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About Floris Arntzenius
Floris Arntzenius (1864-1925) is one of the great masters of Dutch Impressionism and is considered part of the second generation of the Hague School. Arntzenius was born in Surabaya (on present-day Java, then still Dutch East Indies), but raised in the Netherlands. When Floris Arntzenius was eleven, the family moved to Amsterdam. When his father passed away and his mother longed for the atmosphere of the Indies, The Hague, with its large Indies community, became his new home. Here, Arntzenius would live and work for the rest of his life. He was a welcome guest in The Hague's cultural life.
From 1883 to 1888, Floris Arntzenius took classes at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, where George Hendrik Breitner and Isaac Israels were also students at the time. Afterwards, he continued to take classes at the art academy in Antwerp. Like Breitner, who worked in Amsterdam, Arntzenius was fascinated by the increasingly bustling life in the city. He captured the modern life of the time, with a clear preference for the streets of The Hague's inner city around 1900: strolling ladies, shoppers, carts and trams, butcher's and baker's boys delivering groceries, and horses pulling carriages. It is not without reason that he is also known as ‘the master of The Hague’s little streets’.
In his paintings, the weather is often cloudy and drizzly, for the sake of the picturesque effect. Floris Arntzenius mastered the reflections of the rain-soaked streets. With rather broad brushstrokes, he masterfully captured the clouds in the sky and the dampness on the street in such a way that the viewer is drawn into the atmosphere of that day. Arntzenius’s color palette is subdued but restrained, although he does add color accents to liven up the scenes. Floris Arntzenius can also often be found on the beach in Scheveningen, where he primarily paints women and children playing. Unlike his older colleagues of the Hague School, he shows less interest in the life of the Scheveningen fishermen, probably because he felt that this subject had already been captured often enough. Furthermore, due to the construction of the harbor at the beginning of the twentieth century, the familiar image of the fishing boats and fish sales on the beach had also disappeared.
Although modern city life is his primary subject, he also created beautiful still lifes—especially of flowers—which are distinguished by their unique lighting.
Throughout his life, Floris Arntzenius sold well, and he too won prizes at international exhibitions in Munich, Venice, Pittsburgh, and Brussels. His work is included in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (formerly the Gemeentemuseum), among others.