Johannes Huibert PRINS
The Hague 1756 - Utrecht 1806
Biography
Self-taught as an artist, Johannes Prins was expected to study to be a doctor but chose instead to devote himself to becoming an artist, despite his father’s refusal to pay for him to go to art school. He travelled to Paris early in his career and in 1785 joined the Confrerie Pictura, an association of artists in his native city of The Hague. Prins was active in Leiden, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht, and is best known for his urban views and landscapes, in both watercolour and oil, which are often quite small in scale. He also produced a number of etchings of landscape and genre subjects, as well as several illustrations for the Verzameling van verschillende gekleede mans- en vrouwenstanden, a collection of male and female posed models for young artists to study, eventually published in 1833. Prins died in an accident in 1806, drowned in a canal in Utrecht. Drawings and watercolours by the artist are today in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the British Museum in London, the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam and the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik und Kunstsammlungen in Weimar.
