Willem Van Hasselt

Willem van Hasselt was born in Rotterdam in 1882, the son of a tailor, and studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts. Diploma in hand, he moved to Paris in 1903, drawing for newspapers and painting theatre costumes to live while he discovered Corot in the Louvre. Around 1910 he befriended Jacques Salomon, Vuillard’s nephew, and entered the circle of Vuillard and Maurice Denis, whose intimate, tonal art shaped his own.

He served as an ambulance driver in the French army in the First World War, was naturalised French in 1933 and elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1945.

Van Hasselt’s pictures — the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, the Seine, Brittany and Normandy beaches, gardens and interiors — are painted thinly and fluidly in a silvery, Corot-like key, with figures reduced to a few touches. He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries and with the galleries Druet and Charpentier.

His work is in the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and many French provincial museums. From 1957 he lived at Nogent-sur-Marne, where he died in 1963.