Johan Hendrik van Mastenbroek - Harbor view Rotterdam 089-JM - Sold

The work offered here is a harbor view; This is a large lithograph by Johan Hendrik van Mastenbroek. The work is included in the Rijnmond Toen collection (under number 089-JM).


The work is offered loose-leaf and is, considering its age, in good condition and virtually undamaged (2 small tears in the margin at the bottom edge).

Signed and dated lr in the plate
Signed in pencil right in the margin

Dimensions:
Sheet size: 670 x 480
Image: 600 x 400

Johan van Mastenbroek, born Rotterdam, December 4, 1875 – died Rotterdam, November 16, 1945 , was a Dutch painter who achieved great international fame; he became best known for his harbor views of Rotterdam and its immediate surroundings. In addition, his oeuvre includes the former Zuiderzee works, polder landscapes, some portraits and hunting scenes.
Van Mastenbroek's father Johannes (1827-1909) was an art dealer in Rotterdam with an extensive network. One of his contacts was the Hague branch of Goupil & Cie, an important dealer of contemporary art in the Netherlands. As early as 1894, he bought a number of early watercolors and drawings from Johan and later also mediated in their resale to his foreign trade contacts. Johan also came into contact with Jacob Maris, who would have a visible influence on his style and also gave him advice. From that time on he also started working outside Rotterdam, in Amsterdam on the IJ, Zaandam, Schiedam and in various Zuiderzee towns.
The back room in his parental home became his studio and he sold works to England and in 1896 he was invited to England to work for the art dealership Burrington & Boss. Here he met his future wife Margareth Wellsted in Newhaven.
After receiving the Academy's prize in 1898, he was nominated as a member of 'Pulchri' in The Hague by Jacob Maris and his father's colleague Tersteeg.
Until shortly before 1940, he regularly traveled from Scheveningen to Rotterdam every week to wander through the ports and to experience the activities there. In his last years, he said, his house was chock full of drawings and sketches that he could use to make a painting. Like many other painters of cityscapes, he used topographical data freely in his oil paintings of Rotterdam, Delfshaven, Schiedam and Dordrecht; he also often 'broadened' the composition of his sketch. But in his large watercolors that he made outdoors, he followed the topographical data quite closely as he found them on the spot. His preliminary studies sometimes appeared several times in another painting, sometimes with long intervals of years.