Hendrik Willem Mesdag was born on February 23, 1831 in Groningen. His father, a merchant and banker, was an amateur painter who saw to it that his two sons were also educated in the art of painting. He was a Dutch marine painter. He was born in Groningen, the son of the banker Klaas Mesdag and his wife Johanna Wilhelmina van Giffen. Mesdag was encouraged by his father, an amateur painter, to study art. He married Sina van Houten in 1856, and when they inherited a fortune from her father, Mesdag retired from banking to pursue a career as a painter. He studied in Brussels with Willem Roelofs and in 1868 moved to The Hague to paint the sea. In 1870 he exhibited at the Paris Salon and won the gold medal for The Breakers of the North Sea. Preparations for departureIn 1880 he received a commission from a Belgian company to paint a panorama giving a view over the village of Scheveningen on the North Sea coast near The Hague .  Related Paintings of Hendrik Willem Mesdag :. | Terug van de Vischvangst | Flat-bottomed Fishing Pinks and Fisherfolk at Scheveningen | Calm Sea | Night at Scheveningen | Pinks in the Surf |
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Moritz Daniel Oppenheim
(January 7, 1800, Hanau, Germany - February 26, 1882, Frankfurt am Main) was a German painter who is often regarded as the first Jewish painter of the modern era. His work was informed by his cultural and religious roots at a time when many of his German Jewish contemporaries chose to convert. Oppenheim is considered by the scholar Ismar Schorsch to be in sympathy with the ideals of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, because he remained "fair to the present" without denying his past. Oppenheim was born to Orthodox Jewish parents at Hanau, Germany in 1800; he died at Frankfurt am Main in 1882. His niece was the wife of student and fellow painter Benjamin Prins, Rosa Benari. He received his first lessons in painting from Westermayer, in Hanau, and entered the Munich Academy of Arts at the age of seventeen. Later he visited Paris, where Jean-Baptiste Regnault became his teacher, and then went to Rome, where he studied with Bertel Thorwaldsen, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and Friedrich Overbeck. There he studied the life of the Jewish ghetto and made sketches of the various phases of its domestic and religious life, in preparation for several large canvases which he painted upon his return to Germany. In 1825 he settled at Frankfurt, and shortly after exhibited his painting David Playing Before Saul, to see which a great number of admirers from all parts of Europe visited his studio. In 1832, at the instance of Goethe, Charles Frederick, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach conferred upon him the honorary title of professor.