Hubert Vos

Who was Hubert Vos?

Hubert Vos was a Dutch painter who was born in Maastricht on February 15, 1855. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and with Fernand Cormon in Paris. He exhibited widely in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dresden and Munich. From 1885 to 1892, he worked in England, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1888 and 1891. He was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists.

His second wife was Eleanor Kaikilani Coney, of Hawaiian, Chinese, and American descent. In 1898, he visited Hawaii, where he painted the local people. In that same year, Vos traveled to Korea, where he completed at least three paintings in duplicate. In each case, he left one copy in Korea and kept one copy. The paintings are a life-sized portrait of Emperor Gojong, a portrait of Min Sang-ho and a landscape of Seoul. The copies left in Korea hung in the Deoksugung Palace until all except the landscape of Seoul, were destroyed by fire in 1904. In 1905, on his second and last trip around the world, Vos became the second western painter to paint a portrait of China’s Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi.

In addition to portraits and landscapes, Vos is known for his interior scenes and still-life paintings of Chinese porcelains. The gifts from Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi are favorite objects of the still-life paintings. He died in New York City in 1935.