WILLEM WITSEN
1860 – Amsterdam – 1923
WATERLOO BRIDGE
watercolor on paper, 510 x 730 mm
signed lower left: Witsen
date: 1889-1891
provenance:
with Francois Buffa & Fils, Amsterdam;
private collection, the Netherlands;
private collection, France, acquired the work in the Netherlands, around 1995;
by descent to the previous owner;
Arles Enchères, July 5th, 2025, lot 158.
Willem Witsen is best known for his atmospheric cityscapes, characterized by a controlled use of color, subtle modulation of light, and an almost photographic stillness. Waterloo Bridge is a particularly strong example, which was made in an important moment of his life and career . In 1888, Witsen moved from the Netherlands to Camden Town in London, he followed his English girlfriend, Blanche Ford. The city became a source of inspiration for artistic renewal. His London years were marked by intense productivity and a stylistic shift toward greater restraint: his brushwork grew more controlled, his palette darkened, and backlighting became a recurring compositional device. These formal changes coincided with an increasing concern for mood and inner experience—key aspects of Symbolist aesthetics. This period is widely regarded as a high point in Witsen’s artistic career, which was overshadowed by great personal loss, the drowning of his adult sister in 1889. Witsen returned to the Netherlands in 1891.
London boasts many architectural masterpieces. Yet, it is the seven-hundred-and-fifty-meter-long stone bridge across the Thames that attracted numerous famous artists. Among them were John Constable, Joseph Turner, James Whistler, and Claude Monet. Monet even created a series of no fewer than forty-one paintings of the bridge.
This large-scale watercolor depicts Waterloo bridge in London, which was built in 1813 and commemorates the victory of the British, Dutch, and Prussians at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Waterloo Bridge depicts the bridge as a faint silhouette shrouded in mist and smoke, with architectural detail largely dissolved. River, sky, and built environment merge into a unified atmospheric field, while a small rowboat appears marginal and easily overlooked in the foreground. Backlighting suppresses descriptive clarity and favors suggestion over definition, shifting the image away from precise representation.
This visual obscurity disrupts spatial legibility and produces a sense of stillness and distance. The bridge—typically a symbol of connection and movement—loses its functional meaning and appears withdrawn and almost immaterial. The mist, rooted in the actual nineteenth-century conditions of London’s fog and industrial smoke, thus acquires symbolic significance. The city becomes a melancholic, introspective space in which the external environment mirrors an inner psychological state, while the diminished human figures underscore a sense of human insignificance within the urban landscape.
Witsen’s Waterloo Bridge does not stand on its own. The artist studied the subject and its surroundings extensively and depicted it in various media. Several related works are known, including preparatory studies (fig. 2 and 3), an oil painting (fig. 4), and an etching (fig. 5). His use of the watercolor technique — with its soft transitions and subtle brushwork — enhances the dreamlike quality of the scene. Generally, it is believed that Witsen’s artistic talent is expressed most fully in his watercolors.
Witsen’s artistic development should be understood within a broader international context, in which several contemporary artists pursued comparable Symbolist-inflected approaches. Figures such as James McNeill Whistler and Vilhelm Hammershøi likewise favored compositional restraint, subdued tonal palettes, and an atmosphere of stillness and melancholy. These affinities were reinforced through shared exhibition networks. Whistler, for instance, visited the Netherlands and the Dutch Etching Club—of which Witsen was a prominent member—during the period in which Witsen was residing in London. Like Witsen, Whistler produced a number of etchings depicting Amsterdam cityscapes, underscoring the extent to which artists across national borders engaged with similar formal and atmospheric concerns.
The circulation of these ideas was further facilitated by an international art market. In the Netherlands, E.J. van Wisselingh emerged as one of the most influential art dealers at the turn of the nineteenth century and played a decisive role in shaping Witsen’s career through the active promotion and sale of his work. Van Wisselingh’s engagement with artists whose work resonated with Witsen’s aesthetic sensibilities extended beyond national boundaries. Recognizing the strong stylistic affinities between Witsen and Hammershøi, the dealer also took a interest in the Danish artist’s oeuvre and organized a selling exhibition of Hammershøi’s work at his London branch in 1907. Together, these artistic and commercial networks positioned Witsen within a transnational Symbolist movement, rather than a solely Dutch artistic tradition.
Fig. 1 Willem Witsen, Self-Portrait, c. 1889, mixed media on paper, 320 x 270 mm, Witsenhuis Amsterdam.
Willem Witsen was a Dutch painter, printmaker, photographer, and writer who forged a highly personal artistic position between tradition and innovation. He belonged to a remarkably talented generation of Amsterdam-based artists now known as De Tachtigers (“The Eighties Movement”), a loosely affiliated group of artists and writers who, during the 1880s, sought renewal and individuality in art and literature. Inspired by French artists who embraced l’art pour l’art, they consciously broke with the internationally successful Dutch painting tradition of the Hague School.
Among Witsen’s Dutch contemporaries were Isaac Israels and George Hendrik Breitner, who explored the possibilities of Impressionism through dynamic compositions and a characteristically loose brushstroke. Witsen, by contrast, developed a restrained and introspective style in which the expression of inner feeling took precedence. Although he, too, was inspired by modern urban life, his work resists anecdote and narrative. Instead, it is defined by a contemplative atmosphere—a world of silence, subdued light, and controlled emotion. In this regard, his art stands in deliberate contrast to the visual dynamism of modern city life so vividly articulated in the colorful works of the Impressionists.
Born into a wealthy family in Amsterdam, Witsen studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in his hometown. He was strongly influenced by Symbolism, yet his work remained marked by restraint and melancholy, favoring quiet, contemplative subjects over overt symbolism or allegory. In addition to painting, he produced still lifes, portraits, and etchings, and was an early pioneer in photography. In his photographic and graphic work, he employed the camera as a compositional instrument, frequently using contrasts of light and shadow to generate a dreamlike, introspective mood. Much of his oeuvre can be understood as a silent meditation on transience and stillness.
Over the course of his career, Witsen received substantial international recognition for his work. Notable distinctions include a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, a gold medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, and a gold medal at the Kunstausstellung in Munich in 1913, as well as an award at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Witsen received this latter honor in person and, during his visit to North America, traveled with his wife to Montreal, New Brunswick, Boston, and New York.
Beyond his artistic production, Witsen played a significant role in the cultural life of his time. He maintained close friendships with writers such as Lodewijk van Deyssel, Willem Kloos, and Albert Verwey, and engaged in extensive correspondence with them. His home on the Oosterpark in Amsterdam functioned as an important meeting place for artists and intellectuals. Although Witsen died in 1923, his work continues to be valued for its poetic and introspective qualities, securing him a distinctive position within the Dutch Symbolist tradition.
Fig. 2 Willem Witsen, Gezicht op Waterloo Bridge te Londen, 1888-1891, 329 x 245 mm inv.no RP-T-1964-217-23 (this is a sheet from a sketchbook containing many Waterloo Bridge studies).
Fig. 3 Willem Witsen, Gezicht op Waterloo Bridge, c. 1888-1891, black chalk on paper, 136 x 230 mm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, inv no RP-T-1964-216-50.
Fig. 4 Willem Witsen, Waterloo Bridge, oil on board, 31.8 x 38.2 cm, Fondation Custodia, Paris, inv.no.
Fig. 5 Willem Witsen, Waterloo Bridge in the Fog, London, 1890, etching and equating on paper, 323 x 285 mm. Kröller Möller Museum, inv.no. KM 108.499.