Portrait of Willem

Jacob Maris was the eldest of the three Maris brothers and one of the central figures of the Hague School, the Dutch realist movement that dominated Dutch painting between roughly 1860 and 1900. His Portrait of Willem — most likely his younger brother Willem Maris, the animal and landscape painter — belongs to the informal family portrait tradition within the Hague School, where domestic subjects were treated with the same tonal seriousness as landscape. Jacob Maris painted his brother at a stage in his career when the Hague School's grey-toned naturalism had found its mature expression.

Jacob Maris constructs the portrait in the silvery grey tonality characteristic of Hague School painting, using a neutral dark ground against which Willem's face emerges through careful warm underpainting. The brushwork is loose and direct in the hair and collar while more controlled in the flesh, a combination typical of his portraiture.