Jacob Ritsemaartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsmanHaarlem 1869-1943 Laren (N.H.)

Jacob Coenraad Ritsema, brother of Jacoba Johanna (Coba) Ritsema, was a widely appreciated landscape painter in his day. The young Ritsema was apprenticed to P.J.C. Gabriel and he followed his teacher on his study trips across the country. Ritsema did not embellish nature or add compositional details: he saw and painted the immediate beauty of swampy green polders, the imposing gray cloudy skies and the white drawbridges that stood out against them. In his paintings he is very good at conveying the simplicity, silence and tranquility of the landscape.