(Click to Enlarge)
Oil on Wood
7 x 5 inches
7 5/8 x 9 3/4 inches in Ornate Unoriginal Frame
Signed Hein J Burgers Paris 1874 lower right
Craquelure, one hole upper right, and two repaired holes
Hendricus Jacobus (Hein) Burgers ( Huissen , January 9, 1834 – Paris , 11 October 1899 ) was a Dutch genre painter who became a naturalized French citizen in 1888. Burgers was trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam and at the Academy of Fine Arts and Applied Sciences in Rotterdam (diploma in 1864). His principal teachers were Louis Royer and Jozef Israels . After a relatively successful start in the Netherlands whose work was heavily influenced by Israel’s exhibits, Burgers decided – now married with the previously separated Wilhelmina Fleischhacker – to try his luck in Paris. There, thanks to contracts with Goupil, he got a stable foothold. His work gradually began to show. His palette became lighter and his subjects were more elegant than the dreary fishing interiors that were on the rise in Holland.
After a break of two years (1870-1873) because of the Franco-Prussian War , when Burgers again stayed in the Netherlands, he settled permanently in France. In 1878 he worked at the World Exhibition in Paris as vice chairman of the jury for the engraving department. Because of his merits, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor . In the following year he was again in a position of distinction in part: that of Knight in the Order of Ernst House of Saxony.
In 1879, Burger’s wife Wilhelmina died. The painter sought comfort in traveling to Normandy and Venice, and he struck a new direction again. The demand for his work then took off he became a naturalized French citizen in 1888. He was appointed as a drawing teacher at the Paris Institute of Deaf-mute and also to higher normal school for girls in Fontenay-aux-Roses , a suburb of Paris. Both functions gave him a regular annual income pension rights. In 1894 Burgers married for the second time, this time with the young Belgian widow Colette Heyman, who worked at the Paris Opera as a costume seamstress. The couple made an annual holiday trip to Venice, which resulted in numerous paintings in distinctive Mediterranean colors.
On the threshold of his retirement, Hein Burgers died in 1899. His wife then entered the institution of the Black Sisters of St. Philip Neri in her hometown Sint Niklaas , where she would eventually die in 1949
Source: Netherlands Institute for Art History