Station: [15] Johan Barthold Jongkind: "Sailing Boats on the Maas", 1870

The Dutch landscape painter Johan Barthold Jongkind was repeatedly drawn to the water. He painted numerous views of rivers, harbours and coasts. After studying under Andreas Schelfhout, he went to Paris for the first time in 1846. There Jongkind painted scenes from everyday life along the Seine and the city’s canals. He temporarily returned to the Netherlands and often journeyed along the coast of Normandy. In the artists’ colony of Honfleur, which can be considered one of the birthplaces of impressionist landscape painting, Jongkind met the young Claude Monet, on whom he had a lasting influence. Jongkind was among the important forerunners of impressionism – as was his friend the French painter Eugène Boudin, who also devoted special attention to maritime motifs. As an outstanding watercolourist, Jongkind used restless and open contours to capture the fleeting ambiences of light, such as the reflections of light on the surface of water. Many of the landscapes that he painted in oils on the basis of plein-air watercolours also possess this character. With his grey tonalities and motifs of the simple life of the Netherlands, Jongkind is akin to the painters of the Hague school, an important group of Dutch artists from the late nineteenth century.