Willem van Hasselt: a Dutch Painter of the Paris Parks

A Rotterdam tailor’s son who became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Willem van Hasselt (1882–1963) painted Paris as Corot might have painted it had he lived in the twentieth century: parks, quays and beaches in a thin, silvery, fluid oil, the figures no more than a few touches. His view of the pond in the Luxembourg Gardens is in our Modern Masters: 20th Century Art sale.

Rotterdam to Paris

Van Hasselt was born in Rotterdam on 3 September 1882 and studied at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. Diploma in hand, he moved to Paris in 1903, drawing for newspapers and painting theatre costumes to live, and discovered Corot in the Louvre. Around 1910 he befriended Jacques Salomon, Vuillard’s nephew, and entered the circle of Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, whose intimate, tonal art shaped his own. He drove an ambulance in the French army in the First World War, was naturalised in 1933 and elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1945.

The Paris parks

His pictures are the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, the Seine, the beaches of Brittany and Normandy, gardens and interiors — painted thinly in a silvery key, with a Dutchman’s eye for the weather and a Nabi’s for the flat patch of colour. The canvas in our sale shows the great pond of the Luxembourg on a summer afternoon: the fountain, iron chairs set out on the pale gravel, strollers under the chestnuts and a nurse with a pram at the water’s edge — the park a few streets from his Left Bank studio.

Collections and the market

Van Hasselt 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. The Paris park views are the most sought-after of his subjects. More on his artist page.

At Aurora & Athena

The Pond in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, oil on canvas, framed, comes from a Spanish private collection and is offered on 17 October 2026 with an estimate of 600 – 800 €. Photographs, condition summary and bidding on the lot page.