Joseph Bles was a pupil of The Hague painter Salomon Verveer. He continued in the tradition of his mentor by painting sunny cityscapes and Scheveningen beach scenes with boats and fishermen, sometimes with convivial groups of people as staffage. Due to the highly narrative and often humorous content of his work, he was sometimes compared to genre painters like D. Bles and A.H. Bakker Korff, whose paintings often provided a sharp and funny comment of life in their time.