Lot Essay
Johan Barthold Jongkind was the first among the 19th century Dutch artists to popularize the moonlight scenes of Dutch 17th century artists such as Aert van der Neer. Jongkind began his artistic training with Andreas Schelfhout, who was the Director of the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague. With Schelfhout and later in the Parisian studio of Eugène Isabey, Jongkind came under the influence of teachers who believed that landscape was a legitimate and respected art form. Through Isabey, Jongkind was exposed to the work of the great English landscapists Bonington and Constable and their theories of naturalism in painting. In Isabey’s atelier in Paris, Jongkind met fellow students Theodore Rousseau, Isidor Pils, Thomas Couture, Georges Michel and Eugene Boudin, among others.
Upon meeting Jongkind, the Impressionist artist Claude Monet declared ‘his painting was too new in far too artistic a strain to be then in 1862, appreciated at its true worth. Neither was there anyone so modest and retiring…He asked to see my sketches, invited me to come and work with him, explained to me the why and the wherefore of his manner and thereby completed the teachings I had already received from Boudin. From that time on he was my real master, and it was to him that I owed the final education of my eye’ (‘Claude Monet, The Artist as a Young Man,’ Art News Journal, vol. 26, 1957, p. 198).
Upon meeting Jongkind, the Impressionist artist Claude Monet declared ‘his painting was too new in far too artistic a strain to be then in 1862, appreciated at its true worth. Neither was there anyone so modest and retiring…He asked to see my sketches, invited me to come and work with him, explained to me the why and the wherefore of his manner and thereby completed the teachings I had already received from Boudin. From that time on he was my real master, and it was to him that I owed the final education of my eye’ (‘Claude Monet, The Artist as a Young Man,’ Art News Journal, vol. 26, 1957, p. 198).