George Hendrik Breitner
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George Hendrik Breitner (September 12, 1857 – June 5, 1923) was a
Dutch painter and photographer.
George Hendrik Breitner was
born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. From 1876–1880 he attended the
Academy in the Hague where his extraordinary talent was rewarded on
various occasions. From October 1878 till April 1879 he worked as an
art teacher at the Leiden academy Ars Aemula Naturae. In 1880 he was
expelled from the Art Academy of The Hague for misconduct, because
he had destroyed the regulations-board. In the same year he lived at
landscapist Willem Maris's place at Loosduinen and was accepted as a
member of Pulchri Studio, an important artist's society in The
Hague.
From 1880-1881 he worked at the
famous Panorama Mesdag together with Hendrik Mesdag, S. Mesdag-van
Houten, Theophile de Bock and Barend Blommers. In 1882 he met and
worked together with Vincent van Gogh, with whom he often went
sketching in the poorer areas of The Hague. Breitner preferred
working-class models: labourers, servant girls and people from the
lower class districts. Interest in the lot of the common people,
which many artists felt in that period, was nurtured by the social
conscience of French writers such as Emile Zola.
He was a member of the Dutch artist
group known as the Tachtigers (English translation: "Eighty-ers"),
because of their artistic influence in the years of 1880, including
painters like Isaac Israëls, Willem Witsen, and poets like Willem
Kloos.
In 1886 he entered the
Rijksacademie of Amsterdam, but soon it became clear that Breitner
was far beyond the level of education offered there.
Breitner saw himself as 'le peintre du peuple', the people's
painter. He was the painter of city views par excellence: wooden
foundation piles by the harbour, demolition work and construction
sites in the old centre, horse trams on the Dam, or canals in the
rain. With his nervous brush strokes, he captured the dynamic street
life. During the end of 1880, begin 1890, photo cameras where
affordable, and now Breitner had a much better instrument to satisfy
his ambitions. He became very interested in capturing movement and
illumination in the city, and became a master in doing this. It is
not impossible that Breitner's preference for cloudy weather
conditions and a greyish and brownish palette resulted from certain
limitations of the photographic material.
Breitner also painted female nudes,
but just like Rembrandt he was criticized because his nudes were
painted too realistically and did not resemble the common ideal of
beauty. In his own time Breitner's paintings were admired by artists
and art lovers, but often despised by the Dutch art critics for
their raw and realistic nature.
By the turn of the century Breitner was a famous painter in the
Netherlands, as demonstrated by a highly successful retrospective
exhibition at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam (1901). Breitner
travelled frequently in the last decades of his life, visiting
Paris, London, and Berlin, among other cities, and continued to take
photographs. In 1909 he went to the United States as a member of the
jury for the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh.
Although Breitner exhibited abroad
early on, his fame never crossed the borders of the Netherlands. At
the time foreign interest was more for anecdotal and picturesque
works; the typical "Dutchness" of the Hague School. As time went by
critics lost interest in Breitner. The younger generation regarded
impressionism as too superficial. They aspired to a more elevated
and spiritual form of art, but Breitner did not allow himself to be
influenced by these new artistic trends. Around 1905-1910
pointillism as practised by Jan Sluyters, Piet Mondrian and Leo
Gestel was flourishing. Between 1911 and 1914 all the latest art
movements arrived in the Netherlands one after another including
cubism, futurism and expressionism. Breitner's role as contemporary
historical painter was finished.
Breitner had only two pupils, Kees
Maks (1876–1967) and Marie Henrie Mackenzie (1878–1961).
He died on June 5, 1923 in
Amsterdam, Netherlands.
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