Matthijs Maris

Matthijs (Thijs) Maris was born on August 17, 1839, in The Hague, the middle of the three Maris brothers (with Jacob and Willem). He trained at The Hague Academy and like his brothers was associated with the Hague School, though his temperament and vision were radically different from theirs. Where Jacob and Willem pursued objective landscape realism, Matthijs developed an increasingly mystical, dreamlike vision. He studied in Antwerp and then lived in Paris from 1869 to 1877, becoming associated with the Symbolist milieu there.

In 1877 Matthijs moved to London, where he spent the rest of his life in near-isolation, rarely exhibiting and almost never selling, yet becoming increasingly celebrated as a visionary artist. His late London paintings — Shepherdess (known as 'Monumental Conception of Humanity', 1887), Sorrow (1887), The Fair Beauty (1885) — are among the most otherworldly images in 19th-century painting: figures emerging from, or dissolving into, misty paint surfaces, their forms barely tangible.

His early work, including Portrait of Hendrika Troussard-Maris (1872) and The Sisters (1875), shows a more conventionally finished style, but the tendency toward dematerialization is already present. He died in London on August 22, 1917.

Matthijs Maris's mature style is unlike that of any other 19th-century Dutch painter. His figures seem to exist in a dreamworld between presence and absence — their forms dissolving into veils of paint, their features softened to archetypes of universal humanity. The paint surface becomes a vehicle for mystery: thick, worked, layered, contributing to the sense that the image is emerging from or sinking back into the material of the painting itself.

The Shepherdess (1887) is his most ambitious expression of this vision: a monumental female figure carrying a lamb, rendered in a misty, silvery-grey tonality that suggests both spiritual apparition and ancient myth.

Matthijs Maris is a unique figure in European Symbolism — a Dutch painter who developed a completely independent mystical-Symbolist vision without academic theory or literary program. His influence in Britain, where he lived, was felt among younger painters of the Aesthetic Movement. In the Netherlands he is recognized as the most original of the Maris brothers and a pioneer of Symbolist painting in Dutch art.