Edward Portielje - Windmill at the seashore

Edward Antoon Portielje (1861 - 1949), C.H. Hermans, possibly his second wife Rosa Hermans
Landscape with windmill
Signed upperleft corner 'Edward Portielje' and lowerright corner C.H. Hermans 1880
Oil on panel
Dimensions excl. frame: 17 x 26 cm.
Dimensions incl. frame: 34 x 43 cm.

Edward Antoon Portielje (8 February 1861, Antwerp – 18 December 1949, Antwerp) was a Belgian genre painter.
He was born to the painter Jan Portielje and his wife Eulalie (née Lemaire, 1828–1903). His older brother, Gerard, was also a genre painter.

His first art lessons came from his father. Then he attended the Royal Atheneum and, from 1873, took after-school classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts with Edward Dujardin. From 1877 to 1881, he was a full-time student at the Academy under the tutelage of Polydore Beaufaux, Charles Verlat and Nicaise de Keyser.

He was married twice, first to Jeanne Marie Cochet and then, in 1888, to Rosa Hermans, with whom he had a son. During World War I he lived in Brussels, returning to Antwerp in 1919.

For a short time, style and choice of subject matter ran parallel to those of his brother Gerard. But Edward Portielje developed his own touch with fine and precise work and use of his own themes. He found his inspiration mainly in fishing circles in Zeeland. They are traditional inn scenes or living rooms enlivened with one, two, four or even more characters. They are often domestic scenes with mothers with children, lacemakers, women chatting coffee around a table, lovers, etc., all in the local costumes that were still common at the time. In addition to these genre paintings, he also painted marines. All in all, a rather stereotypical body of work. A tight, realistic touch gradually gave way to looser brushwork and a moderately impressionistic approach. He cleverly played with the lighting effects of the daylight that enters the rooms through open or half-closed windows.

Portielje rarely collaborated with other artists. For the sale of his paintings, he relied on the intervention of the art dealers Albert D'Huyvetter and then mainly on Guillaume Campo. Both before and after the First World War they had a contract. During the interwar period, this applied to the entire production for which Campo was the only representative, worldwide.

In 1894, he worked together with Edouard de Jans and Joseph Dierickx to create murals for the Exposition Internationale d'Anvers. (Wikipedia)