Gerard Bilders

Gerard Bilders (early 1860s)

Albertus Gerardus "Gerard" Bilders (9 December 1838 – 8 March 1865) was a Dutch painter, associated with some members of the Hague School, as Anton Mauve and Willem Maris.

Biography

Bilders was born in Utrecht, where he lived until 1856, though from 1841 to 1845 the Bilders family lived in Oosterbeek, a village near Arnhem which later became a major center for Dutch plein-air-painters. In 1857 Bilders moved to The Hague. He was financially supported by the Dutch writer Johannes Kneppelhout; the two men wrote for several years many letters which were published by Kneppelhout [including Bilders' diary-notes of 1860 and 1862], shortly after Bilder's death in 1865.[1]

Bilders received his first drawing lessons from his father, the landscape painter Johannes Warnardus Bilders. From the start of his artistic career Bilders' focus was on landscape painting. Bilders studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague from about 1857 to 1859 and drew naked and dressed models there. In the Mauritshuis museum he copied Paulus Potter's landscapes with cattle; for a while he was the pupil of landscape and animal painter Charles Humbert in Switzerland. In 1860 he traveled to Brussels with his father and became acquainted with the painters of the French School of Barbizon. Several times he made a voyage to Switzerland. the first and longest time in September 1858, when he painted there with some artist-friends in open air, in the Savoy near Genova.

Later he began painting in the area around Leiden, often painting meadows with cattle. Here he tried to reproduce the moods that the landscape evoked by using peculiar light effects as well as 'a colored, fragrant warm grey.' When he mixed all the colors of the palette with grey to get this effect, he was usually dissatisfied with the result. This attempt foreshadows the tonal painting style of the Hague School painters.

Gerard Bilders returned to Oosterbeek from 1857 - 1864 where he met Anton Mauve and the Maris brothers. He died in Amsterdam because of tuberculosis when he was only 26.

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