Maurits van den Kerkhoff

Biography
1830 - 1908

About the artist

Maurits van den Kerkhoff was born in Phillpeville in Belgium on the 7th of February in 1830.
He was a painter and lithographer.

Van den Kerkhoff lived and worked, as a tobacco planter, in East Java, Malang, most of his life. His paintings, which he viewed as a hobby, consisted almost entirely of
Javanese landscapes around Malang.

In 1889 the director of the Koloniaal Museum in Haarlem asked Van den Kerkhoff to consider a bequest of paintings by him to the
museum. Van den Kerkhoff obliged and in 1891 sent four paintings to the museum in the Netherlands and in 1898 another eight.

In the Netherlands the very strong greens and bright light in Van den Kerkhoffs paintings were often criticised as unrealistic and romanticised. In several letters to
the museum Van de Kerkhoff defended his renditions and explained how difficult he found it to portray the intensity of colour and light in the tropics.

Maurits van den Kerkhoff died in Malang, Indonesia on the 15th of February in 1908.

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