nouveau riche'. In this way, both artists in Amsterdam became the most important trendsetters in painting in the 1980s, for whom art was a vocation and the artist was a genius. Everything revolves around the most individual expression of emotions, impressions and observations.

In art historical literature, Breitner is seen as one of the important painters in the Netherlands at the end of the 19th century. Breitner is less known internationally as an artist – he had little international orientation and did not seek to connect with the new art directions that emerged around 1900. At that time he was the most famous, best-selling and most successful painter in the city and in 1901 he received an honorary exhibition of his work at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam. Breitner would not live to be very old, he died at his 62nd, after an intense life with great highs and lows.