The Difficult Question

Born in Amsterdam to a family of bakers, Jacob Meyer (Meijer) de Haan enrolled briefly in 1874 in the National Academy of Fine Art, but he left due to his chronic ill health. He continued to be involved in the Arti et Amicitiae society, which enabled him to exhibit at the 1879 and 1880 Salon de Paris. In 1888, shortly after exhibiting his Uriël Acosta in Amsterdam about the seventeenth-century Jewish thinker Uriel de Costa (de Haan’s early works stressed Jewish themes), de Haan moved to Paris and was associated with Paul Gauguin, as well as with Camille Pissarro and Vincent van Gogh’s brother, Theo. Most of de Haan’s surviving works reflect Gauguin’s synthetist style of bright, two-dimensional forms.