Johan Jongkind

Johan Barthold Jongkind was born on 3 June 1819 in Lattrop, in the Dutch province of Overijssel. His father intended him for a career as a notary, and Jongkind began that training as a teenager, but he abandoned it after his father's death in 1836 to pursue painting. He enrolled at the drawing academy in The Hague, the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten, where his talent earned him a study scholarship and where he trained under the director, the landscape painter Andreas Schelfhout, roughly from 1836 to the mid-1840s.

In 1846, supported by a royal grant from the Dutch crown, Jongkind moved to Paris to study further in the studio of the marine painter Eugene Isabey, and also worked under Francois-Edouard Picot. He began exhibiting at the Paris Salon in 1848, and the French state purchased a work from his 1850 to 1851 Salon showing. He received a Salon medal in 1852; some sources also credit him with a further medal at a regional Salon in Dijon around 1858, for a painting shown again at the 1859 Paris Salon, though this second award is less consistently documented and could not be independently confirmed. He settled permanently in France around 1860 and lived for much of his later life with Madame Josephine Fesser, who supported him through periods of financial and personal difficulty.

In 1863 Jongkind exhibited at the Salon des Refuses, the landmark showing of works rejected by the official Salon, alongside Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Henri Fantin-Latour, Camille Pissarro, and James McNeill Whistler. His 1868 Salon submissions were reviewed by Emile Zola, who described the paintings as rapid, direct records of a first impression of landscape. Jongkind's only solo exhibition during his lifetime was organized by the dealer Detrimont in Paris in May 1882.

Jongkind struggled in later life with alcoholism and declining mental health, a documented and unavoidable part of his biography reported by Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Bibliotheque nationale de France's authority record, among others. At the end of January 1891 he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Egreve, near Grenoble, where he died on 9 February 1891. He was buried at La Cote-Saint-Andre in the Isere region of France, which some secondary sources also list, imprecisely, as his place of death.

Jongkind's contemporaries recognized him early as an unusually direct and honest colorist. The critic Edmond About, writing on the occasion of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, praised the distinctiveness of his palette and drawing, while the critic Jean Rousseau, writing in 1857, singled out the rare honesty of his work. Emile Zola's 1868 review of Jongkind's Salon submissions described them as hurried sketches made to capture a landscape's first impression before it faded, a reading that anticipated the language later used for Impressionism itself. Claude Monet regarded Jongkind as a mentor and Edouard Manet is reported to have considered him a father figure of modern landscape painting. Twentieth-century and later critics have consistently framed him as a bridge figure, one whose loose handling and interest in fleeting atmospheric effects fed directly into the Impressionist generation that followed.

Jongkind's auction market is thin relative to his museum stature, and a definitive all-time auction record could not be confirmed in available sources. The highest documented price found is USD 38,000, for the painting Moulin et scierie, Hollande (1843), sold at Sotheby's New York on 12 February 1997; the same painting later resold for USD 32,800 at Christie's New York on 21 May 2025 and for USD 32,400 at Christie's London in 2008. Other tracked results, at houses including Lempertz, sit in the low five figures in euros, for example EUR 34,020 for Harbour Entrance at Antwerp and EUR 7,440 for Flusslandschaft mit Windmuhle. There is no catalogue raisonne, so buyers rely on provenance chains and dealer or auction-house cataloguing rather than a centralized authentication reference.

Because Jongkind's market is small and infrequently tested at the top end, any single auction result should be read with caution rather than as a stable benchmark, and the absence of a catalogue raisonne places extra weight on provenance research and on cross-checking with museum and dealer records. His deep presence in major museum collections, from the Musee d'Orsay and the Louvre to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum, is the strongest evidence of his lasting art-historical importance, even where it has not translated into large or frequent auction prices. Collectors should also be aware that his popularity with Impressionist scholars and dealers has at times produced misattributions, making documented provenance and reputable dealer or auction-house support especially important when evaluating a work.