Willem Maris

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Willem Maris (February 18, 1844, The Hague - October 10, 1910, The Hague) was a Dutch landscape painter.

He got his first lessons in drawing from his brothers Jacob and Matthijs Maris. For a while he followed evening classes at the Hague Academy and later continued his studies with the cattle painter Stortenbeker. In the Mauritshuis in The Hague, Willem copied the work of the seventeenth-century animal painter Paulus Potter. From an early age Willem went outdoors to sketch the countryside. Maris painted many Dutch landscapes with animals, especially cows and ducks. In 1862 Willem Maris established himself as an independent painter. In the same year his friendship with the painter Anton Mauve began. They had met in the Gelderland village of Oosterbeek, where the Maris brothers often stayed during the summer, in the company of other painters. Like Mauve, Willem Maris was considered part of the Hague School, because it was particularly the atmosphere and mood of a landscape which he tried to capture. He portrayed his subjects with increasingly free brush-strokes. However his sun-filled pastures are much more colourful than the greyer landscapes of other painters of the Hague School. George Hendrik Breitner was one of his pupils.