Dutch painter, engraver, watercolorist, with many connections to the Hague School and later associated with the Amsterdam Impressionism movement. "Willem de Zwart, who is before all a colourist, was... a pupil of the Hague Academy and... the only direct pupil of Jacob Maris. The influence is seen in his "Sand-pits" of about 1885 to 1890. Mellow, firmly-painted, bright and full of tone, these sand-pits, lying in the yellow dunes under the grey skies, reflected in a canal, enlivened by the movement of sand-boats and navvies, belong to the best that he has yet painted. At that time, he was living at the Hague in the Beeklaan, a favourite quarter with artists, lying between the dunes on the one side and the fat fields, canals and farmsteads on the other. Here he would also surprise us with his figures of women, full of the breath of life, like Breitner's women, like Jacob Maris' portrait of his sister, like Terburgh's women, although less refined. And, above all, he was the first to turn into a sheer feast of colour the bright squares of the town, with the gleaming black panels of the passing carriages, pieces filled with rich tones, thoroughly intelligent performances which, nevertheless, did not go beyond the just demands of landscape-painting. A turning-point ... in his career ... was when the Hague ceased to be the artistic centre, when Breitner and Isaac Israëls were settled in Amsterda ... Was this for private reasons, or to enter the environment of the younger Amsterdammers, or from the longing for the country, for solitude, that drove the strongest to seclusion? One thing is certain, that De Zwart had his work cut out for him to recover his "form." He drew in chalks, he etched, he painted, until, a few years ago, he again began to produce paintings which attracted notice through the..." http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dutch_Art_in_the_Nineteenth_Century/The_Younger_Masters_of_the_Hague_School undefined

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