Joseph Raphael artwork • painting • previously for sale The bridge over the Mee in Bruges

The American painter Joseph Raphaël was educated at the School of Design in San Francisco. In 1903 he left for Paris, where he took lessons at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. From 1911 he spent the summer months in the Netherlands, in the painter's village of Laren. There the pointillism of Breman and Hart Nibbrig took hold of his style. After he settled in Brussels in 1912, his paintings became increasingly colourful and free. Figures, landscapes and still lifes were his preference, in addition to scenes of busy Brussels city life. A subsequent move to the countryside near Uccel inspired him to paint the nature around the plateau where he lived. Before returning to the United States in 1940, he lived in Oegstgeest from 1929 to 1939. There, the sea at Noordwijk and the Kager Plassen were an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the painter.