Galerie Paul Prouté

Johan Jongkind, born in the Netherlands, left school at age 16 to become a notary’s clerk. His father died the following year, and his mother then allowed him to go to The Hague to study at the Academy of Drawing. In 1845, the Prince of Orange—the future William III—paid for his French lessons and subsidized his move to Paris, where, at age 27, he joined Eugène Isabey’s studio and later attended François-Édouard Picot’s studio before embarking on a long series of travels throughout France and beyond. In the 1850s, he ran out of money, moved to the Paris suburbs, and sank into depression for a time. In 1855, following his mother’s death and his financial difficulties, he returned to Holland. It was his friends, at the initiative of Count Doria, a collector, who enabled him to return to France by organizing an auction for his benefit in 1860. He stayed in the town of Châbons for the first time in 1873, with his friend Joséphine Fesser, whose son worked as a cook at the Château de Pupetières. Until 1877, he returned there almost every year and produced numerous watercolors of the estate and its surroundings. From that time on, he visited the Dauphiné region very regularly, where he died in 1891 at the Saint-Robert asylum in Saint-Égrève.