JONGKIND, Johann Barthold (Latrop, 1819 – La Côte-Saint-André, 1891)
“Imagine a fair-haired beanpole, with blue eyes, the blue of Delft earthenware, with a mouth drooping at the sides […]” (Edmond de Goncourt 1871).
Johann Barthold Jongkind was born in Latrop (Netherlands) in 1819. At the age of 18 he enrolled at the Fine-Arts Academy in The Hague and Andréas Schelfhout encouraged him to study nature, introducing him to watercolour. Eugène Isabey, a French landscape painter, took him to Paris in 1846 and showed him Normandy in 1847. Jongking befriended the landscape painters of that period and for ten years produced views of Paris, Normandy and Holland.
Between 1855 and 1860 Jongkind went back to Holland. His artist friends and his French dealer Firmin Martin supported him during this period of self-reappraisal. Finally, still helped by his friends, he returned to France where he met a soul mate, Joséphine Fesser, who offered him a more stable family life. Jongkind, who was thought, in the words of Monet, to be “dead for Art”, rose from his ashes. He painted in Normandy from 1862 to 1865, especially in Honfleur, in the company of Boudin and Monet, and continued to produce Dutch landscapes which he painted from memory or based on watercolours made from nature, and finally composed views of Paris and of the newly renovated areas of the capital. He spent the last twenty years of his life in the Nevers region and then in Dauphiné where his partner’s son had bought a house. He produced many watercolours of landscapes and travelled during the summer to Switzerland and to the Midi. At the end of his life, his unpredictable character became a psychological disorder and he died in Côte-Saint-André on 9 February 1891. Manet honoured him as the “Father of the School of Landscape Painting”.
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