Rouen- View of the bustling old town. Circa 1837-1839.

Oil on panel monogrammed lower left .

Dimensions: 26.5 x 20.5 cm, with frame: 42.5 x 36 cm.

Johannes Bosboom represents here a delicate view of Rouen.

It can be placed between 1835 and 1839, a period during which he went to France. He painted the Quai de Paris in Rouen in 1839, a painting in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

We underline the degree of detail specific to the Flemish school. 

Lots of entertainment in the street,   a hay cart in the foreground, a market with merchandise stalls. In the background, you can see the masts of the boats moored on the quays of the Seine.

The key is free. His colorful palette is limited: the painter focuses on drawing and above all, on light. A ray of sunlight illuminates the facade and darkens, by contrast, the lower part of the painting playing on a chiaroscuro.

Belgian painter and watercolorist. Coming from a family of the Austrian nobility, his parents had to emigrate to Belgium before his birth for political reasons.

In 1831, Johannes Bosboom attended   the studio of Bartholomeus J. van Hove, cityscapes painter from The Hague. At first, Bosboom helped his teacher create theatrical sets and cityscapes. Around the age of 20, he decided to focus on depicting church interiors. This decision determined his entire career, his work in this genre establishing his reputation.

Subsequently, he wrote, he was influenced by the Romantic movement, in particular by Wijnand Johannes Josephus Nuyen. Although Nuyen's influence is evident in his early works, he gradually abandoned romanticism for a more sober treatment of his subjects.

After training in The Hague, Bosboom traveled to Germany, Belgium and France between 1835 and 1839 with his fellow students Samuel Verveer and Cornelis Kruseman. In 1851 he married the historical novelist Anna Louisa Geertruida Toussaint. Subsequently, he settled in the region and the village where he was born, Alkmaar.

Bosboom has exhibited extensively and received numerous honors during his life. It belongs to a long Dutch tradition of church interior painting established by Gerrit Houckgeest and Emanuel van Witte. He was seen, thanks to his freer watercolors and his vision of the fishing port of Scheveningen painted in the summer of 1873, as a painter of influence on the younger generation of the Hague school.

After the death of his twin brother Nicolas in 1862, Bosboom experienced a period of mild depression. In 1876 he stayed in the rural provinces of Groningen and Drente, where agricultural life and local churches informed him. During the last ten years of his working life, he worked almost entirely in watercolor.