Joseph August Knip

JOSEPH AUGUST KNIP (Netherlands 1777-1847).
"Landscape."
Gouache on paper.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 40 x 58 cm; 69 x 88,5 cm (frame).
Josephus Augustus Knip was a Dutch painter. His first teacher was his father, the decorative painter Nicolaas Frederik Knip. At the age of eleven he moved with his family to Bois-le-Duc, but in 1794, the town was taken by the French. At nineteen he became the breadwinner of his family after his father became blind. Brother of Frederik Willem Knip and Mattheus Derk Knip, he was also the first teacher of his younger sister, Henriëtte Geertruida Knip. In 1801 he settled in Paris for nine years, where he accepted commissions for topographical paintings. In 1808 he won the Prix de Rome in the landscape category. At the end of 1809 he traveled to Rome, where he remained until 1812. In 1811 he made trips to Naples, Sabina, the Albani Mountains and Campania, during which he made watercolors from Palestrina to Terni. In 1813 he returned to the Netherlands with his wife, the painter Pauline Rifer de Courcelles, and settled in Bois-le-Duc, where he worked as a painter. He lived in Amsterdam from 1817 to 1823 and in Paris from 1823 to 1826, where he divorced in 1824. In 1827 he resided in The Hague and became blind in 1832, receiving then a pension from King William I. He spent the last years of his life in Berlicum (Sint-Michielsgestel) from 1840.