Who is Willem Bastiaan Tholen?

Willem Bastiaan Tholen (Amsterdam, 13 February 1860 – The Hague, 5 December 1931) was a Dutch painter, draftsman and printmaker afterward some contacts to members of the Hague School and unconventional associated following the Amsterdam Impressionism movement.

When Tholen was five years old, his relatives moved to Kampen. There he became friendly with the youngster Jan Voerman and they entered the Amsterdam academy together in 1876. Tholen earned his authorize of expertise within a year, in twist enrolling in the Polytechnic School in Delft, where he attended drawing classes for two years. Having concluded his studies there in 1878 when a secondary scholastic teaching certificate, he went to discharge duty as a drawing teacher at the evening secondary scholastic in Gouda.

He spent three months in Brussels in the studio of Paul Gabriël, from whom he expected his first real instruction in painting. In the considering years Gabriël’s advice was of particular importance for Tholen, as they worked together en plein ventilate for many summers near Kampen and Giethoorn, among new places. In Gouda (1878-9) and Kampen (1880–85) he taught draftsmanship in order to support himself but after 1885 concentrated entirely upon his own work.

In 1885 Willem Witsen invited Tholen to visit his family’s country house near Baarn, where their contemporaries, George Hendrik Breitner and Anton Mauve were frequent guests. From 1887 he lived in The Hague, where he became friendly with other painters of The Hague school. He took an lithe part in the artistic dynamism of The Hague and was a devotee of the Pulchri Studio.

Tholen established his reputation in The Hague with his landscapes of the countryside nearly Kampen and views of the woods near Baarn. He along with frequently painted views of The Hague, the woods of Scheveningen and a series of interiors in which a window typically provides a view outside: a garden, a street illumined by sunlight or the rhythmically grouped roofs of a city. He painted the fishing boats on the seashore in Scheveningen, but versus Jacob Maris (whom he greatly admired), Tholen did not hire the desolate sea as a backdrop, but rather, the blooming village. He used the hustle-bustle of the city more often as a theme than was generally the achievement in the Hague School, depicting such subjects as construction sites, slaughterhouses, stonecutters and the sand excavations and sand barge captains upon the canal amongst The Hague and Scheveningen.

His second wife was dollhouse collector Lita de Ranitz; they married in 1919, and he created little artworks for her collection.