Pedestrians strolling along the Spuistraat, The Hague

Floris Arntzenius received his training at the Amsterdam Academy together with other students such as Willem Witsen, Isaac Israels, Eduard Karsen and George Hendrik Breitner, whose unfolding impressionistic style Arntzenius deeply admired. Besides studying at the Antwerp academy for a year, Floris Arntzenius for the greater part spent his early years in the Dutch capital, regularly showing his work at Arti et Amicitiae. The painting Drie Maandaghouders, which shows three men on a bridge and with which Arntzenius contended for the Willink van Collenprice at the time, reveals the artist's early passion for daily urban activity and dreary weather conditions. After subsequently practising the genre of landscape painting in Nunspeet and the Geuldal for several years, Floris moved to the Hague in 1892 and further developed his mastery of city scenes, fervently making sketches and studies of various streets in the Hague (see D. Welling, op.cit., p.12). The artist preferred The Hague above the Dutch capital, because the latter only incited him to paint very large canvasses. During his years in the Hague, the artist mostly painted modest sized canvasses, thus emphasizing the intimate character of streets such as the Spuistraat, with figures hurrying over the wet and shiny asphalt past illuminated shopwindows and colourful sign-boards. In order to capture the city's wide range of everyday life subject matter, Arntzenius moved studio regularly, eventually settling on the Zoutmanstraat overlooking the Bierkade in 1909.