JONGKIND, DUTCH LANDSCAPE PAINTER

Jongkind was born in Lattrop, in the eastern part of The Netherlands, in 1819, eightht of a family of ten children, but will spend his childhood in the harbour of Vlaardingen on the Meuse River, the west of Rotterdam harbour, where his father was appointed as tax collector.

In 1835, he lives school to work as a junior clerk at a notary's office.
After his father died in 1836, he moves to The Hague to attend drawing studies at the Academy of Arts, before studying in the workshop of a landscape Master, Andréas Schelfhout (1837).

In 1845, he will be noticed by Eugène Isabey, the leader of the French Romantic school, who is in The Netherlands and invites him to become his student in his Paris studio.

At the same time Jongkind is recommended to the Prince of Orange (future Guillaume III) who grants him subsidies and the necessary allowance so that he can go to Paris (this grant will end in 1852). Jongkind takes French lessons which, all his life and in spite of the number of years spent in France, he will pronounce and write with a lot of fantasy!

JONGKIND, PAINTER OF PARIS

Jongkind arrives in Paris in March of 1846, deeply impregnated with this cumbersome inheritance as a dutch landscape painter. He will work in the workshop of Isabey, and study in the studio of Picot. He will also get acquainted with many painters, especially Barbizon School's painters.

Surprisingly, when one would expect him to paint the Paris of monuments and wide open spaces, he will apply himself to paint close-up views of Paris, slices of life he observed. Jongkind looks at Paris with an acute and new eye, and his painting evolves with a new langage, new ranges of color and light, and a research for pictorial representation of light.

Jongkind sets up a new way of working : outdoors, he draws quick watercolored sketches, where colored touches allow him to seize instantaneous impressions, that he possibly annotates with handwritten comments. Then, he will later compose in his studio a more elaborate and constructed painting based upon several of these sketches as well as his memories. He innovates too by getting a brighter palette and by introducing in his paintings small strokes of various colors to translate the analytic decomposition of light and to better render changing effects (reflection, heavens...)

All throughout his life, Jongkind will keep on painting Paris, of which he will write, once he had returned to his country (between 1855 and 1860), : "It is Paris where I am recognized as a painter". But he will also, during this first stay in France, fell in love with the Norman Coast that he discovers in 1850 while travelling from Dieppe to Le Havre with Isabey. He will exhibit "View of Harfleur port " at the Salon of 1850, that will be unanimously appreciated by art critics.

After his mother died in 1855, Jongkind goes back to Holland and lives in Rotterdam, where he will return to more traditional paintings. Until his return to Paris in April 1860, he corresponds with his art dealer, the Père Martin. Jongkind will send him paintings to sell, and Martin will regularly send 100 francs notes to Rotterdam.

On Comte Doria's initiative, with the help of painter Adolphe-Félix Cals and Père Martin, a sale by auction of works of 88 artists including Corot, Isabey and Rousseau is set up on 8th of April 1860 to the benefit of Jongkind, in order to make his return to Paris possible.

JONGKIND, PAINTER OF THE NORMANDY COAST

Jongkind is back to Paris and will then live in France until the end of his life. He settles 9, rue de Chevreuse (today 5), in the area of Montparnasse, in an apartment that he will keep until his death.

Soon, at the Père Martin's store he becomes acquainted with a Dutch painter, Mrs Joséphine Fesser, with whom he falls in love and who will become his partner. Weakened by his melancholic disposition, familiar with brothels and filles de joie, always short of money, Jongkind will find with Joséphine a strong woman who was to help him to overcome his difficulties. She will also have him visit the country, especially, as soon as 1861, the Nivernais area where he painted "The ruins of Rosemont castle " that will be exhibited at the Salon des Refusés of 1863.

In 1862, Jongkind gets acquainted with Boudin and Monet, with whom he goes painting to Le Havre. Monet will later express his debt to Jongkind by writing that he became, after Boudin, his master and that "he completed the definitive education of his eye".

It is this Norman period of Jongkind which situates him as the precursor of Impressionism that he will remain in regard of art history. His friendship with Manet and Monet during his sojourns at the Saint-Siméon farm in Honfleur, where they will found a school, also entitles him to this designation. But, from that time, it is his entire work, not only his seascapes, which deserve this qualification, even when he is painting far from the sea, in the Nivernais or Dauphiné areas.

Jongkind will then have a good reputation in France, he is idolized by young people, and his works, sunsets, seascapes, moonlights, are much sought after by art collectors.

Every fall, he returns to Belgium and The Netherlands.

JONGKIND'S RETIREMENT IN DAUPHINE

The franco-prussian war of 1870 will drive Jongkind and Mrs Fesser far from Paris, in Nantes then in Nevers.

Gradually, he will take his distance with parisian life, definitely settling down in 1878 in the house Mrs Fesser's son bought in la Côte-Saint-André, a small village in the Dauphiné area near Grenoble. There, he will lead a quiet life until the end of his life, except for a few trips in Provence and regular sojourns in Paris, where he comes every winter to work.

Whereas the genius of some artists is sudden, that of Jongkind is constant over a long period of maturity, whatever the subjects and genres he approaches.

Especially he will contribute to make watercoloring an art by itself.

Entrance to Anvers port
Watercolor, 1866
Musée d'Orsay