Marius Christiaan Middelbeek was a landscape painter who would live and work in Amsterdam almost all of his life. He was a pupil of the landscape painter P.L.F. Kluyver, whose daughter Catharina Helena he married in 1881. Middelbeek specialised in painting snowy woodland scenes and occasionally collaborated with fellow Amsterdammer Willem Hendrick Eickelberg. In addition to his activities as a painter, Middelbeek also ran a shop dealing in painting supplies.