Johannes Rosierse (1818-1901)

Family by Candlelight

Signed
Oil on Panel
16 x 12 inches – 40.6 x 30.5 cms

Provenance: Private Collection, USA Artist Biography: Johannes Rosierse was born in, coincidentally close to the home of Godfried Schalcken (1643-1706), the prime exponent of candlelit paintings and nocturnal scenes of the seventeenth century.

Rosierse as a youth was apprenticed to a shoemaker before becoming a pupil of the artist, Michael Versteeg (1746-1843). He was a painter of figures, interiors and market scenes, but it is as a painter of these subjects by lamplight or candlelight that he is renowned. He is likely to have seen and studied the work of Schalcken in Dordrecht and so to have adopted this genre. Rosierse worked and exhibited in Amsterdam, Groningen and The Hague, and briefly in Leeuwarden in 1855.

His works can be found in museums in: Dordrecht; Leeuwarden; Montpelier and Rotterdam.