signed and inscribed ‘J. Dooijewaard./ 1897/ Portret van/ Frans Langeveld’
charcoal
43.8 x 31.8 cm

Provenance:
Studio sale, Van Zadelhoff, Hilversum, 13 September 1993, lot 146 (according to an inscription on the old mount).

Dooijewaard’s artistic talents were recognized early on; from a young age he painted on sigar boxes and he was later trained at the ‘Rijksnormaalschool voor Teekenonderwijzers’ in Amsterdam. Aged 19, he was already active as a drawing teacher and won the Willink van Collen price in 1903. The artist rented a studio on the Bloemgracht in Amsterdam, which was a gathering place for his artist-friends. Dooijewaard moved to Laren in 1903 and he stayed there until 1946. While the majority of his œuvre was produced Laren, some of his finest portraits were in fact made during his Amsterdam period.
This is also the case for the present portrait, which was executed in 1897 and which stands out for its expressive quality. It can be closely compared to a painted self-portrait, which the artist made a year later. As noted in Dooijewaard’s inscription on the present drawing, it is a portrait of the artist Frans Langeveld (1877-1939). The two artists met at the Rijksnormaalschool and they would remain close friends until Langeveld’s death in 1939. In 1899, Dooijewaard and Langeveld travelled to Paris where they rented a room in Montmartre for four months. Later, both artists became members of the so-called ‘Larense School’- a group of artists that worked in Laren at the end of the 19th- and beginning of the 20th century. Together with other artist-friends from the Larense School, both artists regularly met at ‘Het Kroegje van Jan Hamdorff’. While Langeveld would specialise in views of Amsterdam, and especially its canals, Dooijewaard treated a wider range of subjects including still-lifes, interior scenes and landscapes. The two artists would remain friends until Langeveld’s untimely death in 1939, when he was found dead in the studio of his friend, the portrait painter Gerard van Hove.