Willem Roelofsartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsmanAmsterdam 1822-1897 Berchem (België)

Willem Roelofs (1822-1897) is sometimes called the great predecessor of the Hague School. He painted forest scenes and wide-ranging landscapes in which he managed to hit the wide and flat of the Dutch polder landscape with its water and cows. The first twenty-five years of his life Willem Roelofs lived alternately in Utrecht and The Hague, where he was taught by the animal and landscape painter Hendrikus van de Sande Bakhuyzen. In 1847 he moved to Brussels. The art climate there was more favorable for a novice painter than in the Netherlands. He did, however, remain an active member of Pulchri Studio and kept in touch with art life in The Hague. Roelofs would continue to live in Brussels for 40 years. He had almost immediate success with his paintings. Through exhibitions he became acquainted with work by the painters of Barbizon. He would adopt the realism with which they captured nature. He himself probably traveled for the first time in 1851, and as one of the first Dutchmen, to the forests of Fontainebleau.
Roelofs first sought his inspiration in the vicinity of Brussels, from 1856 he traveled annually to the Netherlands. Like his colleagues from the Hague School, he was interested in the landscape that had hitherto been considered too ordinary in our country: the polder land with windmills, swampy meadows with cows under heavy cloudy skies, moors and rivers. First he went to Drenthe, later he looked for idyllic spots along the Gein, around the Nieuwkoopse Plassen and near Loosdrecht. For him, it was about capturing the mood and light of the moment into reality, which were constantly changing on cloudy days. He carefully collected his impressions in sketches and oil studies on canvas, which he used in the elaboration of the painting in his studio. It is known that Roelofs made a lot of it. A good outdoor study, as Roelofs called it, had to have 'the breath of nature' in it and served as a reminder when making the painting. He often provided these oil studies with inscriptions stating the place or month and sometimes a number, which corresponded to other oil sketches from the same region. The appreciation of contemporaries for the immediacy of these landscapes is evident from the fact that they were regularly sold as independent works of art.
In the Netherlands, his innovations in the field of landscape art were only fully recognized in the 1970s and he is referred to by contemporaries as the 'pioneering of modern Dutch painting'. Museums in Belgium and the Netherlands buy his work during these years. In 1887 Roelofs returned permanently to The Hague.