A Mid 19th Century Oil Painting by Johannes De Haas

Johannes Hubertus Leonardus de Haas (Dutch, 1832-1908), a mid 19th oil painting on canvas of a peasant with an ox drawing a plough in a field near a pond, with ducks, cattle and dogs nearby, and with a village in the distance and woods beyond under a noonday sky, signed lower right J H L de Haas ft 59, in an ornate giltwood frame. Sight 17½” x 27”

Condition: Excellent, the painting is in very good condition having been relined and cleaned in the recent past, the colours are vibrant and the frame is in excellent condition, Overall the painting has a charming appearance.

Johannes Hubertus Leonardus de Haas (25th March 1832 - 4th August 1908) was born in Hedel (Gelderland) and spent his youth in Amsterdam where he received his earliest education in painting at evening classes at the Koninklijke Academie, thereafter going to Haarlem where he was apprenticed to the painter Pieter Frederik Van Os. In 1853 he and two friends who had studied with Van Os moved to Oosterbeek, where they met Johannes Warnardus Bilders, an influential landscape painter, who established a group of painters around him later known as the Hague School. It was here that de Haas met his future wife, Bilders’s daughter Caroline. By 1855 his paintings were receiving good reviews, notably from the critic Jean Baptiste Gustave Planche following an exhibition in Paris.

In 1857 he visited Brussels where he befriended Willem Roelofs, settling there in 1861 and used the city as a base to go painting in Flanders and Picardie in northern France, painting coastal scenes and rural landscapes, often with cattle, such as this painting. His style, whilst certainly his own, shows Bilders’s influence, and de Haas would regularly paint cattle into works by those of his friends Paul Gabriel and Willem Roelofs, whose styles complemented his very well.

An exhibition in Munich resulted in a friendship with Prince Luitpold, the future Regent, and this opened up opportunities for him to contribute works at exhibitions in Bavaria and the wider German Empire, leading him to establish a name for himself in Germany. He became responsible for selecting the Dutch entries to the Munich exhibition from 1888, which led to criticism from younger painters for the conservative nature of his choices. His connections with European royalty would, however, lead him to be chosen by Queen Emma of the Netherlands to select works from the Dutch Royal Collection for an exhibition at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich in 1892.

Johannes de Haas died on 4th August 1908 at Königswinter, near Cologne.