Jan Jacob Spohler, a contemporary of Frederik Marinus Kruseman (1816-1882) and Charles Henri Joseph Leickert (1816-1907) was a leading figure in the school of nineteenth century Dutch landscape painting. Spohler studied with Jan Willem Pieneman (1779-1853) in 1820, the Director of the Amsterdam Academy and primarily a painter of portraits and historical subjects.

Despite this more formalised academic training, Spohler was almost exclusively a painter of summer and winter landscapes, not however the Arcadian landscape occasionally painted by his mentor, Pieneman, but landscapes showing a way of life in the rural countryside of the Netherlands. Spohler led a somewhat peripatetic life, a resident of Amsterdam in the 1830’s, he proceeded to live for a few years in, successively, Haarlem, Brussels, the Hague, Leiden and Rotterdam, returning to Leiden in 1855 to 1860, before again returning to live in Amsterdam in 1861, where in 1866 he died.

Spohler became a member of the Amsterdam Academy in 1845 and had exhibited in Amsterdam and The Hague from as early as 1830 to 1859. One of the foremost landscape painters of his generation, Spohler was the father of Jan Jacob Coenraad Spohler (1837-1894) and Johannes Franciscus Spohler (1853-1923) and amongst his pupils was the landscape painter Willem Vester (1824-1895).

His works can be found in museums in: Broederpoort; Haarlem, Teyler Museum; Kampen and Stedelijk Museum.