Willem Anthonie Oepts was a Dutch painter, autodidact pur sang and famous by his many abstracted and sunlit landscapes he began to paint after World War II. His artistry can be divided into three periods, namely his Amsterdam period (1919-1931), a transitional period (1931-1938) and a French period (1938-1988).
Until 1935, he mostly painted dark street scenes and cityscapes of Amsterdam in a social-realist style. In 1938 he left for Paris where he had painting lessons from Emile-Othon Friesz and became acquainted with the work of Pierre Bonnard and André Derain. In the city of light he came to the conclusion that colour was the very essence of painting. After 1945 Oepts often worked with violet, bright yellow and cobalt blue, in search of a compromise between figuration and abstraction. In the early seventies his paintings reached their zenith. Oepts had been able to find the correct balance between monumentality and detail. His paintings have a distinctive character.
