ROELOFS, Willem - b. 1822 Amsterdam, d. 1897 Berchem

Dutch painter. He is said to have made his first sketches at the age of four; at fifteen he completed his first landscape painting. Many of these early works are in the print rooms of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. In c. 1837-38 he was apprenticed to the amateur painter Abraham Hendrik de Winter (1800-1861) in Utrecht, where the Roelofs family had moved in 1826. In 1838 he entered his first paintings in the Exhibition of Living Masters in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. In the late summer of 1840 Roelofs became a pupil of the landscape and animal painter Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen (1795-1860), with whom he made a study trip to Germany in 1841. Roelofs took a special interest in nature: he applied himself energetically both to painting and drawing, almost always selecting landscape subjects. He also studied entomology and accumulated a large collection of insects. After his training he returned to his parents in Utrecht.

From 1848 to 1887 Roelofs lived in Brussels. His conception of landscape is comparable to that of Daubigny or Rousseau. He was an important predecessor of the Impressionists in Holland.

Summertime

For Roelofs and other artists of the Hague School, with their knowledge of Dutch 17th-century art and the Barbizon School, plain air painting became fundamental. Taking Daubigny’s floating studio as their model, Roelofs and Weissenbruch regularly went out in boats. Roelofs’s pasture, windmill and canal landscapes - of which Summertime is a fine example - use lighting effects that express a painterly freedom comparable with Daubigny’s.