Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriel, also known as Paul Gabriel, (1928-1903) was born in Amsterdam on 5 July 1928. Gabriel was the son of the then celebrated Amsterdam sculptor Paul Joseph Gabriel. His father died when he was five years of age. The young Gabriel helped his mother support their large family by painting portraits. Besides being a painter, Gabriel was also a draftsman, watercolorist, and etcher and he belonged to the Hague School. After his initial classes in apprenticeship in Kleve, Gabriel went to Oosterbeek in 1853 to hone his painting talent. He started studying nature with one of his friends, Anton Mauve. Reports say that as Gabriel was working long hours in bad weather, his ear became infected and he became deaf.

Oosterbeek, ‘Dutch Barbizon’

In 1853, Gabriel moved to Oosterbeek which is also called ‘Dutch Barbizon’. One of the famous landscape painters, Johannes Warnardus Bilders was already at work there together with some of the younger painters. The members of this group later became the central figures in the Hague school. Gabriel together with Anton Mauve visited the area repeatedly during the ten years in a row. He learned to paint directly from nature in this village.

Gabriel was having a hard time in Amsterdam. Hence, in 1860, he moved to Brussels looking for a further scope to try his luck there. There, he met Willem Roelofs who influenced him and became his teacher in his later years. Gabriel benefitted from Roelofs’s social position in the art world in Brussels. Some of the other painters from Barbizon School who were exhibiting their work in Brussels regularly also influenced Gabriel considerably. Gabriel received his formal education in painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam from 1840 to 1843 under Louis Zocher.

Beauty of Dutch Landscape

After a brief stay in a drawing academy in the German town of Cleves, Gabriel returned to the Netherlands to study with Cornelis Lieste in Haarlem. His friend, Roelofs took him on a painting tour in the Netherlands. This helped him to deeply appreciate the nature-rich Dutch landscape. Their visit to Kortenhoef with its lakes, peat areas and polder landscapes became a central part of Gabriel’s speciality. Gabriel’s paintings depicted the varying nuances of nature’s colours vividly. He found a wealth of colors in the Dutch landscape. Windmills, barges, cowherds, fishermen, farmers are some of the subjects of Gabriel’s paintings.

In 1884, he shifted to the Netherlands and settled down near the Hague. This was also the place where one of his childhood friends, Anton Mauve, lived at that time. Gabriel settled down with his wife on the Kanaalweg in Scheveningen. He pursued his search for untouched areas of the Netherlands’s bountiful nature to feature as his subject for painting. ‘Early morning in the polder near Kortenhoef’ and ‘Landscape with farm at sunset‘ are some of his spectacular paintings that took shape during his stay in Scheveningen. Gabriel died on 23 Aug 1903 in his home in Scheveningen.

Some of Gabriel’s Ladscape Paintings

Some of the memorable pieces of Gabriel’s paintings are Polder Landscape, Landscape with a train, Landscape near Abcoude, Landscape with two Trees, De Winkel near Abcoude, Windmill in a Polder, Polder with Mills Near Overschie, Farm in the Open Fields, Morning Twilight, Landscape With Windmill, A windmill on a Waterway, A Watercourse Near Abcoude, Landscape Near Kortenhoef, Polder Landscape, Wooded Landscape with Watercourse, De Winkel te Abscoude, Cattle by a wooded Stream, Sunny Day – A Mill to a Watercourse, Cottage in an Open Field, Polder Landscape, The kamperveenderij, Mill in a Puddle, A Peat Cutter with his Barge in a Polder, Ducks’ Nests, etc.