Johan Barthold Jongkind

Vue du Port au Chemin de Fer à Honfleur

1866

Johan Barthold Jongkind (Lattrop, 1819 – 1891, La Côte-Saint-André) was a Dutch painter, watercolorist, draftsman, etcher and lithographer. He lived most of his life in France. After an aborted notary training, he attended the Haagsche Teeken-Academie, where he had enrolled in 1837. His teachers awarded him a scholarship as he was impotent and apparently very talented. Andreas Schelfhout became his teacher there. When the French painter Eugène Isabey came to The Hague in 1845, Schelfhout recommended his pupil to the French master. He invited Jongkind to Paris to work in his studio. A year later he went there in possession of a royal subsidy, which he had received from the Prince of Orange, later King William III. Jongkind soon enjoyed some success in the French Salons. Jongkind painted 'after nature', but for him that meant that he made watercolours on the spot and later developed them into a painting in his studio. After Vincent van Gogh, Johan Barthold Jongkind is considered the Netherlands' most influential 19th-century painter.