Andreas Schelfhout Biography | Oil Paintings

Andreas Schelfhout started as a house painter in the house framing business of his father and when not working he painted in his spare time. After a well-received first exhibition in The Hague, his father sent him to receive proper training with Joannes Breckenheimer, a stage designer. There he learned to paint city scenes and landscapes, but also made detailed studies of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape artists Meindert Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael.

In 1815 Andreas Schelfhout started his own workshop and became a member of the Pulchri Studio. Through his technical excellence and sense of composition and use of naturalistic colors, his fame started to spread outside of The Hague.

Initially, he painted mainly summer scenes, beach scenes, and animal paintings. But as his initial winter scenes had more success, he began to include them in his exhibitions. He was mainly a studio artist, relying on his sketches done en plein air and finished paintings in the warmth of the studio. He started to travel abroad in 1825 and in later years he traveled France and Germany in 1833, and to England in 1835 to study the art of John Constable.

Andreas Schelfhout provided training to many painters who would later become famous: Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch, Johan Jongkind (one of the forerunners of the Impressionists), Charles Leickert. His death marked the end of the Romantic art period in Holland. He is considered a precursor of the Hague School. Andreas Schelfhout's Dutch winter scenes and frozen canals with skaters were already famous during his lifetime and he became one of the most influential Dutch landscape artists of the nineteenth century.

Art Movement: Romanticism Art.
Artists Influencing Andreas Schelfhout: Joannes Breckenheimer, Meindert Hobbema, Jacob van Ruisdael.
He Traveled To Belgium, France, England, Germany.
Painters Andreas Schelfhout Influenced: Johan Jongkind, Charles Leickert, Johannes Josephus Destree, Jan Willem van Borselen.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.