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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / / Henriette Ronner Oil on canvas Title: Cats
Original oil Hand signed. Measures: 9 x 12 cm (without frame) Measures: 22.5 x 25.5 cm (with frame) Biography; Nationality : Dutch Birth Year : 1821 Death Year : 1909 Place of Birth : Amsterdam, Holland Place of Death : Elsene, Belgium Henriette Ronner-Knip was a Dutch artist active through the 19th century, best known for her paintings of cats and dogs. She was born in Amsterdam and died in Ixelles in Belgium. Early Life Henriette Knip was born into a household of artists in Amsterdam in the summer of 1821. The last two generations of her family had begun their careers in wallpaper art, though her father, Josephus Augustus Knip, branched out into gouache landscape painting after moving to Paris in his youth, a city to which he would return intermittently over the next two decades, bringing his wife and two children, Henriette and Augustus, for a four-year stay between 1823 and 1827. As a child, Ronner-Knip showed a proclivity for drawing, replicating her father?s sketches and studies from as early as her years in France. Josephus, who had been gradually losing his eyesight since their return to the Netherlands in 1828, began giving his daughter a formal education in art when she was 11 years old, knowing that she would soon be accountable for household finances and that developing her talent would immediately reinforce the family?s annual income. She was placed under a strict routine that required she be at her easel from dawn to dusk, with a short respite for meals and siesta. Her father took exclusive responsibility for her training, teaching her to observe nature and identify factors that would help with composition, all the while pressing upon her the sacrifices an artist must make to be successful. Ronner-Knip was a quick study ? in part because of the severity of her regimen ? and her work began to sell within months. In 1837, when she was 16, her painting of a cat by a window was displayed and sold at the annual art exhibition in Dusseldorf. She worked prolifically, producing a large number of landscapes, pastoral scenes, still lifes and portraits every month, making her a regular fixture at exhibitions in Holland and Germany. Post Education Towards the 1840s, she began focusing on animal studies, her favored subject, depicting scenes of cattle, birds and horses with a rare attention to detail. In 1845, she narrowed the genre down further, producing images of only dogs, most often in hunting scenes and on the country moors. As her style matured, Ronner-Knip?s work began receiving critical acclaim, in time for her father to recognize her growing success before his death in Brabant in 1847. In 1850, the artist married Teico Ronner and the couple moved to Brussels. The initial years were a struggle, as her husband was often in ill-health and unable to provide, leaving the strain of family finances on her. The discipline and work-ethic of her youth served her well at this time, as she awoke at five o?clock in the morning to begin her day at the easel, rapidly generating paintings of canines, the majority of them featuring the motif of dogcarts, a regular mode of transportation for poor farmers and street-hawkers. Over the decade, she gave birth to six children, two of whom became painters as well. In 1860, she finished work on a composition titled ?Death of a Friend?, a large-format painting of an elderly sand-seller crying over the body of one of his dogs, still attached to the cart. It received immense critical acclaim, cementing her reputation as a skilled dog-painter and leading to a number of high-profile commissions including those from the Queen of Beligum, the Countess of Flanders and the Kings of Portugal, Hanover and Prussia. Mid-Life Despite her growing fame, Ronner-Knip maintained a modest, if not austere, lifestyle. In the 1870s, she changed her focus from canines to felines after a stray wandered into her home. She became fascinated by their movements and psyche, capturing them in various domestic scenes in paintings such as ?Chaton Sur Une Chaise? and ?Chatte Et Ses Chatons Endormis?. She didn?t suffer any dip in popularity due to the shift away from dogs, as cats were becoming increasingly popular as house-pets amongst the metropolitan, upper middle-class. However, in the last decades of her life, modernism began gaining prominence in both popular and critical circuits, and her work was deemed too conservative. Though she adopted a softer color palette to mitigate the reviews, she had become somewhat irrelevant in the 20th century?s abstract revolution. Ronner-Knip died in Brussels in March of 1909. MUSEUMS / COLLECTIONS Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Hemeentemuseum, The Hague Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht Christie?s Sotheby?s BOOKS /PUBLICATIONS ?Cats and Kittens at Play: The Art of Henriette Ronner-Knip 1821-1909? by Han van der Horst
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